NOVA: "Arctic Ghost Ship" (Lion Television, 90th Parallel, CBC Canada/Radio Canada, Channel 4, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that KPBS re-ran a NOVA episode from September 23, 2015 called “Arctic Ghost Ship,” about the attempt to recover the remains of the two ships that sailed from Great Britain in 1845 across the Atlantic into Canada in an attempt to find the fabled “Northwest Passage” from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. The expedition was commanded by Captain John Franklin and consisted of 129 sailors in two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. To make sure they could survive the long Canadian winters, the ships were outfitted with oak and iron planking, were given both sails and steam engines to propel them, and carried enough food and other supplies to last three years. None of that did any good, though; within the first year of the expedition at least three crew members had died – their tombstones were discovered a few years later – and ultimately all the crew disappeared, as did the ships themselves. The show dealt with an effort mounted by the Canadian government and some private companies to trace what happened to the Franklin crews and see if they could discover the wreckages of one or both of the ships. The show’s narration, delivered by Richard Allinson, is quite blunt about just why finding out what happened to the Franklin crews has become a major issue for the Canadian government. “As global warming melts the ice, interest in extracting the Arctic's natural resources will likely grow,” the narrator explains. “These surveys will allow safer navigation here, in the years to come. These vessels host a diverse task force, led by the underwater archaeology team of Parks Canada.”

The 2014 expedition runs into some of the same problems that sank – literally and figuratively – Franklin’s crews, notably the rapidly shifting ice on the surface of the seas they’re traversing and the ultra-short time window afforded by the brief North Canadian summer before the ice across the sea becomes solid and impenetrable by ships. One high-tech gizmo they have is an unmanned submersible called the Arctic Explorer, a sort of large yellow torpedo which they can launch from either of their ships – but they can only use it when the surface ice is relatively absent because the ice could easily crush the craft to pieces if it comes in suddenly, which it does. The program runs on two parallel tracks, one telling the story of the Franklin expedition itself and one on the modern-day crews’ efforts to retrace it and find the wreckages of its ships. Among the clues they have to trace the Franklin crews’ stories are oral accounts from the Inuit, Canada’s indigenous people, including one tale that got repeated in The Times of London on October 23, 1854. It was a letter to the editor written by British explorer John Rae, who’d lived among the Inuit and had been told a grisly story of how an Inuit hunting party had discovered one of the boats from the Franklin ships. “The bodies of some 30 persons … were discovered,” Rae wrote. “Some were in a tent, others under the boat, which had been turned over to form a shelter. … From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and from the contents of the kettles, it’s evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource — cannibalism — as a means of prolonging existence.” This caused a major controversy among the British public; in a surprisingly racist comment from someone usually regarded today as a progressive, Charles Dickens wrote that he didn’t believe such grisly tales from “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber.” But in 1992 bones belonging to some of the Franklin crew members were discovered that had knife wounds in them consistent with the use of then-modern Western knives to cut the corpses into pieces for human consumption.

Ironically, despite the high-tech Arctic Explorer, the key clue that finally led the 2014 crew to discover the remains of the Erebus underwater came from an overflight with a helicopter. The flight crew found a U-shaped object that turned out to be a metal fitting used to support one of the ship’s cranes. With that clue, the 2014 crews were able to locate the underwater wreckage of the Erebus, and were able to tell which ship they had found by doing a high-tech comparison between the sonar images of the wreck and the surviving original plans for both ships, which were slightly different in shape. A postlude to the original program read, “In 2016, the Arctic Research Trust discovered the HMS Terror largely intact in Terror Bay. In 2018, Britain transferred ownership of the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus to Canada and the Inuit Heritage Trust.” It’s an intriguing story, even though there’s also a bit of anticlimax to it that one of the most engrossing legends of the sea would have such a prosaic ending. It’s also ironic that the Franklin expedition occurred during an extended period of unusually cold weather even for the Canadian Arctic. Ice cores drilled from the area revealed that in the 1840’s that part of Canada was much colder than usual and the seas were frozen for far longer periods than the norm. So the Franklin crew had the bad luck to set sail across Canada in search of the Northwest Passage in historically awful times for such a journey – and even in 2014 the crews were literally racing against time to get the information they needed before the seasons changed and the sea froze over for the winter.