Original subtitles

In 1845, an ambitious British expedition

set out to find one of the greatest prizes in all exploration -

the elusive Northwest Passage.

Armed with the latest equipment,

Sir John Franklin led two ships into uncharted Arctic waters...

..but they vanished, never to return.

There is no story in the history of British exploration

that ends as tragically as this -

129 men disappear off the face of the earth.

Clues have been found -

bodies in the ice,

unexplained sightings of a mysterious ghost ship,

even signs of cannibalism...

..but without the ships themselves,

this remains one of the world's most enduring maritime mysteries.

Ships don't just disappear...

..and if there is a Franklin expedition ship, we will find that ship.

In 2014,

archaeologists mounted the biggest modern search for the wrecks.

Combining 21st-century technology

and previously dismissed eyewitness accounts,

they made an astonishing discovery.

We're both looking at the sonar monitor,

I jabbed my finger at the screen and lunged forward and said,

"That's it! That's it!"

'The search teams have finally hit the jackpot.'

After more than a century of searching,

one of Franklin's lost ships is coming back from the dead.

Oh... Is that a gun?

Oh, my God. We are going to open up a window directly into history.

This is the exclusive inside story

of a discovery that's set to rewrite the history of exploration

and could finally solve the mystery of John Franklin's doomed expedition.

In the summer of 1845,

Sir John Franklin led an expedition to conquer the Northwest Passage,

the fabled route linking Europe with Asia.

The approaches to the passage were already mapped,

but in between,

a treacherous uncharted maze of islands and ice

had defied explorers for centuries.

Franklin's mission was to navigate that final link

and claim the passage for the British Empire.

The fact that there's an empty space on the chart, a terra incognita,

that's both appealing but also an insult to the British Navy.

They need to fill in the lines on the map.

There's power in the ink lines that are drawn on charts -

it's ownership, it's sovereignty, it's politics.

Franklyn's expedition set off in a blaze of publicity,

surrounded by a great deal of enthusiasm.

Franklin, the distinguished veteran of the Arctic,

would lead this two-ship expedition to success.

To force the passage,

Franklin assembled the best-equipped Arctic expedition there'd ever been.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were ex-gunships,

now fitted with the latest innovations,

such as central heating and steam propulsion.

Plans held at the National Maritime Museum

show their hulls strengthened against the ice

with extra layers of oak and iron plating...

..protection against the desolate and hostile wilderness

they were about to enter.

It was somewhere that had fascinated men for hundreds of years

but they'd never mastered the environment.

It was very much the dark side of the moon

as far as the Victorians were concerned.

In July 1845, Erebus and Terror were last seen by whaling ships

at the gateway to the Northwest Passage.

From there, they sailed off the edge of the known world.

They never came back.

In 2014, the biggest modern hunt for Franklin's ships

is getting underway.

Led by the Canadian government,

this multi-agency task force is the culmination of six years' effort...

..with icebreakers, helicopters and state-of-the-art sonar equipment,

all carefully manoeuvred into position.

One of the driving forces behind this year's search effort

is John Geiger.

It's the greatest mystery in exploration history,

There is nothing that compares with it.

It's really important from a historical standpoint

to understand what happened to them.

Parks Canada's lead diver, Ryan Harris,

has been searching for the wrecks for much of his career.

This is actually our sixth field season

searching for Franklin's lost ships.

We're hoping that there is going to be a payday down the road here.

These hostile seas are frozen solid for ten months a year,

leaving only a brief summer search window.

With huge expanses of ocean floor to survey,

underwater archaeologist Marc-Andre Bernier

knows they'll have to work fast

so, this year, they've brought a secret weapon.

Well, what we have here is an autonomous underwater vehicle -

it's basically an unmanned torpedo

that we can deploy and it will follow the route that we've asked to follow,

gather data and come back with that data.

This piece of equipment is quite spectacular.

Better known as the AUV,

it uses sonar technology to obtain a detailed image of the sea floor.

..to Zodiac, just to confirm, the vehicle is go.

Originally designed to detect naval mines,

it will now be used to search for the two missing wrecks.

This is Zodiac. We will hang by in location for a little longer.

Franklin's expedition entered the Arctic in 1845

with supplies for three years...

..but, three years later, there was no news

and, with every passing month,

fears were growing that something had gone wrong.

In 1850, search parties were sent to the Arctic...

..and, on Beechey Island, at the entrance to the Northwest Passage,

the first clue was found...

..graves -

three sailors who had died during Franklin's very first winter in the Arctic.

This shouldn't happen,

three men should not die in the first winter of an Arctic expedition.

They've only been out of Britain six months. What's killing them?

With Erebus and Terror stuck in the ice,

Franklin's expedition spent their first winter here,

at Beechey Island.

Overwintering was something they'd anticipated,

burying three of their crew was not.

Strangely, they marked one grave

with an unsettling quote from the Bible:

"Thus saith the Lord of hosts, consider your ways."

Puzzling, it's ominous.

Has something gone wrong?

Do they sense that something is going to go wrong

for the rest of the expedition?

It's tragic but it's also the first proof

that this is where Franklin and his men have been.

Over a century later, in 1984,

archaeologists exhumed the bodies to try to find out why they died.

The corpses of Franklin's men

were shockingly well preserved in the frozen ground.

Tests revealed high levels of lead,

giving rise to the theory that toxic tinned food had poisoned them...

..but what actually killed them remained a mystery...

..and, frustratingly,

nothing at the grave site indicated where the expedition had gone next.

All we know is that by springtime, the ice had broken up

and Franklin pushed on, deeper into the maze.

In the waters of the Northwest Passage,

the search for Franklin's lost ships continues.

The AUV has brought back detailed images of the seafloor.

Anything man-made would show up immediately.

So far, they've drawn a blank.

And there's worse to come.

When this part of the search team runs into heavy sea ice,

it's a worrying development.

As hard as it may be to believe, this is somewhere in the Arctic.

This is...parts of the Arctic.

This is as good as it's going to get this year.

There's more ice here this summer

than there's been for several years.

It's thought that Franklin faced exactly the same conditions

170 years ago.

In some odd way, this is as it should be.

This is a lot closer to what Franklin was dealing with.

And you get here and you realise that this is why Erebus and Terror

have not been found.

It's a very difficult part of the world to operate in.

If it were easy, it would have been done many, many years ago.

Maybe we'll get lucky.

In the same waters in 1846, luck was not on the side of Franklin

and his crew.

More than a decade after the expedition disappeared,

a second vital clue was found,

left by Franklin's men in an icy cairn.

The note's an incredible document,

the only written record of the fate of the Franklin crews.

How can a piece of paper

hold fortune in its hands?

This is the most important object

that has been recovered.

This precious piece of the Franklin puzzle is now

held at the National Maritime Museum in London.

It was standard naval practice to issue these kind of notes

with a standard blank form that would be filled in when necessary.

The notes were then placed in tubes

like these, they could just be left

for people to find information about the expedition.

The note reveals that, after their first winter in the Arctic,

the expedition sailed some 300 miles south

before the sea froze around them again.

And they spent a second winter locked in the ice.

But crammed in around the margins of the same note

is a disturbing update.

Added a year later, it contains only bad news.

Doctor? Yes?

HE COUGHS

Sir John Franklin was dead.

Nine other officers and 15 men had also passed away.

Something was going seriously wrong.

The loss of any leader in the middle of an expedition isn't good news.

Particularly so when you're stranded in the middle of nowhere

in a hostile environment.

A devastating morale-blow.

To make matters worse, that summer the sea refused to thaw.

Trapped in the ice,

the crew now faced a third gruelling winter in the Arctic.

In the perpetual gloom, the ship's bells where rung every half an hour

to mark the passing of time.

The note says that the captain of HMS Terror, Francis Crozier,

was now in command.

With Franklin dead and supplies running low,

he ordered the men to abandon the ships.

They would attempt to march hundreds of miles south

where a river provided a possible route inland

to the nearest trading post.

It is the most enigmatic of clues, it's just enough to locate them

in the landscape, it's just enough to tell you

that something terrible has happened,

it's just enough to point you in the right direction to follow them

but there are so many things that are not there.

Thanks to Captain Crozier's note, the search team has

the coordinates of the last known position of Franklin's ships.

There's thick ice here, so with their summer-search window

closing fast, the coastguard helicopter goes up

to look for open water.

RADIO STATIC

'...the ship right here, you've got at least...

'eight to ten miles in open water

'before the next concentration of ice.'

That's good.

Actually, that's excellent.

It's been a sort of cat-and-mouse game.

We feel like we have a break, we feel like we have a shot

and then the ice shifts and the doors close.

The good news is that, to the north of us, there is a large opening.

This is right where we want to be,

it's right in the primary search zone, so, essentially,

we have a shot here, a chance to get the AUV in the water.

We're waiting to launch the first mission of the day.

We're going to look at the first block of 4km long.

There we go.

Now the waiting starts.

Do you have a visual on it now?

Just a couple of hours in,

drifting ice is yet again spotted near the AUV.

The run is aborted.

In the northern area, it's been the problem.

It's changing very rapidly.

This morning we had a window, a very large window, so we went out and,

very rapidly, that opening closed on us from outside,

so now we had to abort.

The ice is moving quickly around us, again capturing us, trapping us.

With heavy sea ice all around them, the AUV is pulled out of the hunt.

It's a frustrating setback and winter is approaching fast.

But all is not lost.

The team has also been following a second lead,

based on information that was once overlooked.

In the oral history of local Inuit populations,

there are intriguing stories of a long vessel...

..seen drifting 100 miles from where the ships were supposedly abandoned.

At the last recorded position of Franklin's ships,

thick sea ice is blocking the search.

But further south, there's a second search zone,

based on some intriguing clues.

Nomadic Inuits have lived in this part of the Arctic

for nearly 1,000 years.

There's no written history here,

but information is handed down in other ways.

Oral history is our science, it's the science of Inuit.

That's how we learn about where to go and get the food,

or you may know about these ice conditions in the springtime.

Oral history had to be very, very accurate

because if it was not,

it could mean death.

Could these oral traditions provide an important clue

to the fate of the Franklin Expedition?

In 1848, after three winters stuck in the ice,

the surviving crew members abandoned the ships.

Stories passed down by Inuit hunters record sightings of the men

as they marched south.

Behind them, they dragged boats, laden with supplies.

They were walking in the soft snow, and then into cracks in the ice

where your foot would plunge through.

It was an extremely hard, physical and therefore mental experience.

If they stop, they die, but there's no solution,

so they walk, and they pick themselves up and they try

and head south, pulling the ship's boats behind them.

One remarkable face-to-face encounter with the starving crew

was described by Inuit hunters.

MAN CALLS OUT

HE CALLS OUT AGAIN

An English officer came forward,

shouting the Inuit word for "friend".

Some believe this was Captain Crozier,

who had learned some words on a previous expedition.

HE SPEAKS INUIT

He was given seal meat for his hungry crew.

HE GASPS

But there was no way the Inuit could support so many men,

so they left, knowing it would have been suicide to stay.

HE CALLS OUT AFTER THEM

Franklin's doomed crew continued to march south

through the frozen wilderness.

The word "cold" as we know it takes on a different meaning.

You feel like you want to roll up in a foetal ball all the time.

You become inactive, weak-willed, you don't want to do anything

other than creep into some place where there is no wind and no cold.

As you get farther from the ships,

bodies are found lying on the beach,

lying on gravel ridges, lying in small camps, bodies everywhere.

Some time later, Inuit hunters came across one of these camps.

With no sign of survivors. They made a grisly discovery.

When news of it reached England, it sparked outrage.

So this is 1854, this is The Times, October 23rd.

"The bodies of some 30 persons were discovered. Some were in a tent.

"Others under the boat, which had been turned to form a shelter.

"From the mutilated state of many of the corpses,

and from the contents of the kettles, it is evident

"that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource...

"..cannibalism... as a means of prolonging existence."

It's a horrendous, horrific truth for the Victorian public to hear.

Heroes don't eat each other, least of all naval heroes.

To many in Britain, the stories of cannibalism were an insult,

and none other than Charles Dickens leapt to the men's defence.

He dismissed the Inuit accounts as the uncivilised chatter,

"Of a gross handful of people,

"with a domesticity of blood and blubber."

But in 1992, archaeologists settled the matter once and for all

when they examined another camp in forensic detail.

This site map shows the distribution of the bones

that we uncovered at the site.

On this end of the site, there is a scattering of bones,

they are fairly widely scattered, and then as we move towards this end

of the site, you see a dense concentration of bones

in this area here.

The first bone in which I identified a cut mark was a left pelvic bone.

I turned it over, uncovered it, lifted it up from the soil

and found a distinct cut mark,

clearly identifiable as the mark that was not made by an animal.

These kinds of human-made cut marks

tend to have a V-shaped cross-section,

depending on the shape of the blade.

The marks were made by metal blades.

Flesh was stripped from these bones

by knives forged from British steel

in a last, desperate bid for survival.

MAN COUGHS

The Inuit reports were vindicated.

In its disgust,

Victorian Britain had rejected their stories as unreliable folklore.

But in dismissing Inuit oral tradition,

many later searches also overlooked clues

about the fate of Franklin's ships.

According to Inuit accounts, one of the abandoned ships was

crushed in the ice before sinking off King William Island.

But oral history also preserves clues about the fate of the second ship.

In recent years, this local knowledge has been gathered together

by amateur historian Louis Kamookak.

With the elders involved,

we collected all the place names in this region,

because place name is one way oral history is passed down.

Oral history is passed down by speaking, telling stories,

but it's also in the place names.

Those names all point towards the presence of a ship far to the south.

So there's places like... Simpson Strait...

a boat place,

that's a story where one of the ships was when it was still afloat.

That's why it's called a "boat place".

The idea that one of Franklin's ships could have made it this

far south, 100 miles from its last recorded position, is intriguing.

Other Inuit sightings extend right down towards the mainland,

and guided by that information,

this has become another focus for recent searches.

'So what do we have?

'Detailed oral history'

that really helps us define where to start looking.

Were it not for information provided by the Inuit,

we would have no reason to start looking for Franklin's ships

down in Wilmot and Crampton Bay.

These southern waters have remained ice-free all summer

and a boat run by the Arctic Research Foundation has been

surveying here with a towed sonar unit.

That's the safety cable for this one, we don't want to lose it!

This time, the data comes in live

and searchers work in shifts to keep a constant eye on the screens.

Another team of archaeologists is looking for evidence

of the Franklin Expedition on land, led by Professor Doug Stenton.

When they return from a routine survey, it's helicopter pilot

Andrew Stirling who brings news of an exciting breakthrough.

Just walking on the beach, something caught my eye,

and it just looked out of place, the colour, behind a rock,

so I just went over to investigate it.

Wasn't sure at that time what it was.

It was a large piece, it was unusual,

it wasn't your usual artefact on the ground so I looked around,

Doug's finished up, so we called him over,

and he's like, "Oh, good find!"

It was just unmistakable what the significance was.

It was marked with two Royal Navy broad arrows,

an indisputable indication that this came from a Royal Navy ship

and undeniably from either Erebus or Terror.

In the 19th century,

these arrow ship marks were used to identify British Navy property.

The object is quickly identified from the ship's plans

as the metal fitting that supported one of the ship's cranes.

In over a century of searching, this is by far

the most important clue to the whereabouts of Franklin's ships.

This large iron object,

very close to where the Inuit report

that they encounter one of these ships,

to find this in that vicinity is very exciting

And it really told us we were barking up the right tree.

The discovery of a metal artefact from one of Franklin's ships

has dramatically reduced the radius of the search.

The object is too large and heavy

to have travelled far from its parent ship.

So the Parks Canada team deploys its sonar equipment

in the surrounding waters.

After just a few minutes, a signal appears.

My colleague and I were manning the sonar station.

We were both looking at the sonar monitor and there it comes.

It was the unmistakable outline of a shipwreck.

No doubt what it was.

Started to scroll down the monitor.

And it wasn't even halfway onto the screen

before you really knew what you were looking at.

I jabbed my figure at the screen

and kind of lunged forward and said, "That's it, that it!"

When I saw...

the image of the ship coming down, I just...it cut my legs, literally.

Oh, my God!

This is going to be a treasure trove of information

and we are going to really open up a window directly into history.

This is a great moment for exploration.

We have been searching for 160 years for answers

to what happened to the Franklin Expedition.

The best equipped, most finely prepared and trained expedition

that had ever set out for the North West Passage

and to have it literally obliterated, end in mass disaster,

no survivors and no ships.

It's just, er, it's been a confounding mystery.

To finally have something significant,

to finally have a ship is incredible.

I had spent most of my adult life dreaming of this day

and, you know, it's here.

This is a day of some very good news

and that is that we have found one of the two Franklin ships.

APPLAUSE

Scientists have located one of the ships

from the fabled Franklin Expedition....

One of two ships used to search for the North West Passage...

The search team have finally hit the jackpot...

An absolutely incredible day for those people,

some of whom have spent a good chunk of their lives...

For the search team, it is the find of a lifetime.

But there is no time to bask in the glory.

They are hoping for a closer look at the wreck

before the seas freeze over for the winter.

3,000. Right. 21.

They waste no time putting the first divers in the water.

I caught a glimpse of the timber on the sea floor,

followed along its length.

Just growing anticipation and excitement and then, boom!

Towering overhead out of the haze

loomed the bulk of this stately shipwreck.

Four or five metres tall.

That sensation,

finally laying hands on the side of this historic shipwreck...

it was quite a remarkable experience that I will never forget.

From the beginning of that dive to the very end,

it was almost too much to take in.

Sitting 11 metres below the surface,

the wreck is a diver's dream.

In the cold Arctic water, the level of preservation is remarkable.

And artefacts are strewn across the site in plain view.

'Is that a gun? It's a cannon.

'Incredible! Is that two of them? Two of them.'

There is so much to see, it boggles the mind.

From the surface, the Canadian Hydrographic Service carries out

more sonar work to build up a 3D image of the entire wreck.

Its masts have been swept away by drifting ice.

But the body of the ship remains remarkably intact.

Holes in the deck

even allow the divers to get their first look inside the ship.

I was peering around inside the ship, just gazing inside

and you could look forward and see murky features.

Just the incredible sensation of being inside.

Sharing this place where the men of Franklin Expedition went through

these difficult experiences.

That is where they would have spent long, harrowing winters,

the dark Arctic nights.

It's just an absolute remarkable site,

the fact that it still stands intact,

it allows you to, sort of, place yourself there.

You feel this connection with the past. It's really quite astonishing.

To cap it all off, an iconic prize lay in wait.

I hear John call over on the headset saying,

"You're not going to believe this, but I found the bell."

And I thought I must have misheard him.

But sure enough, I went over and there was the ship's bell,

lying in plain sight, right on top of the upper deck.

Embossed on the side is the year the ship set sail - 1845.

A poignant reminder of the terrible fate of the Franklin Expedition.

Today was an extraordinary day.

I've never had the like of it in my entire career

and I probably never will after this day.

This wreck site, without a doubt,

is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever laid eyes on.

It is absolutely an underwater archaeologist's dream.

Tilt it slightly back.

Back at the Parks Canada laboratory, the bell is carefully cleaned.

We really want to capture this...

Cast in Britain 170 years ago,

it's now scanned in 3D

to create a digital replica that will never decay.

By matching up the sonar data

with plans from the National Maritime Museum,

the wreck is confirmed as HMS Erebus, Franklin's flagship.

The sonar image enables us to build

a computer-generated picture of the wreck in all its glory.

The find is a stunning success for the team

and a vindication of the Inuit oral tradition that led them to it.

In many ways, this is just the beginning.

The wreck will be explored in great detail in years to come

and anything brought to the surface

will undergo painstaking conservation and study.

But already, this wreck has thrown up one extraordinary possibility.

An idea that could rewrite the history of exploration.

Originally, it was thought both ships had been abandoned

off King William Island, much further north.

So how did this ship move 100 miles to the south?

Where the wreck of Erebus is found, it actually happens to be protected,

almost surrounded by a barrier of small islands and islets.

What we ask ourselves is how this ship arrived at that location.

One option is that HMS Erebus was carried by the ice itself.

Satellite imagery from the Canadian Ice Service shows that

ice in this area flows south with the prevailing wind.

You see the tendril of ice coming down the bottom of the screen

and that is being expelled from the strait into the Queen Maud Gulf.

It's not terribly surprising that at least one of the ships

ultimately would have been directed towards Crampton Bay.

What is less clear, however, is how it could have got through

this tangled web of small islands and shoals,

how it worked itself into a protected pocket where we find it today.

It is unlikely the ice could drag a ship intact

through this dense network of reefs and shoals.

But there is a more plausible explanation.

According to Inuit testimony, when Erebus was spotted here,

smoke was rising from the ship

and a gang plank had been lowered to the ice.

Had some men returned to the ship while the rest continued to march?

And did they steer the ship to where it now lies?

There has to be some sort of human hand into getting the ships there.

When did that start and how easy was that?

Those are the kinds of questions that we are going to look into.

The possibility that crew members

steered Erebus to its final resting place is crucial.

From this point onwards,

the North West Passage had already been surveyed.

Any of Franklin's men who reached this spot would have completed

their mission's goal.

These men, that last surviving band,

a final fire before the flame goes out,

these men have, in effect,

completed the final link in the chain of the North West Passage.

But that is so far from their minds at that moment.

These men are thinking nothing of fame or records.

They are thinking of the following day.

Inuit accounts mention a few sets

of what they call white man's footsteps heading inland.

A last trace of the last remaining souls.

In navigating the ship to where it now lies,

those men would have found

the final link of the elusive North West Passage.

The wreck of HMS Erebus is a monument to their achievement.

And to the sacrifice of all 129 men of Franklin's lost expedition.

# We were homeward bound

# One night on the deep

# Swinging in my hammock I fell asleep

# I dreamed a dream and I thought it true

# Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew. #