In 1848, Franklin's crew abandoned HMS Terror in the Canadian Arctic; 168 years later, researchers found plates and bottles still resting on its shelves

In April 1848, the surviving crew of HMS Terror walked off their ship and into the Arctic ice. They were never seen again. The vessel remained lost for more than a century and a half until searchers located it in September 2016 in a remote inlet now called Terror Bay. The ship’s interior was so well preserved that divers found plates, glasses and bottles still sitting exactly where the crew had left them, according to Parks Canada, the government agency that has led the underwater investigation since then.

A doomed search for the Northwest Passage

In 1845, HMS Terror and its sister ship, HMS Erebus, left England, with Sir John Franklin leading them to navigate through the Arctic region of Canada and complete the Northwest Passage, a water route that connected the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean. The ships were trapped near King William Island in September 1846, remaining so for one and a half years. In April 1848, due to insufficient provisions and the death of 24 crew members, the remaining 105 crew members abandoned the two vessels and traveled on foot in the hope of finding a trading post far away. None of them made it.


The mystery of what happened to the two ships persisted for many years. In 2014, HMS Erebus was discovered. In September 2016, a search team from the Arctic Research Foundation found HMS Terror sitting upright on the seafloor, about 92 kilometres away from where historians thought it would be.

Divers step inside a ship frozen in time

With the identity of the vessel having been established, Parks Canada's underwater archaeology unit then started investigating the ship. In 2019, Parks Canada used a remotely operated vehicle to maneuver through openings in the hull to capture clear images of the ship’s lower deck. The findings amazed even the most experienced researchers.

Glass tumblers, stemware, and plates were still stacked in rows on shelves in what is believed to have been the officers' mess pantry. In the quarters where the crew members would eat and sleep, shelves were found to have bowls and wine glasses intact. The beds and writing desks were still standing in the officers’ cabins, and the captain’s desk was found closed, with its drawers intact. According to Smithsonian Magazine, rusting guns could even be seen hanging on the wall.

Parks Canada attributes the excellent state of the artifacts found to the extremely cold and dark environment of the shipwreck. The water temperature at the wreck is near freezing, and the sediment that has sifted in through the stern windows of the ship has buried many of the artefacts, sealing them away from oxygen. The low-oxygen environment slows decay, and researchers hope that paper documents and photographs could still survive somewhere inside the ship.

What the wreck tells us about the crew's final days

The state of the wreck has also changed scientists’ understanding of the ship’s last hours. Objects were placed in a neat order, and the propeller was found in its lowered, operating position, a detail Parks Canada archaeologists say suggests the ship may have been re-manned by crew members returning after their initial 1848 departure, rather than crushed abruptly by pack ice while empty. The full sequence of events is still being pieced together.

The wreck has also provoked a decades-long argument over how exactly Franklin’s men died. One long-standing theory implicated lead poisoning from poorly soldered food tins, a condition believed to induce confusion and physical deterioration in the crew. The idea was tested in a 2018 study published in PLOS One, which examined bone and dental remains of expedition members through high-resolution X-ray imaging. The study, led by researcher Treena Swanston and colleagues, found no clear evidence that the crew’s lead exposure was unusually high compared with other 19th-century Royal Navy sailors. It concluded that lead poisoning likely did not play a decisive role in the expedition’s failure.

A story still being written

Almost 180 years after Franklin’s expedition vanished into the Arctic, the two ships have kept revealing parts of their secrets through the years. Parks Canada has kept visiting the wreck sites year after year since then, contributing fresh information every time the season comes around in the course of their mission to uncover the last days of the crew members who sailed the two ships into mystery. Each trip reveals another piece of a story that began as an attempt to find a trading route and became one of polar exploration’s greatest mysteries. For now, the plates and bottles on Terror's shelves remain right where the crew left them, a quiet, frozen snapshot of a voyage that never made it home.