On March 8, 2014 Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 took off on
a routine trip from Kuala Lumpur north to Beijing. Shortly thereafter, the
plane disappeared from radar screens and, other than a few satellite pings, no
trace of it has been found. Two hundred and thirty nine people are missing and
presumed dead. There are several clues as to its whereabouts that surprisingly
led south, to one of the most inaccessible regions of the Indian Ocean. Even a
massive international effort involving dozens of boats, airplanes, and
submarines has failed to unravel the mystery of MH370. Commentators have called
this the “largest maritime search in history.” But is it?
Readers of this blog know of my interest in polar
exploration. So it should be no surprise that I find a connection between MH370
and the biggest polar search in history.
On May 19, 1845 the ships Erebus and Terror departed England
under the command of Sir John Franklin. Franklin and his 129 crewmembers set
forth on what was expected to be a triumphant journey through the North-west
Passage. Discovering a navigable route through the Canadian labyrinth of
islands and ice-clogged passageways was one of the great geographical mysteries
yet to be resolved. On July 25, 1845, just west of Greenland, a whaling ship
pulled along side Franklin’s ships. After that, not a word. At the time, that
was not a problem. After all, this expedition was expected to be away for a
year or more.
As Andrew Cohn writes in Lost Beneath the Ice (2013):
But when nothing was heard from
Franklin by late 1847, the [British] Admiralty worried. … Tens of thousands of
worshippers filled churches across England, and the efforts to find Franklin
became a cause célèbre. A massive international effort was
launched... It ‘was the greatest activity the Arctic would ever witness’… Over
the next dozen years, some forty ships and 2,000 officers and men would join
the search for Franklin, making this ‘the longest and most expensive search and
rescue operation ever undertaken.’ Between 1848 and 1853, some twenty-eight
expeditions on sea and land were sent to the Arctic.
The search area was literally the entire Canadian Arctic, at the time
regarded as one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Expeditions probed
from the Eastern Arctic, trying to retrace Franklin’s path. Others entered from
the Western Arctic, expecting him to have completed or come close to completing
the North-west Passage. Yet others explored the northern reaches, thinking that
he might have gone into the mythical Open Polar Sea that supposedly existed
around the North Pole. The British public was hungry for news. But each
expedition took many months to return home, and most took several years. There
were no telephones or Internet to keep the public informed. The drama in the
Arctic was played out in painfully slow motion.
In 1850, the first trace of Franklin was found. On Beechey Island,
close the geographic center of the Canadian Arctic, the Franklin’s 1845-46 winter
camp was found. But no note was discovered – nothing to indicate where he went
once the summer came, the ice melted, and his ships were free to continue their
journey.
It wasn’t until 1854 that evidence emerged as to the fate of Franklin
and his men. John Rae, on a routine mapping mission, encountered Eskimos with
stories of white men who died of starvation many years before. Rae returned to
England with the stories and artifacts from the lost crew. The public had to
wait until 1859 to get most of the story. Francis Leopold McClintock led an
expedition that was able to reach the site of the tragedy (King William Island)
and recover the only surviving document of the expedition. The single page of
paper told a sad tale of being hopelessly trapped in the ice and a starving
crew forced to abandon ship in a desperate attempt to march south. None survived.
It took 14 years to discover what happened to Franklin’s expedition.
Over the course of that time, most of the blank areas on the map of the
Canadian Arctic were filled in. A navigable North-west Passage turned out to be
illusionary, at least for ships in the nineteenth century.
The Franklin mystery was eventually solved, as will that of MH 370
eventually. The search for MH 370 has been ongoing for only two months. With
today’s sophisticated equipment, we can only hope that the search won’t take as
long the Franklin search.
