Europeans thought of the world as perfect and symmetrical, according to “Franklin’s Lost Ship,” a book by John Geiger and Alanna Mitchell. Explorers had discovered a passage at the bottom of South America that linked the Atlantic and the Pacific. And so people reasoned that a similar one must exist in the north.
.. But Franklin was heading into a frontier that science had not mastered. Compasses did not work properly because their magnetic readings were impaired by proximity to the North Pole. There were no weather reports. It was much colder than today, and there were years with no summer ice melt at all,.. The region is vast; even today, only 10 percent of the Canadian Arctic has been mapped... The only way to survive is by listening to the Inuit, said Adrian Schimnowski, chief executive of the Arctic Research Foundation, who spends five months every year in the North. “When the Inuit give you advice on weather, hunting grounds, the best route to take to get somewhere, I follow 100 percent what they say,” he said. “They know the land better than anyone else.”.. Zagon thinks a storm crept up on the expedition, icing Victoria Strait within hours and trapping the ships. The men huddled onboard for nearly two years, waiting for the ice to clear. But even in summer, it remained unyielding.. Until recently, Victoria Strait thawed only once every 10 years, but now it usually clears every summer, Zagon said. Instruments such as a side-scan sonar are best used in open