“There were two areas we planned on searching, one northern and one more southern, and we were hoping to do the northern search first. But there was more ice there than there had been in twenty years, so we had to look south. It was like, you know, the old joke about the drunk looking for his car keys outside, even though he lost them inside, because the light is better there. But, in this case, that’s where the car keys were.”
During that southern search, a helicopter pilot named Andrew Stirling, working under the guidance of the archaeologist Doug Stenton, began a “walk survey” of a previously unsurveyed island. “And that’s where they found it: a davit,” Balsillie said—a pulley system for deploying lifeboats. “So anyway, they looked at it and—a heart-stopping moment this was—it had the little arrows of the Royal Navy on it. So they said, ‘Let’s get over to this island and start searching right now.’ They redeployed within hours and—well, they found it.
“The basic take is that it is pretty clear now. These guys [the Franklin crew] went down Victoria Strait, they got stuck—irrefutably, I think—in the most forbidding, awful part of the Arctic, where the ice pushes down—they just got stuck in the ice. They got stuck really bad. And then what happened was that they were voyaging from Victoria Island, and they came back to the vessel and the ice broke and they actually sailed again, for a while. I think the ice broke and they sailed it down, and then they were moving around and they got close to shoals. And they said, ‘Let’s leave the ship and see if we can catch a Hudson’s Bay [trading] post.’ I think that’s what happened. Where they were sailing there’s incredible potential for near misses in shoals—the Bergmann was mowing the lawn in forty metres of water. The boat must have been caught up and stuck, or near stuck, and they found the best place they could to land. And they started walking.” Balsillie explained that these new findings made sense of many other puzzling details in the pieced-together accounts—including Inuit lore of a “ghost ship” seen sailing south, presumably the relaunched Franklin vessel.
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