On May 19, 1845, Sir John Franklin’s search for the Northwest Passage began. He left England with two ships, Erebus and Terror, and 128 officers and men accompanied him.
The vessels were last sighted by British whalers north of Baffin Island at the entrance to Lancaster Sound in late July of that year.
Before he left on his fateful voyage, Franklin had served in the English Royal Navy, had been part of an assortment of exploratory expeditions and had spent six years as the governor of Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania.
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Franklin’s ships carried supplies to last for three years, but after two years with no word from the expedition, the British admiralty sent search parties to try to find Franklin and his crew. Expeditions sought the explorers for more than a decade, but their fate was not learned until 1859, when searchers discovered skeletons of the crewmembers and a written account of the expedition through April 25, 1848.
In September 2014 an expedition led by Parks Canada found Erebus south of Victoria Island in Nunavut. Last September an Arctic Research Foundation expedition found Terror south of King William Island in Terror Bay.
