Franklin’s Lost Expedition — every man died, and the Inuit were right all along

In May 1845 the Royal Navy sent Sir John Franklin into the Canadian Arctic with two bomb vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to complete the last unmapped link of the Northwest Passage. Every one of the 129 men aboard died. The ships were beset in the ice off King William Island in September 1846, were never freed, and were abandoned in April 1848. The survivors dragged boats and sledges south across the sea ice and the island toward the Back River and died strung out along the way, of cold, starvation, scurvy and the slow toxic accumulation of a flawed supply system. It remains the deadliest disaster in the history of polar exploration.

The expedition was, on paper, the best-equipped Arctic venture Britain had ever launched: three years of tinned provisions, steam engines, internal heating, libraries. It vanished into a region the Admiralty believed it understood and did not. No survivor was ever found, and no continuous written account survives beyond a single two-line note left under a cairn at Victory Point. That note, signed by Captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, records that Franklin had died on 11 June 1847 and that 105 men deserted the ships on 22 April 1848 — the last dated word from anyone aboard.

What is known of the men’s final months comes not from the Navy but from the Inuit, who saw the survivors, who later found their bodies and their gear, and who told searchers plainly what had happened: men starving, men dying as they walked, and bodies that bore the marks of cannibalism among the last to live. The Hudson’s Bay surveyor John Rae carried that testimony back to Britain in 1854 and was vilified for it, most famously by Charles Dickens, who could not accept that British sailors might eat their dead and dismissed the Inuit as unreliable savages. The forensic record has since proved the Inuit account correct in nearly every particular. The same Inuit knowledge, carried in oral history for more than a century and a half, ultimately led searchers to the wrecks of Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016.