Newfound Terror, the second ship of the expedition Franklin

Located the wreck of Terror in a bay on the island of King William, in the Canadian Arctic. It is 50 kilometers from the twin Erebus found two years ago.

Two years after the discovery of the HMS Erebus, was finally located the second of two sailing ships of the expedition of John Franklin, explorer and officer in the Royal Navy, started in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage – the route that connects the oceans Atlantic and Pacific through the Arctic Ocean – and never returned.

And the path, which was the El Dorado of the sailors, then had to wait 1906 and Roald Amundsen to be traced. Without news after two years from the start of the expedition, Franklin’s wife British Admiralty asked them to be sent research teams. Teams that, indeed, departed at the end of the third year, when they thought they were already exhausted food supplies for the crew. They were the first of a long series: the research of the Franklin expedition continued throughout the nineteenth century, but were found only the remains of some of the crew members.

The ships and the missing, 129 people including Franklin, have entered into myth, to feed the curiosity of scientists and researchers who have tried to solve the riddle of their disappearance.

The tall ships, two mortars, remained stranded in the ice of the Strait of Victoria between 1846 and 1848, and the crew, after spending two winters on King William, left them permanently to try to reach the South by land.

But the fact remains that those men has lost all traces, and the few remains found have raised several hypotheses: showed signs of cannibalism and very high levels of lead in the bones, so much so that some scholars have speculated that the sailors have suffered poisoning from canned food (for lead used in cans of food stocks) which, together with cold and hunger, it has accelerated the death.

Even ships have long gone missing. It took 170 years to locate its position: in 2014 it has been located, and then explored the HMS Erebus and on 3 September was identified Terror in the small and undiscovered cove of Terror Bay, prophetic event of the same name, on ‘ King William island, fifty kilometers from its sister.