The Tragic Voyage of Terror: The Lost Franklin Expedition

hello everybody today we are going to be talking about the story of one of the doomed voyages in humanity's twilight days of exploration and that is the failed journey of the franklin expedition and its ships the hms erebus and the hms terror i've always loved this story because it's one of the last cases of adventure and exploration and serves as a testimony of what that adventure can lead to now this story may be familiar to you if you saw the amc miniseries the terror which was about the franklin expedition however that took a few creative liberties with the story and i want to tell you about the true story or at least the story that was pieced together by the evidence i'm going to talk about now there's also been some other youtubers who have done a fantastic job of covering this story as well like history buffs who compared the real life accounts to the accounts of the tv show and maritime which is quickly becoming one of my favorite youtube channels i'm going to include those videos down below as well as some of the others that i really enjoy but if you want to hear much better accounts and representations of those stories than whatever i can manage check them out in the description two quick thanks before we get started for one i am back to the blue yeti mic as you can see and i'm trying out a lot of different settings with my camera i've heard you guys in the past video saying that the lighting was weird and the audio was weird and i'm really dumb to all this and trying to teach myself with youtube videos so honestly let me know how this looks and how it sounds because i'm trying my best and also if you're a patron stick around to the end of the video during the end credits i want to make one last announcement for everything that i mentioned on the patreon lately so stay tuned for that and for everyone else hopefully you want to stick around as we talk about one of the final stories of humanity's desire to explore the earth but before we get into a story 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africa because the suez canal had not yet been invented however once the americas were discovered people figured out that the globe was a bit bigger than they initially thought it was so people at the time began speculating perhaps there is a path to asia if one were to travel north specifically north through the arctic around the north pole and down south into asia if this theory were true it would save literally years of time during travel as well as the lives of the people who died aboard ships making these long voyages in the late 1700s the hudson bay company made several expeditions around the coast of canada trying to find an inlet that they think could get them to pass across into asia at the time no one really understood the westward to eastward expanse of the americas and people were kind of testing the shores to see if there was any breakage that they could drop south through and in the 1800s the secretary of the admiralty which is basically england's navy at the time was determined that there was a passage near the north pole in 1845 sir john barrow was 82 years old and at the end of his career he was determined to commission the first travel from europe to asia through the north pole and so barrow set about in finding the best captain for the job who could man such a dangerous voyage the first two captains that he selected each turned him down because while both of them were very experienced with the arctic they have both sworn off ever traveling north again see traveling to the arctic by ship at the time was not only an incredibly dangerous journey but a terrifying one whenever it became winter near the north pole the oceans would begin to freeze on the several inlets that the ships would travel through or in other words you could be sailing for a year and then be stuck for half a year as the water freezes around you where you have to wait for it to thaw and you continue sailing into the nothingness of ice and water as i mentioned in the decades leading up to this expedition there were several other attempts to try to get through the arctic passage and most of them ended with the ship turning around after about a year and a half and even then with several of the crew members dying of either food poisoning or hypothermia or pneumonia and the other various diseases you could die of at the time as well as many sailors reporting to have gone mad due to the isolation of the north pole or technically northern canada not quite the north pole but i mean like it's just like infinite eyes you couldn't tell the difference anyway the third pick for the job was a sailor by the name of francis crozier he had taken many trips to the arctic was well experienced liked by the admiralty and was up for doing it again it sounds like the perfect option however crozier was irish and it was a big deal for the british government at the time that it needs to be a thoroughbred member of british royalty who makes the first expedition the fourth pick for the option was a captain by the name of james fitz james and yes that was his real name and while he did fit the criteria of being of british upper class he wasn't that experienced with sailing especially not in the arctic so he was passed up as well the man who would eventually lead this expedition was barrow's fifth pick for the job captain john franklin john franklin was of british upper class and a sort of celebrity amongst the sailors of the time he was incredibly kind to sailors who worked under him and was also a religious leader who would regularly lead sermons and pray with the men aboard his ships his wife lady jane franklin was also a well-loved figure in england and the two of them were known for being very philanthropic and giving to local charities and schools and things of the like so to most of the british public captain franklin seemed like a natural fit so why was he the admiralty's fifth choice well captain franklin was second in command during another arctic expedition in 1818 and he was also a part of two separate canadian expeditions in the decades that followed keep in mind any one of these expeditions would take a few years at least well one of these expeditions ended in disaster when the crew essentially became lost and their food provisions ran out as a matter of fact according to sailors during this time franklin's crew became so desperate for food that they began cutting and eating the leather of their own boots to which franklin was given the nickname by some sailors the man who ate his own boot however because of his pleasant demeanor and place in british society he was again the fifth choice of the admiralty and he readily accepted the job some historians say that perhaps he took it in haste because he was trying to make up for the shame of being called you know the man that ate his own boot however even if this were the case he was incredibly careful and lighthearted around the people in the crew and throughout the entire expedition i could find no one writing of ill will about him the expedition was to occur across two ships and to make sure that everything went well the aforementioned third and fourth choices were also made a part of the expedition franklin himself was set to captain the hms erebus while francis crozier the third choice i mentioned earlier who was knocked out of the league because he was irish was given command of the hms terror and named executive officer of the expedition and the fourth choice the young captain james fitch james was named as franklin's second in command aboard the erebus itself the government naturally felt better that even though their fifth option was the one leading the charge the third and fourth options were right there with him franklin's ship the erebus and crozier's ship the terror had each been a part of arctic expeditions from 1841 to 1844. now you may be thinking it's probably in bad faith to name a series of expedition ships the terror and the erebus which erebus comes from greek mythology as being the dark ring around hades itself well the reason that the two ships renamed that is because they were each originally part of the british military as a matter of fact the terror was in the war of 1812 and took part in the attack on fort mchenry which was the battle in which francis scott key wrote america's national anthem they were each massive ships with the erebus weighing 378 tons and the terror weighing in at 331 tons the ships at the time were also state of the art they were lined with these iron bands and reinforced walls and the propellers and rudders even had a function where a latch could be pulled and they would fold inside of the ship that way if you pass through a lot of ice it could just bump off the iron and you wouldn't worry about knocking anything off the ships were also ahead of their time in that they had steam engines inside of them which had been taken off of trains so if you were at open sea and there were no winds you could still move by bringing in salt water purifying it and then using it to burn steam and power the ship it even had a heating system that was piped throughout the ship which again in 1845 was a huge deal in the months before the departure the men were essentially seen as astronauts they were hailed as being the brave people who are going to step out and change our way of life as we know it and as historians have noted an astronaut is given their spaceship and the terror and erebus served as spaceships of their time now it turned out that the construction of their ships ended up being part of the problem down the road but right now i'm talking about the fun lighthearted stuff we'll talk about the death and destruction in a little bit lady franklin was incredibly proud of her husband and as soon as the officers of the voyage were announced she made all of them get their picture taken which was a brand new technology at the time she also bought her husband a pet monkey named jaco who was to accompany them on their journey in the meantime captain crozier of the terror brought along his new foundlin dog by the name of neptune the ships also had a cat on board however that's less remarkable as that was kind of a necessity at the time because you know if you were out there for three years and then mice destroyed your food supply that would be bad each ship also left with over 1 000 books in their respective libraries as well as different sporting effects because you know if your ship is stopped in the middle of the ice and it's so thick that you can get out and walk on it so that way you don't lose your mind it's probably a good idea to like play a few games while you're out there each ship was also equipped with several barrels of liquor and two tons of tobacco again not to ship or haul any of it this is just so the sailors don't go crazy they even left with different costumes and fancy clothes so that way if they were bored they could put on plays for each other i should also mention that the men of the erebus would cut up the costumes and make tiny costumes for jacko another recent invention that was a very big deal at the time was that of canned food see it had always been an issue historically of keeping food so that it doesn't go bad so the fact that you could seal and preserve it was a huge deal on expeditions like this however what came to light after all of this is that the british government hired the lowest bidder to make over 8 000 tins of food about seven weeks before the ships were set to set sail this became a problem that i'll talk about in a little bit also the other food source was cattle because this ship was so big they would just straight up bring cattle on board which i mean if you don't have a refrigerator i guess you just let the steak refrigerate itself until you need it despite all these preparations however only six men of the 134 man crew had any experience with the arctic nevertheless on may the 19th of 1845 the franklin expedition set sail from england the crew consisted of 24 officers and 110 sailors they made a brief stop in scotland as the barretto jr and hms rattler accompanied them to the coast of greenland at this point the rattler transferred over the last of the supplies that the men would need and took back five sailors from the erebus and terror who had become sick during their journey these five are the only survivors of the franklin expedition as the rattler departed it also took the final letters of the men that were to be sent home back to england in franklin's 14-page letter to his wife he had said that spirits were high and although he had banned drunkenness and swearing amongst the crew they still seemed to enjoy his company he also mentioned that jaco was stealing several trinkets from the men but they all thought he was cute so they didn't care from all of the letters that were sent that day everyone seemed to be in good hopes and thought that the journey would turn out well in july of 1845 a whaling ship passed the terror and the erebus at the baffin bay as the whaling ship was heading back to england and the expedition was working its way closer to the canadian arctic the sighting of the whaling ship is the last time that any of the crew were ever seen alive at least officially but we'll get there now before i get into theories and talking about what happened to the expedition specifically through discoveries that were made let's talk about what led up to those discoveries see this voyage in particular was supposed to take about a year and a half so when 1847 rolled around and there was no word from any ships that had seen him or any letters conveyed back home people started to worry and one of those people was lady franklin herself whenever she brought her concerns to the admiralty they said that they were unfounded so franklin in an attempt to find out of her husband's whereabouts began to amass people and committees in order to get the state to do something to which her friend charles dickens began writing in the paper urging the public to say something about the missing franklin expedition eventually the government did and sent two sea expeditions and one land expedition across northern canada to look for any sign of the crew furthermore the state put out a twenty thousand pound reward for anyone who could find the crew which by today's money is about two million and thanks to no small part to lady franklin's urging it became a matter of public interest of what became of the expedition itself a song even became popular at the time known as lady franklin's lament eventually the search party found some sign of the expedition when in 1850 on beachy island they found several tin cans what looked to be the remnant of a camp as well as three graves buried in the ice the names on the headstones were that of three members of the expedition spaced out over the course of several months it wasn't uncommon for people to get out in the middle of the cold and die of pneumonia or tuberculosis so this didn't prove that the entire crew had met a tragic end and as a matter of fact it shows that they were in enough state that they could still bury their dead however the dates on the tombstone indicated that they were buried in 1845 meaning that this had to occur in the first several months of the expedition furthermore in 1851 an iceberg began to be spotted off the coast of greenland that had two ships stuck in the ice of the iceberg itself now it turned out later that these were actually two abandoned whaling ships but stories of seeing two giant ships frozen in ice didn't help quell any of the fears back home in 1852 a captain by the name of edward belcher managed to get trapped in the ice while looking for the franklin expedition and a total of four ships were lost and had to be abandoned during this voyage this isn't necessarily related to the story but one of those ships was called the hms resolute which was recovered by americans several years later and as a sort of gift america returned that ship to britain to which britain then made several desks out of the wood of the ship and one of those desks called the resolute desk was gifted to president hayes and still sets in the oval office to this day just fun note there's a lot of reports that belcher was very hasty and made a lot of bad decisions during the voyage and that's what led to losing four ships however this was enough to scare the british government away from looking for the crew after so much cost had already been accrued and officially the expedition was declared lost and the crew dead on march the 31st of 1854. the next month on april the 21st of 1854 a man by the name of john ray who was from britain but was currently living with the inuit people in canada said that he came into contact with a few natives who said that they had found signs of the franklin expedition see at this point no one had any idea what happened to the expedition and this was the first clue of their whereabouts since the 1845 campsite while talking to local natives john ray said that they came across a campsite of some 35 to 40 men who were all wasted away and dead specifically near the southernmost point of king william island near the opening of the back river at northern canada the natives had several items to prove that their story was true including silverware with crozier's initials on it as well as framed pictures of the captains themselves the most horrific part of the story is that the hunting party that came across this campsite said several of the bodies were mutilated and cut up and due to human remains being in the fireplace it was suggested that the final survivors had to resort to cannibalism john ray collected several more testimonies and then brought his findings back to britain this coincided with an unrelated search that happened in 1855 in which a crew said that they found a piece of wood located on king william island that had erebus carved into it and another piece of wood that had mr stanley carved into it mr stanley being the name of the doctor aboard the erebus john ray's findings were published in papers across england and people lost their minds primarily at the suggestion of cannibalism see at the time concepts of people being pushed to the brink and the horrors of survival and things like that weren't really commonplace in people's mindset and cannibalism was just seen as the ultimate act of evil so the people who left 10 years earlier as the superheroes aboard their rocket ship often to the great white wonder were now being considered the worst of the worst several people just simply didn't accept the information charles dickens being one of them saying that the he didn't use the word savages but he heavily implied savages of the north just made it up because they don't understand british dignity either way lady franklin was determined now more than ever to find some evidence of what happened to her husband and his crew however as mentioned earlier the government wasn't having it so she used her own money to commission an expedition all by herself well commissioned sailors to go do it all by themselves she didn't go all by herself although that would be kind of neat on july the 2nd of 1857 a ship known as fox set cell to try to find some evidence of the franklin crew and sure enough on the northern shore of king william island the first evidence of the expedition was found inside of a carn which is essentially a pile of rocks in a box was the only known note to come from this entire voyage i'll explain what the note was whenever i get to the specifics of what happened to the crew but also discovered nearby was a skeleton wearing a work uniform of someone aboard the erebus furthermore on the western shore of king william island they found a lifeboat of the terror which was full of unneeded supplies like soap and combs and brushes and silverware and things that wouldn't be needed for walking across the island as well as two more skeletons laying within the lifeboat there was another man named charles frances hall who also lived among the inuit people who was determined to find some evidence of the expedition from 1860 to 1869 he explored the entire area of king williams island and the back river of northern canada while also interviewing local natives to try to see if he could piece together what happened hall found various graves all across his journey and took hundreds of testimonies from those he came across over the years the testimonies dwindled from seeing large groups of men walking across the island all the way down to just two in 1858 so with the information that all of the people i just mentioned gathered let's try to put together what happened to the franklin expedition well as i mentioned earlier the last time they were spotted was in july of 1845. from that location at baffin bay to the campsite that was found at beachy island it seems that everything was going well up until that point as i mentioned earlier it was expected that whenever winter hit they would be stuck for several months and during this time it seems that they were stuck at beachy island which would explain the three bodies and hundreds of food cans which were found thrown out on shore for reasons i'll explain later it was determined that these three had died of pneumonia while tragic not unexpected however it seems that perhaps their ship was moving too slow and they were there until the next winter where the ship was stuck off the northern coast of king williams island in september of 1846. remember how way earlier in the video i mentioned that these were two naval warships which were heavily kitted out with all of this cool material to make sure that they stay running well something that wasn't considered until years later is the incredible weight that these ships had see whenever you're trying to break through the ice to get around the arctic speed is a priority and while the ships certainly have the fortifications to make sure they didn't sink if they ran into any ice that also weighed them down ensuring that they weren't quick enough to break through it and remember that steam engine i mentioned earlier the one that came from a locomotive and was put into the ships well while a fantastic idea at the time if these things were opened up a hundred percent they could go a speed of 7.4 kilometers an hour or about four and a half miles per hour again not enough to get any substantial distance through frozen water it wasn't uncommon for ships at the time to get ice bound up in the propellers of their system to which someone would have to do the nauseating process of putting on a diving suit going overboard and breaking it off with a stick so perhaps a combination of the water freezing and it taking too long to break the ice in front of them which was often done with long sticks and explosives as well as ice itself freezing to the ship and propeller they didn't travel as fast as they thought they could another factor is the navigation of the expedition itself while this wasn't stated on the note and there were no survivors to say for sure it's quite possible that they quite literally took the wrong turn see at the time it was mapped and documented to go north through baffin bay and then come south to the north of king williams island however at the time and part of the reason the expedition existed it wasn't known if it was best to take a more westward or eastward route through the channels to get out from what we know now it seems that they took a route into the more open and mainland line of water which turned out to be a problem because as we also know al that is a primary route for polar ice caps to break off and then flow through the mainstream meaning if they took the other term they could go through what is now the simpsons strait and make their voyage into asia but instead they went the other route which while manageable today would have been impossible at the time regardless the true was trapped off the coast of king william island in 1846 and it was here that the note was placed inside of the carn that i mentioned earlier also i'm going to assume you can't read latitude and longitude and if you can you're better at this than i am so i'm just going to say location whenever we get to them hms ship erebus and terror wintered in the ice in location having wintered in 1846 to 1847 at beachy island in location after having ascended wellington channel to location and returned by the west side of cornwallis island sir john franklin commanding the expedition all well so as mentioned there this was written and very legible at beachy island the first location where the ship was frozen this second note is written in the margins around the paper and seems to be in much more distress hms ships terror and erebus were deserted on the 22nd of april leagues north northwest of this having been beset since the 12th of september 1846 the officers and crews consisting of a hundred and five souls under the command of captain frm crozier before the note goes on to describe the manner in which this note was retrieved and it then says sir john franklin died on june the 11th of 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this state 9 officers and 15 men signed by james fitch james captain of the hms erebus the note itself was signed by crozier and fitz james and as mentioned indicated that franklin had died on june the 11th and as mentioned at the end that made fitz james the new captain of the erebus so what went wrong yes they were stuck frozen in the water a second time but the ship had rations for three years and up to five if they strung out their meals well remember that little detail i mentioned in the beginning that seven weeks before they were set to launch the lowest bidder made eight thousand cans of food whenever these tins of cans were found on beachy island they were examined and had the worst sealing job you could imagine for one the soldering to close off the can itself was done with molten lead and on the inside of the food there was liquid lead that had been hardened after it ran all in the meal which you know probably isn't good for you but all of the can showed signs of erosion and improper sealing and one of the primary theories of what went wrong is that the food spoiled furthermore if that canned food went bad then the men would be subject to scurvy now most ships at the time including the terror and erebus would keep lemon juice in bottles to drink to keep scurvy away however the effective time of living juice is about a year and as established it had been two years at this point and the lead poisoning of the foods and everything combined there was a lot of different ways these guys could have died and i'll continue to stake my flag on the idea that the food went bad because of the final note written in the margin of the page by crozier which says and start on tomorrow the 26th for bax fish river this lines up with what i mentioned earlier of several relics being found on the way to baxfish river so if the food was still good they would have stayed on the ships because the ships were made to get frozen in ice and then keep going but if it's bad then the guys had no other option than to walk across the expanse of king williams island which king williams island is an empty island full of rocks and ice so very inhospitable this also explains why there was a lifeboat found full of supplies on the west coast of the island from piecing together everything it seems that crozier now acting as commander of the survivors of the ship brought at least one lifeboat and filled it with several of the supplies the men would need possibly any food that was still good and at least initially some supplies for morale like combs and spoons and extra boots and etc the purpose of the lifeboat being for one to carry the supplies but also so that whenever they get to baxfish river they can then get in the lifeboat and take it down the river because the only known settlement was several hundred miles down bax river meaning that even if they did get all the way to king williams island they would then have to continue paddling down river for potentially months but it was either that or starved to death on the boat so as mentioned in the letter the men set out on april 26th the distance from where the letter was found to the mouth of the river was about 248 miles one group of natives said they came across the men during this time who asked them for food but the natives themselves had to take care of their own and weren't able to offer much but that they did witness about 40 men walking across king williams island south towards canada and from there i wish there was more to say but it seems the franklin expedition at least officially vanished off the face of the earth i'm going to talk about some of the modern findings of this case but there's a couple things i want to mention that are my favorite details of the story the last relics that can be positively id'd as part of the expedition were found about 40 miles north of the river meaning that the men had made it some 200 miles across king williams island however remember how earlier i stated there were several natives who said they came into contact with two men well that was in canada as a matter of fact about 250 miles south of the northern border of canada in 1858 and when shown pictures all of the natives identified one of the men as captain crozier of the hms terror if this were to be true that would mean that captain crozier and one other men had successfully walked about 600 miles over the course of 12 years in 1948 around the same region of northern canada there was another carn very similar to the one found on bg island and inside of the carn was a wooden box that was put together with dovetail wood which was a practice in mid-1800s england sadly and very frustratingly the box was destroyed and no note was found but if that was set up by crozier and the other man that would confirm the idea that they had walked for over a decade 600 miles through the arctic the other detail i want to mention is that of the expeditions mission itself remember i said there were remnants of the crew found on the western side of king williams island well from the coast of king williams island you can actually see the simpsons strait which is the opening that was later discovered to be the pathway through the arctic to asia and it's incredibly possible that that was the last thing in the men's mind at the time but i like to think at some point the captain and the men looked over and saw the entry to the eastern world and realized that even if just to themselves they discovered it as a matter of fact england agrees with me too but let's talk about some of the more modern discoveries in 1981 a researcher by the name of owen beatty was determined to find out what happened to the franklin expedition beatty and his research team explored the region of king williams island where the lifeboat was previously identified between that location of victory point the original area that the letter was found they found several bones of the crewmen upon examination the bones had pitting that was consistent with cases of scurvy as well as lead concentrations 10 times over the regular amount so the theory of the food being bad is pretty well supported however the other thing that they found on the bones was several scratches and knife cuts indicating that there was most likely some form of cannibalism present furthermore at several of the makeshift campsites they found along the way there were bones that seemed to be polished by the inside of a pot which is seen in cases of extreme cannibalism or i should say when cannibalism's needed in extremes and people try to boil the marrow out of the bones indicating how hungry these men were all in all from 1981 to 1982 beady found the remains of six to 14 people to confirm his theories about the death of the men he needed another example for the time and lo and behold perfect examples existed in the graves on beachy island i'm going to show what could be considered to many disturbing imagery but i feel this is important for the historical connotation and also the science aspect of it and is for a purely educational sense however understand if you don't like that so there will be a time stamp in the description to skip past these pictures but these are the images of the bodies exhumed from beachy island despite the ghastly look the tissues were in near perfect condition which allowed very accurate samples of the bodies as well as the causes of death to be determined and also while this is mostly an informational explanation that i'm giving you i don't want to gloss over the horror and simultaneous wonder of people being consumed by the elements yet in death being completely consecrated by them and there's such a it's a vicious poetry to it it was found on these bodies that the cause of death was in fact pneumonia supporting the theory people at the time had that everything went wrong the winter after beachy island from 1984 to 1993 over 400 bones were found along king williams island and many of which indicated signs of cannibalism perhaps most tragic was the feature that the hands feet and head all seemed to be removed before the cannibal acts were taken as if the most human parts of their friends they wanted to remove before committing what was to them such a horrendous act see while the people of britain thought it was such a horrible atrocious action that no sane man would ever commit the people who were a part of this expedition also had those same ideas and while they had to do it to survive the ghastly nature that the people back home felt of them i'm sure they felt 10 times over so you're probably asking yourself the question well if they found all of the bodies of the men what about the ships themselves well over the years there were several sonar studies and helicopter missions to try to see if they could find any remains of the ship well finally on september the 9th of 2014 the erebus was found sunken under just 36 feet of water not far from the northernmost point of king williams island specifically at the location known as wilmot and crampton bay the ship had simply sunk from years of disrepair and after drones and cameras went through the ship it seems to be in completely idyllic condition as a matter of fact the erebus is still in its exhuming process and it's currently said that the first 65 artifacts that are recovered will go back to england and the remaining artifacts will belong to canada and the inuit people and then on september 12th of 2016 the terror was found much farther to the south as a matter of fact out of complete coincidence the terror was found in a place known as terror bay perhaps most bizarrely about the terror other than the fact that it sank in a place named terror was the fact that its anchors were still up and locked see whenever these ships got frozen they would drop their anchors to make sure that they didn't float away or randomly tilt if the ice were to crack or thaw out furthermore it was much further away and seemed to follow a trajectory as if it was trying to get back to the mainland the common historical belief is either that someone went back after they were walking across the island to try to pilot the terror to get it towards land or a few people stayed on the ship who there was enough food to supply for but again like the rest of the crew whenever they made their voyage they met the same fate in 2018 the terror was examined beneath about 80 feet of water and seems to be like the erebus in perfect condition frozen in time under the waves and there are still discoveries of the franklin expedition happening to this day not only are they still in the process of bringing up artifacts from the wrecked ship but in may of 2021 one of the bodies that were found was positively id'd as john gregory because his great great great great grandson living in south africa provided a dna sample which gave a positive id one of the things i love about this story so much is despite the fact that it was over a century and a half ago the mystery is still continuing to be unsolved and unraveled each day another tragic beauty of the story is that in 1850 one of the ships sent to search for the franklin expedition known as the hms investigator and yes that was the name of it seemed to be right on the path of the expedition only they took the other route meaning that they found the path from europe to asia to which the investigator also got trapped in the ice and needed rescued from the resolute which as i mentioned earlier also got trapped in the ice but that's not important they found the path and that path which was later discovered as the simpsons strait is the one i mentioned earlier that perhaps the final members of the crew realized they had discovered the captain who discovered that the simpsons strait was indeed the passage from europe to asia agreed with the admiralty that the franklin expedition should be named as the discoverers of it and in 1860 the british government honored captain franklin as being the discoverer of the passage between worlds and lady franklin was there to accept the medal in his honor to which they commemorated a statue of john franklin to which the plaque simply reads they forged the last link with their lives and with that ends the story of the hms erebus the hms terror and the tragic victory of the franklin expedition i've always enjoyed stories of the last days of the crusades of adventure and the journeys of man and all of that and like the ferocity and just the viciousness of nature is all around this story uh and it's anyone's guess what to happen in the series of terror they talk about how the polar bears could have killed them or how lead poisoning can lead to delusions of the mind and they could have went paranoid and there's all sorts of manner of things that could have led to their end or as the men of the time would say it seems like the whole world is trying to kill you whenever you're up there and every single day is a fight for survival but in spite of all of that because of what they did it led to the discovery of the passage and in other reports that were written around the time there were people who said it was meaningless and by the logical sense it was it took that much effort to get up there there was no way you were going to send a bunch of merchant vessels back and forth all around the year um and the suez canal eventually had to be invented to deal with that and blah blah but in their conquest for that to put the last piece of the map together to decide or figure out the geography of the whole world they managed to succeed one report i forget who i've been doing so much research about this stuff one report said that more was discovered in the search for them than their one ship ever could have put together and that's what i mean by the tragic victory in the end they accomplished what they had set out to do and i i love the idea of crozier walking 12 years for the hms tear and just oh it's so good it's it's it's poetry it's poetry in the real world and i i love it and hopefully you at least liked it a little bit as you can tell i like this stuff and hopefully you liked it too and thank you for watching the this is man like i i love doing the long dives into args and you know horror series and what else do i do conspiracy theories and all this stuff but man like this reminds me of chris mccandles or mccandless but i pronounced it wrong through that whole video but this reminds me of stories like that just stories of ferocity of people braving the wilderness and man i love this stuff anyway i've talked about it enough thank you for watching thank you for sticking around this long into my mad ramblings um i hope that you enjoyed i love this stuff i also hope that the camera setup worked out um as well in this microphone as you can like the blue yeti's back i found a way to sync it to the camera and i think i found a way to make the lighting quit flashing all the time i didn't even notice it until people pointed it out i'm awful with technology um but hopefully this was manageable hopefully uh it looks okay i'm learning as i go i've also been recording all night uh because i keep like what you don't know is all the gaps i take in between and going over my notes and back and forth uh and i started recording around five six am and it's nine am right now i have no idea what this will cut down to um it's also funny because i planned for this to be a short video and now it's not at all and my hair is all over the place and i'm losing my mind so it's par for the chorus but thank you guys for sticking around this long i appreciate it um i'm trying to think if there's any announce oh uh well for one thank you so much to my subscribers still over a million still losing my mind at that we're at like 1.04 something like ridiculous like already another 40 000 people since a million um i love you guys you're fantastic um actually hold on i need to show this on camera so my girlfriend kayla bless her heart uh threw me a party whenever i hit 1 million subs but obviously there's no happy 1 million subscriber balloon at walmart so she got me this uh that says cue the cat fetty i i had to share this information with you um you're welcome any i'm losing my mind right now um i totally forgot what i was gonna say that cat i was looking at the cat and it took all of my uh um thinking away oh uh speaking of my girlfriend uh there is a thing happening soon on the second channel a link to that will be in the description as always i've renamed it from windygames to windygang because there's going to be new stuff happening over there and if i'm not going to announce it yet till all the solids are down and i can make it look pretty but uh yeah check that out in the description so you'll be the first to know when it happens um what was the other thing i was going to say oh yeah i keep loot i'm so tired right now thank you so much to all of my top tier patrons that you can see here and thank you to all of my patrons you guys are fantastic if you're on the patreon you know about the announcement i made regarding the patreon if you are a patron and you have not seen that announcement go do that as soon as possible um the thing that i mentioned in there is going to happen like definitively in about a week from when this video goes up so i'm going to repost the discord link and stuff like that so again like a week and then that will happen so if you're a patron do that asap please uh i'm so tired uh thank you all i've got to edit this and then get it out ah uh but thank you all so much uh for watching instagram i love that i can do this stuff i can go from talking about conspiracy theories to uh horror series and then the stories of ships stuck in ice and that someone is still sticking around this long watching i hope i hope i'm not talking about myself right now that'd be weird um i should stop before i continue to embarrass myself uh thank you guys very much um i that should do it i feel like there's something i'm forgetting to say no i guess not okay i'm just losing my mind whatever all right thank you all so much for watching um i really enjoyed this i hope you did too i hope you enjoyed and i will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Wendigoon

Views: 2,562,007

Keywords: iceberg, explained, scp, analysis, breakdown, scary, spooky, horror, creepy, comedy, funny, laugh, humor, cringe, intel, deep web, dark web, hidden, tier list, secret, top ten, top 10, countdown, compilation, meme, memes, meme compilation, internet horror, reddit, ask reddit, redacted, childhood, trauma, Mary Celeste, Flannan Isles, Eilean Mor, Island, Lighthouse, Kaz 2, Kaz II, Leviathan, Kraken, Ocean Monster, conspiracy, theory, mystery, sci fi, true crime, unsolved, panic, crazy, hysteric, ocean, sea, artic, ship

Id: bHvc-XsYf80

Length: 48min 54sec (2934 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 01 2022