UW anthropologist joins search for lost ships of Franklin

Robert Park is a University of Waterloo anthropologist.

Walking on the same Arctic island where British sailors from explorer Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition died, archeologist Robert Park could imagine the doomed men’s desperation.

The University of Waterloo professor was assisting in this summer’s multi-agency quest led by Parks Canada to find Franklin’s lost ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

Invited to take part by archeologist Doug Stenton, director of heritage for the territory of Nunavut, Park helped to scour known Franklin sites on King William Island in Nunavut for almost four weeks in August and September.

Meanwhile, underwater archeologists were scanning the seabed for Erebus and Terror with sonar equipment aboard small boats launched from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

The search failed to turn up Franklin’s ships, but the data collected by the sonar equipment will help to improve navigation safety in Arctic waters.

And on King William Island, Park, Stenton and other searchers found some artifacts at a known Franklin site, including human bones, buttons, a bone-handled toothbrush, wood fragments, a clay pipe and a copper rivet.

Now back in his UW office, Park, an archeological anthropologist, says he is fascinated by a story that has captivated Canadians for more than 150 years.

He calls the Franklin expedition an “incredible, evocative mystery.”

In 1845, Franklin and his 128-member crew set out from England to explore and map the Northwest Passage. Franklin was 59 and had led previous Arctic expeditions. He had also served as lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), off Australia from 1836 to 1843.

A signed note found on King William Island by an 1859 search party indicated that Franklin had died in June 1847.

The same note said that Franklin’s crews abandoned their ships in April, 1848 after they’d been caught for almost two years in the ice pack in Victoria Strait near King William Island.

“What happened is complicated, but there are Inuit accounts,” says Park, who teamed up with Stenton to look at Franklin sites in 2008 when Parks Canada began searching for the ships.

“The ships certainly drifted,” Park says.

“One of them appears to have been crushed by the ice a little bit south of where they were abandoned. Another one appears to have drifted a lot farther south.”

All perished. It’s believed that lead poisoning from canned food contributed to the sailors’ deaths.

Researchers also believe that some starving sailors resorted to cannibalism to try to stay alive.

As they walked this fall along the beach on King William Island, Park says, he could imagine the cold, sick and starving sailors who had died there. Their partial skeletal remains were excavated and studied in the 1990s, then returned to the island and reburied.

“The place where . . . the bones are, something really horrible happened there,” he says. “At least 11 British sailors died there and there’s good evidence that some of the last ones did resort to cannibalism.

“They did something that would have been repugnant to them, that they had to do in order to survive . . . and it still didn’t save their lives. That is so sad.”

Sailing with other modern-day explorers on the icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Park and Stenton combed the beaches of King William Island and adjacent islands.

“The idea was, if we find Inuit archeological sites where they had lots of material from these ships, that might suggest those sites are located near where one of the ships was,” Park says.

“It might give us a better idea where the ships ended up when they actually sank.”

That hope, however, was tempered by the knowledge that Inuit transported things great distances, he says.

Park is intrigued by the perspective of the Inuit, some of whom found the doomed sailors’ tools and other items later, and adapted them for their own use.

“It’s really interesting to understand the kinds of interaction that happened,” Park says.

“We do know that some Inuit came into contact with some of the Franklin survivors, but then Inuit also had access to all the stuff they left behind after they died.

“And the nature of those interactions and the effect on Inuit culture of all this European stuff essentially abandoned there is a really interesting question.”

Over the years, Park’s research has focused on the Inuit and their ancestors and how they lived in the Arctic.

“I grew up in Toronto, southern Ontario. Just imagining how someone could actually survive in the Arctic” is compelling, he says.

In 2008, searchers found European pieces of copper and other metal items at former Inuit campsites. It’s not known, however, if they were from the Franklin expedition or from other expeditions, Park says.

This year, they found more Inuit campsites, but “we didn’t find any new sites that we could positively identify as Franklin sites.”

Park says it’s puzzling why Franklin’s expedition “failed so catastrophically.”

Previous expeditions had overwintered in the Arctic and returned safely to England, he says.

“Then when the Franklin expedition disappeared, there was this huge search effort made. All sorts of expeditions — British, but also American — went into the Arctic looking for the lost Franklin expedition because it was totally mysterious that it had disappeared.”

Lead poisoning is likely a factor in the Franklin tragedy, Park says.

In the 1980s, the Canadian anthropologist Owen Beattie studied well-preserved human remains of three Franklin sailors buried on Beechey Island, men who died less than a year into the expedition. Beattie also examined skeletal remains of sailors who died after abandoning ship, and he looked at the tin cans.

Beattie found high levels of lead in the tissues of all the sailors, Park says.

“One of the differences of the Franklin expedition to the earlier expeditions was that they actually had this great new technology, canned food,” he says.

“But the canning process was new and apparently they (the cans) were done fairly quickly and so they used lead solder to seal the cans together and a lot of the lead came into contact with the food.

“A really plausible hypothesis is that the health effects of the lead poisoning added on to the other kinds of hardships.”

In 2010, underwater archeologists went to Banks Island and found the wreck of the HMS Investigator, which had been sent in 1850 to find Franklin and his ships.

While Park was not involved in that search, he says he hopes he’ll take part again someday in the search for Franklin’s ships.

Robert Park will discuss the Franklin expedition at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 21 in a lecture at the Stratford Public Library, 19 St. Andrew St., Stratford. His talk is titled, Lost Explorers of Arctic Canada.

http://www.therecord.com/living/article/837613--uw-anthropologist-joins-search-for-lost-ships-of-franklin