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Ottawa,Prime Minister Stephen Harper says one of the two lost ships from Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition has been found.
Harper says it’s not known yet whether the ship is HMS Erebus or HMS Terror.
The find was confirmed on Sunday using a remotely operated underwater vehicle recently acquired by Parks Canada.
“This is truly a historic moment for Canada,” Harper said.
The news comes a day after a team of archeologists found a tiny fragment from the expedition — which they say is the first Franklin artifact found in modern times.
They discovered an iron fitting that once helped support a boat from one of the doomed expedition’s ships in the King William Island search area.
The two ships of the Franklin Expedition and their crews disappeared during an 1845 quest for the Northwest Passage.
They were the subject of many searches throughout the 19th century, but the mystery of exactly what happened to Franklin and his men has never been solved.
The expedition has been the subject of songs, poems and novels ever since.
On Harper’s recent visit to the Arctic, Ryan Harris, a senior underwater archeologist and one of the people leading the Parks Canada search, said it was only a matter of time before the remnants of the missing expedition were found.
Four vessels, including the Canadian Coast Guard ship Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Royal Canadian Navy’s HMCS Kingston and vessels from the Arctic Research Foundation and the One Ocean Expedition led the search this summer.
Harper, on his annual tour of the north, got a first-hand look at some of the tools being used in the hunt for the ships. He helped lower an autonomous underwater vehicle into the frigid water near Pond Inlet.
