Finding Franklin’s Ships - UWaterloo Prof Robert Park’s lecture 

On September 9, 2014, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the discovery of one of Sir John Franklin’s two ships, missing since his expedition sailed into the Canadian Arctic in 1845. The find was the culmination of a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency research project that started its work in 2008. Since then Robert Park has spent parts of four summers assisting the Government of Nunavut in its land-based archaeological investigations into the Franklin expedition tragedy, and helped make the find that led Parks Canada’s underwater archaeologists to the wreck of one of the ships. In this presentation he recounts the many failed attempts to find Franklin, explains what recent archaeological research has revealed about the lives and deaths of the explorers, and how the first of Franklin’s ships, the HMS Erebus, was finally found.