 Diolch yn diolch. Felly cael ѷn ddechrau eich tynnu o'r plant yn gyfodol. A'r newydd yn fawr am ddechrau ar y gyflaeth tarreg cael ei ddweud ac yn ôl i ni bwysig a'i dewis i ddweud a'i dweud o'r frem yn ei bodd ac mae no arlai ddechrau i ddweud hynny, oall yn cael ei ddweud. Diolch yn erbydd i ddweud ffyrdd yn i dda i'n rwyng I'm reliably informed, I'll do it. If you knew how much time I spent on this PowerPoint, I mean really, you know. The saga this evening extends from 1845 up to the present day. So we're going to have to cut a few corners along the way, but if there are any questions at the end, hopefully we can pick up on some things there. Now, I should say at the very beginning that my work in this has been closely involved with him, my very good colleague, he'll be familiar to many of you here, Adrian Bowman at the University of Glasgow, and Adrian and I got caught up in this a few years ago when we read something about the expedition, which I'll come to later, which we thought just didn't sound right, didn't ring true, and we got involved in that. So I'll say more about it shortly. The other two, as Mary has just alluded, the other two bodies that I need to acknowledge, the National Maritime Museum has been very good to us. In fact, they've used our published data far more imaginatively than we ever could in the recent Franklin exhibition about the expedition. And Parks Canada, who've been very good colleagues, they've informed a lot of our thinking on this, not least with their spectacular discovery quite recently of the two missing ships. And again, we'll come to that soon. Now, if you ask most people what is the greatest polar tragedy for this country, they'll say, well, Captain Scott in the Antarctic. And of course that's correct because Scott and his companions died a horrible death there. But it's remarkable that only a few decades before that, 129 officers and men of the Royal Navy died in the grimmest of circumstances in the Arctic. And they have largely been, until the last few years, have been largely forgotten. This is a Victorian representation, a very heroic representation of the end of that expedition where Sir John Franklin is shown as the last man standing. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's quite extraordinary. But equally, this has been presented, represented over the years, as a catastrophe, a disaster where men were reduced to mere beasts and bestial behaviour. Again, that is a calamity as well. What I want to show you is that it was really a tragedy. And there's some redemption at the end. Incidentally, you'll probably also see this title of this painting, Vise, for the longest title of any painting you could possibly imagine. Well, what was the purpose of this expedition? The British Admiralty had been obsessed through the 19th century with finding a north-west passage because it would offer a commercial and strategic advantage because any ship leaving Britain and getting through the Arctic is going to be on the other side of the world, as you can see here, much more quickly than going round the Horn. So this was the ambition of the... Can you still hear me? I'll just turn one of my ears off. The ambition of the Admiralty was, at the end of the 19th century, we will find the north-west passage and we'll find it before the Americans. This was most important, or the Russians, even worse in those days. So our interest lies up here in what's called the High Arctic. And let's focus in on that because this is where all the action is this evening. Today, if you're in the market for a north-west passage, you're spoiled for choice. Any of these routes will get you through. Unfortunately, the laser point is not working here, but one of them, you see the little route there by, you see Joe Haven and Tully Oak down the bottom left, a bottom right of the routes. That route remains open, generally speaking, through most summers. And that's an important bit of information. Now that's the situation today. Back in 1845, it was a bit different. There had been a lot of advances by previous expeditions in finding a way in from the east, from the Atlantic, and also from the west, from the Pacific. But whether there was a connection between the two was unclear. Now, the sharp hide amongst you will also see there's a tiny white bit there that wasn't explored at that time. And that might seem very trivial. In fact, it's very significant because it's where that passage, I showed you a moment ago, lies. And the trouble is that the Admiralty charts at that time suggested there wasn't a passage there at all. It was a bay. Now, you'll see that in a year later, this would have serious implications for a particular expedition. Now, with all this advance and the fact that it seemed that most of the Arctic had been explored, the second secretary to the Admiralty of Mancull to John Barrow came up with this. This is the sort of statement that people who don't actually work themselves or put themselves in danger will tend to come up with. So little now remains to be done. We can find a link between these two bits where home and dry. Barrow was up against it though because there was already this enchantment about whether even if a north-west passage existed, could it be exploited commercially? It might only be open for a few weeks every year. But he was fortunate. He pulled all the right patriotic levers and he got the money. Now, Franklin, who was going to command this expedition? Well, you'll have guessed. It has to be somebody called Franklin. And indeed it was Captain Sir John Franklin. And pictured here the day before they set sail on the expedition. Now, Franklin was a great hero, Arctic hero. As a young man, he had... Actually, as he says, a very young man, he'd served with Nelson at Trafalgar. As a young man, he'd also carried out some of the very early Arctic exploration. And this is where he earned his title of the man who ate his boots because he and his companions, having run out of their provisions, were forced to literally, their shoe leather, to survive. So he was a tough man. But a very decent man, by all accounts, and treated all his crews very well. He was extremely popular. He didn't believe in corporal punishment of crew members. But his career had run... This was in the 1820s and 30s. And his career would rather fall into the Daldrums. And he was desperate before he retired. He was now 59 to redeem things. He was very keen to be made commander of this expedition. The Admiralty weren't so sure. But they couldn't persuade any of the previous commanders who'd gone to the Arctic to go back. They'd been there recently and they thought, we're not chanceing our arm again. Franklin was very happy to go. So he was put in command. And he had two other officers to rely on. Francis Crozier, another very experienced Arctic man. He'd also been to the Antarctic, so he really knew his business. And a younger man with no Arctic experience, gyms with gyms, but a rising light in the navy. And between the three of them, it was thought this expedition would have every success. They were provided with these two ships, the Arabus and the Terror, very strongly built, strengthened for the ice and retrofitted with steam engines to force their way through the pack and very lavishly equipped for three years. Nothing, no expense was spared in the provisioning and equipping of the ships. They were centrally heated for a start, which was real innovation at the time. So when it came time to depart, of course these sort of statements again, which are huge hostages to fortune and great temptations to Providence tend to be made. And indeed, as we'll see, Providence was severely tempted. But no wonder, because one of the astounding facts about the planning of this expedition was that there was no planning for rescue or relief if something went wrong. And all Arctic hands could not believe it that this important, essential part of planning was really cast aside by the Admiralty. It was a ffeta-complee. Franklin will get through. It was enormous complacency. Well, they headed off 19th May, 1845, from the Thames. According to the illustrated London News, 10,000 people turned up to bid them farewell. And at the end of July, same year, they were making their way across Baffin Bay, where they encountered a British whaling ship captain Martin of that ship. He spoke to Franklin and his officers, and when he got back to London, reported they'd been in high spirits and good health and very confident. As it turned out, Martin would be the last European to ever see them alive. So they headed off, and at that stage in the proceedings, they had 129 officers and men and a dog called Old Neptune. I mentioned Old Neptune. He was actually sketched before they left. I mentioned it because we'll see him again later in much less happy circumstances. No animals were deliberately harmed in the making of this presentation. So off they went, and they disappeared into the white and silent attack. I really should be ashamed of this, shouldn't I? And disappeared into the silence of the Arctic. 1845 spun into 1846, and no communication whatsoever. Naturally, the press and the relatives of the crew were starting to get anxious, but the Admiralty said, no, we can expect them to be away for maybe one or two winters before we hear anything more from them. But privately, there was serious concern. And in early 1847, the so-called Arctic Council was convened of leading lights in previous Arctic expeditions. And they never met like this. This is again another bit of Victorian idealism. It's unlikely any of them could have been in the same room together without attempting to murder each other. Most of them loathed each other. But it was decided that a search and rescue mission should be launched, and that it would follow Franklin's prescribed sailing orders into the Arctic. And the man chosen to lead this was this gentleman here, Captain Sir James Ross. Ross was ascribed as the handsomest man in the Navy. That was what the press called him. Of course, you don't know what competition you may have been up against, but anyway, he's a decent enough-looking man. Ross was very experienced. He'd been to the Arctic many times before and to the Antarctic with Crozier, the second command to Franklin. So it was thought, really, that Ross will find them. This has started the problem. But as it turned out, Ross wouldn't find them. And what was even worse, Ross would make sure by making the most terrible mistake that nobody else would find them either. Here's what happened. Ross followed Franklin's sailing orders coming in from the Atlantic here to reach this point here, where both his ships got stuck in the ice. Despite everybody's suggestions, he'd refused to have any steam power fitted these ships, so he just got stuck. But nothing daunted. He headed off south because he had a pretty good idea that's probably where Franklin would then have gone. And he reached a point where he had a view down this straight that you can see there. And the view was this, that there was a solid barrier of ice, which he concluded extended all the way down that straight, and it was part of a known barrier of varial dice throughout this whole area. So he concluded that Franklin could not possibly have forced his ships down that way. It didn't seem to occur to him that two years earlier the ice might not have been in that state, but that was a judgment he made. The result of that was that all the subsequent searches were directed either to the west along this northerly straight here, or to the north of that position. And the area that was never searched was this. And you will guess because you're all insightful people that that is exactly where Franklin and his crews were. Now the early searches were actually quite positive because in 1850 they discovered Franklin's first winter quarters of 1845 on a tiny island called Beachy Island. And it was a very well located place for winter quarters. It's a photograph of it here. It's a very good bay where the ships were known to be moored, very sheltered from the ice. And when it was discovered there was all the signs of a well formed base with buildings and so on, and three graves. And the graves are still there. The graves were not, and there's nothing sinister about the fact that men had died. They died on these expeditions. But what completely confounded the search ships and search crews was that Franklin, when they'd left the base had left no indication of where they were going next. And this was completely against all orders, Admiralty orders. The expectation with any Royal Nableship was that it would leave either in a copper canister which was chucked overboard to be picked up eventually, or buried on land under a prominent cairn a note saying where they'd been, what their present position was, and what their intention was. This island was literally dug over many times. It's a tiny island, it's only about a mile by a mile by numerous search crews. Nothing was ever found, and this completely confounded things because the search ships had no idea where they should then go. The Admiralty was pulling out all the stops by this stage, rather belatedly, five years after they'd left. This is equivalent to about 1.6 million reward now. It was then primarily at the whaling industry because they were most likely to encounter Franklin's ships. But all of this was completely to no avail, and for the next four years, numerous squadrons of ships, both British and American, were sent into the Arctic according to Ross' instructions of where it was best to look, and nothing at all was found. After this period of time, the expedition had been gone for nine years. They were provisioned for three. The Admiralty realised nobody could still be alive. And when they did their audit, it was pretty obvious that this could not, this farce could not go on. I won't bother reading the speculative value yourself. 200 men dead, that's in addition to the Franklin crew who were known to be dead, and all these ships lost. The present day total, estimated by the National Archives, is that this little venture cost 48 million, and that does not include the cost of replacing these ships, some of which were brand-new steam ships. So it was a staggering sum of money for nothing, absolutely nothing. The Admiralty agreed that things would have to be brought to an end at that point, and so did the Times newspaper, which summed up the whole thing like this. A downright, faragoing catastrophe, which it was. So the Admiralty decided the relatives would be, all the salaries of the crew would be paid up to 31 March 1854, and paid to the relatives, and that would be the end of it. If they thought it was the end of it, they were just about to be very sadly disabused of that notion, because only a few months later, this man, John Ray, some of you may have heard of John Ray, he's an Orcadian, and he studied medicine at Edinburgh, but never practised. He joined the Hudson Bay Company, where he became one of their most eminent explorers and surveyors, and it was while Ray was surveying this area here in the Arctic, he was aware of the Franklin expedition that was missing, of course. He encountered a group of Inwits, these are called Eskimos, but the Inwit people are the correct title today. Who astounded him by saying that they knew that white men had died in large numbers far to the west of where they were at that time, and that prior to their death, some of other members of their particular family had encountered them while still alive in 1850. Now that dates very important if you can hang on to it. So this was four years before Ray got this news, 1850. It was obvious from what they had told him that the site of this disaster, if that's what it was, was here, what's now, King William Island. And they had some of the personal possessions of the men who had died, many of which were obviously possessions from some of the officers in the expedition, and most telling was this, the Guelfic Order that had been awarded to Franklin and which he was wearing the day before he left on the expedition. So there was no doubt now they were dead, they had met some, obviously grim fate. So Ray headed back at once to England with the news, the winter was setting and he couldn't go to King William Island himself to check on this, but he got back to England, went straight to the Admiralty with this report. And there was one element of the report which he, of what the Inwit had told him, which he and the Admiralty agreed should not be disclosed because it was too shocking. So it was agreed this report would go to the Times newspaper for publication, but this would be omitted. Well, you can guess exactly what happened. Some buffoon in the Admiralty did not remove the offending part of Ray's report. So this is what appeared in the Times the next day. This is the offending bit. From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, those are what the Navy called the cooking apparatus. It was evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of prolonging existence, in other words cannibalism. Now this was met with shock and disbelief by the public. British officers did not eat each other. Maybe the men might, but you know, we're not going to know. And honestly some people did say that in the report in letters to the Times. That basically this was something that was beyond the pale. We would not accept this. And for the Admiralty it was the final straw. It was a stain on the whole thing. And they were hugely pleased shall we say, that the Crimean War of course had just begun, which was proving a major distraction to the public because of the other greater blunders going on there. So the nation's attention was distracted. Jane Franklin and this horrible event could be forgotten. But not everybody was distracted. And the one person who certainly was not was Jane Franklin, Franklin's widow. And if you ever get lost in the Arctic, this is the person you want rooting for you, I can tell you. Jane Franklin accepted that her husband John was dead and all the rest of them. But she felt it was important that the formal records, and diaries from the expedition should be recovered because they would tell exactly what had gone on. And she couldn't believe her husband had resorted to cannibalism. So she was determined to do this. She petitioned the government, the Admiralty. She petitioned Palmerston, the then Prime Minister directly. But they politely basically told her to forget about it. So nothing daunted, she set up a public subscription. And she raised enough money to buy her own ship to go to the Arctic. This shamed the Admiralty into providing a captain for the ship and a crew and to provision it. And the little steam yacht Fox was found and bought by Jane Franklin up in Aberdeen of all places. It was a former luxury yacht which she bought and had it fitted out for the ice. You can see this photograph was obviously taken on washing day. It's a fine selection of long johns and semets hanging up there. And the man set to command this was Francis McClintock, a very experienced Arctic commander who could be trusted to do the best possible job. In fact he refused to take a salary for this. He thought it was a matter of principle to go and do this work. You can see too he lived a long life. McClintock knew exactly where to go. He headed for King William Island. And when he got there he had the Admiralty chart with him that Franklin also had. And he realised very quickly by the fact that he could circumnavigate what was thought to be King William land that Franklin had been seriously misled. That he could have got through that easy passage. McClintock recorded that in the bestselling book that he later wrote about all this. But we'll come to that later. To cut a long story short after searching the island on the 27th of May 1859 McClintock found the only written document ever recovered from the Franklin expedition. And he found it in a copper canister buried in a cairn, a prominent cairn. And this is it here. The handwriting is James, the third in command. I've been privileged to see and handle this document. I must be getting a bit soft in my old age. It's actually quite an emotional experience I have to say. It's a very frail piece of paper. You can see that some of it is written in a very strong, confident hand. And if you look up the right hand margin you can see a scroll up the side. This was written on two occasions. The paper itself is a standard performer that all the ships had to record their position routinely, their ongoing activities and their expected proceedings. And the first bit of it, if I take you through this, we can turn this into the chronology of what, to the Victorians anyway, appeared to have happened. So let's do that now. We know for sure they left Beachy Island in 1846 having spent the winter there. And it's evident they made very fast progress south to this point here. Now this of course is where they would consult their chart, which told them completely wrongly that they could not head east and through that into that bay. Because apparently it was a bay, we know it's a straight now. Had they been able to do that, I wouldn't be here talking to you about the loss of the Franklin expedition. Most historians say they would have got through easily. But unfortunately they headed this way. This is a bit like Captain Pugwash, isn't it? You know the animation? Where there is a perennial sea of ice very difficult to get through and their ships got completely stuck. Now they were stuck 80 miles north of charted waters. So while this was a frustration to them, they would resign themselves to another winter in the ice knowing that next summer they'd be a thaw. They'd get through and they'd be off to the Pacific. So a frustration but still high hopes and plenty of confidence. What they didn't know unfortunately is that three years had just begun in the Arctic where there would be no thaw at all. None of that ice would melt. They unfortunately didn't know that. So the next May in 1847 having got through that winter of 1846 if it's James, everything had gone fine. If it's James was still able to sign off saying all well, underlined it for emphasis, things were still going fine. Only three weeks later calamity because in June Franklin dies. It's not known what the cause of death was. It was probably something quite acute. Of course no thaw. Obviously all on board there would be no thaw and they were faced with another winter in the ice, stuck. When we get to the end of the winter of 1847 into 8 we find from Fitzgames's record now written in a very hasty scrawl nine officers and 15 men were dead. This is a disproportionate number of officers. The ships would then be deserted. The plan was to desert the ships in April. They were deserted. This is now a Victorian assumption because all Fitzgames said the ships were being deserted and they were heading south. The Victorians at the time assumed this was the heroic death march to the mainland and that all were dead by autumn of 1848. If you remember what I said earlier John Ray encountered Inwit who had met survivors in 1850. This doesn't match with the actual witness testimony. The Victorian idea of this heroic march to the end and they were all dead by this time is not correct. The Victorians never tried to explain why so many officers died as well other than saying that the officers would have heroically sacrificed themselves for the rest of the crew by hunting and saw. In fact there's a cynical though we are now. We'll see that's probably actually what happened. The passage therefore in as far as the Victorians were concerned was completed because by walking to the mainland they'd made it into chartered waters so that they're all dead, the ships had sunk but it was a success. Tennyson was encouraged to provide lifting lines and this is what is on the Franklin monument which we'll see in a moment in Palmall. They forged the last link with their lives. I'm not trying to make light of that. They had died in horrible circumstances as we'll see in more detail shortly. Franklin got his memorial. Parliament voted for a very nice memorial which you can see if you walk along Palmall to Waterloo Place it's still there. At long last the nation could put this whole business to rest. Here's another embarrassing fade out slide. Over the succeeding years into our century, 20th century memories of the Franklin expedition and its failure really disappeared so that certainly by the middle of the century most people knew nothing of Franklin. Nobody could remember it. But it wasn't the case and it certainly is not the case in Canada where the whole Franklin tragedy is very much part of their young history. To the Canadians we now look to the final part of this saga because over the last 30 or 40 years they've spent an enormous amount of time and money trying to understand what happened to the Franklin expedition and that has paid off spectacularly just in the last couple of years with the discovery of the two ships which were thought to be irretrievably lost. The Arabus on the top here was found in only 30 feet of water and that accounts for her condition. Unfortunately the superstructure has been stripped by heavy ice passing over but her hull is completely intact and all the contents. We'll talk about that shortly. And the terror more fortunately sank in 80 feet. She's completely intact. The mast is still standing. You can see the bow sprit sticking out there. The archaeologists who have swum down to Lichodur have said if she could be raised and pumped out she would float. It's a wonderful time capsule that even the two privies on the stern for officers who are fully intact and both doors closed. So the parts Canada team who have been working on these ships have a lot of fascinating information from them which we'll talk about in a moment. We've also concentrated on the oral history from the Inuit people whose forebears were actual physical witnesses of what happened and who met the crew. Until recently their oral history has been completely discounted. It was discounted by the Victorians as nonsense because these people were court savages. And of course the idea that they had met anyone in 1850 was discounted because they had no sense of numbers and how could that possibly be true. As we'll see the Inuit history has been very significant. But some of the early work conducted in Canada was to look at the remains of those three men who died in Beechie Island and also some of the skeletal remains which are found in King William Island and you literally will fall over them. It's still skeletal remains scattered about in the place. It's quite extraordinary. The next slide I'm going to show you. I apologise if some people don't like looking at dead bodies. One of the extraordinary things about the graves on Beechie Island was that the men inside them were found to be completely preserved in the permafrost. And these are them. Quite astounding. And it was possible to conduct very full autopsies on them. And it confirmed that probably pulmonary tuberculosis was responsible for the deaths, which was very common in the Victorian times. But what was unanticipated was the discovery that there were also high levels of lead in their soft tissues and skeletons and also in the skeletons found in King William Island. Now this has led to the hypothesis that the crew died, the expedition was brought to an end, by lead poisoning which caused such extensive mortality and morbidity that the whole thing simply came to an end. This theory is a wonderful example of not allowing the facts to get in the way of a good story, as I'll show you. Some of you will remember the late Archie Roy. One of Archie's sayings was, ''Facts are chills at when I dink.'' And some of these Canadian investigators might want to have thought about that. The evidence from Beachy Island was this, because some of the cans have been recovered, that the expedition had their provisions in. This was an innovation at the time. And it was concluded because some of the cans, you see the law right there, had evidence that the seams on the cans had been sealed with copious amounts of lead solder. And this had got into the food, eaten, and had then poisoned the crew. It's under the can on the top left there. You'll see that the invention of the can opener came after the invention of the can, because to get into these things, you needed a hammer and a chisel. This is actually one from the expedition itself, which is held at the National Maritime Museum. The interpretation of these data was that, and I quote here from a paper written, and which has received huge amounts of public attention, has become part of a best-selling book, that these frail adult men, their brains and bodies poisoned with lead, staggering across the ice. This was meant to portray the end of the Franklin expedition. Well, the fact is, Adrian Bowman and I have gone through all the medical records of the search ships, which went to the Arctic to look for Franklin. They were identically provisioned, and none of those medical records, and there's 1,500 of them we've been through, none of them show any of the signs and symptoms of lead poisoning at neurological and gastric, which are well-recognised. If it didn't poison the search ships, it's difficult to see how it poisoned the Franklin crew. Also, it's unfortunate that people didn't do their homework, because in 1960, a paper was published in The New Scientist where these cans were analysed, not because anyone thought they might have been lead poisoning, but analysed routinely to see what the contents were like, and it looked for metals in the contents, and found that levels of lead were either nil or very low. So this story really was something that ran away with itself. And it also neglects the fact that in the 19th century in Britain, lead was absolutely everywhere. It's astounding when compared to what's permitted today. It was in the water, it was in the food. Red Lester cheese was adulterated with red lead to give it its healthy red hue. You could buy over-the-counter acetate of lead to treat your diarrhea or whatever else, hemorrhage and all sorts of things. So the population was exposed to enormously high levels of lead, and it's known that the levels of lead in skeletal material from that time is very high. So given that the Franklin crew was recruited from that population, their levels of lead would have been high anyway. And some Canadian researchers recently have used some very clever x-ray analysis to show that the lead in skeletal material from the Franklin crew was deposited before they went on the expedition. And it did not increase during the expedition. And that really is a clincher. And Adrian Bowman and I have taken that a little bit further by estimating what the lead in the blood was at that time. And again, the morbidity associated with the level of blood in the lead would have been very low or nil. So if you only take one message away from this evening, please, disregard what it says in Wikipedia, the Franklin expedition did not succumb to lead poisoning. If you believe that, my work is done, thank you. So it equilates through the scurvy, which is common on these ships, in which it affects some of the Franklin crew, did not do for them, and nor was there any medical factor that's been found to explain it. So what would have caused these deaths over that winter? Well, and this is where our discussions with Parks Canada have been very helpful. They have pointed out a number of things to us that, while stuck in the ice, the officers and other crew would not have just sat there passively. For a start, their provisions were running out. They'd have gone hunting. And hunting in the Arctic for the search ships was highly perilous, some extraordinary escapades there, where officers were lucky to escape with their lives, because hunting fell to the officers primarily. By the way, this fellow who's lying at the feet of the polar bear is sadly, going to be sadly disabused with the idea, it works with brown bears and grizzly bears. If you lie down, they think you're dead and they don't bother with you. Polar bears aren't taken in by that, sadly. And he's just about to find that out. And that may always be two thirds of a ton. Nothing stops a polar bear. So these would explain a number of deaths. And also the fact, and it's the maritime museum historians who have come up with some evidence for this, that some of the crew would have been sent back in the hope of contacting search ships, which they would be sure were up near Beachy Island in that long straight there. I can say more about that later if you're interested. Clearly, they didn't make it. They didn't manage to make contact. We can say more about that. And finally, they were up against the weather. The arctic weather was something they were not prepared for. This is data that Adrian Bowman primarily has prepared. And it's from one of the search ships, unwittingly, was only 200 miles north of where Franklin's ships were in the winter of 1948-1949. Now, you can see the temperatures there, minus 60 degrees. You cannot survive in that, wearing a standard issue royal naval greatcoat, winter cape, boots and mittens. That's not survivable if you're stuck in snow away from the shelter of a ship. So this undoubtedly caused numerous deaths. And it caused numerous deaths in the search ships as well. And if you look, as you see as the 1849 goes on and summer comes on, the temperatures start to rise above freezing. And this, at long last, is where the thaw began. And this is the final section of our little story, which is a short section. You'll not have to be pleased to know. In 1949, probably, maybe in 1850, the thaw occurred which released the ships. And it's thought that they may have travelled in consort. It's not clear. It's thought that they had travelled to these positions here where they were found just a few years ago by Parks Canada. The Arab is first in 2014 and the terror just two years ago. It seems that what happened to the two ships at this point is very different. And we'll look at that quickly. Let's focus on the terror and where she was just off King William Island. Now, when she was, when the terror was in this position, also from the Inuit testimony, that there was a tented camp from the men on board, on shore, which was found by the Inuit in 1849 or 50. The Inuit also reported that they'd visited the ship where they'd been rough handled by the crew but an officer had stopped them and had given them something to eat to calm them down. And had pointed to this tented camp some miles away on the shore and said to them, you must never go there. You're welcome to come to the ship. You must never go to that camp. And later, the Inuit found out exactly why. When they did go to the camp, as they approached it, it was clearly, there was nobody there living at the time, they found arms and legs lying outside, dismembered bodies. And when they got into the large marque tent that was there, it was really like a charnel house. With dismembered bodies, partially cooked, some men chained by the neck, one cannot hardly imagine what that meant, and clear evidence of cannibalism. And very recent forensic examination of these skeletal remains from there has confirmed without any shadow of a doubt from the cut marks on the skeletons, these are consistent with a body being dismembered to be eaten. And also some of the evidence is completely consistent with murder. Some of these men were killed deliberately. Well, the Inuit later encountered, remember 1850, 40 men assumed to be survivors from this camp, although they may have come from the terror herself. And they were very ill. The Inuit gave them some food, but they went on their way. They couldn't really help them. Later, 1850 or 51, they reported finding their scattered corpses. As part of the testimony, an Inuit woman in old age remembered what she'd seen as a girl of these men. And box clearly the last moments, the last throws, the wolves were very thick, meaning the wolves were everywhere. Only one man was living. He sat on the sandy beach, his head resting in his hands, and he grimened, I'm sure you'll agree, to whatever happened to the men of HMS terror. HMS Erebus, a slightly different tale. The Inuit were aware of her presence in that position there, and they were aware that there were men alive and active on board. They didn't go near the ship, but they waited until that activity appeared to have died down and approached certain and went on board where they found one man dead in a bunk and, leading from the ship eastwards, the footprints of three men and a dog. Now, that dog can only have been old Neptune, who had survived despise at all. You might infer, at this original inference, that men who would not eat their dog would not eat each other. So the way things went for the two ships may have been rather different. Now, the next bit of testimony that's quite fascinating is that, away over here in Repulse Bay, where there was a substantial Inuit encampment at that time, two men appeared and said that they had walked from the east, and it's a heck of a long way. It's approximately 300 miles. Now, if there were two men, originally there was three in old Neptune, clearly one man and poor old Neptune had succumbed somewhere along the way. But the Inuit recognised one of the men who had appeared. They called him Crozar. Remember Crozar had a long history in the Arctic. The Inuit knew him very well. They were adamant that Crozar was one of the men who appeared, who the other man was, is not known. They were in very bad way. The Inuit looked after them and got them restored to reasonable health and showed them how to go eastwards to the coast where they could find Hudson Bay Post and hopefully rescue. Unfortunately, to get there meant travelling through an area where First Nation people lived who were extremely hostile and if they went that way there was no way that they were going to survive. We assume that's what happened to them. The interesting thing is though that Crozar, before he left, the Inuit said he spent a lot of time sitting in a big book and he had lots of papers with him that he had writing on. He gave that in a satchel to the Inuit but they couldn't understand what he wanted them to do with it. When he'd gone they had no idea really what to do so they gave it to the children in the camp. Of course it ended up being scattered, all the material ended up being scattered to the four winds and historians are confident that that was the end of any formal records of the Franklin expedition. But maybe not and this is where we come to Parks Canada in this last couple of minutes. Their discovery of the ships has opened up all sorts of new possibilities. The top left there, this is on Erebus, you'll see if you've sharp eyed, this isn't the officers mess. They had a willow pattern and crockery there. There's nothing but the best for them. You can probably see one of them there. Really quite astounding things are being brought out of these two ships. The bottom left there, a diver is indicating one of the stern windows on HMS Terror. It's fully intact, the glass is intact as are other pens. They can see through into the cabin, which is the captain's cabin. The door on the other side is closed and it's what apparently is called in archaeological terms a sealed environment. Anything that was in that room when the ship went down will still be there. Apparently, if any written materials are in that room and in a secure drawer or something like that, with modern conservation techniques they can be made fully legible. If, for example, a ship's log is left there and they were kept in duplicate or one of the surgeon's records, they were kept in triplicate or any officer's diary is in that room, it may well explain everything that happened to these men and this ship. They've also found personal effects. They've found this shoe, it's an officer's shoe from the Airbus and have extracted DNA from it. And because the Canadians have set up a very extensive DNA database from descendants of the crew, they're very hopeful that they're able to tell whose shoe this was and the implication being he must have been on board the ship when it sank. They'll get a sense of who was on board. I'm not sure the logic of that entirely. I mean, it used to say he was still on the ship when it went down, but the shoe may have been clean enough. And most spectacularly of all, they are very confident that John Franklin's remains will be found in a lead-lined coffin in the hold of the Airbus. I can say more about the reasoning for that later. It's very plausible, but we could talk about that later if there's any questions. We're rather getting ahead of ourselves here because we're in the realms of speculation now. Let's finish by thinking about what we know as a fact for what happened and how we might interpret it. We're always in the game of blame, I suppose, and there's no doubt that these four factors here played their part. The ambition, really a pointless ambition of finding a north-west passage which could never be exploited, the complacency of the Admiralty and, first of all, having a plan for rescue and then taking five years to get sorted out for one, and the tragic misjudgment of poor James Ross, who never spoke of it for the rest of his life, and, of course, the chart. But these are only contributions to it because basically what they were up against was that they were pathetic. And they were a naval expedition. They were not trained and they were certainly not equipped to survive if they had to leave the ships. And it was never thought they would have to leave the ships. So when they did, they were both literally and metaphorically fatally exposed. And what I'd like to suggest to you is that, while the expedition and its failure has been regarded as a catastrophe and a disaster and a shaming incident, it's not that at all. It's a tragedy where, in fact, these men really did their best. They were volunteers. They didn't have to go. They went to do their best and they met a very grim fate. And I think it's very unfortunate that even today very respectable historians, no doubt because it sells books, when they write about the Franklin expedition, they focus on everything that went wrong, and in particular the cannibalism, which was a feature, but probably did not affect, not all of them, I'm sure, became involved in it. And just to give you an example of this, is this really how to remember the Franklin crew? This is from Anthony Brand. He's an American historian in his otherwise admirable biography of Franklin. This is literally how the book ends. The images of pieces of human arms and legs cooking in a kettle while starving men stare with dead eyes at the ultimate consequences of this spectacular piece of folly. Well, folly it was, but it wasn't a folly of their making. And I think you might, I hope you'll agree with me, that they deserve a better memory than that. So how about this? Had they made it through the Northwest Passage, as they were in the Bering Straits, heading west, as they made the exit which would take them round the Aleutian Islands to the Pacific, this is what they would have seen. And in the last letter that Harry Goodser, who was assistant surgeon on the Air of Us, wrote to his father and Strother, this is what he said. All the officers are in great hopes of making the passage and expect to be in the Pacific at the end of next summer. Well, it wasn't to be, but at this stage they were fit and well, they were hopeful, they were confident and they were ready to do their best. So let's leave them there. Thanks very much.