The Lost Expedition

In 1845, Captain John Franklin departed England with 129 crew aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, with a mission to navigate the Northwest Passage. Instead, the ships were eventually trapped in ice in the Canadian Archipelago, and the crew abandoned the ships, relinquishing them to the crushing forces of Arctic ice.  After many searches and rescue attempts, all of the crew and the Captain would eventually succumb to diseases and the elements before they were found.  The ships would remain lost until one was discovered in 2014, and the other in 2016.

The entrance to the Anchorage museum, where the discovered articles of the Franklin Expedition were on exhibit.

The Inuit people of current day Canada played a crucial role in the investigations into what happened to the Franklin Expedition.

Although there were no written records kept by the Inuits, investigators found that stories they told of previous expeditions were re-told with incredible accuracy 300 years after they occurred, having been past down from one generation of storytellers to the next.

Once the wrecks were eventually found, artifacts were recovered, and are on exhibit at the museum in Anchorage.

Belaying pins, made of heavy metal, bent by the ice as it crushed the HMS Erebus.

HMS Erebus ship's bell, recovered from the wreckage ~170 years after it sank amidst crushing Arctic ice.

A canister with teeth marks from a curious polar bear readily visible.

They also had an exhibit of a local popular cartoon - Molly of Denali. Would probably be more correctly pronounced if they had called it Sally of Denali, though.