Ryan Harris had been searching for the wreck of the lost ship of John Franklin for six years. Now, having finally located it, he tells Robin McKie what the find may reveal about the doomed expedition to discover the North West Passage
Ryan Harris has spent six summers working in the Canadian Arctic hunting the two most sought-after wrecks in marine history: the lost ships of British explorer Sir John Franklin. In those years, on remote islets to the west and south of the frozen wastes of King William Island, Harris and his team have found tantalising items including pieces of iron embossed with Royal Navy markings, which clearly came from 19th-century sailing ships.
Everything suggested these could be parts of Erebus or Terror, the ships in which Franklin sailed, in 1845, to find the fabled Northwest Passage between the North Atlantic and the Pacific before vanishing with all his crew. However, the precise location of the shipwrecks eluded Harriss team, despite their trawling more than 1,600 sq km of seabed with sonar detectors between 2008 and 2013.
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