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00:00Tonight, a historic expedition sets sail into a labyrinth of ice.
00:08This is, without a doubt, the best-planned and best-equipped expedition ever to try to find the Northwest Passage.
00:16Lots of provisions, technically advanced ships, and it all just vanishes.
00:21That disappearance sparks a search for clues spanning nearly two centuries.
00:26For the British, it was unthinkable these two exploration ships could be lost.
00:33It's just pure luck that there were enough Inuit eyewitnesses to even piece together a rough idea of what happened to these poor men.
00:40Now, we'll investigate the top theories surrounding this legendary disappearance.
00:46Something happened before the crews abandoned those ships.
00:50Nobody wants to believe men of the Royal Navy would resort to cannibalism.
00:56If the men believed the ships were cursed and decided to leave, their fates are already sealed.
01:02What really happened to the men of the Franklin Expedition?
01:07On a spring morning in 1845, two British Royal Navy ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus,
01:32depart England under the command of Sir John Franklin. Their quest, the elusive Northwest Passage.
01:39At this time for ships traveling from England in order to get to Asia, you have really just two options.
01:44You can either travel around the tip of South America and up into the Pacific Ocean,
01:49or you can travel down the tip of South Africa and then work your way up to the Indian Ocean.
01:55They both take a really long time.
01:58It was speculated there had to be some sea route by which ships could travel up around Greenland
02:06and then across from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific.
02:10The quest for a Northwest Passage is huge because it would cut travel time down considerably.
02:17What the British do is they send out continual expeditions.
02:22From the west they've come almost to the middle, and from the east they've come almost to the middle.
02:27And it's that little middle, maybe 300 nautical miles, that's a blank on the map still.
02:32All the other routes were known, so if you could get through that middle part, you would get to the other side.
02:37The big problem, of course, is it freezes every year.
02:42Shipping is going to come to a standstill, so there were only certain months of the year where it could be traveled.
02:49By 1845, explorers have charted enough of the Canadian Arctic to make the Royal Navy confident that the Northwest Passage is finally within reach.
03:00To complete the final push, the British Admiralty selects 59-year-old Captain Sir John Franklin to lead the expedition.
03:09He isn't their first choice.
03:11The British Admiralty had approached a number of known Arctic explorers.
03:16Sir William Perry was too old by that time, he declined.
03:20The Rosses were involved with other expeditions, so they actually considered delaying.
03:27But at the last moment, under pressure from Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John was chosen.
03:34John Franklin, for one thing, was kind of old.
03:39He was 59 years old, which for a Royal Navy officer is pretty up there.
03:44And although he had led two former expeditions, they weren't particularly successful.
03:51In fact, in his first one, half of his crew had died.
03:57They ran out of food, and they were reduced to eating boots.
04:01Despite his age, and despite the fact he hadn't commanded a ship in some years,
04:06I imagine he wanted to redeem himself after his prior failures.
04:11To help in Franklin's Arctic mission, the British Admiralty spare no expense,
04:16starting with the two ships he'll set off in, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
04:24For the day, the Erebus and Terror are the best ships that the British Navy could use for maritime exploration.
04:33They're converted bomb ships, which means they're heavy, they're robust.
04:37They were refitted, especially for this expedition.
04:40They both had iron-reinforced hulls to withstand and be able to maneuver through ice.
04:46One new technological advancement that they also had was a propeller,
04:50which could actually maneuver up and down as needed.
04:53They were very, very big.
04:56They had powerful engines.
04:58They were good for carrying a whole lot of heavy cargo.
05:02Thousands of cans of food, thousands of barrels of pickled, preserved vegetables,
05:07flour to be made into bread.
05:09It is hoped that the whole trip will take maybe about a year, maybe a little more.
05:15Nevertheless, the ship can carry three years' worth of provisions.
05:21And those three years could be stretched out to five years through rationing.
05:25This is by far the best-planned and best-supplied expedition ever to try to find the Northwest Passage.
05:33The morale, according to all reports among the crew and the officers, is extremely high.
05:39They think this is the voyage that's going to find the Northwest Passage.
05:45The expedition gets off to a good start, reaching Greenland by mid-July.
05:51The letters that the sailors and officers send home are full of confident predictions about this being a huge success.
05:57In July 1845, a group of whaling vessels in Baffin Bay spot the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror heading west toward Lancaster Sound.
06:11The Royal Navy had set a plan for Sir John Franklin and his crew to navigate through Lancaster Sound into the archipelago and find a calm area where they can be able to shelter down during the winter.
06:23Because they're already anticipating that they're going to be trapped in sea ice for quite some time.
06:30Once the ice melts that spring, they're supposed to continue on their voyage, maneuver through this archipelago of islands.
06:38They're supposed to send a message as soon as they get through.
06:42But no letter comes, no ships in the Pacific report ever having seen the Erebus and the Terror.
06:531845 passes, 1846 passes, 1847 passes.
07:02Jane Franklin, Franklin's wife is concerned.
07:05So both her and the British Parliament, they are putting pressure on the British Admiralty to do something.
07:12From the British Admiralty's perspective, they don't want to say anything about there being a problem with this expedition.
07:19So they're really going to wait as long as they can.
07:22By 1848, there's enough pressure on the British Admiralty that they issue a reward of £20,000.
07:31By today's standards, that's $2 million.
07:341848, three years after the expedition set sail, the Admiralty launches the first of a number of search parties.
07:43Traveling both overland and by sea, within two years, many others have joined the search.
07:49In 1850, the first major clue is found on a tiny island just past Lancaster Sound.
07:58They find the first camp where they overwintered.
08:01And they find three graves.
08:03Those belong to John Hartnell, John Torrington, and William Brain.
08:12Three crew members who had died during that first winter.
08:17And so they have actual sort of physical evidence that the Franklin expedition had been there.
08:24The timing of the deaths of the three men indicates that something had happened and they're not sure what, but it's not a good sign.
08:38The other thing is that the ship doesn't find any record, any message left by the Franklin expedition.
08:471854, nine years after this expedition first set sail, and six years after the first search crew was sent,
08:55the British Royal Navy completely drops this search and declares this expedition as officially lost.
09:03Lady Jane Franklin was quite outspoken for a woman around that time.
09:07And she also had a lot of influential friends.
09:10And so she decided she was going to raise her own money and have a private expedition to find out what happened.
09:16She still wants to know what's happened to her husband.
09:19She raises enough money to buy a ship called the Fox and to pay a crew and a captain to try to find the Erebus and the Terror.
09:32In 1857, 12 years after the expedition first set sail, the Fox departs England on the trail of Franklin's lost ships.
09:42Two years into the voyage, Leopold McClintock, who is commander of the ship, the Fox, finds evidence that might explain what happened to the ships.
09:53February of 1859, the Fox crew is on an overland search on King William Island.
10:04Leopold McClintock comes across one of these Inuit seal hunters, and they have some knickknacks and some buttons that are part of the Royal Navy.
10:13The Inuit, after being questioned about this, point the crew in the direction of a place called Victory Point.
10:21Victory Point had been established back in 1830 in an earlier expedition.
10:26They erected what's called a cairn. It's just a mound of stones.
10:31McClintock and his crew find nestled within these stones a tin canister, and within that canister, a letter.
10:42The Victory Point note is a pre-printed official Royal Navy document.
10:47It also contains two very different handwritten messages.
10:52The first message is very positive. It's dated May 1847.
10:59A report that all is well.
11:02Franklin is still in command and really doesn't indicate anything too worrisome,
11:08other than the fact that they have been stuck in ice for a long time.
11:11The second message is written on the same sheet of paper, but is scribbled around the margins.
11:18It's written nearly a year later and tells a far bleaker tale.
11:22This second message is from April 1848.
11:27It says the ice never melted, which means they have been stuck there for 19 months.
11:37So the area in which they got stuck is called the Back of Beyond, and not even the hunters will go there.
11:42It's very barren, and unfortunately, that's exactly where they got stuck.
11:47According to this note at the time, 24 crew members had already passed away,
11:53including, unfortunately, Sir John Franklin himself, who had perished just two weeks after the first note was written.
11:59The idea that an entire summer could pass without the ice melting enough for the ships to move, it's unheard of.
12:10There have been multiple expeditions through this area. That's never happened before.
12:15So once this information is seen in the letter, the reaction is, how can this possibly be true?
12:29In 1859, search parties looking for the lost Franklin expedition find their most telling bit of evidence yet,
12:39the so-called Victory Point Note.
12:42The second message on the note, written on the 25th of April, 1848,
12:47almost three years after the expedition first leaves England, provides a clue to their fate.
12:53The second Victory Point message is actually signed by the two commanding officers of the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
13:03This is James Fitzjames and Francis Crozier.
13:08The second message makes clear the ice never thawed, that the two ships just remained imprisoned by the icy conditions,
13:18and it had now been 19 months.
13:20There's a postscript that says,
13:24and start on tomorrow, the 26th, for Baxfish River.
13:29Baxfish River is 200 miles away from the ship.
13:33This is a heck of a trek they're going to have to take across a completely desolate area.
13:40By this time, Baxfish River has already been searched in 1858, and nothing was turned up.
13:46So the reaction to this message is disbelief.
13:51But in 2005, climate scientists make a discovery in the Arctic ice that could provide fresh insights.
13:58A team of climate researchers, headed up by a scientist named Roy Koerner, drills out core samples of the ice going down about 300 feet.
14:10Upon studying these ice cores, they discover why it is that the Erebus and the Terror were not able to escape from the ice.
14:17You have different layers in each ice core.
14:21And that gives you a glimpse into environmental and climate factors going back to when that layer was formed, all the way back to the 1840s.
14:30It was the deepest freeze since the last ice age.
14:32People in the mid-19th century don't have the kind of understanding of atmospheric warming and cooling that we have today.
14:41John Franklin had literally picked the worst time.
14:44We're talking a one in 10,000 year winter to go through the Northwest Passage.
14:49To face the perils of winter, Franklin is sailing in ships that are state-of-the-art at the time.
15:00One of the reasons why there was so much faith in this voyage was that the Erebus and the Terror had these state-of-the-art engines.
15:08These engines generate 25 horsepower, which, whoa, that's amazing.
15:15Well, modern icebreakers have 75,000 horsepower to cut through the thickest ice.
15:22The Erebus and the Terror, with only 25 horsepower, they don't stand a chance.
15:28Yet, despite the freak weather the expedition is unwittingly sailing into, the Victory Point Note offers another clue to what doomed the expedition.
15:37Not only is he running into this weather phenomenon, but he's also made some choices for the expedition that was going to carry the Erebus and the Terror into some dangerous, uncharted waters.
15:55Lancaster Sound is the entrance to the passage that is already known, so the idea was to go through there until he came to a spot where the map was no longer filled in.
16:04After his first winter at Beachy Island, Franklin then heads south through Peel Sound, where he faces a crucial decision.
16:13He had come to what turned out to be the northern tip of King William Island, but what he didn't know, of course, was what was beyond it.
16:20So he did have a choice to make there whether to head east or west in his route.
16:24The coordinates recorded in the Victory Point Note make clear that Franklin chooses the western route.
16:31Franklin is going to take the ships west of King William Island.
16:35The uncharted waters that Franklin enters is an area where water from different sources is flowing in, and it acts as a funnel.
16:44So you've got ice flowing and meeting in the middle, and this is where Franklin and his ships were, and it was the worst place in the Arctic to be.
16:54And what they don't realize is right behind them, the water is freezing as these ships are moving in, so they're locked into place.
17:02That's where the expedition is stuck, and there's no way out.
17:06Had he sailed down the east side and then past King William Island and then to the west, had Franklin done that, we don't know what would have happened.
17:15Maybe he would have made it.
17:17Fifty years later, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen takes the eastern route and successfully navigates the Northwest Passage for the first time.
17:30But for Franklin and his men, after 19 months trapped in the ice, they are desperate enough to abandon ship.
17:38There is very little daylight because they're so far north.
17:42Twenty-four people had died.
17:44Maybe they're afraid they're going to be stuck there for another year, but there could be something else.
17:52There's something that could be terrifying these men enough to leave the relative safety of the ships to go through this desolate area.
18:011848, three years after setting sail, the Franklin Expedition abandoned their ships off King William Island.
18:17Meanwhile, the first British search team is setting off to rescue them over land.
18:23Led by explorer John Ray, for the next six years, they scour the Arctic.
18:29John Ray is a Scottish explorer.
18:32He got his start as a surgeon with the Hudson Bay Company.
18:36Unlike Franklin and his men, Ray has learned from the local indigenous people, the Inuit.
18:42And so he's wearing fur instead of wool.
18:46He's using sleds and snowshoes.
18:49He's able to survive in that harsh Arctic environment just like the Inuit.
18:55And he covers, by 1854, more than 5,000 square miles.
19:01In May of 1854, at a place about 150 miles east of King William's Island, they encounter a group of Inuit who want to trade with them.
19:12And he noticed on the wrist of one of the Inuit hunters, his sealskin parka, a gold band.
19:20And Ray immediately recognizes it for what it is.
19:23It's a cap band.
19:24It's an officer's cap band.
19:26And he knows the chances of an Inuit being given that are very, very unlikely.
19:31So he starts a dialogue with this hunter and asks, where did you get that?
19:36The Inuit tell Ray that four winters previously, they had encountered a group of about 40 white men dragging a boat south through this area.
19:48The Inuit describe the leader of this group as a tall, stout man with a telescope.
19:56Their description matches a description of Francis Crozier, who had been Franklin's second-in-command.
20:03The Inuit stated that the white men communicated using gestures, saying that their ships had actually been chopped in ice and they had fled to land in order to hunt deer.
20:13Obviously, Ray is excited by this news and he immediately wants to figure out where they've gone.
20:19The Inuit explain all of these men are now dead and they believe that they know why.
20:31The Inuit provide further information about this group of men as well.
20:36The Inuit say that they actually encountered their camp several months later and discovered 30 corpses on site.
20:46They were quite sure that Franklin's men, or at least some group of them, had resorted to what Ray called the last resource, cannibalism.
20:53So the Inuit tell Ray that they had seen pots in which human flesh had been cooked.
21:03People with their arms or limbs cut off, severed, signs of the flesh being removed from the bones.
21:10When the Inuit discovered this camp, not only did they have this shocking news, but they actually have physical artifacts to buttress their claim.
21:20There was a silver plate that actually belonged to Franklin.
21:25So for Ray, both what the Inuit tell him and the artifacts that they've brought him, it's enough to convince him that he knows what happened to Franklin and his men.
21:35But he writes a written report to his employers, the Hudson's Bay Company, detailing what he has found.
21:42And the report, as it turns out, gets to London before Ray does.
21:47Ray is satisfied that he's finally solved the riddle of the missing expedition, but his report isn't well received.
21:53Nobody wants to believe that men of the Royal Navy would resort to cannibalism.
22:08Cannibalism is something that savages engage in, not civilized men of the greatest empire in the world.
22:18Charles Dickens gets involved in this because he's a friend of the Franklins, and Lady Franklin apparently urges him to attack Ray and the Inuit who make these claims.
22:31Dickens implies that the Inuit actually killed Franklin's men, and then they took these artifacts, which was totally not true.
22:41Ray collects the reward money, but his reputation is pretty well shot, and he does not make a return trip.
22:50It turns out much, much later, he was right.
22:541981.
22:55On King William Island, a team of scientists, led by Owen Beatty, recover bones belonging to members of the Franklin Expedition.
23:05After forensic analysis, these bones reveal that the Inuit's claim may have been true.
23:11Bones that were retrieved show cut marks on them from knives, and they also show that they were indeed cooked and that they were boiled to draw the bone marrow out.
23:25Despite this compelling forensic evidence, questions remain about how the men of the Franklin Expedition could have starved to death.
23:34They were equipped with over 8,000 tins of food and vegetable, so they should have had enough provisions to have survived.
23:42Ray also reported that the Inuit told them that they found many cans that were unopened.
23:49So why were men resorting to cannibalism if they weren't eating the food that they had brought with them?
23:57In 1845, the ill-fated Franklin Expedition set sail from England, searching for a route to the Far East through the Arctic Circle, only to mysteriously vanish and die.
24:12Then in 1981, researchers start to ponder a new cause.
24:17Could what doomed the men be something else entirely?
24:21So on King William Island, a team led by Dr. Owen Beattie find bones that show evidence of cut marks.
24:31And this clearly indicates cannibalism.
24:34Something else they find when studying these bone fragments is that they have crazy high levels of lead in them.
24:46Lead is incredibly toxic to humans.
24:49It can lead to a number of complications, including stomach aches, headaches, seizures, and ultimately even death.
24:56The results of Beattie's analysis suggest that these bone fragments have ten times the normal amount of lead.
25:05That is shockingly high.
25:07The amount of lead in a person's body accumulates over their lifetime, so it doesn't speak to a particular time or period.
25:14It just speaks to the overall amount of lead in the person.
25:16A more useful way of determining lead content that would not only tell you how much lead there is, but when it was introduced to the system, can come from an analysis of hair, fingernails, and toenails.
25:30Unlike bone, it's harder for nails and for hair to be found.
25:37So really you need a body. And of course, most of the Franklin remains are only bones.
25:43Yet Beattie and his team realize there's one site that could provide the material they need to test their theory.
25:49So in 1984, Owen Beattie is given permission to dig up to exhume the three graves on Beach Island.
25:59The first grave that they exhume is the grave of John Torrington.
26:04His body is so well preserved in the ice that you think if you touched him, he would wake up.
26:09The lead levels found in Torrington's body were so high, he would have been suffering from a whole host of mental and physical problems.
26:24The question is, how does that level of lead enter their bodies?
26:31The answer may be found not far from Torrington's body.
26:36About a half a mile from those graves, his team find a garbage dump that include a whole bunch of tin cans.
26:46Cans that would have held the food that supplied the men of the Erebus and the Terror.
26:52They find evidence that they have been soldered shut very shoddily.
26:58And what was used for the solder? Lead.
27:01In preparation for this expedition, Sir John Franklin makes a deal with a food supplier by the name of Steven Goldner.
27:08He's commissioned to make these tin cans to be able to supply these crew with provisions that they would need for their long expedition.
27:16The contract calls for him to provide about 34,000 pounds of preserved canned meat, which is about 8,000 cans.
27:24The whole process of canning meat is very new at this point.
27:28This is a full 70 years before there's any understanding of how to sterilize food to begin with.
27:35So any kind of canned food in the mid-19th century is going to be kind of dicey.
27:40Goldner is informed that Franklin needs this 34,000 pounds of canned meat in seven weeks.
27:50That is a really short period of time.
27:53By all accounts, with this expedition on the horizon, Goldner and his team are completely overwhelmed in order to be able to produce these 8,000 cans.
28:00An analysis of the can suggests that they're cutting corners on soldering these cans shut.
28:09The soldering job was so shoddy that it's easy to see how lead could have contaminated the meat inside.
28:16To make matters worse, expedition records suggest that tinned food might not be the only source of lead poisoning.
28:26Each ship was equipped with a locomotive engine, and this allowed them to travel slowly, say when there wasn't wind.
28:34And it also provided heat throughout the ship.
28:38But those steam engines do other important things.
28:42They allow for the distillation of salt water.
28:46The only problem is this fresh water is passing through lead pipes, and it's easy to see how lead could have contaminated that water.
28:54Franklin's men were subjected to this for two years.
28:58Could the amount of lead that they consumed in their drinking water, that they consumed in the atmosphere, could it have contributed to their decline in both their mental and their physical health?
29:11Maybe they irrationally believed that it made sense to leave the safety of the ships and risk death on the frozen tundra.
29:20The disappearance of the Franklin expedition in 1845, while en route to uncover the fabled Northwest Passage, has baffled the world for generations and sparked one of history's longest rescue searches.
29:42In addition to Lady Jane Franklin, a number of independent researchers decided that they would try to find out what happened to the Franklin expedition.
29:52Some people are still convinced that there's a chance that some survivors might be alive.
29:57And one of them is an American named Charles Francis Hall of Cincinnati.
30:00Charles Francis Hall, an American newspaper publisher in 1857, decides that he's just going to head up on his own and launch his own search to find out what happened to the Franklin expedition.
30:15He figures his best lead are the Inuit who interacted with these people.
30:21So he spends a long period interviewing any Inuit that he can find who would have encountered these men.
30:271869. After nine years searching and countless interviews with the Inuit, Hall ends his Arctic expedition.
30:37A decade later, U.S. Army Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka picks up the trail.
30:43In 1879, he's exploring King William Island with a dog sled team.
30:48And he encounters an Inuit woman who does remember the time of Franklin and has a story about what the men look like.
30:58What she observed was a group of white men moving very slowly, sort of shuffling their feet across the ice.
31:05They looked thin and their mouths were dry, hard and black.
31:09Schwatka finds this odd. Why would their mouths be black and hard and dry?
31:15He doesn't know what to make of it. So he just kind of files it away.
31:19But 50 years later, the story about the starving sailors with black mouths draws renewed interest.
31:24In the mid-1930s, an English doctor named Richard Syriax is doing research on a new book about the Franklin expedition.
31:33When he reads accounts from Schwatka about the sailors having black mouths, he realizes he's seen that symptom before.
31:39Scurvy is basically a disease that prevents the body from keeping its blood vessels, skin, bones and muscles healthy.
31:52People suffering from scurvy often have blackness around their mouth because they bruise very easily and also their gums bleed.
32:03So that could explain those symptoms. Other symptoms of scurvy, fever, seizures, personality changes, and if it's allowed to progress far enough, death.
32:14The root cause of scurvy is vitamin C deficiency. Most animals are actually able to produce vitamin C themselves, but humans cannot.
32:23So we're required to get all of our vitamin C from food, such as fresh fruits and vegetables.
32:28Scurvy had been the scourge of navies around the world because on voyages of exploration particularly, you're going so far from your original supplies.
32:40So you're getting mostly dried and preserved food that's lost all of its vitamins.
32:45After three or four months, it's almost inevitable that people are going to start to fall victim to the first symptoms.
32:50Between the 16th to 18th century, approximately 2 million sailors lose their life to the conditions of scurvy.
32:58The disease kills more sailors in the 18th century than died from enemy combat.
33:03In 1747, a British naval surgeon, James Lind, he discovers that there's a very effective way to prevent scurvy and that is to consume citrus.
33:15Things like limes, oranges and lemons.
33:17According to Navy records, the Franklin expedition set sail with a three year supply of lemon juice.
33:25But the Royal Navy may not have taken into account the effects of such a long journey on the ship's reserves.
33:33A problem could have arose because after three years, they may have run out.
33:39Or as Syriax points out, after a year, the lemons may have started to ferment.
33:45And so it's believed that they probably smelled it and it smelled rotten. It had fermented. And they tried to boil it.
33:55But unfortunately, you're getting rid of all the vitamin C by doing that. And so that could have led to them getting scurvy.
34:00Once scurvy takes hold, the symptoms begin to progress incredibly fast. So by the time the Franklin crew realizes that their lemon juice is no longer effective, it's ultimately just too late.
34:12So the scurvy may not have been enough to actually kill everyone off, but it could have set things in motion.
34:19You're talking about people getting sick. They're now thinking maybe this boat is cursed.
34:24And so they want to go and seek resources elsewhere. So then they get off of the boat.
34:29There's no going back from that decision.
34:38While the Erebus and Terror were locked in snow and ice, it's likely the men would venture out of the ships to hunt for any game they could find.
34:48Fresh meat would have made all the difference to these men because they would have acquired vitamin C and then of course protein from eating the meat itself.
34:55Polar historian Ken McGuggan puts out a book that suggests that one particular type of game in the Arctic could have possibly doomed the crew.
35:09McGuggan learns about an expedition that took place in 1619. 65 men on this expedition led by a Danish-Norwegian explorer named Jens Monk.
35:21They're hunting beluga whales up in northern Hudson Bay and they're not having any luck.
35:28And so they shoot a polar bear and they eat it.
35:32The Inuit have always known that in order to get enough vitamin C, you eat meat raw.
35:39So the Inuit, for example, they hunt seals, whales, caribou, but they don't hunt polar bear.
35:45Raw polar bear meat is often infected with a microscopic parasite called trichinella.
35:52And for a human that consumes it, you can actually come down with a disease called trichinosis.
35:56Eating the flesh of an animal with trichinella means that the parasites go inside of you.
36:02Eventually, the parasites make their way to the muscles and induce fever and seizures, inflammation, ultimately death.
36:16And it would be an agonizing death that takes place over a period of weeks.
36:20One of the things McGuggan reveals is that after eating this polar bear flesh, the entire group, with the exception of Monk and two others, end up dying.
36:33McGuggan speculates that a similar thing occurs to the Franklin expedition while the Terror and Erebus are stuck in the ice.
36:41And this is an area with heavy polar sea ice. This stuff is impenetrable.
36:46You couldn't drill a hole in it and fish through it. It doesn't have an edge and the ice edge would be where you would hunt sea mammals.
36:52You're stuck hunting what's available on land. And certainly a polar bear would be a very tempting target.
36:57Enough food for everybody in the whole party.
37:00In the Royal Navy, it's tradition that the first officers would be the ones that would hunt, but they would also get first dibs on the meat.
37:06The rest of the crew would get the reserves the next day.
37:08According to that second victory point note, 24 men have died, 15 crew and nine officers, despite far fewer officers on the expedition.
37:20This means these officers have died at twice the rate of the rest of the crew.
37:25If they're eating contaminated polar bears, it's the officers who are going to suffer disproportionately as a result of this.
37:32The message found doesn't indicate when these men died or how these men died, but the fact that so many officers seem to be dying might help us to understand why the rest of the crew would become spooked and decide to get away from the ships.
37:50Even stuck in the ice, these ships provided the best protection from the elements.
37:55But if the men believed the ships were cursed or spreading disease and decided to leave, at the time they abandoned ship, their fates are already sealed.
38:03September 7th, 2014, a team of Canadian marine archaeologists finally discover the remains of the HMS Erebus.
38:15Two years later, the wreck of the HMS Terror is also found.
38:21Yet for some unknown reason, both shipwrecks are many miles away from the coordinates where the victory point note tells us they were abandoned.
38:29The team studying the ships happened to notice that the propeller of the terror is down.
38:36So this raises a fascinating possibility that maybe the old assumption that those ships got stuck in the ice and never moved again under their own power, maybe that's wrong.
38:48Maybe crew members found their way back to the ship and once the ice had freed them, had managed to move them.
38:53Historians hope that ongoing analysis of the Erebus and Terror wrecks will help explain what ultimately doomed the crew and forced them to flee on foot.
39:06It's just pure luck that there were enough Inuit eyewitnesses to even piece together a rough idea of what happened to these poor men.
39:12It's certainly possible to survive being stranded somewhere over months if you have adequate provisions, if you have adequate nutrition, if you have adequate medical care.
39:26But if you find yourself in the wilderness starving so dramatically that you're willing to engage in cannibalism, chances are not just one thing has gone wrong, but everything has gone wrong.
39:38When we talk about the mystery and the expedition, I think we tend to forget that these are real people. You can imagine fear, hunger, the horrific effects of scurvy. You can easily imagine people going mad in those circumstances.
39:56Nearly 180 years after the vessels carrying explorer John Franklin and his men vanished while navigating the Northwest Passage, the expedition's demise is still generating new theories.
40:15Maybe another clue will one day emerge from the ice to finally solve the mystery of the Franklin expedition.
40:20I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
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