On May 19, 1845, two Royal Navy ships carrying 134 men set sail from England on what was expected to be the triumphant final push to chart the last unmapped stretch of the Northwest Passage. Two months later, a whaling ship spotted them tied to an iceberg in Baffin Bay, waiting for the ice to clear. No European ever reported seeing them again. All 129 men still aboard by that point vanished, along with both ships, and more than a century and a half of search expeditions found only scattered bones, rumors, and a story British authorities spent decades refusing to fully believe — until 2014 and 2016, when the wrecks finally turned up almost exactly where that dismissed story had said they would be.
Background: A Mission to Chart the Last Unknown Passage
The expedition was led by Sir John Franklin, an experienced Royal Navy officer nearing 60, commanding HMS Erebus alongside Captain James Fitzjames, with Francis Crozier captaining the second ship, HMS Terror. The mission's goals were to finally navigate the last unexplored stretch of the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic and to gather magnetic data useful for navigation more broadly. The ships were last confirmed seen by the whaler Enterprise on July 28, 1845, secured to an iceberg in Baffin Bay. The expedition wintered at Beechey Island in 1845–46, during which five men fell ill and either died or were sent home, reducing the crew to 129. The following summer, the ships pushed through Peel Sound before becoming trapped in pack ice near King William Island, where they remained icebound for more than a year.
Abandonment and Silence
A note later recovered from a cairn on King William Island, left by Crozier and Fitzjames, recorded that the ships were formally abandoned on April 22, 1848. By that point, 24 men, including Franklin himself, had already died. The 105 remaining survivors, now under Crozier's command, set out on foot toward the Canadian mainland, hoping to reach help. None of them were ever seen again by European eyes.
Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John's wife, spent years lobbying the British Admiralty to launch search expeditions after two years passed without word. Those searches, beginning in 1848, eventually recovered scattered artifacts and human remains, revealing that the men had suffered from starvation, scurvy, and lead poisoning, the latter possibly linked to lead solder used to seal the expedition's tinned food supplies. Some recovered bones showed cut marks consistent with cannibalism among the last survivors, a detail that had already reached British authorities decades earlier through a far more controversial channel: in 1854, explorer John Rae relayed detailed Inuit oral testimony describing exactly this outcome. The British public, and prominently the writer Charles Dickens, publicly and forcefully disputed Rae's account, insisting English naval officers would never resort to such acts. Rae's professional reputation suffered for repeating testimony that later physical evidence would substantially confirm.
The 2014 and 2016 Discoveries
Between 1992 and 2004, researcher David Woodman led nine Arctic expeditions built specifically around taking Inuit oral histories seriously as primary evidence, an approach that hadn't been consistently applied in the previous century of largely fruitless British-led searches. Woodman's work didn't locate either wreck, but it laid essential groundwork for a later, more coordinated effort combining Parks Canada, the Arctic Research Foundation, and Inuit elders including Louie Kamookak. In September 2014, that partnership found the wreck of HMS Erebus in just 11 meters of water, remarkably intact, its bronze bell still in place and artifacts including boots, dishes, and buttons preserved by the cold. The discovery came directly from an Inuk elder's account of a piece of wood seen poking from the ice decades earlier, near the very location where the ship was found. Two years later, in September 2016, HMS Terror was located in Terror Bay, even more astonishingly preserved, sitting upright on the seafloor in roughly 79 feet of water. Both ships were found essentially exactly where generations of Inuit oral testimony had placed them, testimony that had been available to British searchers for well over a century.
Vanished Without a Trace at a Glance
| Case | Year | Who Vanished | Current Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amelia Earhart | 1937 | Pilot Amelia Earhart, navigator Fred Noonan | Unresolved; competing theories, active 2025 expeditions |
| D.B. Cooper | 1971 | Unidentified hijacker, parachuted from a commercial flight | Unresolved; FBI formally closed active investigation in 2016 |
| Franklin Expedition | 1845 | 129 British Royal Navy officers and crew | Ships found in 2014 and 2016; full fate still debated |
| Percy Fawcett | 1925 | Explorer Percy Fawcett and his son Jack | Unresolved; believed lost in the Amazon |
| Michael Rockefeller | 1961 | Heir Michael Rockefeller, lost off New Guinea | Unresolved; contested theories persist |
Theories and Explanations
A combination of starvation, scurvy, and lead poisoning. Autopsies of preserved crewmen exhumed from Beechey Island graves, conducted by researcher Owen Beattie in the 1980s, found tissue evidence supporting lead poisoning as a contributing factor, likely worsened by malnutrition and scurvy as the expedition's food supplies dwindled during the prolonged ice entrapment.
Cannibalism among the dying, later confirmed. Cut marks identified on recovered bones corroborate the Inuit oral testimony that reached the British public in 1854, indicating that some of the last surviving crew members resorted to cannibalism as starvation set in during the final overland march.
Inuit testimony, dismissed and then vindicated. Perhaps the most significant finding to emerge from the 2014 and 2016 discoveries isn't about the ships themselves, but about how they were found: through oral histories that Inuit communities had maintained and offered to British searchers for more than 150 years, and that Victorian-era British institutions had largely dismissed or actively disputed.
What remains genuinely unresolved. Even with both wrecks located, researcher David Woodman has noted that much about the expedition's final months remains, in his words, informed speculation rather than settled fact. Current evidence suggests the surviving crew split into smaller groups sometime after the April 1848 abandonment, with some men surviving longer than others before succumbing to starvation, exposure, and illness, but the full sequence of events during those final months is still being pieced together.
The Curious Connection
The Franklin Expedition is the pivot point of this series. Amelia Earhart's case remains fully open after 88 years despite institutional resources. D.B. Cooper's file is formally closed while the actual mystery persists. Franklin shows something different: that a case can hold the title of history's most famous unsolved disappearance for over 150 years and still eventually break open, not primarily through new technology, but through finally taking seriously evidence that had been available and dismissed from the very beginning.
That thread, communities whose knowledge is sidelined by the dominant institutional narrative of the moment, only for later evidence to confirm what they'd been saying all along, echoes directly back to the Indigenous oral traditions CurioLink examined in its earlier coverage of Bigfoot's Sasquatch origins. It also sets up an uncomfortable contrast for this series' next entry. Explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for a lost city he believed Indigenous Amazonian societies had built and then abandoned, a search shaped by many of the same colonial-era assumptions that once caused the Franklin searchers to overlook the very testimony that would, a century and a half later, finally solve their case.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Franklin Expedition?
The Franklin Expedition was an 1845 British Royal Navy mission led by Sir John Franklin, aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to chart the last unexplored section of the Northwest Passage. All 129 crew members died after the ships became trapped in Arctic ice.
When were the Erebus and Terror finally found?
HMS Erebus was discovered in September 2014, and HMS Terror was located in September 2016, both in Arctic waters near King William Island, Nunavut, roughly where Inuit oral histories had long placed them.
What killed the Franklin Expedition's crew?
Evidence points to a combination of starvation, scurvy, and lead poisoning, likely worsened by contaminated tinned food supplies, with some crew members resorting to cannibalism during the final, desperate overland march.
Why weren't the ships found sooner?
Inuit communities offered detailed oral testimony about the expedition's fate as early as the 1850s, but British authorities largely dismissed this testimony for over a century. The ships were ultimately found by researchers who took that testimony seriously.
Is the Franklin Expedition mystery fully solved now?
Not entirely. While the ships' locations are now known, researchers still describe much about the crew's final months, including exactly how survivors split up and moved after abandoning the ships, as partially informed speculation rather than fully settled fact.