Entrevue avec Ryan Harris et Jonathan Moore (en anglais)

Ryan Harris

Jonathan Moore

Ryan Harris and Jonathan Moore are underwater archaeologists with Parks Canada who have led a series of notable interdisciplinary expeditions in search of the ships Erebus and Terror since 2008.

Lyle Dick – Interview Ryan Harris and Jonathan Moore of Parks Canada’s underwater archaeology unit.

1) When and how did you first hear of the missing expedition of Sir John Franklin?

RH: Well, like many Canadians perhaps, my first acquaintance with Franklin comes from listening to Stan Rogers and the Northwest Passage.

JM: I think I first heard a bit about the expedition actually through the work that took place on Beechey Island with the exhumation of three burials from the Franklin Expedition, work that was conducted by Owen Beattie and his colleagues that sought to look at those human remains. I remember the photographs. I think this was in the early eighties.

LD: And that’s when you caught the Franklin bug.

JM: I wouldn’t say I got the Franklin bug per se, but I think that’s when I first heard about the expedition.

2) What happened to Franklin's party?

JM: Well, we actually know quite a lot from historical evidence and information collected by subsequent searchers, beginning with McClintock, and we also know quite a lot from Inuit oral history testimony. So there’s a certain amount we can reconstruct, we can take the story forward to a certain extent and after that we’re relying on- we’re trying to really piece together the evidence. So we know that the ships departed in 1845 from Greenhithe, and the ships overwinter at Beechey Island, 1845 to 1846, and through the Victory Point cairn note we know that the ships made their way south, probably through Peel Sound and they became beset in ice in September 1846 just north of what is now King William Island. And there, they were trapped in the ice for the next two seasons, and in 1847-1848 - In the spring of 1848, the crews abandoned ship and made their way on to the shore of King William Island, in an attempt to retreat south, to the North American mainland. So we know those facts from the cairn notes, subsequent researchers found human remains scattered along the shore, along the shore of King William Island and we know that the crew made it south towards the Simpson Strait, where the last survivors met their deaths. And- at the end of the day, all of the crew members died during the south bound retreat.

LD: But do you know why they died?

RH: Well, time will tell. Obviously there are many theories that have been floated as to what caused their ultimate demise. I tend to subscribe to the view that- Franklin and his men - their fates were ultimately sealed the moment they received their orders from the Admiralty in May 5, 1845. And ultimately what those orders dictate is that Franklin and his two ships were to proceed westward through Baffin Bay, Lancaster Sound and into Barrow Strait. And upon gaining Cape Walker, on Russell Island, they were specifically to proceed southward and westward towards the North American mainland to try and make their way as directly as possible to Bering Strait. In receiving that instruction, they were directed to proceed into one of the harshest environments in the world. Ultimately, the route that they decided on, that took them, we believe, through Peel Sound, as John said, where they became trapped in Larsen Sound, and found themselves in a very inhospitable environment where there was very little- very few resources for them to survive on. Trying to eke out a meager existence to the west coast of King William Island, a location where even the Inuit would very very seldom travel as there was a [scarcity] of wild life and game to subsist on. So ultimately trapped in this sort of unforgiven environment, I would suspect that they slowly lost their strength, as their provisions dwindled. And it was probably a convergence of various factors: malnutrition, physical fatigue from coping with very very strenuous conditions, and perhaps influence of scurvy, as the quality of their provisions started to betray them. So I’m not sure if it’s a very complex mystery, it’s where they found themselves, more or less, how difficult it was to survive there.

LD: Professor Andrew Lambert of King’s College in London told me that the bodies of Franklin crew members who were buried on Beechey Island revealed the presence of both scurvy and tuberculosis and he thought it quite possible, perhaps probable, that a virulent strain of tuberculosis might have spread across the command of these ships. Do you have any thoughts on that, or whether that’s a possibility?

JM: I suppose-

LD: It’s OK, I was just curious as to whether the possibility occurred to you as well.

RH: Ultimately what we’re confronted with is trying to reconstruct events based on a very small sample size of archaeological information. This is despite the fact that a number of skeletal remains have been found across the landscape. Really, we’re still wrestling with trying to reconstruct these events. And from our particular perspective, of course, what the underwater archaeology service can hopefully contribute is the archaeological information that is contained within the ships themselves. So while we certainly take interest in theories that pertain to the health of the crews, ultimately we’re focusing our efforts on trying to locate the archaeological remains of the ships.

JM: One thing that I think we find interesting about this whole- well, this story, is that there’s multiple lines of evidence as to, you know, to explain what happened. And obviously there’s no one single factor that would have led to the abandonment of the vessels and the demise of the crew. And we got some insights from the human remains, which tell part of the story, but, again, we’re not dealing with all the information. We’re still in the dark on some aspects of what these guys experienced. And one of the things I find interesting is that they were not necessarily marching into the unknown when they abandoned the two ships. It was standard procedure at the time to explore from ships that were wintering or beset in the ice. So we know they were ashore, from the Victory Point cairn notes, so there’s a certain amount of exploration that would have proceeded there, after the abandonment of the vessels. So to a certain extent, they were probably following a route that, at least part of which, they knew where they were heading. So that’s something to bear in mind as well. But as we get further south, the direct evidence as to exactly where they got to, starts to be theoretical.

3) Why did they fail?

RH: I thought we kind of tackled that one previously. That’s right I kind of jumped to that, question there Lyle.

LD: Well, what happened to Franklin’s party, yes. But I guess you mentioned, Ryan, you thought it was basically embedded, their fate was sealed with the instructions to Franklin, the sailing orders. That coupled with the fact that they were directed to go into this extremely difficult environment. And [John] went into the complexities of the ice regime of Victoria Strait and so on, which I guess seems to have explained a lot. But do you want to elaborate on any points or is there anything else that you think went into the fact that they failed as an expedition?

RH: Well, I would say that there has been a significant amount of, say, armchair quarterbacking as to what sort of decisions they made and how sensible they were. There’s generally been the often voiced opinion that they failed because they didn’t adequately embrace Inuit approaches to survival in the Arctic and that’s the criticism that’s often leveled at Royal Navy search parties. But ultimately, as we said, they were tasked with trying to survive in a location where even the Inuit, for a good reason, wouldn’t frequently travel. So that combined with the really difficult circumstances of being trapped in a body of ice that was, you know, drifting southward at an almost glacial pace, so to speak, where they must have lost all hope that that was ever going to change.

JM: And I think we need to consider the word ‘failure’ or ‘fail’ and what do we mean by that? There were expeditions that attempted to penetrate the Arctic that didn’t get much past Lancaster Sound or much past Hudson Bay. So in terms of their penetration into the Arctic, it was fairly successful and they, in their first season, circumnavigated Cornwallis Island, which was an accomplishment. So really what we’re looking at is- this expedition is defined by the fact that the ships were abandoned, the crew abandoned ship, attempted to save themselves by retreating south. That was- really defines this expedition, but there were some major accomplishments and we don’t really know exactly what they achieved. For instance, especially when they were beset. So maybe there were some accomplishment, we just have no idea of it. So we have to be careful not to be overly negative about the accomplishments of this expedition. I think we need to also use the- embrace the term ‘expedition’ because it was following in a long series of explorations/expeditions and I think we need to be careful about how we define the accomplishments.

RH: I think that’s a good point. Well, did Sir Edward William Parry fail in 1820 when he progressed as far west as Melville Island? Well, he didn’t complete the Northwest Passage but that was a spectacular accomplishment. The fundamental difference between his achievement and Franklin’s, is that he survived to tell about it. And where his ships had to- or found themselves, was in a far more forgiving environment in terms of where the ice and the currents could take them. So they were able to escape by proceeding to the east in 1820. Franklin, with his two ships and his men, they made it about as far as Parry but in a southwesterly direction but ultimately were not able to escape. We can also look at the example of Commander McClure and the Investigator, just incredible circumstance, managed to spare most of his men from a similar predicament and they ultimately- he was able to lay claim to the discovery of the Northwest Passage, something that historians justifiably argue was probably an accomplishment made by Franklin and his men. Certainly Lady Jane Franklin argued that, in making their way to the bottom of Victoria Strait, they understood where they were and that a navigable route did in fact exist. The difference is that the other survived and Franklin and his men did not.

JM: Another example, not to belabour this but another example would be John Ross’s first expedition in 1818. He did not venture into what was later- became Lancaster Sound. You know, none of his men, you know, were put at risk, he didn’t put his ships at risk and he sailed home. Now that was later interpreted as a, you know, a failure, because he didn’t seize on that opportunity. But because all of the crew- all of the crews of Erebus and Terror died, it’s become overwhelmingly associated with disaster and failure.

4) Where are the ships?

RH: Yes, certainly that’s the pressing issue for us. From my perspective, I don’t see any reason to not put a lot of stock in the version of events that comes to us from nineteenth century Inuit oral tradition, as it was- No, sorry, I’m going to start again there, because it’s not what I meant to say- From my perspective, I don’t see any reason to challenge the version of events that come to us from the Inuit reports of the nineteenth century as claimed by McClintock and Hall and Schwatka, that ultimately suggest that the two ships parted company, that one was lost somewhere west of King William Island in deeper water and that the other somehow made it much farther south, ostensibly to the eastern stretches of the Queen Maud Gulf. To my mind, these accounts, they tend to congrue in a sufficient number of details and those details are sufficiently vivid that I think it’d be hard to conclude that there’s not a lot of validity to their experience. Of course, the challenge has been how to weave together these various accounts into a coherent narrative and of course Dave Woodman has done some splendid work in that regard. Certainly that’s been the underpinning of our surveys since 1997, to target the suspected vessel in Queen Maud Gulf, and then in 2011 we opened up a second front, so to speak, looking for a vessel somewhere in Victoria Strait, or perhaps in Alexandra Strait.

JM: Well- Really the- we’ve got two lines of evidence. The historical evidence provided by the Victory Point cairn note, or the so-called Victory Point cairn note, and the Inuit oral history testimony. The cairn note gives us a starting point for the search. The note gives a position, or not really a position, a bearing and a distance from the landing spot of the crews on the shore of King William Island, that’s five leagues north-north-west of the spot that they landed on the shore. So really that’s pretty much the end of the direct historical evidence supplied by the crew. What happened after that, we really have to piece together from terrestrial archaeological evidence and of course importantly the Inuit oral history testimony that tells us that, as Ryan mentioned, there’s two reported wreck locations, one off the west shore of King William Island in the vicinity of the Graham Gore Peninsula, what is now the Graham Gore peninsula, and another, farther south, down towards what’s now Wilmot and Crampton Bay, in the region of O’Reilly Island, the Klutschak Peninsula, at the east end of the Queen Maud Gulf. So initially, most searches for the wrecks took place in the more southern location, mainly because of ice conditions and a little more accessible. And more recently we’ve carried out searching again due to better, more favourable conditions in the southern part of the Victoria Strait and the northern end of the Alexandra Strait. And so these are the two search areas determined overwhelmingly because of the Inuit oral history testimony.

LD: And that’s where you think the ships are, roughly in those two areas.

RH: Yes. We’ve covered quite a bit of ground to date, as of the conclusion of the 2013 field season. We’ve systematically surveyed an excess of 1,200 square kilometers of the sea floor, almost equally divided between the two areas. That’s not to say that we’ve covered the highest priority areas as far as we’re concerned. There are many factors that guide and dictate where we can survey at any point in time: ice conditions, weather conditions, the opportunities that we have to work from supporting platforms, the coast guard ice breaker for example. We’re I think still quite excited at the areas we’ve identified for 2014. To continue the survey of Victoria Strait from the bottleneck of Alexandra Strait north to the point where the ships were abandoned in April of 1848. And also working closer towards shore in Wilmot and Crampton Bay, where the Inuit reports- not just that one of the ships arrived there but that it had in fact come ashore. So certain logistical factors have prevented us from working very close to shore, we’ve been concentrating on the deeper areas. But next year with new equipment and smaller support vessels we hope to be able to conduct a tote side-scan, and with a small autonomous underwater vehicle a based side-scan, and amongst all the islets of Wilmot and Crampton Bay, where quite possibly one of the two ships came ashore and where the Inuit reportedly ran into, harvested a number of useful raw materials, where they saw the final footsteps supposedly of the remaining crew proceeding towards the Adelaide Peninsula where they observed evidence that the ships had been reoccupied at some point. So I would expect that in the future their detailed testimony will be validated by archaeological discovery, we shall see.

JM: I just wanted to add that one of the things we’re doing is really continuing on from past searches by other researchers. So for instance there have been terrestrial searches and marine searches going on for over fifty years now. So we mustn’t forget the efforts of others in the past, Dave Woodman we mentioned. And there’s been military expeditions, there’s been a host of previous expeditions. And one of the things we’ve been doing is looking at shore finds as well because these can often be indicators of nearby sites and water. So we’ve taken a decidedly maritime archaeological approach to this as well. Although most of the search is in the water, we want to make sure that we’ve considered, for example, any shore finds that are in Inuit contexts. So if there had been any kind of harvesting or salvage or collection of materials, for example drift materials or materials taken directly from the ships, on the part of the Inuit, that found their way ashore. We want to make sure that we’ve actually considered those finds if they’re out there. And that’s one of the reasons why our collaboration with Douglas Stanton and Robert Park has been so important. We want to straddle the shore line and have a look at any evidence that may exist, that would point us in the direction of these shipwrecks. So while our focus has been on actual in-water work, we’ve got to consider what’s on land as well, on the foreshore. The other point I wanted to make was- I forgot!

RH: I would add that we have preferred hypotheses that we’re gravitating towards but we’re often asked about other notions and the number of competing hypotheses as to where these ships might have ended up. And some to our mind are more plausible than others. Many would be familiar with the purported sighting of two three-masted ships off the coast of Newfoundland by the English brig Renovation in 1851 for example, which is but one of several more far-flung, far-fetched ideas. There was a sighting, supposedly, by the Anderson party of a masted ship in- would have made it through Simpson Strait. There’s suggestions of one of the vessels being re-manned and navigating down James Ross Strait. And these are all possibilities, of course. What we have attempted to do of course is try to assess where the preponderance of evidence points us. So engaging not just historical information and Inuit testimony, but also looking at environmental factors, working closely with the Canadian Ice Service, and Tom Zagon. We’ve been working with an historical ice climatology study which has provided very useful information that informs us as to where the ice at the time could have, how it would have formed, seasonally how it would have drifted and broken up. This helps us to narrow our search by providing an array of possibilities that would have limited where these ships we think could have ended up. So just to reiterate, it’s trying find where the overwhelming preponderance of information leads us. Not all the Inuit accounts are necessarily perfectly coherent one to the next so we have to try to evaluate where to put most emphasis.

5) How do you know?

LD: So I guess that- in a sense you’ve already answered the next question but it kind of leads into that and that is ‘how do you know’ and I think you just enumerated how you know. A mix of historical evidence, Inuit oral testimony, the one surviving- well I guess there’s two Franklin records but they’re basically replication of the same record, the main one at Victory Point that pinpoints where the ships were abandoned in 1848 and then your coupling that with scientific data on ocean currents and ice movements and that kind of thing and then applying hypotheses or heuristic frameworks that you then seek to refute I guess in a scientific manner in order to then move on to the next possibilities. Is that a fair summation?

RH: Yes, I’d say so. I mean our view is that the suggestion of one of the ships followed this trajectory through the Alexandra Strait and then down southeast into Wilmot and Crampton Bay, or at least in the vicinity of the western shore of the Adelaide peninsula is consistent from an ice climatology perspective, I think it’s consistent with what their objective was, if they still held on to any hope of trying to complete the transit to the Bering Sea, it’s consistent with the smattering of archeological evidence we have in terms of wreck materials having been located by the Schwatka party on the Adelaide peninsula, Collinson’s finds at the same time. So while it’s not rock solid, it’s- we think the most likely scenario.

JM: One of the interesting things we found from the discovery of the Investigator in 2010 was that the vessel was in fairly- had been navigated into a fairly sheltered, protected bay. It was found in fairly shallow water, about 11 meters. What that shows us is that vessels of the size of Erebus and Terror can find their way into a fairly confined sea space. They can be fairly close to shore. So what that indicated to us is that it could be quite tricky to find the Erebus and Terror if indeed they found their way into a fairly convoluted shoreline, tucked behind an island, or a shoal. So we’re not necessarily looking for a target that is in, you know, wide open spaces fairly easy to find as it stands out from the surrounding bottom topography and the coast line. So that was one of my- one thing I brought back from the Investigator work was that, you know, the Erebus and Terror could be tucked away somewhere.

LD: Well that’s another source of data, that is guiding your efforts.

JM: It is. It informs us that we’re not just looking for [it] in deeper water. We’ve got to consider close to shoreline which we have done over the years but it just makes the search, I would say, a little more complex in that these vessels could have found their way, depending on how heavily-laden they were of course at the time and how much water they were drawing on, they could have found their way quite close to shore. And it doesn’t, you know, to get, you know, five, ten, eleven meters of water you can be very close to shore.

RH: We’re researching this principally because we’d like to know what to expect in a side-scan sonar image, what would one of these ships in these various survey environments, how would it present itself. From the evidence provided by the Investigator site, which, given its relatively shallow depth and clear evidence on side-scan that the ice routinely grounds on the sea floor, routinely impacts the wreck itself, yet it’s still a very conspicuous target, it still stands three meters proud on the sea floor, its full length and breadth are preserved, it’s an unmistakable shipwreck. Our view is that from scanning in Wilmot and Crampton Bay and the vicinity of O’Reilly Island we don’t see evidence of sea floor scouring by ice so that would tend to suggest that if one of the vessels did come to lie in this area that it bodes well for its preservation. Our experience in Victoria Strait is actually quite different: where even at a significant depth of water, even exceeding fifty meters of depth, the ice somehow still manages to etch these deep furrows in the sea floor, sometimes two- three- four meters deep and etching in swaths, even eighty meters in breadth. Of course, if one of Franklin’s ships fell in the trolley tracks of one of these ice keels it would probably stand to be obliterated. So we would expect to see a different type of wreck site in that environment. But that said there’s a lot we still simply don’t know about, about the local environment, these ice scours in Victoria Strait, could be hundreds, could be thousands of years old, it’s- there’s still a lot of unknowns surveying this environment.

JM: Carrying on from Ryan’s point that the local environment as you mentioned is hugely important to us because it really affects the level of preservation of the vessel. So for instance, if it came to pass that one of these vessels did actually sink near the abandonment position, where we have conducted a reconnaissance and we know there’s some very very deep water out there. So we would expect a preservation on a- fantastic preservation, you know, possibly mast still standing, an intact hull and a lot of coherence to the wrecks. However, if we’re talking about a wreck site near shallow water, near the shoreline where there’s a lot more ice and wave energy, then we going to see a lot poorer preservation.

LD: But your technology is capable of picking up a ship that might have sunk in very deep water?

RH: Certainly we’re deploying an array of sensors, tote side-scan sonars, hull-mounted multi-beam echo sounders to produce three-dimensional maps of the sea floor even to these depths. In 2014 we hope to employ a number of autonomous underwater vehicles with new generation sonar systems that will allow us to systematically survey even the deeper waters of the Victoria Strait. In many ways we’ve looked at the search as something of a technological problem, how do we cope with the very short navigation seasons, the relatively brief windows of opportunity where we have to conduct our research. These challenges are addressed in part with technology but also in developing multidisciplinary partnerships with other research groups at an academic level, working with other federal departments, be it the Canadian Ice Service, the Coast Guard, Environment Canada, the Canadian Space Agency, trying to bring in a full constellation of expertise and capability to cover as much ground as possible.

LD: Well, good luck! You’re certainly bringing all the resources to possibly bear on the issue.

6) Why do you care?

RH: As John said earlier we don’t really consider ourselves- what’s the term?

LD: Franklin fanatics.

RH: You’d used the term Franklin fever, Franklin fanaticism. We find the story about Franklin of course very very riveting. But it’s not necessarily the white whale for us, that we’re going to pursue to the ends of the earth. We’re looking for these ships because we think that we can bring the expertise and a survey strategy that stands a reasonable chance of actually locating these ships. Of course, together they were designated as a national historic site in 1992. So we of course have an institutional responsibility within Parks Canada to try to locate these ships and that will allow us to communicate their importance to the public. It goes without saying they’re absolute icons of maritime history globally, not just within the Canadian Arctic. We feel that we stand a reasonable chance of locating the ships and we focus of course on I guess where did the ships end up. But that is really just the beginning of the archaeological process, locating the sites themselves. It would be in many ways even more complex question of what can they teach us? What can they tell us about the final throes of the doomed expedition, perhaps taking inventory of the surviving provisions- are there the remains of crewmen on board? We may even be able to tease out some of these difficult questions. Maybe it’ll shed light on what was guiding their decisions in the final stages of the expedition.

LD: But what would it mean to you if you found the ships?

JM: Well I share Ryan’s-

LD: You’ve explained a lot about what it would mean I guess to Canada, to the government of Canada and so on but I’m just wondering what it would mean to you personally if you found the ships.

RH: Well, having spent, you know, five field seasons John and I with a lot of hours spent on the water, in often very very challenging conditions, staring at a computer monitor, watching the sea floor scroll by on the side-scan sonar- with all the preparation that goes into sending a survey team north every year- us, we look at it as a gratifying end into a lot of effort. You can’t help, when you’re on the water and you’re staring out and you see the enormous expense of the ocean and the other survey vessel you might not see it for half a day as it goes about its scanning on its survey lines. You might not see the icebreaker until you report back at the end of the survey day and you’re struck with the absolute enormity of the area. And what many times seems like an insurmountable challenge to cover enough ground to stand a reasonable chance of locating one of these ships, but day after day, week after week, survey year after survey year, it’s satisfying that we’re able to project this coverage on a map of Victoria Strait, and Queen Maud Gulf, and it does add up. We are making steady progress but ultimately if it doesn’t lead to locating one of these sites and hopefully both, it will be enormously disappointing. I suppose it would be a relief that would my reaction to locating one of the ships, and followed by the incredible excitement of having the opportunity to study them directly, to gaze on them first hand, to really spend a lot of time trying to tease out what archaeological information lies within.

JM: I echo Ryan’s comments there, that my personal interest is to first of all, like everyone, to solve this mystery of where they are. That’s the curiosity we all have about these vessels. And as an archaeologist the second question is what kind of condition are they in? Do they- are they well enough preserved to be able to begin to answer- can we use them to begin to answer some of those questions we have about the story of these vessels after the beginning of the voyage and are the hulls intact? Can we get at that really rich archaeological information that we suspect would be there? Can these vessels and the archaeology that they, one or more of them, embody. Can they rewrite history? And can we gain a better understanding of what happened to them, the men and their personal stories and the story of the expedition as a whole? Those I suppose are my- the two burning questions I have.

7) What is the significance of Franklin's last expedition?

RH: Well, it’s myriad of course. The search for a Northwest Passage and then the ensuing searches for Franklin has an enormous geographical legacy, in that this serves to chart thousands and thousands of kilometers of what now forms the Canadian Arctic archipelago. Not surprisingly, so many stories about exploration and the exploration of the Canadian Arctic ultimately come back to Franklin. Um, how are we doing there? Well, that’s not a terribly good response-

JM: Well Ryan’s mentioned the geographical discoveries, well European geographical discoveries that ensued following the demise of the Franklin expedition and the various rescue expeditions that took place and also the subsequent searching that took place up into the 1870s. So that of course is of great importance. And I think- I’m drawing a blank there-

RH: I mean, without a doubt Franklin is a historical figure, his two ships Erebus and Terror are icons of the history of polar exploration and [Pause, coughing, small talk about cold season and sickness.]

LD: Some have suggested that if you didn’t have Franklin’s expedition going missing, then you wouldn’t have had this extensive search effort and the completion of the mapping, and then you wouldn’t have had the British claim to the Arctic archipelago and then because the lands were grandfathered by Britain to Canada, you wouldn’t have Nunavut as part of Canada. I don’t know, do you have any thoughts on that? Or not, that’s fine too.

JM: I think since others have probably covered that I think- I think the wrecks are significant wherever they lie because of the archaeological potential they hold to tell us what happened to this expedition. I think from my perspective that’s their significance. There are wider aspects of their significance of course but from my perspective as an archeologist I think it’s their archaeological potential.

RH: At the time of course there was considerable interest in the Arctic, be it from the British but also the Americans, Norwegians and Danes and Russians, so I think it’s a very reasonable conclusion that the search, the British search for a Northwest Passage, the Franklin Expedition and what transpired in the succession of search parties that were sent out to look for them and the considerable stretches of the archipelago coastline that were consequently mapped. Ultimately this does underpin what’s now Canada’s claim over its Arctic territory. That’s been often stated, and I want to say it’s a fairly reasonable conclusion.

LD: And you guys are continuing to strengthen our claim.

JM: I think one last thing we should consider too is the significance in how really the Franklin Expedition to a certain extent is a story of two cultures coming into contact. We know most about that in terms of the end of the expedition, the demise of the expedition, when the crew members were retreating southwards. But perhaps there are other interactions that took place that we don’t know about or we don’t really understand fully. And of course once the wrecks are found we’ll have a better understanding of- I think we’ll have perhaps a clearer understanding of the Inuit oral history testimony and that’s certainly something that would be interesting to resolve some of the questions that we have regarding that testimony and to gain perhaps a deeper understanding of it.

LD: So there may be layers of significance yet to be discovered?

JM: Yes.

RH: I think that’s a really good point. Where you look at the accounts that were preserved by Schwatka, and Hall, and McClintock, the level of detail that they convey is really quite astonishing. And in the event that these searches in Queen Maud Gulf, Victoria Strait and Alexandra Strait, if they are ultimately successful in locating Franklin’s ship or ships this would go a long way to clearly validate the Inuit testimony and it would add a lot of credibility to even the subtlest details they report and that would, I think, elevate Inuit traditional knowledge at least as it pertains to these Franklin ships to put on a more equal footing with the European accounts.

LD: That’s an interesting issue as well that had not occurred to me.