John Franklin’s Quest for the Northwest Passage | The Lost Arctic Expedition

In 1845, two ships—the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—slipped quietly out of the dockyards at Greenhithe, England. They were the pride of the British Royal Navy, bristling with reinforced hulls, steam engines retrofitted from locomotives, and tinned food stores thought to last three years. At their helm was Sir John Franklin, a 59-year-old naval officer and Arctic veteran, called by some “the man who ate his boots” for surviving an earlier polar ordeal by boiling his footwear and eating lichen for sustenance. This expedition, however, would be his last voyage—and his most famous. It would also be one of the world’s most mysterious.

Franklin’s mission was imperial and romantic: to find the final navigable route of the Northwest Passage, a fabled waterway threading through the Arctic Archipelago, promising a shortcut between Europe and Asia. But what began with national confidence and fanfare soon descended into one of history’s coldest and most persistent enigmas.

In 1845, with British pride invested in finding the Northwest Passage before the Americans or the Russians, Franklin was handed command of Erebus and Terror. The Admiralty spared no expense. The ships were equipped with steam engines, iron-reinforced bows, and hundreds of tinned provisions—a technological marvel on paper. 

The officers dined on silver-plated cutlery, beneath oil paintings and beside a library of over a thousand volumes. The men wore wool and flannel, not fur. Inuit parkas would have served better than starched naval coats.

In truth, the expedition’s very preparedness masked its fragility. The engines added weight but were near-useless in frozen seas. The heating systems failed. The food was contaminated with lead from the tinned cans. Franklin and his men sailed not just into the Arctic, but into a trap of their own making—armed with blind faith in progress and the mistaken belief that nature could be neatly charted like an Admiralty map.

Departure and disappearance 

On May 19, 1845, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror slipped their moorings at Greenhithe, England, under the command of Sir John Franklin, they sailed first to Stromness in the Orkney Islands, then across the Atlantic to Greenland, stopping at Disko Bay to take on final supplies. Here, five men were sent home—due to illness or administrative reshuffling—leaving 129 to vanish into history.

The last sighting came from a whaling ship in 1845 along the Greenland coast near Baffin Bay. After that, silence. The expedition seemed to sail into a void. 

The mystery of the lost ships: wrecks and revelations

It would take over a century and a half to find the ships themselves. Erebus was located in 2014, Terror in 2016—eerily well-preserved in the cold Arctic waters. The Franklin Expedition had finally begun to give up its secrets, not through triumph, but through the patient erosion of myth by time and ice.

In 2008, Canadian archaeologists began intensifying their search efforts with the help of Inuit oral histories—stories passed down through generations of a great ship seen in the ice, and a mast protruding from shallow waters. One such account, describing a ship seen in a bay near King William Island, led searchers to Wilmot and Crampton Bay. 

The key Inuit individual whose knowledge led to the discovery of HMS Erebus was Sammy Kogvik, an Inuk hunter and guide from Gjøa Haven, Nunavut.

In 2014, while accompanying a team from the Arctic Research Foundation aboard the research vessel Martin Bergmann, Kogvik shared a story he had kept quiet for years: while out fishing near Queen Maud Gulf, he had seen a large wooden mast sticking out of the ice in the water near Hat Island. He hadn’t told anyone previously, fearing ridicule. 

Kogvik’s  account led directly to the area where the wreck of Erebus was discovered in Wilmot and Crampton Bay. Without Kogvik’s observation the wreck might still be hidden beneath the ice. The team listened—and followed his lead.

There, in 2014, they discovered Erebus, remarkably intact. The wreck rested in just 11 meters of water, its wooden hull cloaked in kelp, its massive bronze bell still in place—a ghostly time capsule from the 1840s. Parks Canada’s underwater archaeologists were stunned: decks and cabins had collapsed, but much of the ship’s structure was still discernible. Even artifacts—boots, dishes, buttons—remained inside, eerily preserved by the cold Arctic sea. The find electrified historians and captivated the public, but it also marked a turning point. Erebus had been found not through high-tech scanning or archival sleuthing alone, but by listening—to an Inuk elder’s story about a piece of wood poking from the ice, seen decades earlier near the very bay.

Two years later, Terror was found even more astonishingly preserved in Terror Bay, upright on the seafloor, as if waiting to sail again. These finds confirmed what the Inuit had known for generations—and what the Admiralty had overlooked. The final clue had been hiding in plain sight, not on a map, but in memory.

The discovery was a watershed moment—not just in archaeology, but in how the world came to recognise the critical value of Inuit traditional knowledge, or Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. It showed that the answers the British had sought with dozens of search ships and millions of pounds were known all along by those who lived with the land and ice.

In a cruel twist, it seemed that the Franklin crew  came achingly close to escaping—if they had known to wait out the ice just a few miles further south, they may have found open water.

Discover the Arctic for yourself

The ice may no longer claim ships the way it once did, but its vast, silent beauty remains untouched and awe-inspiring. 

To journey into the Arctic today is not to conquer it, but to listen. To witness the vast stillness where men once vanished and legends were born. The same waters that carried Erebus and Terror remain—windswept, remote, and breathtakingly wild.

There is wonder here still. In the crunch of sea ice beneath your feet. In the call of a distant seabird. In the way history lingers in the cold.

The Arctic is no longer the edge of the known world. But it is still a place that can change you.

Come to the High North. The ice is calling. 

Would you like more of John Franklin? Watch the below video