HMS Investigator found

More than 155 years after its failed search for Sir John Franklin’s expedition, the wreckage of HMS Investigator has been detected during Parks Canada’s ambitious search for the 36-metre ship in Mercy Bay, NWT ...

More than 155 years after it was abandoned and disappeared in an isolated Arctic bay, the ship whose crew officially discovered Canada’s Northwest Passage has been found. And this huge historic find may boost Canadian claims to Arctic sovereignty.

The wreck of HMS Investigator was detected by sonar radar in shallow water shortly after Parks Canada archeologists launched an ambitious search for the 422-ton ship from a chilly tent encampment on the Beaufort Sea shoreline.

HMS Investigator, among the most famous of the ships sent to look for the Franklin Expedition after its disappearance gripped a distraught British public in the mid-1800s, became locked in the ice itself in 1851 and eventually sank in Mercy Bay, off Banks Island, in 1854.

“It’s sitting upright in silt; the three masts have been removed, probably by ice,” declared Ifan Thomas, Parks Canada’s superintendent of the western Arctic Field Unit.

“It’s a largely intact ship in very cold water, so deterioration didn’t happen very quickly.”

Environment Minister Jim Prentice, who arrived at the camp July 27, said that finding a relic linked to the discovery of the Northwest Passage represents a reasserted Canadian claim to Arctic sovereignty.

“It’s fundamental to Canadian sovereignty in the North,” he said. “And the tragic tale of Investigator is one of the most amazing stories of Arctic history. It’s a tale of incredible determination and suffering.”

The three-masted, copper-bottomed Investigator was found after marine archeologists deployed side-scan sonars from inflatable Zodiac boats. Further aided by the clear Arctic water, it was possible to glimpse the outline of the ship’s outer deck only eight metres below the surface.

Three graves were also discovered, undoubtedly the remains of a trio of British sailors who succumbed to scurvy in the final months of the ship’s three-year Arctic ordeal.

“In anthropological terms, this is the most important shipwreck in history,” said senior marine archeologist, Ryan Harris. “This was the first contact with the Copper Inuit; it’s a bit like finding a Columbus ship in the Arctic.”

The remains of the 36-metre ship were discovered at the approximate spot 150 metres off shore where it was last visited in 1854 by a passing British expedition. Whether the ship had drifted into deep water or out of Mercy Bay altogether had been a source of constant speculation for more than a century, partly because the area has always been frozen.

But with the Mercy Bay area now being largely ice-free during the brief summer months, the mystery of one of the Arctic’s greatest marine dramas has been solved.

In 1850, HMS Investigator sailed from England under Captain Robert McClure to join the frantic search for the ill-fated Franklin expedition, entering the Arctic from the western side in hopes of finding Franklin’s two ships emerging from the fabled passage.

However, while Investigator probed further east than any other European expedition, the ship soon became trapped in ice, hoisted out of the water by 15-metre-high ice ridges and threatened with hull-crushing floes.

In the summer of 1851, the 69-member crew first attempted a route along the southern shore of Bank Island before retreating to head north into what is now McClure Strait. Having run into pack ice, they sought shelter in this treeless, windswept bay and spent another two winters hopelessly locked in ice. At that point, with no sign of a thaw and his sailors weakened by scurvy and starvation as rations dwindled, Captain McClure ordered the ship’s crew to be divided into three parties, two leaving on suicidal attempts to walk to safety while the third was to stay aboard in hopes of sailing free later in the year.

Within weeks of his desperate survival plan being implemented, another ship’s officer miraculously appeared on the horizon with word that two better-equipped British vessels were also trapped in ice at neighbouring Melville Island.

At this news, Captain McClure gave the order to abandon ship; he and the crew then set out for the HMS Resolute where, after spending a fourth winter trapped in ice, they abandoned that ship and boarded the HMS Northern Star for England where British MPs voted to give Captain McClure the posted reward of £10,000 for discovering the Northwest Passage.

Now, 155 years later, Parks Canada has finally uncovered the Investigator in a remote, uninhabited location 1,000 km north of Inuvik.

News of the historic discovery traveled fast.

The expedition was joined on July 27 by the National Post and Calgary Herald along with a CPAC television network crew to further explore the wind-scrubbed northern shoreline of Aulavik National Park, where polar bears roam and the muskoxen population has exploded.

Indeed, the payoff was worth the complicated effort, said Prentice, who’s been dreaming about finding the wreck since he wrote a book review of BC author Bryan Payton’s acclaimed account of the Investigator’s fate, The Ice Passage.

“This is one of the most important shipwrecks in Canadian history because Investigator carried Captain Robert McClure, who discovered the western entrance to the Northwest Passage,” said Prentice after he was informed of the discovery. “I’m elated. It’s a special moment linking our past and future in the Canadian Arctic. It was the first contact between Arctic people and European explorers and it couples high tech with the oral history of the Inuit people.”

Nor will the expedition stop with the wreck’s discovery as electronic scanners are being deployed on land to search for buried artifacts and graves. Although the giant cache of supplies taken off the ship has been largely removed over the decades, other areas around the Investigator’s final resting place will be searched for archeological remains.

There’s also the question of the fated sailors graves. Although Parks Canada is legally barred from exhuming the remains found July 27, there is now speculation that British authorities may remove the bodies for a burial in England.

Plus, the year of banner discovery may not be over yet for Parks Canada archeologists as plans are now afoot to search for the Franklin expedition’s two ships, the Erebus and the Terror.