Prairie Schooner

Kitikmeot Region, Nunavut, September 12, 2016

One hundred sixty-eight years of searching,and the Terror has been found,the second of Franklin’s ships,icebound in the hunt for a Northwest Passagewith its crew of one hundred twenty-nine.Soon the search expeditions were turning up clues:a note stuck in a cairn to tell whoever came across itthat the ship had been abandonedand the men were heading south.Later, a few bodies, well preserved like Arctic mummies,poisoned by lead in their tin food cans.

Then, two skeletons in a lifeboatwith all the unnecessary baggage:handkerchiefs, slippers, scented soap, and, touchingly,a copy of the Vicar of Wakefield.And, less delicately, four hundred bone fragmentswith the unmistakable marks of cannibalism:the crude flaying cuts from blunted knivesand the peculiar damage that occurswhen bones knock the sides of a cooking pot.All of it fascinating enough for public televisionand to keep the expeditions setting out.

And now suddenly here it is—its three masts standing,and the captain’s quarters windows [End Page 20] all intact except for one.“If you raised it and pumped out the water,it might float,” said the expedition leaderabout the long-elusive ship, whose locationwas casually pointed out by an Inuit man named Sammy,who, seven years before, had posedbeside it on the snow, hugging the main mastwhile his snowmobiling buddy snapped a photo—later lost—leaving him no way to prove it.

Other Inuit had seen it too, most of them hunters,a few in planes, but who was going to believe themwhen the Royal Navy and the Coast Guardwere already out with sonar and magnetometersthat can say scientifically where something is—the same things they used two years earlierwhen the first ship, the Erebus, was foundoff an unnamed island in Queen Maud Gulf,an island, whose name in Inukitut meansthe place where the big ship is,or the place where the ship went down. [End Page 21]