In 1845, 129 men sailed two of the best-equipped ships in the Royal Navy into the Arctic to conquer the Northwest Passage, and were never seen alive again. It took 170 years, Inuit testimony the British had dismissed, and forensic proof of cannibalism to piece together how they died.
A cinematic entry point: the two ships, the ice, and the century-and-a-half hunt that finally found them. Start here to feel the scale of the disaster.
The full timeline: departure in 1845, the winter icebound off King William Island, the single terse note left in a cairn, and the abandonment march that killed everyone.
Scary Interesting walks the grim trail of scattered bones and abandoned gear the search parties found — boots, silverware, and bodies dragging a lifeboat overland.
The National Maritime Museum lays out 'the worst disaster in the history of British polar exploration' — scurvy, starvation, and tinned food gone wrong.
For 150 years the British ignored Inuit eyewitness accounts. In 2014 and 2016, Erebus and Terror turned up almost precisely where that oral testimony had always placed them.
The famous 'the cans poisoned them' theory gets complicated: new synchrotron analysis suggests the crew's lead exposure long predated the voyage. So what really finished them?
A long-form, unsettling deep dive that reckons with the forensic evidence of 'end-stage cannibalism' among the last survivors. The dark bottom of the rabbit hole.