Weekend video: The 180-year mystery of the Franklin Expedition

This weekend’s pick revisits one of the Arctic’s most haunting mysteries — the Franklin Expedition, lost 180 years ago.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin sailed from England with two Royal Navy ships, Erebus and Terror, to chart the Northwest Passage. Both were built for polar conditions and stocked for years at sea. Yet neither returned. All 129 crew vanished into the ice, leaving behind only scattered relics, Inuit accounts and grim signs of starvation and desperation.

For more than a century and a half, the fate of Franklin’s men was a matter of speculation — until the wreck of Erebus was found in 2014 and Terror in 2016. These discoveries have shed new light, but also raised new questions.

This video blends history, archaeology and recent research to tell the story of a journey that began in hope and ended in tragedy. Nearly two centuries later, the Franklin mystery still grips the imagination.