One of the ships used on the Franklin Expedition to find the North-West Passage has been found.

The actual identity of the ship is still unknown.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-29136409

Another arctic "ghost ship" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Baychimo

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Another arctic "ghost ship" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Baychimo

Like something from a Clive Cussler novel, Gil.


Erebus and Terror were original built as bomb vessels; ships built to fire mortars at land targets, indeed Terror had taken part in the bombardment of Fort McHenry, Star Spangled banner and all.
To withstand the recoil of the mortar, bomb vessels had specially strengthened hulls, which in turn made them first choice for Polar Exploration:

The ship has now been confirmed as the Erebus

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-29457728

The ship, according to the images being released, drowned gracefully and with dignity. Such was a fate denied to its crew, felled in the weeks and months that followed their abandonment of the ship by scurvy, lead poisoning and exposure, resorting even to cannibalism in their desperate but doomed attempt at survival.

HMS Erebus

Officers

Sir John Franklin, Captain, Commanding the Expedition
James Fitzjames, Commander
Graham Gore, Lieutenant
H.T.D. Le Vesconte, Lieutenant
James Walter Fairholme, Lieutenant
Robert Orme Sergeant, Mate
Charles Frederick Des Voeux, Mate
Edward Couch, Mate
Henry Foster Collins, Second Master
James Reid, Ice Master
Stephen Samuel Stanley, Surgeon
Harry D.S. Goodsir, Assistant Surgeon
Charles Hamilton Osmer, Purser

Warrant Officers

John Gregory, Engineer
Thomas Terry, Boatswain
John Weekes, Carpenter

Petty Officers

John Murray, Sailmaker, age 43
William Smith, Blacksmith, age 28
Thomas Burt, Armorer, age 22
James W. Brown, Caulker, age 28
Francis Dunn, Caulker's Mate, age 25
Thomas Watson, Carpenter's Mate, age 40
Samuel Brown, Boatswain's Mate, age 27
Richard Wall, Ship's Cook, age 45
James Rigden, Captain's Coxwain, age 32
William Bell, Quartermaster, age 36
Daniel Arthur, Quartermaster, age 35
John Downing, Quartermaster
Robert Sinclair, Captain of the Foretop, age 25
John Sullivan, Captain of the Maintop, age 28
Phillip Reddington, Captain of the Forecastle, age 28
Joseph Andrews, Captain of the Hold, age 35
Edmund Hoar, Captain's Steward, age 23
John Bridgens, Subordinate Officers' Steward, age 26
Richard Aylmore, Gunroom Steward, age 24
William Fowler, Purser's Steward, age 26
John Cowie, Stoker
Thomas Plater, Stoker

Able Seamen

George Thompson, age 27
John Hartnell, age 25
John Stickland, age24
Thomas Hartnell, age23
William Orren, age34
William Closson, age25
Charles Coombs, age28
John Morfin, age25
Charles Best, age23
Thomas McConvey, age24
Henry Lloyd, age26
Thomas Work, age41
Robert Ferrier, age29
Josephus Geater, age32
Thomas Tadman, age28
Abraham Seeley, age34
Francis Pocock, age24
Robert Johns, age24
William Mark, age24

Royal Marines

David Bryant, Sergeant, age31
Alexander Pearson, Corporal, age30
Robert Hopcraft, Private, age38
William Pilkington, Private, age28
William Braine, Private, age31
Joseph Healey, Private, age29
William Reed, Private, age28

Boys

George Chambers, age18
David Young, age18


Icemaster James Reid from Aberdeen. His watch was recovered from Eskimos by John Rae in 1854 whose expedition set out but failed to locate the site of the tragedy.


Henry Thomas Dundas le Vesconte, pictured on board the Erebus. The waistcoat he is wearing in this image was also recovered by Rae.

The artefacts recovered by Rae are now at the Greenwich Maritime Museum.
Portraits of many of the crew members can be found on the Scott Polar Research Institute website.

Pentangle's haunting rendition of "Lord Franklin" from their 1970 Cruel Sister album.

Had the pleasure & privilege of hearing the incomparable Nic Jones sing this live shortly before the accident that curtailed his career. Even better than Pentangle, hard to credit though that may be.

Latest update;

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hms-erebus-dive-just-scratching-the-surface-of-franklin-expedition-mystery-1.3086476

nordmann wrote:

The ship, according to the images being released, drowned gracefully and with dignity. Such was a fate denied to its crew, felled in the weeks and months that followed their abandonment of the ship by scurvy, lead poisoning and exposure, resorting even to cannibalism in their desperate but doomed attempt at survival.

I got hoodwinked into watching the 2018 television series The Terror the other day believing it to be a dramatised interpretation of what might have happened to the crews of the Franklin Expedition based on the available historical evidence. It slowly dawned on me, however, that it was nothing of the sort but was a dramatisation of a fantasy novel of the same name. As though the story doesn’t involve enough horror to be getting on with, the novelist and program-makers decided to include a giant predatory polar bear with a humanoid face and supernatural powers to add to their many miseries. This then promptly dismembered Sir John Franklin himself before the ship’s company. Furthermore, the only defence against the creature which the series-makers afforded the crew were flintlock muskets and pistols. Apparently, sailors aboard 1840s ships had no cutlasses and marines no bayonets.

They certainly had modern (for the time) percussion-lock, double-barrelled, smooth-bore, "heavy-slug", shotguns. Two such guns were recovered by Lieutenant William R. Hobson's sledge team on 24 May 1859 at a place where a ship's boat was discovered on the coast of Erebus Bay, King William Island, as part of the search expedition led by Captain F. L. McClintock. Hobson described finding the guns: "Right aft stood two double barrel guns, one on each side [of the boat]; both had one barrel discharged, the other loaded and capped. They stood on their buts[sic], resting against the upper rail."

At least one these guns now resides in the Royal Naval Museum at Greenwich (item AAA2531):





Of course just a few years later in 1851 (albeit too late for the Franklin expedition) Samuel Colt invented his multi-shot, six chambered, revolver pistol. But early prototypes and versions of the revolver design had actually been in service in several armies as early as the 1830s, and so they were certainly available to Franklin's expedition should he have wanted them (and when equiping the Franklin expedition cost rarely seems to have been a problem). Many thousands of Colt's revolvers were purchased by the Royal Navy: their first major order being placed in 1854 and specifically destined for the British Baltic fleet for use in the Crimean war.

Well some years ago I was at Southsea Castle, and discussed the weapons the Fort Cumberland Guard re-enactors were using. They were 1842 pattern percussion muskets (the converted India Pattern ones having been lost in a fire) so I would expect the marines at least to be using those rather than flintlocks.

I may have mentioned on another thread that when I was transcribing entries in registers at the NHM on to a database that I came across a batch of entries regarding specimens collected by the Sir James Clark Ross expedition to Antarctica made in the Terror and Erebus prior to the vessels being used in the Franklin Arctic expedition.  It's only recently I've come to realise Mounts Erebus and Terror in Antarctica were named for the ships. (Geography never was my best subject).

The Australian National Maritime Museum claim to have discovered the remains of Captain Cook's Endeavour.

Endeavour, renamed Lord Sandwich, in February 1776, was employed as a transport ship during the American War of Independence when it was scuttled at Rhode Island.

The claim is not yet agreed by the US authorities;

wiki:
On 3 February 2022, the Australian National Maritime Museum  (ANMM) held an event attended by federal cabinet minister Paul Fletcher to announce that the wreck had been confirmed to be that of the Endeavour. The RIMAP has called the announcement "premature" and a "breach of contract", which the ANMM denies. RIMAP's lead investigator stated that "there has been no indisputable data found to prove the site is that iconic vessel, and there are many unanswered questions that could overturn such an identification".

That spat between the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) and the Australian National Maritime Museum reminds me of the debate which took place following the finding of the wreck of the RMS Titanic in 1985. Seven years after it was located, and on the 80th anniversary of the sinking, the Maritime Museum in Greenwich held an exhibition on the story of the ship. I visited that 1992 exhibition and remember it being in the early years of the concept of ‘interactive’ displays. One such display was a touch-screen computer by which visitors could vote on where they thought that a permanent exhibition on Titanic and its artefacts should be located. There were no fewer than 7 contenders:

Belfast – (birth port)
Liverpool – (home port) 
Southampton – (port of departure)
Cherbourg – (first port of call)
Cove – (last port of call)
New York – (destination port)
Halifax – (ghost port)

Although Liverpool was the ship’s home port and the words ‘Titanic Liverpool’ famously appeared on the stern of the vessel, the ship never actually docked at the city. During the registration process, the Liverpool tugs came out into the Irish Sea where the ship’s trials took place. In the end it was Belfast which won that competition with the Titanic Exhibition Centre opening there 20 years later in time for the centenary of the sinking. Robert Ballard, who led the teams which located Titanic, (along with the KMS Bismarck and the USS Yorktown), is professor of oceanography at Kingston University, Rhode Island. I don’t know if he has any official connection with RIMAP but I would imagine he would be keenly following developments regarding HMB Endeavour.

Co-incidentally (regarding ships with names beginning with the letters ‘end’) an endeavour to locate the wreck of Endurance has set sail from Cape Town this week. Launched 8 months after Titanic sunk, the Norwegian-built barquentine Endurance of Ernest Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition was crushed by ice and sank off the coast of Antarctica three years later in 1915. You can follow the progress of the South African Antarctic Program’s vessel SA Agulhas II here:

Endurance22 – The hunt for Shackleton’s lost ice ship

a link to Titanic, also now in Belfast. https://www.papershipwright.co.uk/product/ss-nomadic/

Okant Skepp (Unknown Ship)

News of this ship was first announced back in July 2019. The vessel is very well preserved under the cold waters of the Baltic.

Pristine Shipwreck

PBS have made a documentary on this, "The Ship that changed the World" ( showing Thursday evening 24/02/22)
from Transcript

NARRATOR: Four chronicles mention Gribshunden by name, as does a single eyewitness account, written by a young nobleman who survived the ship’s sinking. They report that, in 1495, the Griffen Dog came to this island, seeking shelter, before sinking under strange circumstances.

video not available
PBS Nova

It seems that Shackleton's Endurance has been found.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJlWycXGHkQ

This thread has reminded me of something I wrote for a newspaper in 2014, about a disaster of the Cospatrick coming to NZ/Aotearoa.
Cospatrick Disaster
The Titanic disaster. 1513 people lost. No New Zealand links. Known to everyone.
The Lusitania sinking. 1198 people lost. Few New Zealand links. Widely known.
The Cospatrick fire. 470 people lost. Coming to New Zealand. Hardly known at all.

Why the difference? Yes, the first two are 20th century disasters and the Cospatrick burnt in 1874, but it seems safe to assume the Titanic will still be a household name in 2036. The number killed was fewer, but 500 people lost in one disaster is still a huge number.
On September 11th 1874 the Cospatrick set out from London heading to Auckland, New Zealand, with 473 people aboard. Three of these people, all crew members, survived the journey, after drifting on lifeboats for 10 days. Surely a story worth preserving in the country’s psyche. And yet it hasn’t been. Why not?

The Cospatrick was a sailing ship made of teak wood. She was a well-build 1200 ton frigate in good condition when she set sail. According to the Auckland Herald, 429 of those aboard were immigrants, 5 were paying passengers, and 40 were crew members. More than three quarters of these were English and Irish, with the rest from Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands, France and Switzerland. Over 100 of them were children with their parents. The ship was captained by Captain A. Elmslie, an experienced and respected captain, who was accompanied by his wife and child.

Daily throughout January 1875 the Auckland Herald under “Expected Arrivals” named the Cospatrick, until on January 11th the announcement was made in large and unusual (for the times) headlines – TOTAL LOSS of the SHIP COSPATRICK BY FIRE. Half a column of extra headlines followed, with an account of the telegraphic information and a list of the immigrants and cargo.

On the 17th November 1874, the Cospatrick, making her way to the Cape of Good Hope, caught fire and in less than two hours was destroyed. Her stores of shellac, paint and turpentine spread the fire and it was fanned by the wind. In the ensuing panic most passengers jumped into the water and were subsequently drowned. Others were crushed or burnt. Two lifeboats were able to put off with 61 people. What is knows of these boats comes from the testimony of one survivor, Henry McDonald, the second mate, at the inquiry held later in England.

The boats separated after two days and one was never seen again. The other boat, with no supplies, mast or sails, drifted for ten days. Some fell overboard, some died, some went mad. “On the 25th we were reduced to eight, and three of them were out of their minds,” said Henry McDonald. The Auckland Herald said the survivors were “compelled to subsist upon the bodies of their dead companions”, though this did not form part of McDonald’s report.

Eventually the ship British Spectre, heading to Dundee from Calcutta, picked up the remaining five and took them to St Helena. Two of them then died, and in the end only McDonald, Thomas Lewis, the quartermaster, and a young crewman, Edward Cotter, survived.

A story of tragedy, endurance and survival, It contained a beautiful ship, a voyage to a distant land, and a rescue. So what didn’t it have to allow it to be sustained in the public memory?

I think in the end it lacked some vital element of romance. The people on board were mainly farm labourers seeking a better life as immigrants, not the wealthy people of the Titanic or the Lusitania. The Titanic had the added glamour of an unsinkable ship on her maiden voyage; the Lusitania the horror of a war attack involving neutral Americans, as well as its British passengers. The Cospatrick was a ship plying the normal course of many ships of the time – five similar voyages started from Britain in the month of September 1874 alone. The tragedy of the Cospatrick happened far from either the embarkation point of the destination of the ship. Only three living people had a vivid recollection of it. It just wasn’t enough for the stuff of legends.
But on the 125th anniversary of the Cospatrick disaster, it is time to remember the people who lost their lives en route to making New Zealand their new home, and salute their courage and potential vision, even if this was not realised.

The facts and quotations for this article have been taken from the following:

The Auckland Herald, various January editions, 1875.
White Wings. Sir Henry Brett. Brett Publishing Company Ltd, 1924, reprinted Capper Press.
Plum Cake and Duff: The Journal of James Nichols 1874 – 5. Edited Joyce Neill. Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1975.
i was there! Edited Bob Brockie. Penguin Books, New Zealand, 1998.

Further to that I have found in my records the following about our trip to Britain later:
My treat was to go to Shipton-Under-Wychwood where there is a memorial to the Cospatrick victims. The Cospatrick carrying 473 passengers (immigrants to New Zealand) and crew went on fire round the Cape of Good Hope in 1874 and only two lifeboats got free, one of which was never seen again, and one which was picked up after a few days with five survivors only three of whom, all crew, lived. And the rest of their lives wasn’t too happy either. I wrote an (unpublished) article about it years ago, and later a book was put out about it (one review of it mentioned me!) so I have always had a great interest in it. It was a real thrill to see the memorial to the 17 people who died from Shipton. Many of them were from one extended family.

Although the case of the Wilhelm Gustloff is a little better known than the Cospatrick, it was probably the greatest single loss of life at sea. By some estimates over 9,000 casualties. The Lancastria (estimates vary between 4,000 and 7,000) also dwarfs the casualty list of Titanic and Lusitania combined. Ask a random selection of people for the greatest loss of life and I'd wager good money neither will get a mention

Talking about the wrecks of the polar exploration ships Erebus and Terror, I see that Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance has recently been found (5 March 2022) virtually intact on the Antarctic seafloor at a depth of 3000m and just 6km from where her captain, Frank Worsley, last recorded her position before she sank in November 1915, having finally succumbed (after many months) to the crushing sea ice. The first photos show her to be in amazing condition after 107 years. Note the five-pointed star on the stern below her name - under a previous owner she'd been called Polaris, after the (north) pole star, but while her old name had been painted over in 1912 the propitious polar symbol was retained.

We were told years ago that one of my husband's relatives was on the Lancastria. Don't know how to verify that. It was his uncle and he always thought he died in the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Here is what he wrote in 2007 (and we did go to the cemetery he mentioned):
je suis certain des noms des cimetières car je suis allé moi même voir et le nom de votre oncle mort sur le Lancastria est inscrit sur une tombe.
J'ai également le nom de votre oncle sur la liste du mémorial de Dunkerque informant que votre oncle est décédé sur le Lancastria et entérré à Noirmoutier à l'Epine.
j'espère avoir répondu à votre question.
Sinon tous les ans à Saint-Nazaire nous organisons une cérémonie pour le souvenir du Lancastria, si vous le souhaitez je peux vous envoyyer des photos par internet.

Dear Carolyn Deverson
I am certain names of the cemeteries because I went me to even see and the name of your uncle died on Lancastria is registered on a grave.
I also have the name of your uncle on the list of the memorial of Dunkirk informing that your uncle is deceased on Lancastria and buried to Noirmoutier with at l'Epine.
I hope to have answered your question.
If not every year in Saint-Nazaire we organize a ceremony it to remember Lancastria, if you wish it I can send photographs by Internet to you.

M Beaujuge Yves
21 bd Maupertuis
44600 Saint-Nazaire
France

With a surname you can search the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records online, which should return the location of the grave or memorial and also details of rank and when killed etc. (I tried with Deverson but of the 12 results nothing fitted for the Lancastria in 1940, so I guess that wasn't his name). There's also a list of victims on the Lancastria Archive.