The Note in the Cairn: 129 Men Who Walked South and Never Arrived

2026-09-06 · Ghost Ships · 8 min read

The last Europeans to see them were whalers. In late July 1845, in Baffin Bay, the crews of the Prince of Wales and the Enterprise came upon two Royal Navy ships moored to an iceberg, waiting for the pack to loosen so they could push west into Lancaster Sound. Officers rowed across to visit. There was talk of the three years of provisions in the hold, of the engines fitted below decks, of a commander who expected to be home long before the food ran out. Then the ice moved, the ships parted, and the expedition sailed out of the written record.

HMS Erebus and HMS Terror had left Greenhithe, in Kent, on 19 May 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. They were bomb vessels, built heavy to absorb the recoil of mortars, which made them promising candidates for ice. The Admiralty rebuilt them for the Arctic: iron plating on the bows, screw propellers that could be hoisted clear of danger, steam heating for the living quarters, converted railway locomotive engines, libraries of more than a thousand volumes, and tens of thousands of tins of preserved food. Sir John Franklin, fifty-nine years old and on his fourth Arctic voyage, commanded 134 men. Five were discharged as unfit at Disko Bay in Greenland and sent home aboard a supply ship. That left 129.

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