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Our guest speaker today was Robert Park from the University of Waterloo, speaking on the topic of Dying to Explore: Finding Sir John Franklin's Third Arctic Expedition. Past President Candi introduced Robert. In addition to being the Associate Dean of Arts, Robert has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Southern Ontario, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and especially Nunavut for over four decades. Most of his own research over that period has been into the Inuit of Canada’s Arctic, exploring the development of their way of life over the past five thousand years. However, He has also been involved in research studying the early European exploration of that region from the 1800s through the 1930s. He has been on the fringes of research into the famous third Franklin expedition for many years but his participation in the current search goes back to its beginning in 2008. Since then he has been assisting the Nunavut Government in the land-based component of the archaeological research. Robert gave a most interesting talk about the history of the Franklin Expedition and the search for the North-West Passage. After the battle of Waterloo in 1815 the British had many sailors and ships available and to make use of them several were deployed to the Canadian Arctic to search for a North-West Passage. By 1845 about one-half of the arctic area had been explored and there was evidence that a passage could be found by exploring a remaining 650 km long area. To do this the Franklin Expedition was sent with two ships - the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, both former war ships capable of sailing in the arctic waters. The ships were provisioned for three years and it was expected that by 1848 at the latest they would return or at least have sent word back. However, when neither happed search expeditions were launched in 1848/49. Over the years some evidence of the expedition was found such as the place were they spent the first winter, and in 1859 the "Cairn Note", a document from the HMS Erebus left in a stone cairn. It provided some information on where the ships had been but gave little hint as to their future course or what difficulties they were encountering. Not much more evidence was uncovered and the British Government officially declare the expedition lost and all soles dead. In 2008 the search was resumed by Parks Canada using underwater sonar techniques and well as both land and air searches. It was known that Intuits had found one of the ships stuck in the ice before it sank and they removed many of the items to their camps. It was the hope of the searches that by locating old Inuit camps they might find some artifacts which would give a clue to the general location of the ship. And this is indeed what happened. On September 1, 2014 several objects were found that were clearly from a ship and the next day the sonar on a search ship located the HMS Erebus. Two years later the HMS Terror was located. Professor Parks included many personal anecdotes and related historical points of interest that made his presentation most informative and fascinating. |
