Sir John Franklin: Fabled Arctic ship found

(BBC) -- One of two British explorer ships that vanished in the Arctic more than 160 years ago has been found, Canada's prime minister says.

Stephen Harper said it was unclear which ship had been found, but photo evidence confirmed it was one of them.

Sir John Franklin led the two ships and 129 men in 1845 to chart the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic.

The expedition's disappearance shortly after became one of the great mysteries of the age of Victorian exploration.

The Canadian government began searching for Franklin's ships in 2008 as part of a strategy to assert Canada's sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which has recently become accessible to shipping because of melting Arctic ice.

Expedition sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show the wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29131757


-- BBC 2014-09-10

I wonder how ling will it take to find flight MH-370? I hope not as long as it took to find this ship...

Fascinating stuff ! I saw the documentary where they found some of Franklin,s crew in the ice, and autopsies showed they had all suffered from severe lead poisoning, possibly because they had taken the lowest bidder in the beginning era of canned food. More amazing to me the fact that anyone would want to endure such incredible hardship in the name of exploration. How soft we have become

Those were some tough <deleted>. Miserably clinging to life in ice-box conditions. Eating shoe leather, ...that's a lot more than I could or would want to endure.

"Canada's sovereignty over the passage".......joking right

"Canada's sovereignty over the passage".......joking right

No joke buddy, look at the facts.

....the Northwest Passage, which has recently become accessible to shipping because of melting Arctic ice.

Uh Oh, don't let the GW deniers hear you say that. They'll commandeer this thread with all sorts of bogus reasons why there's no less Arctic ice cover, ....and even if there is, it's not because of any sort of warming trend.

"Canada's sovereignty over the passage".......joking right

No joke buddy, look at the facts.

If Canada doesn't claim these waters then Russia will. Who do you trust more - Canadians or Russians?

Edited September 10, 201411 yr by Utley

Russians.

Edited September 10, 201411 yr by JohnDodd

Russians.

joking?

Russkies actually planted (hundreds? thousands?) Russian flags deep under Arctic water - marking their claims.

Fascinating stuff ! I saw the documentary where they found some of Franklin,s crew in the ice, and autopsies showed they had all suffered from severe lead poisoning, possibly because they had taken the lowest bidder in the beginning era of canned food. More amazing to me the fact that anyone would want to endure such incredible hardship in the name of exploration. How soft we have become

This is a quote from Steven Fry's QI show on the BBC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJB20mC4Rqc

No-one knows why in 1845 Sir John Franklin led an expedition of 128 men to the Arctic to discover the Northwest Passage, carrying a sled-load of button polish, handkerchiefs, curtain rods and a writing desk. We do know that 35 rescue parties over several decades were sent out to discover what had happened. Eventually, in the 1980s they discovered that they were eating canned food, but the cans used lead-solder. They thus suffered from mass delusions caused by lead poisoning. We do not know why they did it, but we know they did, and no-one from the expedition came back alive.

The suggestion is that the lead poisoning caused Sir John Franklin and his colleagues to stock the ships with these useless items, and led to the failure of their mission and their ultimate demise.

Also the Victorians where horrified when they found out that in desperation the survivors resorted to cannibalism , they where shocked, because they did not do things like that, only naked savages practised that.

It was swept under the carpet.

Lead poisoning sounds more polite.

Latest school of thought is still lead poisoning played its part but not from the cans of tinned food (the food not being acidic enough to cause leaching to that extent) the ships had lead drinking water pipework and now research reckons that this may have been the culprit of the lead poisoning...?

Either way amazing stories of daring do!

God bless em one and all RIP