A cheering crowd stands on the docks as the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror
leave port. Captain John Franklin takes one last look through his spyglass at his wife,
tears fill her eyes as she waves goodbye to her beloved husband. Unfortunately, Captain
Franklin will not be returning, and neither will the 129 other souls who set off on his expedition.
It is May of 1845 when the Terror and Erebus leave Britain for the Canadian Arctic. Their
mission is to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. Captain Franklin is in charge of
the expedition. He meets with Captain Francis Crozier who is in command of the HMS Terror
to discuss their route, and how they will make it through the brutal landscape of the Arctic.
The ships reach Nunavut, Canada in spring, and wait patiently for the winter’s ice
to thaw. Once the weather begins to get warmer, and the ice sheets break apart,
the HMS Terror and Erebus sail into the deadly waters of the Arctic. Franklin is sure that he
will find the Northwest Passage this time. He has failed twice before, and even though the
course the ships will take is going to be brutal and dangerous, he must complete his mission.
By July the ice is thin enough for the expedition to commence. The sun stays up for nearly 24 hours.
Still, the men take shifts making sure that the furnaces stay on, so they don’t
freeze to death. Even with endless sunlight the temperatures can drop dangerously low.
But the cold is not the only thing threatening the expedition.
An animal that weighs nearly 1,000 pounds and blends into the white landscape stalks the crew.
The Terror and Erebus make it through their first summer without any problems. They have
made progress, but have still not found a passage into the waters of the Pacific.
Unfortunately, there is no turning back now. Captain Franklin knew that spending a
winter on the ice was all but inevitable, but was hoping they’d be further along.
The ships have been designed to winter in the Arctic. The rudders
are raised out of the water so they are not damaged by the quickly freezing ice.
As the nights become longer and longer, the temperatures drop lower and lower.
The expedition comes to a complete halt and makes camp for the winter.
The ships are stocked with 2,700 pounds of candles each to illuminate the black night
of winter. Fires are lit, wicks burn, and the furnaces aboard the Terror and Erebus are fed.
At all times during the winter months marines pace back and forth along the deck,
keeping a watchful eye out for the arctic hunters that can tear a human limb from limb.
The soldiers are also there to keep watch over the ships and
maintain order. The crews of the Terror and Erebus are not the most loyal to the crown,
many are there for fortune and glory. The marines make sure that the Captains’ orders are followed.
The men haven’t seen the sun in weeks. The darkness of night seems to go on forever.
The temperature outside of the ship drops to -54 degrees Fahrenheit as the wind howls
unrelentingly. Even with the furnaces and fires going at full blast, the men are freezing.
They wear layer upon layer of clothing, but the cold still chills their bones. The crew must
consume more calories than they would normally need just to keep their body temperatures up.
In preparation for the coming thaw the navigators of the expedition take measurements,
being careful not to touch the metal instruments to their bare skin
as they would instantly freeze to one another. The crew hears the sounds of gunshots fill the
air while they lay in their hammocks. It is unclear if the marines are firing at shadows,
or if there is something out there terrorizing them in the dark.
To pass the time the men smoke or chew tobacco. They play board games and tell stories.
Sometimes on a still night the sky becomes illuminated with the brilliant green, blues,
and purples of the Aurora Borealis. The colors swirl across the sky as if painted
by a brush from the heavens. The Arctic can be beautiful, but it is also deadly.
The new route that Franklin has planned for the expedition takes the ships into
some of the most isolated and desolate parts of the Arctic. The native Inuit people have a
name for such a place. They call it Tununiq, meaning “the back of beyond.” This region of
the world is so isolated that the Terror and Erebus will not be able to resupply.
There are no native peoples, or British outposts, this far into the Arctic.
The crew were warned about how brutal the landscape could be,
but nothing prepared them for what was to come.
Even with layers of clothing, and the heat of the ships, frostbite affects everyone. Fingers,
toes, and dead skin are amputated. As the crew leaves the ship to explore the surrounding area
they sweat from the strenuous activity of trudging through the hip-deep snow.
But once they stopped moving, their sweat freezes under their layers of clothing,
causing them to stick to and pull at their skin.
And it is on these expeditions that the men need to keep a watchful eye on the horizon.
Around each snowdrift or ice column there could be an ambush waiting. The apex predator of this
part of the world is the polar bear, and just before, as well as just after their hibernation,
they are at their hungriest. These behemoths will eat anything they can find, including humans.
Towards the end of the winter months something horrible begins to happen. The crew are becoming
restless and acting strange. It isn’t only the cold or the endless nights that are getting to
them, but something else entirely. The doctor finds that the teeth of the crew are falling out,
and their skin is bruising easily. Both are signs of a deadly disease that plagues sailors: scurvy.
The Terror and Erebus have been stocked with lemon and lime juice to provide the crew with vitamin
C and prevent this disease, but it seems as if there wasn’t enough for the expedition. Another
source of vitamin C can be obtained by consuming raw meat. The ships had been stocked with cows,
sheep, and pigs at the beginning of the voyage, but all of the animals are long dead.
However, there are other less common forms of meat on the ships. Captain Franklin has
a pet monkey given to him by his wife. There is also an old Newfoundland dog named Neptune,
and a cat that is there to eat any rats that may have stowed away before the
expedition left. Unfortunately, all of these animals will perish with the crew.
The sun begins to rise for brief periods of time each day. It stays up for longer and
longer until eventually spring arrives. Finally, the ice cracks. The ships drop back into the
water and the expedition continues. The winter has been incredibly hard,
and the stores of food and other resources are running low. The expedition needs to make
it through the rest of Tununiq and reach the Pacific Ocean before the next winter.
Progress is slow during the summer of 1846. The temperature seems to never get above freezing,
and the ice reforms in front of the ships before they can make any sort of progress. Franklin and
the crews become frustrated. They are not going to make it. The days begin to get shorter again,
the nights longer, until the unthinkable happens. Winter is upon the Terror and Erebus once again.
The crew readies the ships for another winter on the ice. They know there is not enough food
or fuel to make it through the next summer unless they can reach the Pacific. People
begin to go crazy. But this isn’t just out of panic, there is something else plaguing the
crew. Something that has gotten inside of them, and is sending them to the brink of madness.
The canned food is starting to go bad. But it isn’t the food that is driving the crew insane,
it is the cans themselves. They have been contaminated with lead, and this poison has seeped
into the food that the crews of the Terror and Erebus have been eating for the last two years.
As lead builds up in their bodies, it can cause irritability, loss of memory,
and aggression. It is an awful winter as the crew literally begins to tear themselves apart.
Men die from disease and the cold, others are found deceased under mysterious circumstances.
Spring finally comes, but the ice refuses to melt. Franklin and Crozier decide to send an
expedition of men to Point Victory where a cairn was erected by an earlier expedition.
It is here that they leave the first written record of what the expedition has gone through.
Only a couple months later tragedy strikes. Captain John Franklin dies. It is unknown
what the exact cause of his death was. Perhaps it was a disease, or maybe the crew mutinied,
we may never know. About 30 men have died now, and Captain Crozier is in charge of the expedition. He
makes the decision to abandon the ships, load up sledges with equipment and the remaining food,
and walk across the Arctic tundra to try and reach the nearest outpost or Inuit village.
Crozier doesn’t know how far they will have to walk, but if they continue south,
they should reach the Back’s Fish River. Then they can use the boats
being used as sledges to make their way down the river and find help.
Unfortunately, none of the members of the expedition make it that far.
It is believed that the 105 men who left the Terror and Erebus perished in
the frigid Arctic along the west coast of King William Island. Before heading further south,
Crozier stopped at the cairn again to update the document that would later become known as
The Victory Point Note. In it Crozier writes “the Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April,
5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September, 1846.”
Crozier also mentions that Captain “John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847;
and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.” The last
line of the note is the most tragic, as Crozier says that the remaining men will start making
their way to Back's Fish River the following day. As history shows, not a single person made it.
So, what happened to the rest of the crew members of the Terror and Erebus?
It can be theorized by the remains of several bodies found so far that some of the crew
succumbed to the harsh weather and unrelenting cold of the region. They were probably exhausted,
couldn’t continue on, and froze to death. Also, it is not out of
the realm of possibility that members of the crew were attacked and eaten by polar bears.
Others most likely died from scurvy, starvation, lead poisoning, or a combination of all three.
It is clear that some of the men resorted to cannibalism as mutilated human remains
from the expedition have also been found. The damage to their bodies are consistent
with cuts caused by knives. Also, human bones were found still inside cooking pots.
It is unclear if violence ever broke out between members of the expedition, or if they waited until
their crew members had died of natural causes before consuming them, but one thing is clear:
the last days for the survivors of the Terror and Erebus must have been horrible.
The ships themselves were found by divers in 2014 and 2016. Both ships
had sunk into the depths of the arctic. But several diving expeditions have been
able to take pictures and document the still eerily intact ships from the 1800’s. However,
the Terror and Erebus are raising more questions than they are answering.
The two vessels were supposed to be tethered together, yet they were found 45 miles apart.
And something even more creepy was discovered. Researchers can’t find any clear reason why the
HMS Terror sank. The scientists who discovered the ship said that “it wasn’t crushed by ice,
and there’s no breach in the hull.” However, the Terror seems to have sunk quickly,
and now rests gently on the bottom of the ocean as if it were purposefully
placed there. There is definitely more to the story of what happened
to the crews of the HMS Terror and Erebus just waiting to be discovered.
Now watch “Why Did Nine Ships Disappear In Perfect Weather?” Or check out “Real
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