1. The condition of HMS Erebus (New Data).

The sonar images and divers photographs of the wrecked hull of HMS Erebus, discovered in 2014 with her deck only ten feet beneath the sea surface, show considerable damage. Much of the stern is missing and the deck above Sir John Franklin’s great cabin has collapsed so that the shattered contents are lying beneath heavy beams. The deck is much broken up with planking displaced. The masts and bowsprit are also missing. The wreck is surrounded by a debris field of wooden planks and artifacts. Two brass cannon were present on deck with the ships bell. One of these and the bell have been raised.

In September 11-12 th 2018 brief diving occurred, when it was found that storm waves had damaged the wreck.  A 14 m section of the deck had been detached and flipped over and moved 8m towards the ship’s stern. A detached windlass was also moved. Several deck beams had separated from the underlying beam shelf. Erebus is crumbling.

The 2019 diving season was a great success with 350 artifacts recovered mainly from three officers cabins during 93 dives totalling 110 hours underwater. Excavation of Sir John’s steward’s pantry (he was 23 year old Edmund Hoar when the ship sailed) revealed stacks of willow-pattern plates stacked 13 high.  Some of Hoar’s personal effects were found and a fragment of a wooden parallel ruler belonging to Terror’s mate Frederick Hornby found in the pantry.  Excavation of an officers cabin possibly Lieutenant Fairholme revealed a pair of well-preserved epaulettes on a tin box in a drawer.  The hold was found to be largely empty, consistent with Inuit testimony that many things were removed from the ship before she sank.

The field seasons for 2020 and 2021 were suspended due to the Covid pandemic and the need to protect the Inuit.

The first report of the lost expedition and one ship was obtained by Captain Leopold McClintock in March 1859 when he met four Inuit near the magnetic Pole (McClintock, 1859, p. 231):

‘A naval button upon one of their dresses afforded the opportunity; it came, they said, from some white people who were starved upon an island where there were salmon (that it, in a river); and that the iron of which their knives were made came from the same place.’

McClintock moved on about 10 miles to the vicinity of Cape Victoria and next day was joined by around 45 Inuit. They brought many Franklin relics which McClintock purchased. He wrote (1859, p.233):

‘None of these people had seen the whites: one man said he had seen their bones upon the island where they died, but some were buried. Petersen also understood him to say that the boat was crushed by the ice. Almost all of them had part of the plunder.’

‘Next morning, 4th March, several natives came to see us again. I bought a spear 6.5 feet long from a man who told Petersen distinctly that a ship having three masts had been crushed by the ice out in the sea to the west of King William’s Island, but that all the people landed safely; he was not one of those who were eyewitnesses of it; the ship sunk, so nothing was obtained by the natives from her; all that they have got came from the island in the river.  The spear staff appears to have been part of the gunwale of a light boat. One old man, ‘Oo-na-lee’, made a rough sketch of the coastline with his spear upon the snow, and said it was eight journeys to where the ship sank, pointing in the direction of Cape Felix. I can make nothing of his rude chat.’

Today in 2021 we know that it is HMS Terror sunk in Terror Bay that is being described.

On 20th April 1859 on another sledging trip, McClintock was travelling south along the coast of Boothia Felix and was north of Cape Victoria when he found two families of twelve Inuit seal hunting on the ice about three quarters of a mile off shore. McClintock (1859, p.251) wrote:

‘After much anxious enquiry we learned that two ships had been seen by the natives of King William’s Island; one of them was seen to sink in deep water, and nothing was obtained from her, a circumstance at which they expressed much regret; but the other was forced on shore by the ice, where they supposed she remains, but is much broken. From this ship they have obtained most of their wood, &c.; Oot-loo-lik is the name of the place where she grounded’.

‘Formerly many natives lived there, now very few remain.  All the natives have obtained plenty of wood.’

‘The latter told us that the body of a man was found on board the ship; that he must have been a very large man, and had long teeth: this is all he recollected having been told, for he was a child at the time.’

McClintock purchased many relics including officers silver from the Inuit who had recovered it from the wreck at Utjulik (today known to be HMS Erebus).

McClintock obtained further information about the wreck at Utjulik (HMS Erebus) in May 1859 when he was sledging south towards Montreal Island in the estuary of Backs Great Fish River.  McClintock had crossed from Matty Island onto the south-east coast of King William Island. There he found a snow village of ten to twelve huts with around thirty to forty friendly Inuit.  He purchased from them six pieces of silver plate bearing the crests of Franklin, Crozier, Fairholme and McDonald, bows and arrows made of English woods, uniform and other buttons and was offered a heavy sledge made of two short but stout pieces of wood.

McClintock (1859, p. 262) wrote:

‘They told us it was five days journey to the wreck – one day up the inlet still in sight, and four days overland; this would bring them to the western coast of King William’s Island; they added that but little now remained accessible of the wreck, their countrymen having carried almost everything away.  In answer to an enquiry, they said she was without masts; the question gave rise to laughter amongst them, and they spoke to each other about fire, from which Petersen thought they had burnt the masts through close to the deck in order to get them down.

There had been many books, they said, but all have long ago been destroyed by the weather; the ship was forced on shore in the fall of the year by the ice.  She had not been visited during this past winter, but an old woman and a boy were shown to us who were the last to visit the wreck; they said they had been at it during the preceding winter (i.e. 1857-8).

Petersen questioned the woman closely and she seemed anxious to give all the information in her power.  She said many of the white men dropped by the way as they went to the Great River; that some were buried and some were not; they did not themselves witness this, but discovered their bodies during the winter following.’

The abandoned Erebus was first found by the Inuit out at sea with the body of a large man inside the great cabin. She eventually drifted ashore.  There she was salvaged for perhaps eight years until there was little left that was useful to the Inuit. Later the wreck was ice rafted offshore and sank. The stern of the ship was further damaged by the ice keel of a pressure ridge that hit the stern of the ship and may have dragged along her decks wrecking some of the planking. Erebus was repeatedly swept by ice after sinking, her capstan and other deck features are displaced from their original positions.

The find of part of a parallel ruler belonging to Terror mate Frederick Hornby is particularly interesting. Roobol 2019 has suggested that Terror was abandoned in 1847 after ice movement threw her over and both crews wintered on Erebus before the1848 retreat.  Later in 1848 Erebus was remanned by men from both ships returning from the retreat who worked her through the North-West Passage to her final resting place on the shore of the American continent .

QUESTION.  Were the masts of Erebus removed by the Inuit burning through them for the wood before she sank, or were they broken off by ice rafting after the ship sank?