If you’re interested in the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage, the Royal Ontario Museum has information on the finding of the HMS Erebus, including videos (via american archaeology, summer 2016). And Archaeology (July/August 2016) has a full article:
The search to determine the fate of Franklin’s 1845 expedition began almost immediately after the realization that the ships were lost. Since then, explorers have turned up bodies, bones, weapons, tools, a sunken rescue ship, and even a handwritten note with precise coordinates of where the quest veered so horribly off course. But the shipwrecks themselves remained elusive, lost amid a constellation of archipelagos and the whims of sea ice. After nearly 170 years, Canadian archaeologists were finally on the cusp of a breakthrough in one of the great maritime mysteries. The potential find carried the weight of decades of anticipation and even modern geopolitical ramifications, as the nations that surround the now increasingly ice-free Arctic jockey for access to the natural resources that are thought to lie beneath it.
The romance of exploration mixed with the horror of running into conditions beyond our management. Is that our future as well, exploring outer space (or the Marianas Trench) and encountering disastrous conditions combined with failing equipment?
Is that the fate of an individualist, the likes of which has only arisen in the last 50 years? Or does this fate belong more to those who feel themselves an inextricable part of the human society, such as T. E. Lawrence, whose letters (T. E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters, ed. Malcolm Brown, although I shan’t dig out the page number as it’s been many years since I read that tome) include his envy that two of his brothers died in World War I, in service to the British Empire – a find that brought me up short many years ago. I would have reacted in horror, knowing the possible final fates of those men, cut down by machine gun fire, or choking to death on any of several poison gases employed by both sides, perhaps bayoneted… But, for him, it was their honor to give their lives in the employ of the empire.
Never mind his own exploits.
Franklin, Shackleton, Lawrence – no doubt very different men, but who put their lives on the line in very chancy circumstances. Will we see those days again? Will we see those days where craters are explored by future drones – not in search of new frontiers, but in search of those who went before, and became ever-silent?
