Bonus Episode: The Arctic’s Biggest Mystery

solid ice off King William Island. They've been trapped there since the previous September, preventing the cruise from continuing their search for the Northwest Passage. The expedition, under leader Sir John Franklin, now bids farewell to the party consisting of Commander Graham Gore, Lieutenant Charles Frederick de Vaux, and six additional men. They are to scout the coast to the south.

If the admiralties actions are correct, the last missing link in the passage should be a couple hundred miles to the southwest. Historian Richard Syriacs believed Gore and the men aimed to find out and claim the long sought prize for their country. Before setting off, Gore has handed a metal cylinder containing an Admiralty form and instructed to leave it on shore as a record of the expedition. They

travel towards land over high hummocks of broken ice. They likely go some distance to the south along the windswept coast, hoping to confirm that Victoria's straight to the west of King William Island connected to Simpson straight to the southwest and proving the existence of the Northwest passage. On May, the men gather stones from the beach into a tall cairn before placing the metal cylinder and note in it. Gore records the Arabis and Terror's progress thus far and

adds Sir John Inankland commanding the expedition all well. Two weeks later, Franklin is dead. The sea refuses to release the ships that summer. By April, the Terror's captain, Francis Krozer, makes the fatal decision to abandon the ships. The demise of the Franklin expedition remains the most compelling puzzle and

Arctic exploration. What catastrophe had befallen Britain's best prepared polar expedition and what clues are still being uncovered from mental floss and I Heart radio you're listening to the Quest for the North Pole. I'm your host, Cat Long, science editor at Mental Floss, and this bonus episode is the Arctic's biggest mystery. In a few episodes of the Quest for the North Pole, we looked at the life and career of Sir John Franklin, the most famous of nineteenth

century polar explorers. We mentioned how Franklin captained one of two British ships sent towards the North Pole to navigate a short cut to Asia through the alleged open Polar Sea in eight He didn't get very far. The ships ran into storms and had to turn back, but that was just the beginning of his polar career. The following year, the Admiralty put Franklin in charge of a grueling overland expedition in northern Canada. They mapped much of the region

but ran out of food. They survived by eating lichen and their own leather boots. Multiple people were murdered, and there were suspicions of cannibalism. Only nine of the twenty members returned alive. You think Franklin would have been exiled after such a catastrophe. Instead, he became a hero the public celebrated him as the tough and resourceful man who

ate his boots. His account of the three year expedition was an instant bestseller, and his bosses at the Admiralty actually sent him back to Northern Canada for another more successful trip. By almost all of the purported Northwest Passage had been charted. All that remained unknown was a relatively short stretch west of Cape Walker, where Lancaster Sound turned

into Barrow Street. Sir John Barrow, the outgoing Second Secretary of the Admiralty, and polar veterans like William Edward Perry and James Clark Ross, believed it was only a matter of time until the mystery of the passage would be solved. All they had to do was navig gate this blank space and link the known areas to the west with those to the east, then the Northwest Passage could finally be claimed. Barrow devised a plan that would allow Britain

to close the book on its Arctic quest. Two ships, HMS Arabis and HMS Terror were fixed up for another round of polar service. Three years worth of provisions were ordered, including more than thirty six thousand pounds of ship's biscuit thirty two pounds of beef and pounds of scurvy averting lemon juice for the cruise comfort. There were custom made wolfskin blankets, a full library for each ship, religious volumes donated by various Bible societies, and a hand organ that

played fifty different songs. And Sir John Franklin, Arctic Hero, would lead them to victory. According to history Rian Richard Syriacs, the expedition was the best equipped that the Admiralty had ever sent to the polar regions. Let's take a break here, We'll be right back. Franklin was to sail south and west from Cape Walker and chart a navigable route towards bearing Straight. If he found himself blocked by permanent ice or land, he was to sail northwest through Wellington Channel,

around Cornwallis Island, and toward Alaska. Barrow expected Franklin's expedition to emerge triumphantly in Bearing Straight in a year, maybe even less. There can be no apprehension of loss of ships or men. Barrow wrote confidently to the Admiralty lords. I confess this expedition is an object I have long had at heart, and the present time of bringing it forward appeared to be a suit of but one a time of profound peace and the finances of the country

in a flourishing state. The Admiralty having done so much, it would be most mortifying and not very creditable to let another naval power complete what we had begun. On May, the Arabis and Terror left green hythe Kent and sailed towards Baffin Bay before entering Lancaster Sound, the eastern end of the supposed northwest passage. Franklin's men met two whaling vessels. Then, as far as the Admiralty and their loved ones knew, the Franklin expedition vanished. The Arabis and Terror failed to

show up in bearing straight. By early eighty Franklin's old friend John Ross began arguing for a rescue mission, but the Admiralty wasn't worried. They had sent the expedition off with at least three of provisions and everything they need for success. Ross's nephew, James Clark Ross, said there was no cause for concern because he and his uncle had

once spent four years in the Arctic and survived. But by November, with no further chance of receiving, news that year, Franklin's wife, Lady Jane Franklin, began pushing for a search party. Three squadrons of rescuers approached the missing piece of the passage from the east, South and west, sanguine that they would locate the Arabis and terror. All three returned within two years having found no trace of Franklin's men. Lady

Jane Franklin didn't give up. She wrote letters and asked the advice of polar experts and whalers, including William Scoresby Jr. She buttonholed members of Parliament and her correspondence soliciting donations was published in newspapers. She got Charles Dickens to lend his support. She even enlisted supernatural help. Lady Jane met with a shipbuilder from Northern Ireland who claimed that the ghost of his three year old daughter Louisa, had spoken

from beyond the grave to indicate Franklin's location. Little Wheezy, as she was called, supposedly drew, among other things, the initials P, R, I and b S on the wall of her sister's bedroom. The logical message was that Franklin was lost somewhere around Prince Region Inlet and Barrows Strait, and finally, Lady Jane was not above publicly shaming the Admiralty lords into action. It worked, according to historian Pierre Burton, between eighteen forty eight and eighteen fifty nine, more than

fifty expeditions set out to search for Franklin. They attacked the icy maze of islands and channels from every navigable direction, dispatching dozens of sledge teams to search every whole in hummock. Some of the ships sank or were abandoned. Men died of scurvy and exhaustion. Many times the rescuers had to be rescued themselves, but slowly they began to unearthed clues. By eighteen fifty, searchers discovered Franklin's camp on Beechey Island, a tiny speck on the north side of Barrow Strait.

Among the remains of buildings and empty food cans, they found the graves of three young crew members who had died in January and April eight placing Franklin's expedition on the island during their first winter, but there were no notes to reveal where they had gone. The next big break came in eighteen fifty one, when Hudson's Bay Company surveyor John Ray found pieces of a ship on the

west coast of Victoria Strait. The possible area of Franklin's fate narrowed again in eighteen fifty four when Ray met Inuit carrying silver spoons and other relics from the Arabis and terror. One of them told Ray that about forty white men had died on King William Island four years earlier.

Ray relayed this information to the Admiralty, writing, from the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread resource cannibalism as a means of prolonging existence. The Admiralty leaked his letter to the press, shocking Lady Jane, Charles Dickens and the rest of Victorian England. Dickens even suggested, without a hint

of evidence, that the Inuit had murdered the men. The findings seemed to prove that Franklin and all of his men had perished in the Arctic, but it didn't explain what caused the disaster. Lady Jane was bent on finding out. She bought a steam yacht called the Fox. She hired naval Captain Leopold McClintock, a sledging champ and veteran of three earlier Franklin search expeditions, and Lieutenant William Hobson as

his second in command. They left Britain in July eighteen fifty seven with orders to inspect the last parcel of land that hadn't been thoroughly searched by the dozens of earlier efforts, the shores of King William Island. By September eighteen fifty eight, sledge parties fanned out from the ship anchored on the Boothia Peninsula. McClintock and Hobson headed south to King William Island, then split up, with hobson covering the north and west side and McClintock's team continuing to

the east and south. It wasn't long before Hobson stumbled upon the truth. At Victory Point, he found the metal cylinder left by Gore's party back in May eighty seven, with the crew all well, but a second note, dated April had been written around the first and told a

much darker story. Terror and Arabis were deserted on the twenty April five leagues north northwest of this having been beset since twelve September eighteen forty six, The Arabis's Captain James fitz James wrote John Franklin had died on June eleven, eighty seven, just two weeks after Gore left the original note. In total, nine officers and fifteen men had died, and the remaining one five crew under Captain Crozer's command, were headed to the mouth of Back's Fish River on the mainland.

Finally the voices of the lost expedition had been heard. Then Hobson discovered Skeleton's bow and previous camps. McClintock came upon other remains, identifiable by their uniforms and the papers they carried near backs Fish River, confirming the expedition's route described in fitz James's note. Both officers returned home in September eighteen fifty nine with concrete evidence of the expedition's fate,

but the mystery didn't end there. In the eighteen seventies, American explorers like Charles Francis Hall, Elisha Kent Cain, and Frederick Schwatka, with the Inuit guides Tukulit took Pyrvic and many others combed the last known roots of the Franklin Expedition. They found numerous relics and recorded testimony from Intuit who knew of the expedition's demise from their oral histories. Following Schwatka's findings, explorers lost interest in mounting long and arduous

expeditions to find further clues to an old disaster. Instead, they turned their attention to the national race for the North Pole. We'll be right back. The next glimpses into the Franklin mystery were gathered by Danish explorers Canude Rasmussen and Peter Freakin in the nineteen twenties. They traveled from their base camp at the Tuley Trading Post in Greenland, just across Baffin Bay from Lancaster Sound to the Inuit communities in Arctic Canada. Though his purpose was ethnographic research,

Rasmussen's expedition did collect further Intuit accounts of Franklin. By the nineteen eighties, modern science met up with the Franklin Expedition. Canadian physical anthropologist Owen Beatty and a team from the University of Alberta applied forensic investigative techniques to the mystery. Beatty's team traveled to King William Island in n and discovered numerous skeletal fragments likely belonging to Franklin's crew. They showed pitting and scaling, indicating scurvy, as well as parallel

knife marks suggesting cannibalism. Lab tests revealed that they also contained extremely high levels of lead. Beat He believed the preserved food supplied to the expedition may have absorbed lead from the cans, fatally poisoning the crew, but to really confirm his theory, he'd need to analyze soft tissue in His team began exhuming the three frozen bodies of Franklin crew members John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Brain buried

on Beechey Island. Autopsy results showed super high lead levels, supporting Beattie's theory. However, recent molecular research has thrown the lead can theory into question. A twenty sixteen analysis of John Hartnell's nails found that for much of the expedition, his lead levels were within a normal range, but he had a severe zinc deficiency, which might have come from poor preservation of the food the crew was eating. The high lead levels may have emerged as Hartnell was dying.

His body may have released lead he had absorbed throughout his life, making it seem as though he had been exposed to massive amounts of the element. Two of the biggest Franklin expedition relics were still missing when Beattie was doing his work. No one knew exactly where Franklin ships, the Arabis and Terror had sunk, or if they'd been crushed to pieces by ice. Beginning in the early two thousands, the government agency Parks Canada and Inuit organizations and knowledge

holders renewed efforts to locate the ships. To guide their search, They used Inuit testimony collected by Hall and Schwat in the nineteenth century, plus oral history is gathered by Inuit historian Louis Camucock and others on the ground. Investigations were limited to a few weeks each summer when the sea was clear of ice. For several years, the team combed underwater areas with sidescans, sonar, and surveyed the coast, but

came up empty. Like the Franklin search parties of the eighteen fifties, they succeeded in discovering where the ships weren't, which narrowed their target to an area south of King William Island, and Innok had told Charles Francis Hall that

a ship had sunk there. By early September, a chance discovery of some parts from a British naval ship on shore allowed the team to zero in on an area about eighty miles south of King William Island, where sidescans Sonar revealed the final resting place of the h M s arabis Lar vitually intact and preserved by the icy environment, and just two years later, a local hunter named Sammy Kovic led the archaeologist to another site in a sheltered bay where he'd seen wood sticking through the sea ice.

When they dropped an r o V into the water, it's sent back the first full images of the HMS Terror the world had seen in more than one hundred and fifty years. Since then, Parks Canada and Intuit partners have made detailed surveys of the shipwrecks and retrieved hundreds of naval and personal artifacts, from the arabiss bell to a hair brush with hairs still in it. For now, the recks raise more questions than they answer about the

Franklin mystery. Unfortunately, the COVID nineteen pandemic canceled this summer's dive season, but more research is expected next year. One of the most exciting scientific discoveries happened this past May. For the first time, skeletal remains excavated from King William

Island were identified through DNA and genealogical analyzes. Since archaeologist Douglas Stenton and his team have been creating DNA profiles of bones excavated from King William Island and asking anyone who might be related to a Franklin crew member for a DNA sample. They announced the first match in May, identifying a set of bones as belonging to John Gregory, an engineer on the Arabas, confirmed through his direct descendant,

Jonathan Gregory's DNA. The researchers are hopeful that this is only the beginning the biggest mystery, and Arctic exploration continues one hundred and seventy six years after the Arabis and terror left England. While professional archaeologists and Inuit guardians investigate the physical evidence, amateur archivists are pouring over manuscripts and library collections, literally piecing together clues. Franklin is long gone, buried at sea or resting in an unmarked grave, but

his legacy lives on. The Quest for the North Pole is hosted by Me cat Long. This episode was researched and written by Me, with fact checking by Austin Thompson. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagin. The show is edited by Dylan Fagan. For transcripts, a glossary, and to learn more about this episode, visit Mental flaws dot com slash podcast. The Quest for the North Pole is a product of

I Heart Radio and Mental Flaws. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, check out the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.