Franklin's Doomed Expedition Departs to Find the Northwest Passage
On this day · 19 May 1845
Two of the best-equipped ships of their age sailed into the Arctic to chart a fabled passage and were never seen again.
On May 19, 1845, the Royal Navy ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were towed from Greenhithe, England, beginning one of history’s most famous failed voyages. Their mission was to chart the last unmapped stretch of the Northwest Passage, the long-sought sea route threading the Arctic islands of northern Canada.
The expedition was led by Sir John Franklin, with Francis Crozier as second-in-command. The ships were reinforced for ice, fitted with steam screw propulsion, and provisioned for up to three years. They left with 134 officers and crew; after dropping five men in Greenland, 129 sailed on into the ice.
They were last sighted by European whalers in Baffin Bay in late July 1845.
Not a single man returned. The ships became locked in ice off King William Island, and the crews died of starvation, scurvy, and exposure. Decades of searches, and finally the discovery of both wrecks in 2014 and 2016, slowly pieced together the fate of an expedition that vanished while trying to finish the map.
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