The Holy Grail of North American Shipwrecks

Le Griffon remains one of the most enduring wrecks in the world, but how much does the search for it cost?

British ship “Investigator” in Arctic ice during Robert McClure’s search for Franklin’s expedition. (Source: Britannica)

Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones / And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones.” So sang Stan Rogers of the Northwest Passage, the English moniker for a long-theorised western sea route to Asia. Sought as early as 1000 C.E., when Viking navigators started trading with Inuit tribes following the settlement of Greenland. The search for a shortcut to the Orient didn’t begin in earnest, however, until the 15th century and expeditions searched in vain for the fabled passage for the next four hundred years. This intensified in the 1800s when Sir John Barrow, newly minted Second Secretary of the Admiralty, pushed for the Royal Navy to carve a path through the Arctic once and for all.

The most famous of these attempts was certainly Sir John Franklin’s expedition of 1845. Setting out on board HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the crew spent almost two years locked in the ice before disappearing. Contemporary reports suggested poor planning, scurvy, malnutrition, and improperly prepared tinned food contributed to the expedition’s loss. In 1848, John Rae heard reports of Inuit interacting with British sailors on the ice, suggesting they abandoned the ships…