![]() ![]() In 1719, the Hudson Bay Company director and British senior citizen James Knight pushed off in search of the Northwest Passage. It was small consolation that the enormous bay in which he drifted to his death, the Hudson, would later be named after him. As one crewmember explained, “he would rather be hanged at home than starved abroad.” Hudson was forced by the crew into a dinghy, in which he floated away into the arctic wastes, never to be seen again. It was so miserable, in fact, a mutiny ensued. In 1611, Henry Hudson led an especially miserable voyage over Canada in search of the Northwest Passage. Then there was the 16th century voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, which claimed more than 100 lives, but left the legacy of Gilbert’s memorable, if gnomic, last words before he was swallowed by the ocean: “We are as near to heaven by sea as by land!” to the mercy of the unmerciful ice.” The expedition hobbled back to England where Frobisher’s gold was eventually revealed to be fool’s gold, and Frobisher the fool. Frobisher’s final trip in search of the Passage was a catastrophe, with the fleet encountering “such peril that it was wonderful to behold,” and the ships “so fast shut up” by the ice “that they were fain to submit themselves. But despite his misadventures, Frobisher kept returning to the high latitudes, having secured funding by discovering what he thought was gold on Canada’s Baffin Island. Frobisher’s improvisational response, which included kidnapping Inuit and-in later expeditions-killing them, made for increasingly dark jaunts to the North. After reaching the Arctic in 1576 and losing five of his men under mysterious circumstances, he suspected the local Inuit in their disappearance. Some of the earliest expeditions were the wretched voyages of the Englishman Martin Frobisher, who did just about everything wrong in pursuit of the Passage. ![]() The modern equivalent of the search for the Northwest Passage would be an international space program in which ships routinely exploded. Lured by the riches of the “East” and unaware of that a proper continent stood in their way, the Passage beckoned centuries’ worth of European explorers to an icy end. If Franklin’s lost expedition was the most spectacular failure in the quest for a shortcut over North America, it capped what had been centuries-long catalog of doomed voyages into the unknown. It also brings to a belated conclusion an unusually bleak chapter in the history of human exploration: the search for a trade route from the Atlantic to the Pacific via Canada, or as it is more commonly known, the Northwest Passage. While bodies and artifacts from the Franklin expedition have been found over the years, the discovery of the Terror ends more than a century and a half of speculation on the fate of the lost expedition. The announcement comes two years after Parks Canada announced that it found the HMS Erebus, just across the Queen Maud Gulf, to the south. Last week, a team from the Arctic Research Foundation discovered the wreck of the HMS Terror at the bottom of the (coincidentally named) Terror Bay, in the Canadian high Arctic. Alas, the tins were poisoned with lead, the ships were crippled by ice, and the crew of 129 men-deranged by lead poisoning and starvation-became cannibals hopelessly wandering a stark, and almost featureless, icy wilderness. Led by naval officer John Franklin, the expedition’s aim was to subdue nature-to bring even the otherworldly grandeur of the Arctic under the heel of the Empire. In grand Victorian style, the ships boasted a well-appointed library, an organ, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tinned food, and a British admiralty’s conception of itself as lord, not just of the constellation of nations, but of the natural world as well. On May 19, 1845, two iron-reinforced juggernauts, the 340-ton HMS Terror and 370-ton HMS Erebus, set out from Greenhithe, England to defeat the Arctic. ![]()
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