Status Updates From Franklin's Lost Ship: The H...

So perhaps it is fitting that just as Franklin's lost flagship, Erebus, is finally found and its mysteries begin to be solved, so, too, are the Arctic's own mysteries yielding to human knowledge. As technology advances...as the climate warms and the ice melts, the Arctic itself is changing in ways unimaginable even a few decades ago. Today, cruise ships sail through the Northwest Passage every year...

For more than a century and a half, the fate of the lost ships of Sir John Franklin was the most enduring mystery of the North. The mystery was enhanced by the Victorian notion of the Arctic as the idealized, romantic land that time forgot, fixed in snow, frozen in ice, immutable. That haughty resistance to change rendered the North alluring, ripe for the challenge of conquest, even as it remained unconquered.

The divers couldn't help but think about what went so catastrophically wrong during those months... Inside the body of the ship... were there maps and charts, ready to be discovered? What if they were literally frozen in time, preserved from the abrasions of the currents by the ice, the salt water, the lack of oxygen, the absence of light? And if they were, such tantalizing tales they might tell.

But by the time the Inuit found the tent site...no one was left alive. Instead, they found... frozen human bodies, some in tents, some under a boat, some scattered along the shoreline. The bones of some of the bodies were skillfully butchered for meat, skulls broken open for their high-calorie brains. Inuit also reported finding tall boots partially filled with boiled human flesh.