Finding Franklin's Ships and other remnants of the 1845 Northwest Passage Expedition

The Faculty of Arts presents a public lecture by Dr. Robert Park of the Department of Anthropology.

On September 9, 2014, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the discovery of one of Sir John Franklin’s two ships, missing since his expedition sailed into the Canadian Arctic in 1845. The find was the culmination of a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency research project that started its work back in 2008. Since then Robert Park has spent parts of four summers assisting the Government of Nunavut in its land-based archaeological investigations into the Franklin expedition tragedy, and just a few weeks ago helped make the find that led Parks Canada’s underwater archaeologists to the wreck of one of the ships. In his presentation he will describe what recent archaeological research has revealed about the lives and deaths of these explorers, and how this first of Franklin’s ships was finally found.