Listen

Description

Captain Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition set out to find the North-West passage in 1845, aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The ships got locked in ice near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic.

Setting out over the ice, the entire expedition of 129 men was slowly lost to hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning (due to the canned food) and scurvy in the frozen wasteland.

Expeditions to discover their fate took place regularly over the intervening years, with the sunken wreck of the HMS Erebus discovered in 2014, and the discovery of the wreck of the HMS Terror in 2016.