http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/world/americas/canada-franklin-arctic-hms-terror.html 2016-09-14 03:29:03 Tip Leads to Vanished Arctic Exploration Ship After 168 Years Scientists, researchers and the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard searched for the Terror, a British ship that vanished in 1848 while trying to map the Northwest Passage. === OTTAWA — To solve a 168-year-old But in the end it was a tip from a local Inuit hunter that led to the apparent discovery of the Terror. The discovery, made on Sept. 3, comes two years after the Erebus, the other ship in the disastrous expedition led by the British explorer Sir John Franklin, The location of the Terror, appropriately in the middle of the coincidentally named Terror Bay, matched longstanding Inuit oral accounts of Franklin’s fate rather than the assumptions of modern researchers. “The Inuits’ oral traditional knowledge around Franklin has been the only authoritative account,” said John Geiger, the chief executive of the Parks Canada But Mr. Geiger, the author of several books about the doomed expedition, said underwater images of the remarkably intact ship and the paucity of other 19th century shipwrecks in the area make it all but certain that the Terror has been found. The discovery was made by the Martin Bergmann, a research vessel outfitted specifically to hunt for the missing ships. The Martin Bergmann is owned by the Arctic Research Foundation, a nonprofit group founded by Jim Balsillie, the Canadian former co-chief executive of BlackBerry, and Tim MacDonald, a Canadian businessman with a personal interest in the Arctic. Its crew included Sammy Kogvik, the local Inuit hunter. In a video released by the institute, Mr. Kogvik is heard saying that about six to eight years ago he saw “something weird sticking out of the ocean on the ice.” When the Martin Bergmann was near Terror Bay while heading to a rendezvous with naval and coast guard ships involved in the search, Mr. Kogvik, who lives in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, brought up his earlier sighting. The Bergmann then headed for anchor in the bay. Adrian Schimmnowski, the chief executive of the Arctic Research Foundation, said the Martin Bergmann launched a boat in an initial search of the bay, which is not charted, but found no sign of the Terror. But when the research ship pulled anchor to resume its initial course, “We sailed right over a shipwreck and saw it on our sonar.” If the Martin Bergmann’s route had varied by as little as 600 feet, he said, the Terror’s location would still be a mystery. “It sent shivers down my spine,” Mr. Schimmnowski said from Gjoa Haven. “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, and this is a very, very big haystack.” The Before being put on Arctic mapping duty, the Terror was one of the British naval ships involved in the attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812, Mr. Geiger said. That battle The disappearance of the Franklin expedition — the ships were apparently trapped in ice — and the 32 search missions, some of which included Americans, attempting to rescue the crews were In Mr. Schimmnowski said he felt no letdown now that part of the mystery surrounding the expedition has been solved. “The story has just begun,” he said. “There’s so much to look at in the site and what’s actually there it could take several years to piece together what happened to the Franklin crew.”