Beechey Island

Listen to the ground under your boots. It is loose grey shale, flat chips of stone that slide and click with every step. The wind comes off the water with nothing to stop it. There are no trees here, no grass worth the name. Only stone, sky, and the cold, flat light of the high Arctic. Then you see the wooden headboards, standing in a short row near the shore.

You are on Beechey Island, a small piece of land off the southwestern corner of Devon Island, in the far north of Nunavut. It sits near the meeting point of Lancaster Sound, Barrow Strait, and Wellington Channel. For nineteenth-century sailors, these channels were the doorway to the Northwest Passage. That was the long-sought sea route across the top of North America. Many people hoped it would link the Atlantic to the Pacific.

In 1845, the British Royal Navy sent two ships to find that route. They were HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin. More than a hundred men sailed with him. The ships carried tinned food for several years, heating systems, and some of the best equipment of the age. The expedition was meant to show British skill and confidence. Instead, it became the most famous disaster in the history of polar exploration.

The first winter of that voyage, from 1845 into 1846, was spent right here. The ships anchored in the sheltered bay beside you. The men built shelters, workshops, and storage areas on the shore. Imagine the long months of darkness. The sun does not rise at all for weeks in the middle of winter at this latitude. The crews lived with lamplight, routine, and the cold pressing in from every side.

Three men did not survive that winter. Their graves are the row of headboards in front of you. John Torrington was a leading stoker from HMS Terror. John Hartnell was an able seaman from HMS Erebus. William Braine was a private in the Royal Marines, also from Erebus. They were young men. Their deaths came early in a voyage that would claim every single member of the expedition.

Here is something many visitors do not expect. When the ships left Beechey Island in 1846, they left no written message explaining where they were going. Searchers later found a stone cairn — the kind of marker sailors built for exactly this purpose — but no note inside it. Nobody knows for certain why. That silence made the search far harder. For years, rescuers could only guess which direction Franklin had taken.

And the searches were enormous. When the expedition did not return, Britain and the United States sent ship after ship into these waters. Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John's wife, pushed hard for the search and helped fund several voyages herself. In 1850, search parties found the winter camp on this shore, and the three graves. It was the first real trace of the missing men. Beechey Island then became a base for the search effort.

Look along the shore for the remains of Northumberland House. It was a storehouse built by one of the search expeditions in the 1850s. It held food, fuel, and supplies, in case Franklin's men ever returned. Today only low walls, scattered timber, and rusted metal remain. Nearby you may also see old barrel staves and fragments of iron. The cold, dry air slows decay, so objects from that era can still lie on the ground.

The island also holds memorials to the searchers. One honours Joseph René Bellot, a young French naval officer who joined the British search. He drowned in these waters in 1853. There is also a fourth grave, belonging to a sailor from one of the later search ships. Together, these markers turn the beach into something larger than a single tragedy. It is a record of the people who came looking, and of what that cost them too.

The story did not end in the nineteenth century. In the 1980s, a Canadian research team led by the anthropologist Owen Beattie received permission to exhume the three Franklin sailors. The permafrost had preserved the bodies to a remarkable degree. Tests found high levels of lead in their tissue. Some researchers linked this to the tinned food or the ships' water systems. That theory is still debated, and the men's direct causes of death may have been illnesses such as tuberculosis and pneumonia. After the study, the sailors were reburied here.

For most of the twentieth century, the fate of the ships themselves was a mystery. Then, in 2014, a Canadian search located the wreck of HMS Erebus. HMS Terror was found two years later, in 2016. Both lie far to the south of here, near King William Island. Inuit oral history played an important part in those discoveries. For generations, Inuit had described ships and dying men in that region. Their accounts proved accurate.

Today, Beechey Island is protected as a National Historic Site of Canada. Most visitors arrive by expedition ship and come ashore in small inflatable boats. Polar bears live in this region, so landings are watched by trained guides. Stay with your group and follow their instructions. Please do not touch the headboards or pick up any objects. Every piece of wood and iron here is part of the historic record, and part of a burial ground.

Before you go, turn away from the graves for a moment and face the water. Notice how open it is. The steep cliffs of Devon Island rise behind you, layered in bands of brown and grey rock. In summer, the light may barely change for hours. In front of you is the same bay where Erebus and Terror once lay at anchor, their crews still hopeful, with the whole passage ahead of them.

Stand quietly for a breath. Hear the wind, the water on the shingle, the crunch of stone as someone walks behind you. These three men have rested on this shore for well over a century and a half. As you walk back toward the boats, look once more at the small row of markers. They are modest, and easy to miss against the grey. That is perhaps the most honest way to remember them.