See full version: Ship found in Arctic 168 years after doomed Northwest Passage attempt
Kogvik resolved to keep the encounter secret, fearing the missing camera was an omen of bad spirits, which generations of Inuit have believed began to wander King William Island after Franklin and his men perished. [links]
“We have successfully entered the mess hall, worked our way into a few cabins and found the food storage room with plates and one can on the shelves,” Adrian Schimnowski, the foundation’s operations director, told the Guardian by email from the research vessel Martin Bergmann.
A long, heavy rope line running through a hole in the ship’s deck suggests an anchor line may have been deployed before the Terror went down.
Crozier and Captain James Fitzjames signed the note, which had what seemed a hurried postscript, scrawled upside down in the top right corner: “and start on to-morrow 26th for Back’s Fish River”.
About six years ago, Kogvik said, he and a hunting buddy were headed on snowmobiles to fish in a lake when they spotted a large piece of wood, which looked like a mast, sticking out of the sea ice covering Terror Bay. [links]
The well-preserved wreck matches the Terror in several key aspects, but it lies 60 miles (96km) south of where experts have long believed the ship was crushed by ice, and the discovery may force historians to rewrite a chapter in the history of exploration.
With time, and additional exploration, the maps got better. The map below, published in Russia in 1784, was the first to show details gleaned from a large and highly organized survey of the Arctic coast of Siberia. It depicts a possible Northwest Passage: On the far right side, "R. de l'Quest” connects Hudson Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Notice the level of detail on the Asian side of the Pacific compared to the North American side—the situation is reversed in a map published the same year based on Captain James Cook’s exploration of the coast of Alaska (see slide nine in the gallery above). here
There was also a lot of gamesmanship and outright deception in the maps. The map above comes from a book published in 1558 to describe the travels of two Venetian brothers in 1380. The story is almost certainly bogus, Fowler says, made up in an attempt to retroactively claim the discovery of the New World for Venice. Even so, the map was widely copied and may have led some expeditions astray. “It’s dangerous,” Fowler says. “It shows Greenland connected to Europe, which is obviously not true. South of Iceland, there’s a number of fictitious islands. And to the west of Greenland there’s a nice open sea, which at this time would have been unnavigable because of pack ice.” here
Unbeknownst to Franklin and other explorers, their expeditions coincided with what scientists call the Little Ice Age, a period of several centuries of unusual cold in the Arctic. As temperatures began to climb toward the end of the 19th century, the long-sought Northwest Passage finally opened up. [links]
It had to be there: an ocean at the top of the world. The ancient Greeks drew it on their maps, and for centuries, the rest of Europe did too.
Early explorers also occasionally played fast and loose with the facts. The Englishman Martin Frobisher made three voyages in search of the Northwest Passage in the late 1500s. He didn’t find it. “He discovered some straits, pretended to find a lot more,” Fowler says. On one trip, he returned to England with tons of what he claimed was gold-containing ore. It was enough to convince his backers to fund another trip, but it ultimately turned out to be pyrite—fool's gold. here
My first sighting of Garry Island came through wind and rain.
“The weather stopped us,” he said. “The hail was coming in sideways, and I looked out my tent flap and saw a red tail hawk completely motionless in the air, unable to fly against the wind. It was a mutual decision, we all agreed. We knew we couldn’t make it.”
Today, we think of the Northwest Passage as the commercial shipping route through the islands off the coast of Arctic Canada. But two hundred years after Mackenzie’s trip, climate change has now opened his passage as well.
“It would be ironic if tourism promoting a chance to see Arctic wildlife before it disappears actually hastens that disappearance,” they added.
“With an appropriate level of planning, with an appropriate level of judgment, with the right experience around you, it can be done safely, it can be done successfully. But make no mistake: this isn’t sailing a cruise ship out of Miami,” Hutchinson said. here
“We have put on a lot of new equipment on the ship. We have a forward looking sonar,” Vorland said. “We have thermal imaging…One dedicated ice radar and an ice nav system.” more
“When we first heard about it, we thought it was tremendous. It was something in an area where so few people will ever go,” one passenger said. “It’s great to read about it, it’s great to watch it on a video or in a movie, but seeing it for yourself is very special.” [links]
He’s monitoring the 900-hundred mile journey. here
Ice cover has receded dramatically since satellites started keeping a continuous record. NASA calls it “the new normal.” more
The largest ship ever to fly an American flag, the SS Manhattan busted its way north in search of heavy ice. If the Manhattan could prove its worth, Stan Haas and others with Humble Oil envisioned the recently discovered North Slope oil moving away from Prudhoe Bay in superships that would be even larger.
“Eight-hundred miles of one-eighth-inch pipe was not cheap,” Helfferich said as he recently shared his memories.
After leaving Chester, Pa., on Aug. 24, 1969 and reaching Prudhoe Bay and then Barrow by September 14, the Manhattan returned through the Northwest Passage and returned to New York by Nov. 12. Helfferich, who was aboard for most of the trip before flying back from arctic Canada, remembers a smooth ride for the most part. The tanker-icebreaker handled most ice easily, though it sometimes needed to be nibbled out by icebreakers from Canada and the U.S. that accompanied it. here