Weekend Video: Franklin’s doomed Northwest Passage expedition

This weekend’s video, which features actor Laurence Fishburn, looks back at one of the most famous and tragic attempts to open a shipping route through the Arctic.

Today, melting sea ice is renewing global interest in Arctic shipping. Countries and companies are racing to develop new routes across the top of the world that could dramatically shorten travel between Europe and Asia. But more than 175 years ago, explorers were already chasing that same dream: a navigable Arctic passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific.

In 1845, British naval officer Sir John Franklin set sail with two ships, HMS Erebus and the ominously named HMS Terror, in search of the legendary Northwest Passage. The expedition was meant to finish what centuries of explorers had started — proving that a reliable Arctic sea route for global trade was possible.

Franklin himself was already a well-known explorer. During an earlier expedition across northern Canada, his party nearly starved to death and Franklin famously survived by boiling and eating the leather from his own boots, earning him the nickname “the man who ate his boots.”

But the voyage that was supposed to unlock the Arctic shipping route ended in mystery. Franklin’s ships became trapped in the ice, all 129 men were lost and for generations the fate of the expedition remained one of history’s greatest exploration puzzles. Even today, new artifacts and DNA research are still revealing clues about the expedition’s final days.

This video explores what happened to Franklin’s expedition and the discoveries that have slowly revealed its fate — a sobering reminder that the Arctic has challenged those seeking a northern shipping route for centuries.