![erebus ship erebus ship](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/ae/f7/a1/aef7a1a606230c5dc6f8b75e8cc742d7--nautical-art-ships.jpg)
However, at this crucial point, the men of the Prince Albert turned away from the King William Island region and so did not discover the signs of the expedition. Although the first Prince Albert expedition was unable to penetrate the ice, the second expedition, in 1852, discovered an entrance from Prince Regent Inlet into a passage of water that had just been named ‘Victoria Strait’ by the explorer John Rae. This was in opposition to influential voices claiming the ships were likely to be found further north, near Wellington Channel. She told her supporters about Weesy’s message and gave orders for the Prince Albert to search the Prince Regent Inlet area, south of Lancaster Sound.
![erebus ship erebus ship](https://3dprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Erebus_image.jpg)
Lady Franklin was deeply impressed by Coppin’s ‘supernatural revelation’ and his credentials. However, hearing of Lady Franklin’s plans to send out a search vessel, the Prince Albert, Coppin sent her details of the vision and then met her in London. Coppin was at first sceptical of the worth of this message because, although ‘Victory Point’ was a named location on King William Island, ‘Victoria Channel’ was not known to exist on any map of the Arctic. When asked about the Franklin expedition, Weesy gave an enigmatic message that seemed to indicate its location (‘Erebus and Terror, Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Point Victory, Victoria Channel’). In a letter to Lady Franklin, Coppin claimed that the ghost of his deceased daughter, Weesy, appeared to his family in the form of a blue orb.
![erebus ship erebus ship](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/11/25/24/1125248f6bad3030b8367f65477d3b59.jpg)
Although now largely forgotten, Coppin was a stellar Victorian engineering entrepreneur who employed hundreds of men in the Londonderry shipyard during his heyday in the 1840s. In 1850 Lady Franklin was contacted by an Irish shipbuilder named Captain William Coppin. These visionary journeys were widely discussed in the press and were seen by Lady Franklin and several naval experts as complementing, rather than undermining, official naval and land journeys in search of Franklin. These young women were placed into trances by male mesmerists and ‘sent’ to the Arctic to report on the condition of the explorers and the location of the ships. Alongside lobbying the Admiralty for resources and engaging private searchers in the quest, Lady Franklin sought out answers from several clairvoyantes. When the early Admiralty search and rescue missions proved unsuccessful, in the 1850s Franklin’s wife Jane Franklin organised several private naval missions to look for survivors or traces of the ships. The disappearance of the expedition, a loss perhaps comparable to the MH370 plane disaster, sent shockwaves through Victorian Britain, inspiring an outpouring of speculations on the mystery and causing the Admiralty to downsize its subsequent polar expeditions. In their second winter, the ships became locked in the ice near King William Island and in 1848 the survivors abandoned the ships and launched the first of several harrowing attempts to reach the Canadian mainland. In 1845 the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin departed Greenhithe, Kent, in command of 128 officers and crew onboard HMS Erebus and Terror in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia. This opens a new chapter in a strange story of disappearance and discovery that stretches back over 150 years.
![erebus ship erebus ship](https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/History/antarctic_ships/erebus.jpg)
Earlier this week news broke that HMS Terror had been found near King William Island in the Canadian Arctic, just two years after its sister ship, HMS Erebus, was also located in the region.