One of the vessels from Britain's "Lost Expedition" has been discovered

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The Canadian search team had just made one of the greatest marine discoveries in history, locating the wreck of one of two British vessels that vanished into the icy expanse of the Arctic with 129 men on board in search of the fabled Northwest Passage in the late 1840s.


The images of the remarkably well-preserved ship were ghostly in their clarity as it sat seafloor just 11 metres below the surface of the near-freezing waters of the Queen Maud Gulf.


Here, more than 160 years after they disappeared was one of the doomed vessels of Sir John Franklin’s “lost expedition” - a mission that ended in disaster, the ships strangled by a glacial noose of ice, the crew demented by lead poisoning, succumbing to cold and driven in desperation to cannibalism in a futile effort to survive.

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the missing vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were Royal Navy ships that sailed from Britain in 1845 on an Admiralty expedition under the command of Sir John, a rear-admiral who first cut his teeth at sea in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

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They also found that the some of the skeletal remains had knife marks; others showed signs of butchering, with joints removed. It was evidence that confirmed reports of cannibalism by some desperate crew members given by Inuit hunters in the years after the disappearance.

A note dated1848 and found years later recorded the men’s plight. Nine officers, including Sir John, and 15 crewmen had already died. The ships were being abandoned as the survivors decided to try to walk south out of the barren wasteland, the writer recorded.

The expedition had been attempting to find a fabled a northern passage from the Atlantic to Pacific, a new route that could have opened up great trading riches.

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