The Tragic Voyage of Terror: The Lost Franklin Expedition

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What some people don’t realize is that getting stuck in ice while on a wooden ship doesn’t just mean you cannot move, the ice moves around you and freeze. This can wear down the wood like sandpapering wood. And when it does freeze, it puts immense inward pressure on the hull. So much that it could cause the hull to implode in on itself. Lastly as the hull stays under frozen water longer, the less habitable it becomes, the walls freeze and become covered with layers of ice and the air inside of the hull cannot trap heat as effectively. In older models that include steamers and steam engines, having ice touch your steam engine was extremely dangerous as it could cause the entire engine to explode, blowing the ship up outwards. Being stuck in ice back in the infant days of sailing was an extremely terrifying idea.

My man walked 600 miles, was forced to eat his crew, and still kept walking, you have earned my respect. Rest in Peace

“Lifeboat full of useless stuff”. Some see this as a sign of the crew were impaired by illness and malnutrition, BUT others make a pretty good case that the stuff only seemed useless at first, and each had a purpose….weird, obscure books could be brought to help kindle fires, silverware and curtain rods could be hoped to be traded to the Inuit for seal meat, as metal was rare and valuable in the Arctic, etc.

In regards to the people who made the eventual uncovering of this story possible, a big shoutout is needed to a man named Louis Kamookak. He was a Gjoa Haven Inuit explorer, historian, and forensic archeologist who worked on the Franklin Expedition Discovery project here in Canada, and he was invaluable in his efforts speaking with Inuit elders on their passed down testimonies on the survivors, charting their locations by extrapolating the original Inuit geographical names with their Western equivalents, tracking down and collecting locations of found relics of the survivors' trek south, and his information was key in setting the search areas that eventually found the ships. So much of this story would've remained a mystery without him. He died in 2018.

TWELVE YEARS?! He walked for twelve years?! Oh my God I can't even imagine. Even if the journey wasn't a success, the man was a badass.

“As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of this rocket ship was supplied by the lowest bidder.” ― John Glenn

"They forged the last link with their lives." What a metal quote. They literally ended the last chapter of marine exploration with the biggest sacrifice they could have ever given. The search for their bodies literally reads like an epilogue to an epic, with how the people tracing the footsteps of the doomed expedition found the path that the members gave their lives in braving themselves. They say dead men tell no tales, and I have to say, I agree. They don't tell tales. They let others tell theirs for them.

Recently falling on hard times, I constantly find myself watching documentaries on this expedition. Because no matter how bad of a day I’m having, nothing can be as bad as being stuck in ice for years without contact. Sick, cold, hungry, miserable, dark, and extremely windy and wet.

Wendigoon's "As always, thank you for watching" has the same energy as PBS "This program is made possible by viewers like you, thank you" and just adds to the comfort I have listening to him talk about things he is interested in.

Walking for 12 years straight, alone, in the frigid cold year round, with barely a single change in scenery to denote progress sounds like the closest thing to a living Hell I have ever heard. With us keeping their names and story alive almost 200 years later, and the mysteries of their trip solved at last, may all their souls rest in peace. They deserve it.

Lady Franklin was the MVP of this story, she was so proud of her husband’s accomplishment and I can’t stop thinking how horrible it must have been for him to never return, yet she never gave up on him even after he was long dead

Another thing about the Terror and Erebus' legacy, is that prior the the doomed expedition it took part in some of the important early Antarctic Expeditions. Two of the first named mountains in Antarctica are named after them, Mt Erebus and Mt Terror, meaning that the legacy of the ships continue to live on.

Even though she couldn't go out herself, I have to applaud Lady Franklin. She did so much to bring awareness to the situation and try to figure out what happened.

It still amazes me how John Torrington's body was so well-preserved from the extreme cold. Today, you can find bodies in the Italian Alps from World War One, and they look so recent that the local police often get calls about possible murder victims.

Lady Franklin having the officers get their pictures taken, and buying her husband a monkey for the voyage is just fantastic. Glad to see humans haven't changed much.

there is something so horrifying about a man walking through the wilderness for 12 years having gone through all of this and still failing to find sanctuary, just imagine how life would have been for him holy jeez

I feel so bad Lady Franklin. For the person you love to just disappear and for the government who sent them to their deaths to just do nothing, those years of not knowing must have been torture. She travelled for years until her own death to find his remains. She never once gave up on finding him and only death could stop her. They really were two of the most badass people I’ve learnt about

i have never heard of a more bittersweet ending than crozier and a crewmate finding their goal after suffering for 12 whole years and seeing too many of their men die. this has to be the epitome of "we've won, but at what cost?"

Fun cannibalism fact (there's something I never thought I'd type): often by the time people have to resort to cannibalism in starvation situations, even eating a whole person would not actually help them at all. The human body needs fat to properly go through digestion and break down what we eat into nutrients to keep us alive. If there's not enough fat in the food you're eating, your body takes it from preexisting subcutaneous fat (the stuff that sits under your skin and that everyone gets so bent out of shape about). When you're starving, one of the first things to go are your subcutaneous fat cells, and once you get to the point where you're resorting to cannibalism, it's likely that the people you're eating also have lost their SubCu fat. This means that while human meat might fill your stomach, that's basically all that it does for you. Ironically, the one place in the body that continues to have fat cells even while starving is- wait for it- bone marrow! But as Wendigoon mentioned, eating human bone marrow is usually a last resort, so you don't have very much, if any, food (even human meat) remaining to take advantage of the fact that your body can now properly process what you're eating and help you survive. ✨️The More You Know✨️