Lost in the North West

Inuit oral stories could solve mystery of Franklin expedition

Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008

More than 150 years after the disappearance of the Erebus and Terror -- the famously ill-fated ships of the lost Franklin Expedition -- fresh clues have emerged that could help solve Canadian history's most enduring mystery.

A Montreal writer set to publish a book on Inuit oral chronicles from the era of Arctic exploration says she's gathered a "hitherto unreported" account of a British ship wintering in 1850 in the Royal Geographical Society Islands -- a significant distance west of the search targets of several 19th- and 20th-century expeditions that have probed the southern Arctic Ocean for Canada's most sought-after shipwrecks.

Dorothy Harley Eber, author of the forthcoming Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers, says the new details about Sir John Franklin's disastrous Arctic voyage in the late 1840s emerged from interviews she conducted with several Inuit elders at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

The Inuit account -- passed down from 19th-century ancestors who witnessed the British expedition's failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage -- describes "an exploring vessel" that anchored off the Royal Geographical Society Islands during the winter of 1850 because "they were iced-in and had no choice."

Evidence of the expedition's presence on the islands, according to Inuit oral history captured by Eber, can still be seen during the summer months in greasy deposits along the shore where "the ground is soiled by rendered seal oil blubber" used by stranded crewmen to fuel fires for cooking and warmth.

"When I recorded it, and first heard the information, I didn't have a map with me and I wasn't actually quite sure what I was hearing," Eber told Canwest News Service on Wednesday. "But I later had the material translated two or three times and I realized it was very important."

The Royal Geographical Society Islands lie between Victoria Island and King William Island where the Victoria Strait reaches the Queen Maud Gulf north of mainland Nunavut.

The location of the iced-in ship described by the Inuit is nearly 100 kilometres to the northwest of a stretch of water between O'Reilly and Kirkwall islands -- close to King William Island and the mainland Adelaide Peninsula -- that has emerged as the prime search area for Franklin shipwreck hunters.

University of Toronto Press, which is publishing Eber's book this fall, is billing the book as a must-read for Franklin aficionados, in which "new information opens up another fascinating chapter" on the tragic Arctic voyage.

Franklin himself died in June 1847, with the two ships at his command frozen in sea ice somewhere west of King William Island. The 105 surviving crew members battled bitter cold and ice-choked seas before succumbing to hunger and disease over the following few years.

A series of searches in the 1850s gripped the British nation and its Canadian colonies, and much of the Arctic archipelago was mapped and claimed for the British Empire as a result.

Various artifacts from the Franklin Expedition and the remains of several crewmen have been discovered over years, but the ships have eluded searchers -- including those on a major Canadian government-sponsored expedition in the 1990s.

The man who headed that search -- Robert Grenier, chief of marine archeology for Parks Canada -- said he discussed the new account of the Franklin ship earlier this week with Eber, calling the Montreal author's findings "very interesting."

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