In the mid-18th century, Britain had a well-equipped and highly staffed royal expedition that tried to cross the Arctic Circle and open up the Azalasian shipping route, but as the world's most advanced seafaring power at that time, they ushered in not great successes in the history of navigation, but encountered the opposite strange experience -
They took enough people for the fleet to eat for 3 years, and they were completely destroyed in the Arctic. After more than a century of exploration, people have no way of knowing exactly what they went through.
Cemeteries, shipwrecks, broken bones, death... Today, only the Inuit account of the horror of the crew being hunted down by evil spirits is widely circulated.
Everything is ready, set sail
In 1845, Britain's maritime transport was restricted by Spain and Portugal, and the previously developed shipping routes were occupied, which prevented them from trading with China, India and the United States, causing them considerable losses.
In order not to lag too far behind the other two countries, this year the British government decided to form a fleet to open a new Asia-Europe route, because the previous attempt to open a route across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to Asia was unsuccessful, so this time they could only try to go north through the Arctic Circle and reach Asia.
Trade routes between Spain and Portugal
Because the Arctic is a harsh environment, not only the temperature is extremely low, but the sea area is also dangerous, so even if the industry develops to this period, it is very difficult for the fleet to cross the Arctic. So the British began preparations two years in advance for this voyage, and they found two military gunboats and converted them into ships for exploration.
The ship has its own steam system and propellers, so that the ship can travel in the absence of wind; The bow of the ship is also reinforced with iron walls, so that it can break the ice when it encounters the ice surface of the Arctic; The ship is also equipped with a distillation system that can directly purify seawater, allowing the crew to drink fresh water directly from seawater.
Interior cross-sectional view of the Nether and Terror
In terms of food, they stockpiled tens of thousands of kilograms of flour and meat, thousands of kilograms of tobacco and chocolate, and tens of thousands of cans such as meatballs, fruits, juices, and wine, which had a shelf life of five years, and all food could be eaten by all crew members for three full years; Not only that, but they also installed steam heating in the crew resting places, plus a small library with nearly 3,000 books for the crew to relieve their boredom.
This configuration, can be said to be the top configuration at that time, practicality, comfort are full, but it is worth mentioning that the names of these two ships are strange, and even feel full of fatalism when looking back - they are called "Nether" and "Terror" respectively.
When the equipment is ready, it is time to recruit crews, because they know the danger of the Arctic, so many people are reluctant to go, so the British government also specially set up two rewards: 20,000 pounds to reward the first person to open the northwest route, and 5,000 pounds to reward the first ship to reach 89 degrees north latitude. This is a way to encourage everyone to join the fleet.
In the end, John Franklin was appointed commander-in-chief and captain of the Nether, who was a rear admiral in Britain at the time and was recognized as having the most expeditionary experience in Britain at that time.
In the most dangerous case, half of the expedition died, Franklin and the rest of the crew returned alive by eating his boots, and he was teased by the nickname "The Boot-Eater", but it was these experiences that gave him a wealth of experience and tenacity that made him the right choice for commander.
At the time, not only were there high expectations for him, but Franklin, 59, was himself ambitious, hoping that the success of the voyage would help him make a name for him and earn him Britain's highest honour.
In addition, the deputy commander of the Nether is James FitzJames, and the captain of the Terror is Francis Klose, and they are also Franklin's deputies. The remaining crew consisted of 24 officers and 110 soldiers. It can be said that the entire fleet of 137 people are physically fit elites.
The combination of such an invincible ship and a strong crew makes people feel confident that this voyage can really successfully map unknown areas of the Arctic region and explore new routes from Europe to Asia.
In 1845, the expedition officially set out, they passed through Scotland, arrived in Greenland, and carried out the final handover of materials with the supply ship, but during this period, 5 crew members withdrew from the expedition due to illness, which may have felt that they missed the high bonus unlucky eggs, but from today's point of view, they are the only lucky ones who survived this voyage.
After the supply was over, the fleet officially began to march towards the Arctic Circle, passing through Baffin Bay next to Greenland and encountering a whaling ship, which, according to the crew of the whaling ship, described as having high morale. But as everyone knows, this is the last time that the Nether and the Terror appear in the eyes of the world in intact form.
The fleet disappeared, and the "evil spirits" appeared
In the two years since departure, the entire fleet has been said to have been completely unheard, and relatives of the crew, including Franklin's wife, began to worry about their situation and asked the government to send a search and rescue team to find their whereabouts.
However, the British government, which had previously spent a lot of money on preparations, refused the request of the crew's families on the grounds that "there was enough food on board for 3 years, and now only 2 years have passed, so there is no need to worry", and did not carry out a search and rescue.
So the time came to 1848, three years after the fleet set off, but there was still no news from them, and the British government was finally anxious, and even began to regret why it did not go to the search and rescue fleet in advance. So they began to launch a fleet of ships for search and rescue missions, and offered a reward of 20,000 pounds for civilian fleets and fleets from neighboring countries to help and search.
However, it took several countries and multiple batches of fleets to search for a full 3 years before they struggled to obtain a clue.
In 1850, a search and rescue team composed of British and American ships found traces of the expedition's life on an island called "Beach Island" in the Canadian Arctic during the search of small islands deep into the Arctic. There are many empty cans on the coast that have been eaten, as well as graves of three people.
According to the time engraved on the tombstone, the three men died between January and April 1846, according to time calculations, this should be the first winter spent in the Arctic Circle after the expedition of the expedition, because the increasingly cold weather and the Arctic Circle has entered the polar night, the fleet cannot sail, so they chose to camp on this island for the winter. After a preliminary autopsy, the bodies of the three crew members were believed to have died of tuberculosis, and no further research was done afterwards.
Four more years followed, and in 1854 Scottish explorers brought back news of new expeditions from the Busia Peninsula.
After encountering the Inuit, the indigenous people of the local people, these adventurers learned from them that two ships had been frozen here and could not move, and the people on board came down to try to walk out of the snowfield, not knowing whether anyone succeeded in the end, except that their people later found thirty or forty bodies in a camp where the crew was stationed.
Because a period of time has passed, the cause of death of the body is a mystery, so during this time, there are rumors that there are evil spirits in the Arctic region, and the expedition team encounters evil spirits, and all members become evil spirits.
Discover the notes, the preliminary "truth"
As rumors intensified, and no other news came back, the British government unilaterally announced that commander Franklin had died and said it would not fund any more search and rescue operations.
Franklin's wife did not accept this result, and she decided to continue to raise funds to organize the fleet to search. After three years of preparation, the ship Fox, which she funded, set out again to find Franklin's group, but the ship also searched for two years before finally finding a clue about the expedition.
The Fox discovered an artificially built pile of stones on King William Island, Canada, which was then recognized as a device for storing contact letters and logs, and found a manuscript note of the Franklin expedition in the pile, the only surviving expedition information about the operation.
This note is named "Victory Point Notes", which is jointly signed by the captain of the Nether and the captain of the Terror, but it is strange that the captain of the Nether signed here is not Franklin, but his deputy Fitz James mentioned earlier.
"Victory Point Notes"
According to the contents of the notes, it was learned that in September 1846, the expedition was still a few months away from ushering in the second winter after entering the Arctic Circle, and what people did not expect was that when the ship sailed to King William Island, it was frozen because there was no shelter at all, and the ice was so thick that they could not break it by all the methods they could think of, there was no way, the fleet could only stay in place, fortunately the materials they carried were enough to survive.
After surviving the whole winter, spring came, but the imaginary turning point of rising temperatures and melting ice did not come, not even spring, but the following summer came when the ice surface showed no signs of melting, which undoubtedly hit the confidence of the fleet, but the temperature would only be lower after summer, so the fleet had to survive a third winter in place.
They pinned their last hopes on the spring of 1848, which dealt them another blow, and the snow and ice showed no signs of melting.
So far, after being trapped in place for up to a year and a half, they have lost 9 officers and 15 soldiers. The expedition knew they couldn't wait any longer, so they had to make the difficult decision to abandon the two luxurious ships and organize the 105 surviving men to go south on foot through the deserted snowy plains for a glimmer of life.
The notes came to an abrupt end, and although it seemed to record the crew's complete trapped life, there were some doubts.
The first suspicion is that the notes record that the fleet had sent a distress team in May 1847 in an attempt to ask for help, but the situation of the fleet did not change in any way, and the notes were indeed recorded as "everything went well", and the outcome of the distress team is unknown;
The second doubt is that the notes record the death of the former commander-in-chief Franklin in June 1847, compared with the graveyard of the three crew members found on Beach Island before, Franklin, as the highest officer, has no record from the cause of death to the burial place, it is difficult not to suspect that he died;
The last and biggest doubt is that the remains of the Nether and Terror were found and salvaged in 2014 and 2016 respectively, but the remnants of the ship's belongings show that there is still unfinished food left on board, and it is necessary to hike through thousands of kilometers of snowfield, and the surviving team did not take all the food away?! It's really weird.
In addition, the location where the remains of the two ships were found moved hundreds of kilometers south from the abandoned ship site recorded in the notes at that time, although it is said that the ocean current may have displaced the ship after hundreds of years, but according to archaeologists, the terrain within this distance is very complicated, and there are traces of anchors along the way, so it is likely that the two ships were later driven to travel a distance.
Some of these doubts have not been solved to this day, but some, as the subsequent experience of the surviving team is restored, gradually have answers.
The "evil spirit" appears, the complete truth
Since no direct records of the fleet were found, the adventurers had to visit the Inuit who lived nearby to see if they had found any clues.
According to these Inuit recollections, they did see abandoned ships in the waters north of King William Island, and some encountered camps set up by survivors, but many bodies and remains were found.
With supplies already almost depleted, trekking through thousands of kilometers of snowfields would have been impossible, so up to this point, "the last survivors suffered from nautical diseases because they were trapped at sea, and after experiencing a hungry and cold hiking life, they finally could not survive and died tragically in the Arctic" became the widely accepted "truth" of the disappearance of the sailing team. These Inuit memories were also not taken seriously at the time.
But unexpectedly, in the 80s of the twentieth century, anthropology professor Owen Beatty spent a long time studying the wreckage of the crew and found that the lead content on these bones was more than ten times higher than that of normal people, so the three remains found on Beach Island at that time should also be caused by lead poisoning, and most of the crew members in the future are likely to die of lead poisoning.
So where did all this lead come from?
After investigation, it was found that the supplier of cans to the fleet was a cheap can supplier, their cans were mainly made of aluminum and lead, and the lead content was as high as 90%, and the welding process at the seams of the cans was not good, resulting in lead entering the food and being eaten, and also causing the cans to be sealed not up to standard.
That is to say, in the later stage, even if the fleet has unfinished cans, all of them have deteriorated and can no longer be eaten, which also explains why canned food left behind is found in the wreck.
A few years later, scientists added that the previously acclaimed shipboard seawater distillation unit also had the problem of excessive lead, which means that the crew ate cans and drank purified water throughout the voyage!
After such accumulation, many of the crew must have died of lead poisoning, and the survivors also suffered from lead poisoning to some extent, which caused them to become delirious after a certain degree of disease.
In 1993, another batch of bones was found, yes, not remains, but bones. The bones found did not come from the bodies of individual people, but were a mixture of bones from multiple people and various parts of the body, and the fractured surfaces of these bones showed that they were cut by sharp objects.
Later, scientists also found parallel and straight scratches on some bones, which did not look like those caused by wild animals such as polar bears, but they resembled the traces left by the butcher shop owner using a bone-removing knife to remove the meat from the bones of livestock.
It has been confirmed that this is indeed the trace of picking meat with a knife.
A terrifying hypothesis began to spread in people's minds, and scientists eventually said that the bones did show traces of cooking.
The paleographer David Woodman of this period also went back and studied the testimony of the Inuit on King William Island describing the "orderly multitude of remains of the surviving tribe", and found that it was said that the way the fleet handled the wounded was to treat them as food. Combined with the subsequent discovery of residual bones, the cannibalism of survivors has been set in stone.
Because the evil canned food and seawater purifier technology is not up to standard, lead poisoning makes the crew slowly delirious and the juice and fruit deteriorate so that the crew suffers from ring blood disease, and the endless snow field makes the crew suffer from snow blindness, coupled with the experience of being trapped for a year and a half, continuous cold and hunger, and finally tears off the weak rationality of the crew, so that they eventually become the manic and cannibalistic "polar evil spirits" of Inuit legend.
At this point, the full picture of the disappearance of Franklin's expedition has finally been relatively completely revealed.
The truth is still not clear
But is this really the truth?
Why did the ship, which itself should have sunk in the waters north of King William Island, move hundreds of kilometers south? Who went to drive the boat? And why did it sink in the end?
Not only that, but in 2013, researchers analyzed the bones of crew members using the latest technology, which can know how the amount of lead in their bodies changes over the course of their lives, but the results are surprising.
The lead levels in the bones of the crew showed no signs of soaring in the years before they died, which means that the high levels of lead in their bodies were not caused by excessive lead leakage after setting sail. While this does not overturn the hypothesis that most crew members died of lead poisoning, it also raises the question again as to why crew bones contain so much lead.
More than a century later, continuous search and research have not been able to fully solve the mystery of one of the largest maritime tragedies in history.
Ironically, in the first 30 years after the disappearance of the expedition, the search ships and personnel sent out also suffered a lot of losses in the search and rescue process, and the cost even far exceeded the cost of forming the adventure team, and the number of dead far exceeded the number of expeditions.
However, there were a few comforting events, and the expedition's failure to open new shipping routes and map the Arctic was also completed by the search and rescue fleet.
This amazing and embarrassing story is not over, and the investigation of the wreck of the ship is still continuing, and everyone can continue to look forward to its follow-up.