Artifacts from Franklin’s lost expedition found in shipwrecks off Nunavut

globalnews.ca:

Franklin expedition at the site of two shipwrecks in northern Nunavut. The items recovered include pistols, coins and an intact thermometer.The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were the two ships that made up the ill-fated Franklin voyage of 1845, helmed by Captain John Franklin, who was tasked with charting a course through the Northwest Passage.All 129 people involved in the expedition perished.

And now, their ships lie in a permanent watery grave off the coast of King William Island, in the traditional lands of the Nattilik (or Nettsilik) people.For more than a century and a half, the Western world had no idea what happened to the Franklin expedition, when the ships didn’t return to the United Kingdom. Dozens of search and rescue missions over the decades since failed.

The lost Franklin expedition became an enduring mystery.But the answers that Britain, and later Canada, were looking for all along already existed. They were present in the oral histories and traditions of the Nattilik people, who knew almost exactly where the shipwrecks were located.From the late 1990s to the early 2010s, Parks Canada worked closely with late Inuit researcher Louie Kamookak, who resided in the community of Gjoa Haven on King William Island, to find the lost ships.“From the outset, the objective was to use both Inuit oral history and Canada’s best technology to search for the shipwrecks,” Alan Latourelle, former CEO of Parks Canada, said at the time.In 2014, the HMS Erebus was found.

Two years later, the researchers would also find the HMS Terror. The locations of both shipwrecks matched the site described in Inuit oral histories dating back to the 1850s.Since the rediscovery of the shipwrecks, archaeologists have been busy excavating and