What we know
- 1845Two ships stocked with several years' worth of provisions head north and are last seen by whalers.
- 1847A message left on shore reports that the wintering had gone well.
- 1848A note added to the same sheet says that the ships have been abandoned, the commander has died, and the survivors are leaving on foot.
- 2014-16Both ships are found on the seafloor with the help of underwater vehicles and information from local residents.
The note was not found right away: it had been left in a stone cairn on the shore and was discovered only 11 years after the ships sailed. Two entries from different years were written on a standard form that was meant to be filled out and thrown into the sea.
All is well.
This short phrase and the note added in the margin of the same sheet a year later are the key documents in the entire story. Between them came the catastrophe: the commander's death, the loss of two dozen people, and the decision to travel across the ice on foot.
The rest is known from discoveries along the presumed route: abandoned belongings, a boat on sledges, and human remains. More than 20 rescue expeditions were mounted, and it was those expeditions, not the original one, that mapped this part of the Arctic.
What doomed them
There was no single cause; several factors came together. Unusually heavy ice kept the ships trapped for two summers in a row. Their supplies ran out. No one had ever crossed such a distance on foot over the ice.
Lead poisoning has also been discussed: elevated levels of lead were found in the remains and linked to the solder used in tin cans. Later studies dispute this: lead levels were also high in ordinary sailors of that era.
There is also the evidence from local residents who saw the expedition's last members. Their accounts were considered unreliable for a century and a half, and when they were finally taken seriously, they led investigators to the ships.
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Sources
- The expedition set out in 1845
- the note from Victoria Point contains two entries from different years, the second reporting that the ships had been abandoned. Both ships were found in 2014 and 2016, in part through information from Inuit people whose testimony had long been disregarded