History's Greatest Mysteries (2020) s06e02 Episode Script

Tonight, a historic
expedition sets sail
into a labyrinth of ice.
This is, without
a doubt, the best planned
and best equipped
expedition ever to try
to find the Northwest Passage.
Lots of provisions,
technically advanced ships,
and it all just vanishes.
That disappearance
sparks a search
for clues spanning
nearly two centuries.
For the British,
it was unthinkable
these two exploration
ships could be lost.
It's just pure luck
that there were enough
Inuit eyewitnesses
to even piece together
a rough idea of
what happened to these poor men.
Now, we'll investigate
the top theories
surrounding this
legendary disappearance.
Something happened before the
crews abandoned those ships.
Nobody wants to believe
men of the Royal Navy
would resort to cannibalism.
If the men believe
the ships were cursed
and decided to leave,
their fates are already sealed.
What really happened
to the men of the
Franklin Expedition?
On a spring morning in 1845,
two British Royal Navy ships,
the HMS Terror
and the HMS Arabis,
depart England under the
command of Sir John Franklin.
Their quest, the elusive
Northwest Passage.
At this time for ships
traveling from England,
in order to get to Asia, you
have really just two options.
You can either travel around
the tip of South America
and up into the Pacific Ocean,
or you can travel down
the tip of South Africa
and then work your way
up to the Indian Ocean.
They both take a
really long time.
It was speculated there
had to be some sea route
by which ships could
travel up around Greenland
and then across
from the Atlantic
all the way to the Pacific.
The quest for a
Northwest Passage is huge
because it would cut travel
time down considerably.
What the British do is they
send out continual expeditions.
From the west, they've
come almost to the middle,
and from the east they've
come almost to the middle,
and it's that little middle,
maybe 300 nautical miles
that's a blank on the map still.
All the other routes were known,
so if you could get
through that middle part,
you would get to the other side.
The big problem of course,
is it freezes every year.
Shipping is gonna
come to a standstill,
so there were only
certain months of the year
where it could be traveled.
By 1845, explorers have charted
enough of the Canadian Arctic
to make the Royal Navy confident
that the Northwest Passage
is finally within reach.
To complete the final push,
the British Admiralty
selects 59-year-old captain,
Sir John Franklin, to
lead the Expedition.
He isn't their first choice.
The British admiralty
had approached a number
of known Arctic explorers,
Sir William Parry.
He was too old by that
time, he declined.
The Rosses were involved
with other expeditions,
so they actually
considered delaying,
but at the last moment,
under pressure from
Lady Jane Franklin,
Sir John was chosen.
John Franklin, for
one thing, was kind of old.
He was 59 years old,
which for a Royal Navy
officer is pretty up there.
And although he had led
two former expeditions,
they weren't
particularly successful.
In fact, in his first one,
half of his crew had died.
They ran out of food and they
were reduced to eating boots.
Despite his age, and despite
the fact he hadn't commanded
a ship in some years,
I imagine he wanted
to redeem himself
after his prior failures.
To help in
Franklin's Arctic mission,
the British Admiralty
spare no expense,
starting with the two
ships he'll set off in.
The HMS Terror
and the HMS Arabis.
For the day, the Arabis
and Terror are the best ships
that the British Navy could
use for maritime exploration.
They're converted bomb ships,
which means they're
heavy, they're robust.
They were refitted especially
for this expedition.
They both had iron
reinforced hulls to withstand
and be able to
maneuver through ice.
One new technological
advancement that they
also had was a propeller,
which could actually maneuver
up and down as needed.
They were very, very big.
They had powerful engines.
They were good for carrying
a whole lot of heavy cargo.
Thousands of cans of food,
thousands of barrels of
pickled, preserved vegetables,
flour to be made into bread.
It is hope that
the whole trip will take
maybe about a year,
maybe a little more.
Nevertheless, the ship can carry
three years worth of provisions
and those three years can be
stretched out to five years
through rationing.
This is by far the best planned
and best supplied expedition
ever to try to find
the Northwest Passage.
The morale, according to
all reports among the crew
and the officers,
is extremely high.
They think this is the voyage
that's going to find
the Northwest Passage.
The expedition
gets off to a good start,
reaching Greenland by mid-July.
The letters that the sailors
and officers send home
are full of confident
predictions
about this being a huge success.
In July 1845,
a group of whaling
vessels in Baffin Bay
spot the HMS Arabis
and the HMS Terror
heading west toward
Lancaster sound.
The Royal Navy had set a
plan for Sir John Franklin
and his crew to navigate
through Lancaster Sound
into the archipelago
and find a calm area
where they can be able
to shelter down
during the winter,
'cause they're already
anticipating that they're going
to be trapped in sea
ice for quite some time.
Once the ice melts that spring,
they're supposed to
continue on their voyage,
maneuver through this
archipelago of islands.
They're supposed
to send a message
as soon as they get through,
but no letter comes,
no ships in the Pacific report
ever having seen the
Arabis and the Terror.
1845 passes, 1846
passes, 1847 passes.
Jane Franklin, Franklin's
wife is concerned.
So both her and the
British Parliament,
they are putting pressure
on the British admiralty
to do something.
From the British
Admiralty's perspective,
they don't want to say anything
about there being a problem
with this expedition,
so they're really gonna
wait as long as they can.
By 1848, there's enough pressure
on the British admiralty
that they issue a
reward of 20,000 pounds.
By today's standards,
that's $2 million.
1848, three years after
the expedition set sail,
the admiralty launches the first
of a number of search parties
traveling both
overland and by sea.
Within two years,
many others have
joined the search.
In 1850, the first major clue
is found on a tiny island
just past Lancaster Sound.
At Beechey Island,
they find the first camp
where they overwintered,
and they find three graves.
Those belong to John Hartnel,
John Torrington,
and William Braine,
three crew members who had
died during that first winter.
And so they have actual
sort of physical evidence
that the Franklin
Expedition had been there.
The timing of the deaths
of the three men indicates
that something had happened
and they're not sure what,
but it's not a good sign.
The other thing is that the
ship doesn't find any record,
any message left by the
Franklin Expedition.
1854, nine years after this
expedition first set sail
and six years after the
first search crew was sent,
the British Royal Navy
completely drops this search
and declares this expedition
as officially lost.
Lady Jane Franklin
was quite outspoken
for a woman around that time,
and she also had a lot
of influential friends,
and so she decided she was
going to raise her own money
and have a private expedition
to find out what happened.
She still wants to know
what's happened to her husband.
She raises enough money to
buy a ship called the Fox
and to pay a crew and a captain
to try to find the
Arabis and the Terror.
In 1857,
12 years after the
expedition first set sail,
the Fox departs England
on the trail of
Franklin's lost ships.
Two years into the
voyage, Leopold McClintock,
who is commander of
the ship, the Fox,
finds evidence
that might explain
what happened to the ships.
February of 1859,
the Fox crew is on an overland
search on King William Island.
Leopold McClintock comes across
one of these Inuit seal hunters
and they have some knickknacks
and some buttons that are
part of the Royal Navy.
The Inuit, after being
questioned about this,
point the crew in the
direction of a place
called Victory Point.
Victory Point had been
established back in 1830,
in an earlier expedition,
they erected what's
called a cairn.
It's just a mound of stones.
McClintock and his crew find
nestled within these stones
a tin canister, and within
that canister, a letter.
The Victory Point note
is a pre-printed official
Royal Navy document.
It also contains two very
different handwritten messages.
The first message
is very positive.
It's dated May 1847,
a report that all is well.
Franklin is still in command
and really doesn't indicate
anything too worrisome
other than the fact that
they have been stuck in ice
for a long time.
The second message is written
on the same sheet of paper,
but is scribbled
around the margins.
It's written nearly a year later
and tells a far bleaker tale.
This second
message is from April 1848.
It says the ice never melted,
which means they have been
stuck there for 19 months.
So the area
in which they got stuck
is called the Back of Beyond,
and not even the
hunters will go there.
It's very barren,
and unfortunately,
that's exactly where
they got stuck.
According to
this note, at the time,
24 crew members had
already passed away,
including, unfortunately,
Sir John Franklin himself
who had perished just two weeks
after the first
note was written.
The idea that an
entire summer could pass
without the ice melting
enough for the ships to move,
it's unheard of.
There have been multiple
expeditions through this area.
That's never happened before.
So once this information
is seen in the letter,
the reaction is, how can
this possibly be true?
In 1859, search parties looking
for the lost Franklin Expedition
find their most telling
bit of evidence yet,
the so-called
Victory Point note.
The second message on the note,
written on the 25th
of April, 1848,
almost three years after the
Expedition first leaves England,
provides a clue to their fate.
The second Victory Point
message is actually signed
by the two commanding
officers of the HMS Terror
and the HMS Arabis.
This is James Fitzjames
and Francis Crozier.
The second message makes
clear the ice never thawed,
that the two ships just
remained imprisoned
by the icy conditions and
it had now been 19 months.
There's a post script that says,
"And start on
tomorrow, the 26th,
for Backs Fish River."
Backs Fish River is 200
miles away from the ship.
This is a heck of a trek
they're going to have to take
across a completely
desolate area.
By this time, Backs Fish River
has already been searched in
1858 and nothing was turned up,
so the reaction to this
message is disbelief.
But in 2005,
climate scientists make a
discovery in the Arctic ice
that could provide
fresh insights.
A team of climate researchers
headed up by a scientist
named Roy Koerner,
drills out core
samples of the ice
going down about 300 feet.
Upon studying these ice cores,
they discover why it
is that the Arabis
and the Terror were not
able to escape from the ice.
You have different
layers in each ice core,
and that gives you a
glimpse into environmental
and climate factors
going back to when
that layer was formed, all
the way back to the 1840s.
It was the deepest freeze
since the last Ice Age.
People in the mid 19th century
don't have the kind
of understanding
of atmospheric warming and
cooling that we have today.
John Franklin had literally
picked the worst time,
we're talking a one
in 10,000 year winter
to go through the
Northwest Passage.
To face the perils of winter,
Franklin is sailing in ships
that are state of
the art at the time.
One of the reasons why
there was so much faith
in this voyage was that
the Arabis and the Terror
had these
state-of-the-art engines.
These engines generate
25 horsepower,
which, whoa, that's amazing.
Well, modern icebreakers
have 75,000 horsepower to
cut through the thickest ice.
The Arabis and the Terror
with only 25 horsepower,
they don't stand a chance.
Yet despite the freak weather,
the Expedition is
unwittingly sailing into,
the Victory Point note
offers another clue
to what doomed the Expedition.
Not only is he running into
this weather phenomenon,
but he's also made some
choices for the Expedition
that was going to
carry the Arabis
and the Terror into some
dangerous, uncharted waters.
Lancaster Sound is the
entrance to the passage
that is already known,
so the idea was to go through
there until he came to a spot
where the map was
no longer filled in.
After his first
winter at Beechey Island,
Franklin then heads
south through Peel sound
where he faces a
crucial decision.
He had come to what turned
out to be the northern tip
of King William Island.
But what he didn't know, of
course, was what was beyond it.
So he did have a choice to
make there whether to head east
or west in his route.
The coordinates recorded
in the Victory Point note
make clear that Franklin
chooses the western route.
Franklin is
going to take the ships
west of King William Island.
The uncharted waters that
Franklin enters is an area
where water from different
sources is flowing in
and that acts as a funnel.
So you've got ice flowing
and meeting in the middle,
and this is where Franklin
and his ships were,
and it was the worst place
in the Arctic to be.
And what they don't realize
is, right behind them,
the water is freezing as
these ships are moving in,
so they're locked into place.
That's where the Expedition is
stuck and there's no way out.
Had he sailed down the east side
and then passed King William
Island and then to the west,
had Franklin done that,
we don't know what
would've happened.
Maybe he would've made it.
50 years
later, Norwegian explorer,
Roald Amundsen takes
the eastern route
and successfully navigates
the Northwest Passage
for the first time.
But for Franklin and his men,
after 19 months
trapped in the ice,
they are desperate
enough to abandon ship.
There is very little daylight
because they're so far north.
24 people had died.
Maybe they're afraid they're
gonna be stuck there
for another year, but there
could be something else.
There's something that could
be terrifying these men enough
to leave the relative
safety of the ships
to go through this
desolate area.
1848, three
years after setting sail,
the Franklin Expedition
abandoned their ships
off King William Island.
Meanwhile, the first British
search team is setting off
to rescue them over land,
led by explorer John Rae.
For the next six years,
they scour the Arctic.
John Rae is a Scottish explorer.
He got his start as as a surgeon
with the Hudson Bay Company.
Unlike Franklin and his men,
Rae has learned from the local
indigenous people, the Inuit,
and so he's wearing
fur instead of wool.
He's using sleds and snowshoes.
He's able to survive in that
harsh Arctic environment
just like the Inuit.
And he covers, by 1854,
more than 5,000 square miles.
In May of 1854, at a place
about 150 miles east of
King Williams Island,
they encounter a group of Inuit
who want to trade with them.
And he noticed on the wrist
of one of the Inuit hunters,
his sealskin parka, a gold band.
And Rae immediately
recognizes that
for what it is, it's a cap band.
It's an officer's cap band,
and he knows the chances of
an Inuit being given that
are very, very unlikely.
So he starts a dialogue
with this hunter
and asks, where
did you get that?
The Inuit tell Rae that
four winters previously,
they had encountered a
group of about 40 white men
dragging a boat south
through this area.
The Inuit described the
leader of this group
as a tall, stout man
with a telescope.
Their description matches a
description of Francis Crozier,
who had been Franklin's
second in command.
The Inuit stated
that the white man communicated
using gestures saying
that their ships
had actually been trapped in ice
and they had fled to land
in order to hunt deer.
Obviously, Rae
is excited by this news
and he immediately wants to
figure out where they've gone.
The Inuit explain all of
these men are now dead,
and they believe
that they know why.
The Inuit provided
further information
about this group of men as well.
Inuits say that they actually
encountered their camp
several months later
and discovered 30
corpses on site.
They were quite sure
that Franklin's man,
or at least some group of them,
had resorted to what Rae called
the last resource, cannibalism.
So the Inuit tell Rae
that they had seen pots
in which human flesh
had been cooked.
People with their arms or
limbs cut off, severed,
signs of the flesh being
removed from the bones.
When the Inuit
discovered this camp,
not only did they have
this shocking news,
but they actually have
physical artifacts
to buttress their claim.
There was a silver plate that
actually belonged to Franklin.
So for Rae, both what
the Inuit tell him,
and the artifacts that
they've brought him,
it's enough to convince him
that he knows what happened
to Franklin and his men.
But he writes a written report
to his employers, the
Hudson's Bay Company,
detailing what he has found and
the report, as it turns out,
gets to London before Rae does.
Rae is satisfied
that he's finally solved
the riddle of the
missing expedition,
but his report
isn't well received.
Nobody wants to believe
that men of the Royal Navy
would resort to cannibalism.
Cannibalism is something
that savages engage in,
not civilized men of the
greatest empire in the world.
Charles Dickens
gets involved in this
because he's a friend
of the Franklins
and Lady Franklin
apparently urges him
to attack Rae and the Inuit
who make these claims.
Dickens implies that the Inuit
actually killed Franklin's men,
and then they took
these artifacts,
which was totally not true.
Rae collects the reward money,
but his reputation
is pretty well shot
and he does not
make a return trip.
It turns out much, much
later, he was right.
1981 on King William Island,
a team of scientists led by
Owen Beattie recover bones
belonging to members of
the Franklin Expedition.
After forensic analysis,
these bones reveal
that the Inuits claim
may have been true.
Bones that were retrieved show
cut marks on them from knives,
and they also show that
they were indeed cooked
and that they were boiled
to draw the bone marrow out.
Despite this
compelling forensic evidence,
questions remain about
how the men of the
Franklin Expedition
could have starved to death.
They were equipped
with over 8,000 tins
of food and vegetable,
so they should have had enough
provisions to have survived.
Rae also reported that
the Inuit told them
that they found many
cans that were unopened.
So why were men
resorting to cannibalism
if they weren't eating the food
that they had brought with them?
In 1845, the ill fated
Franklin Expedition
set sail from England,
searching for a
route to the far East
through the Arctic Circle,
only to mysteriously
vanish and die.
Then in 1981, researchers
start to ponder a new cause.
Could what doom the men be
something else entirely?
So on King William Island,
a team led by Dr. Owen Beattie
find bones that show
evidence of cut marks,
and this clearly
indicates cannibalism.
Something else
they find when studying
these bone fragments is that
they have crazy high
levels of lead in them.
Lead is
incredibly toxic to humans,
it can lead to a
number of complications
including stomach aches,
headaches, seizures,
and ultimately even death.
The results of
Beattie's analysis suggest
that these bone
fragments have 10 times
the normal amount of lead,
that is shockingly high.
The amount of
lead in a person's body
accumulates over their lifetime,
so it doesn't speak to a
particular time or period.
It just speaks to the overall
amount of lead in the person.
A more useful way
of determining lead content
that would not only tell
you how much lead there is,
but when it was
introduced to the system,
can come from an
analysis of hair,
fingernails, and toenails.
Unlike bone,
it's harder for nails
and for hair to be found.
So really you need a body,
and of course, most of the
Franklin remains are only bones.
Yet Beattie and his team realize
there's one site that could
provide the material they need
to test their theory.
So in 1984, Owen
Beattie is given permission
to dig up, to exhume, the
three graves on Beechy Island.
The first grave that they exhume
is the grave of John Torrington.
His body is so
well preserved in the ice
that you'd think if you
touched him, he would wake up.
The lead levels
found in Torrington's body
were so high, he
would've been suffering
from a whole host of mental
and physical problems.
The question is,
how does that level of
lead enter their bodies?
The answer may be found
not far from Torrington's body.
About a half a
mile from those graves,
his team find a garbage dump
that include a whole
bunch of tin cans,
cans that would've held
the food that supplied
the men of the Arabis
and the Terror.
They find evidence
that they have been
soldered shut very shoddily.
And what was used for
the solder? Lead.
In preparation
for this expedition,
Sir John Franklin makes a
deal with a food supplier
by the name of Steven Goldner.
He's commissioned to make
these tin cans to be able
to supply these
crew with provisions
that they would need for
their long expedition.
The contract calls
for him to provide
about 34,000 pounds of
preserved canned meat,
which is about 8,000 cans.
The whole process
of canning meat is very new
at this point.
This is a full 70 years
before there's any understanding
of how to sterilize
food to begin with.
So any kind of canned food
in the mid 19th century
is gonna be kind of dicey.
Goldner is informed
that Franklin needs
this 34,000 pounds of
canned meat in seven weeks.
That is a really
short period of time.
By all accounts with this
expedition on the horizon,
Goldner and his team are
completely overwhelmed
in order to be able to
produce these 8,000 cans.
An analysis of the can suggests
that they're cutting corners
on soldering these cans shut.
The soldering job was so
shoddy that it's easy to see
how lead could have
contaminated the meat inside.
To make matters worse,
expedition records suggest
the tinned food might not
be the only source
of lead poisoning.
Each ship was equipped
with a locomotive engine
and this allowed them
to travel slowly,
say when there wasn't wind,
and it also provided
heat throughout the ship,
but those steam engines
do other important things.
They allow for the
distillation of salt water.
The only problem is this
fresh water is passing
through lead pipes, and
it's easy to see how
lead could have
contaminated that water.
Franklin's men were subjected
to this for two years.
Could the amount of lead
that they consumed in
their drinking water,
that they consumed
in the atmosphere,
could it have contributed
to their decline in
both their mental
and their physical health?
Maybe they irrationally
believed that it made sense
to leave the safety of the ships
and risk death on
the frozen tundra.
The disappearance
of the Franklin Expedition
in 1845 while on
route to uncover
the fabled Northwest Passage
has baffled the
world for generations
and sparked one of history's
longest rescue searches.
In addition
to Lady Jane Franklin,
a number of
independent researchers
decided that they would try
to find out what happened
to the Franklin Expedition.
Some people are still
convinced that there's a chance
that some survivors
might be alive,
and one of them is an American
named Charles Francis
Hall of Cincinnati.
Charles Francis Hall,
an American newspaper
publisher, in 1857,
decides that he's just
going to head up on his own
and launch his own search
to find out what happened
to the Franklin Expedition.
He figures his
best lead are the Inuit
who interacted
with these people.
So he spends a long
period interviewing
any Inuit that he can find
who would've
encountered these men.
1869, after nine years searching
and countless interviews
with the Inuit,
Hall ends his Arctic expedition.
A decade later,
US Army Lieutenant, Frederick
Schwatka, picks up the trail.
In 1879, he's exploring
King William Island
with a dog sled team
and he encounters an Inuit woman
who does remember
the time of Franklin
and has a story about
what the men look like.
What she observed was
a group of white men
moving very slowly,
sort of shuffling their
feet across the ice.
They looked thin and
their mouths were dry,
hard, and black.
Schwatka finds this odd.
Why would their mouths be
black and hard and dry?
He doesn't know
what to make of it,
so he just kind
of files it away.
But 50 years later,
the story about the
starving sailors
with black mouths
draws renewed interest.
In the mid 1930s, an English
doctor named Richard Cyriax
is doing research on a new book
about the Franklin Expedition.
When he reads
accounts from Schwatka
about the sailors
having black mouths,
he realizes he's seen
that symptom before.
Scurvy is basically a disease
that prevents the body from
keeping its blood vessels,
skin, bones, and
muscles healthy.
People suffering from
scurvy often have blackness
around their mouth
because they bruise very easily
and also their gums bleed.
So that could explain
those symptoms.
Other symptoms of
scurvy, fever, seizures,
personality changes,
and if it's allowed to
progress far enough, death,
The root cause of scurvy
is vitamin C deficiency.
Most animals are actually able
to produce vitamin C
themselves, but humans cannot.
So we're required to get all
of our vitamin C from food
such as fresh fruits
and vegetables.
Scurvy had been the scourge
of navies around the world
because on voyages of
exploration particularly,
you're going so far from
your original supplies,
so you're getting mostly dried
and preserved food that's
lost all of its vitamins.
After three or four months,
it's almost inevitable
that people are going to start
to fall victim to
the first symptoms.
Between the 16th
to 18th century,
approximately 2 million
sailors lose their life
to the conditions of scurvy.
The disease kills more
sailors in the 18th century
than died from enemy combat.
In 1747, a British
naval surgeon, James Lind,
he discovers that there's
a very effective way
to prevent scurvy,
and that is to consume
citrus, things like limes,
oranges, and lemons.
According to Navy records,
the Franklin
expedition sets sail
with a three year
supply of lemon juice,
but the Royal Navy may not
have taken into account
the effects of such a long
journey on the ship's reserves.
A problem could have arose
because after three years
they may have run out,
or as Cyriax points out,
after a year, the lemons
may have started to ferment.
And so it's believed that
they probably smelled it,
and it smelled rotten,
it had fermented
and they tried to boil
it, but unfortunately,
you're getting rid of all
the vitamin C by doing that,
and so that could have led
to them getting scurvy.
Once scurvy takes hold,
the symptoms begin to
progress incredibly fast.
So by the time the
Franklin crew realizes
that their lemon juice
is no longer effective,
it's ultimately just too late.
So the scurvy
may not have been enough
to actually kill everyone off,
but it could have
set things in motion.
You're talking about
people getting sick,
they're now thinking
maybe this boat is cursed,
and so they wanna go and
seek resources elsewhere
so then they get
off of the boat.
There's no going back
from that decision.
While the Arabis and Terror
were locked in snow and ice,
it's likely the men would
venture out of the ships
to hunt for any game
they could find.
Fresh meat would've made all
the difference to these men
because they would've
acquired vitamin C,
and then of course, protein
from eating the meat itself.
Polar historian Ken
McGoogan puts out a book
that suggests that one
particular type of game
in the Arctic could have
possibly doomed the crew.
McGoogan learns
about an expedition
that took place in 1619.
65 men on this
expedition, led by
a Danish Norwegian
explorer named Jens Munk.
They were hunting beluga whales
up in Northern Hudson Bay
and they're not having any luck,
and so they shoot a polar
bear and they eat it.
The Inuit have always
known that in order
to get enough vitamin
C, you eat meat raw.
So the Inuit, for example, they
hunt seals, whales, caribou,
but they don't hunt polar bear.
Raw polar bear
meat is often infected
with a microscopic
parasite called trichinella
and for a human
that consumes it,
you can actually come
down with a disease
called trichinosis.
Eating the flesh of
an animal with trichinella
means that the parasites
go inside of you.
Eventually, the
parasites make their way
to the muscles and induce
fever and seizures,
inflammation, ultimately death.
And it would be
an agonizing death
that takes place over
a period of weeks.
One of the things
McGoogan reveals is that
after eating this polar bear
flesh, the entire group,
with the exception of Munk
and two others, end up dying.
McGoogan speculates
that a similar thing occurs
to the Franklin expedition
while the Terror and Arabis
are stuck in the ice.
And this is an area
with heavy polar sea ice.
This stuff is impenetrable.
You couldn't drill a hole
in it and fish through it.
It doesn't have an edge,
and the ice edge would be where
you would hunt sea mammals.
You're stuck hunting
what's available on land,
and certainly a polar bear
would be a very tempting target,
enough food for everybody
in the whole party.
In the Royal Navy,
it's tradition that
the first officers
would be the ones
that would hunt,
but they would also get
first dibs on the meat.
The rest of the crew would
get the reserves the next day.
According to that
second Victory Point note,
24 men have died, 15
crew and nine officers,
despite far fewer officers
on the Expedition.
This means these
officers have died
at twice the rate of
the rest of the crew.
If they're eating
contaminated polar bears,
it's the officers who are going
to suffer disproportionately
as a result of this.
The message found
doesn't indicate
when these men died
or how these men died,
but the fact that so many
officers seem to be dying
might help us to understand
why the rest of the crew
would become spooked
and decide to get
away from the ships.
Even stuck in the ice,
these ships provided the best
protection from the elements,
but if the men believed
the ships were cursed
or spreading disease
and decided to leave,
at the time they abandoned ship,
their fates are already sealed.
September 7th, 2014,
a team of Canadian
marine archeologists
finally discover the
remains of the HMS Arabis.
Two years later, the wreck of
the HMS Terror is also found.
Yet for some unknown reason,
both shipwrecks are many miles
away from the coordinates
where the Victory Point note
tells us they were abandoned.
The team studying the
ships happened to notice
that the propeller of
the Terror is down.
So this raises a
fascinating possibility
that maybe the old assumption
that those ships
got stuck in the ice
and never moved again
under their own power,
maybe that's wrong.
Maybe crew members found
their way back to the ship
and once the ice had freed
them, had managed to move them.
Historians
hope that ongoing analysis
of the Arabis and Terror
wrecks will help explain
what ultimately doomed the crew
and force them to flee on foot.
It's just pure luck
that there were enough
Inuit eyewitnesses
to even piece together
a rough idea of what
happened to these poor men.
It's certainly
possible to survive
being stranded
somewhere over months
if you have adequate provisions,
if you have adequate nutrition,
if you have adequate
medical care.
But if you find yourself
in the wilderness
starving so dramatically
that you're willing,
to engage in cannibalism,
chances are not just one
thing has gone wrong,
but everything has gone wrong.
When we talk about the
mystery and the Expedition,
I think we tend to forget
that these are real people.
You can imagine fear, hunger,
the horrific effects of scurvy.
You can easily imagine
people going mad
in those circumstances.
Nearly 180 years
after the vessels carrying
explorer John Franklin
and his men vanished
while navigating the
Northwest Passage,
the Expedition's demise is
still generating new theories.
Maybe another clue will
one day emerge from the ice
to finally solve the mystery
of the Franklin Expedition.
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."