Anxious to uncover secrets locked in Sir John Franklin’s flagship, Parks Canada marine archeologists are teaming up with navy divers for the first time in a winter mission to explore HMS Erebus in the waters of the High Arctic.
The treasure of artifacts that underwater archeologists believe are aboard Erebus is just too tempting to wait several more months for the metres-thick sea ice to melt.
So the civilians, who have the final say on what happens at the wreck site, will be paired with Royal Canadian Navy divers, the experts at working in extreme conditions, in an urgent, potentially risky mission.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the April operation at a reception at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto Wednesday night.
The ambitious plan to build an ice camp, with emergency services in case divers get into trouble under the ice, has been in the works for weeks under the command of Rear-Admiral John Newton.
He leads Canada’s maritime forces in the Atlantic along with an effort to re-establish the Navy’s Arctic presence.
Exploring Erebus in the dead of an Arctic winter is ambitious enough. While the logistics were worked out, joint dive teams have been planning and training for weeks to limit the risk of harming Erebus, her artifacts or themselves.
But the ice dive will be part of an even bigger, recurring Operation Nunalivut. It’s designed to demonstrate Canada’s growing capabilities in the Arctic, including emergency response, safeguarding sovereignty and security, economic development and environmental protection.
Jim Balsillie, co-founder of Research In Motion, has played a key role in the effort to find Erebus and the still missing HMS Terror, which began in 2008.
“Seeing them re-establishing their presence in a place that has such strategic interest to Canada is really positive and powerful, any way you look at it,” Balsillie, Canada’s honorary captain of the Navy for the Arctic, told the Star.
Franklin and his 128 men set sail in 1845 on a Royal Navy expedition to find a missing link in the Northwest Passage, hoping to be the first to complete the Arctic voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
The year after Franklin died of unknown causes in 1847, his crew abandoned Erebus and Terror, locked in ice. Survivors tried to make their way overland to safety in the south. All perished.
It was the worst disaster in the Royal Navy’s long history of Arctic exploration and remains an enduring maritime mystery, which may soon begin to unravel.
“Ice is an ideal diving place because it’s fixed and it’s stable,” Balsillie said. “They will be able to be so productive from an archeological point of view that I think we’re going to get some mysteries — not all the mysteries, but some — solved in April,” Balsillie said.
When a team led by Parks Canada underwater archeologists found the submerged wreck of Erebus last September, news of the discovery made headlines around the world.
Chief Petty Officer 2nd Class Larry Lyver, 50, of St. John’s, Nfld., is operations chief for the ice dive.
A reservist with the Navy’s Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic at CFB Shearwater, near Halifax, Lyver has been working for months to plan and co-ordinate the effort to set up a remote camp for dozens of people on the sea ice.
“We will be in control of dive safety issues up there. Anything on the surface is ours,” Lyver recently told the Star.
Get more of what matters in your inbox
“How we conduct our business under the ice, in terms of proceeding to the artifacts, cleaning the Erebus — whatever it is Parks Canada wants to do — they will tell us and we will work in a support role with them.”
Building a camp on windswept ice, and sustaining everyone there with heat, food, fuel and other essentials, requires complex logistics support that will come from the Navy’s Joint Task Force North, based in Yellowknife, Lyver said.
“We identify our requirements. They make it happen,” Lyver said. “We could not do this without them. And in the event of an emergency, they get us out — in quick order.”
It will be the first time in more than 160 years that sailors set their hands on one of the Franklin Expedition ships.
Erebus is submerged in relatively shallow Arctic waters some 30 metres deep, off an island in eastern Queen Maud Gulf.
Franklin’s crew abandoned Erebus and HMS Terror further north, off the northwest coast of King William Island.
Erebus now stands on the seabed far to the south, entombed beneath sea ice some two metres thick. It won’t start to melt and break up for months.
But Parks Canada marine archeologists can’t wait that long to begin probing for clues. The risks of losing crucial evidence to the destructive force of shifting ice, ocean currents or looters is simply too high.
Since Franklin lived and worked aboard Erebus in the commander’s cabin at her stern, some history buffs speculate that his logbook may be aboard.
The duty of recording important details in the captain’s log would have fallen to Franklin’s successors after he died. It may contain vital clues about the crew’s struggle to survive as lead poisoning, scurvy, hunger and other afflictions took their toll.
It is even possible that Franklin’s body was kept aboard Erebus in a vain attempt to bring home one of Victorian Britain’s heroes of Arctic exploration for a proper burial.
Inuit stories tell of hunters, who boarded a ship in the area where Erebus was found, seeing a large dead man in a darkened room with a big smile, perhaps the result of gums swollen by scurvy, a Vitamin C deficiency.
Louis Kamookak, an Inuk historian who has spent more than 30 years cataloguing Inuit oral history linked to the lost Franklin Expedition, is convinced the explorer was buried in a shallow grave in the permafrost.