“They forged the last link with their lives”
This website has been built to discuss the reconstruction of the history of the lost 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin with 129 picked men and the ships HMS Erebus and Terror. The position of the wreck of HMS Erebus, discovered in September 2014, and Inuit testimony suggests that a small crew of survivors did succeed in getting the ship through the North-West Passage. But it might have taken them five years to get there after both ships were beset in the ice in September 1846. The crew were too few to work the ship along the open water channel across the top of the American continent to the Bering Straits. Testimony describes the last four men who lived aboard with the ships dog Neptune as hunters. The abandoned Erebus drifted ashore and was salvaged by the Inuit for at least 8 years before being ice rafted into shallow water where she sank.
