FRANKLIN'S LOST SHIPS

The Main Historical Goal of the 2007 Expedition
is to Locate the Lost Franklin Expedition Ships

The Northwest Passage discovery ships lead by Sir John Franklin, the "Erebus" and the "Terror" were trapped in the ice and abandoned by most of their crew in 1847. Crew member graves and some artifacts have been recovered, but to this day the ships have never been located.

In addition to locating the ships, other artifacts, provisions and equipment from the mission are expected to be discovered. The expedition will be documented by a professional film-crew for eventual release as a full-length documentary on closing this final chapter on the Franklin Expedition Mystery.

NEW TECHNOLOGY
SME has access to a high-precision magnetometer for use in sweeping the area and detecting the metal content from the huge steam-engines which powered the ill-fated ships.

With the rapid climate changes of the past half-century the ships have probably been released from the ice and sunk to a watery grave which will be an amazing archaeological time-capsule. The ships & cargo should be well preserved, frozen in ice and time.
SME has special access through an arctic expert to exclusive and hard-to-acquire information on the approximate location of the ships.

The Franklin Expedition had five years of food supplies, including 8,000 tins (in one-, two-, four-, six-, and eight lb. capacities) of meat, vegetables, and soup. In Frozen in Time (1987), basing their conclusions on forensic examinations of two of the expedition members' bodies, Owen Beattie and John Geiger contend that the tins were sealed improperly, with lead solder running down the inside of each tin; since lead if ingested is poisonous, the metal probably seeped into the crews’ food.

The British Admiralty sent three relief expeditions in 1848:
the first, under Captain Henry, searched the Bering Strait; the second, under James Clark Ross, scoured the region around Lancaster Second; and the last (overland) under the Hudson Bay Company's Dr. John Rae and Sir John Richardson descended the MacKenzie River. Many of the later rescue missions ended in tragedy with the loss of more ships in the search. Not until 1859 did the last search party, led by Leopold McClintock, find the cairn containing messages confirming Franklin's death, and skeletons of some of the last survivors, some of whom had apparently resorted to cannibalism. According to a note found in the cairn at Point Victory, "Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847" at a point when only 24 men had thus far died.

(text adapted from: www.victorianweb.org/history/franklin/franklin.html)

The first note is dated May 28, 1847 and says that the Franklin Expedition spent its first winter at Beechey Island and the second winter off the northwest coast of King William Island. Around the margin is a second message written almost a year later.

It tells how Franklin's ships, the "Erebus" and the "Terror", had been trapped in the ice since September 12, 1846. The ships were finally deserted on April 26, 1848 - nearly three years after they had set sail from England.

The note says that the 105 men who were still alive were planning to walk south. Neither these men, or their ships, have ever been found.

Source: www.athropolis.com/links/franklin.htm

Analysis Indicates Lead-Poisoning Induced Dementia
as a Definite Contributing Factor to the Disaster:

"The party's morale and cohesion was damaged by psychological effects of lead poisoning from the solder that sealed their tinned food supply.

"unfinished messages suggested that none had survived, and it is easy to see why: the men used extremely poor judgment. Not only had they tried to drag a 1,200-pound lifeboat across the ice, they had selected an assortment of strange items to fill the boat: silk handkerchiefs, perfumed soap, six books, tea, and chocolate"

The problems of lead poisoning were not well known in 1845, and it wasn't until 1890 that soldering the inside of food cans was banned in England — forty-five years after the Franklin expedition. Nonetheless, the mystery of the disastrous expedition was explained quite clearly by the mummies of three of its crew members."
(from: Frozen in Time (1987). by Owen Beattie & John Geiger)

This has been confirmed by lead found in both skeletal and soft tissue remains of expedition sailors conducted by Dr Owen Beattie of the University of Alberta. They also were weakened by internal bleeding from scurvy after the first two years when the preventive lemon juice they carried lost its potency. The Inuit witnesses had reported that crew members exhibited the blackened mouth and bruised skin typical of that disease."
(source: Wikipedia)

(Franklin Image source, top of page: Morris, Charles:
Finding the North Pole by Cook and Peary, W. E. Scull, 1909, p. 288)