While he wasn’t present for the moment the members of Canada’s Arctic mission discovered one of the ships from the ill-fated 1845 Franklin Expedition, David Shea still feels he helped make history.
Shea, a former resident of Salmon Arm, went to the Arctic as part of a team to locate the historic ships and map the Arctic seabed. He is the engineering manager for Kraken Sonar Systems, a Newfoundland-based company which installed a high-resolution system onto an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) owned by the Canadian government.
There were four ships taking part in the search, and Shea was based on a research vessel which was accompanied by an ice breaker.
“It was very challenging conditions in the Victoria Strait,” said Shea. “This was the first year since the expeditions have been going that there was ice in the area, which made it more difficult to get into places we had hoped to cover.”
Still, the ice actually proved fortuitous for the crews of the other half of the team, which was led by Parks Canada. Due to heavy ice conditions in the strait, that ship ended up searching in a slightly different area than was previously planned.
“It was there that they happened to run across one of the wrecks,” said Shea, who was already en route home when the discovery was made. “It was in an area farther south than we had expected to find it.”
It is not known yet whether the discovery was of the HMS Erebus or the HMS Terror, so the search for the other ship will likely continue next summer.
Shea called the find incredibly exciting and said any disappointment with not being on the vessel was assuaged by the mapping activities he helped to conduct while on the research vessel.
The Kraken sonar system performed well in the low light, and extremely low temperatures, allowing sea bed mapping that had never been done before.
“Every image coming up was the first time that part of the seabed has ever been seen by human eyes. Every picture was so exciting.”
Shea says he hopes to return to the Arctic next year for the continuation of the project.
