OTTAWA - More than 160 years after Sir John Franklin's doomed expedition vanished in the ice of the fabled Northwest Passage, the federal government is backing a search for the Holy Grail of the High Arctic.
Environment Minister John Baird announced Friday a $75,000 contribution from Ottawa to the effort to find Franklin's ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which were last seen in the late-1840s.
Robert Grenier, a senior underwater archeologist with Parks Canada, will lead the reconnaissance mission through the frigid archipelago aboard the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
The six-week mission begins Aug. 18. If the expedition fails to find the lost ships, two more six-week expeditions are scheduled for the next two summers.
"I am sure every historian, archeologist and storyteller is as excited about this as I am," Baird told reporters.
"This announcement and the search for these two vessels . . . has the allure of an Indiana Jones mystery."
The three-masted sailing vessels, built of wood with iron sheathing at the bow, are among the most sought-after prizes in marine archeology.
Franklin sailed to the Arctic in 1845 to chart the legendary Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean and he, his ships and his crews disappeared.
Experts now believe the ships came to grief in 1848 after they became locked in the ice near King William Island and the crews abandoned them in a hopeless bid to reach safety.
Relief efforts financed by Lady Franklin, the Royal Navy and even the Hudson's Bay Co., vainly scoured the region for more than a decade.
Tantalizing traces have been found over the years, including the bodies of three crewmen, but the ships have never been seen.
This latest mission comes as the Harper government moves to assert Canada's sovereignty in the North, where melting ice floes have unlocked the very shipping route Franklin's men were after.
Grenier said the melting sea ice makes it easier for his crew to navigate the polar waters -- but it also opens the once-inaccessible Northwest Passage to grave robbers.
"Our objective is to find and protect the wreck, because they are in danger of being found by people who don't have the know-how and the same intention and preoccupation that we have," he said.
Grenier and his team will use sonar to cover a 400- to 800-square kilometre search area. A search team will scour the surrounding islands for remnants of the ships or their crew.
"Once we have covered a certain area, it will be marked finished. Nobody has to go there. It is done," he said.
Inuit researcher Louie Kamoukak will aid the team in their search with oral history passed down from 19th-century ancestors who witnessed the lost Franklin crew's forlorn end.
"For the first time in over 160 years, I feel that the witnesses of (the) Franklin tragedy events have a chance to really contribute to an important search party," he said.
Author Dorothy Harley Eber gathered Inuit oral accounts in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, while researching an upcoming book on the Northwest Passage.
Inuit lore tells of "white men who were starving" as late as the winter of 1850 on the Royal Geographical Society Islands, she said, meaning some of Franklin's crew may have survived longer than previously thought.
Inuit elders believe greasy patches on the islands' shores mark the spots where the stranded crew used seal oil blubber for cooking and warmth, she said.
"They were apparently cooking on the ground and they used seal oil, but they used it in a way that Inuit would never have used it," Eber said.
Franklin has assumed a mythic role in Canadian culture. Folk singer Stan Rogers and novelists Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood have plumbed the legend for material.
Meanwhile, one of the Franklin ships helped inspire lawyer Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Rockets fired from the Erebus against Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 are described in one of the U.S. anthem's most celebrated verses: "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air . . ."
