Backgrounder: Hunt for answers to Franklin Expedition is newest “old cold case” for award-winning project

The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History (GUMICH) won the most prestigious award in Canada for popularizing Canadian history (the Pierre Berton Award), as well as the international award for best history education website (the MERLOT Award). It has already engaged over 5 million students in solving the great mysteries of Canadian history and on June 4 in Ottawa, the project will launch “The Franklin Mystery: Life and Death in the Arctic” as its 13th mystery.

Last year’s dramatic discovery of the sunken hull of HMS Erebus, one of Franklin’s two ships, has brought what was a Canadian mystery to a wide international audience and opened a treasure chest of new questions to be answered and fresh mysteries to be solved. The fact the ship is largely intact makes the mystery of what happened to its crew even more puzzling.

Questions remain:

• How did the best-equipped, best-trained, most experienced British scientific expedition of its time disappear with every one of its 129 men?
• Was it bad planning, bad luck or just plain hubris that doomed them?
• Where, when and why did the crew abandon the ships, or did some remain with them? And are their bodies still on board?
• Oral history tells us the Inuit observed some of the crew struggling over the ice towards safety. What was the role of the Inuit in helping or hindering the stranded mariners and why did they respond as they did?
• Did lead poisoning, starvation, freezing temperatures or conflict cause the deaths of the crew and were Inuit stories about cannibalism true?
• There are many mysteries still to solve, including a new one examined for the first time on the website: was Franklin primarily interested in finding the Northwest passage as is thought or was his main goal really to get close to the North Magnetic Pole and allow the British to develop a new method of navigation using magnetic fields?

GUMICH is based on the premise that everyone loves a mystery and that students of all ages can be drawn into the study of Canadian history with the allure of solving cold cases. Founded at UVic in 1997, the project draws nearly 2,500 users every day from over 50 countries including Morocco, Japan, Israel and Peru.

A total of over 5,000 teachers and professors have registered to access the guides and lesson plans over the years. The mysteries span nearly 1,000 years from 1000 AD to the 1950s and range from unsolved historical murders to the actual location of the first Viking settlement on the East Coast.

ALL 13 MYSTERY SITES

• Where is Vinland?
• Torture and the Truth: Angélique and the Burning of Montreal
• Jerome: The Mystery Man of Baie Sainte-Marie
• Who Killed William Robinson? Race, Justice and Settling the Land
• We Do Not Know His Name: Klatsassin and the Chilcotin War
• Heaven and Hell on Earth: The Massacre of the “Black” Donnellys
• Who Discovered Klondike Gold?
• The Redpath Mansion Mystery
• Death on a Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy
• Aurore! The Mystery of the Martyred Child
• Explosion on the Kettle Valley Line: The Death of Peter Verigin
• Death of a Diplomat: Herbert Norman and the Cold War
• The Franklin Mystery: Life and Death in the Arctic

SITE STATS

The most popular sites (in order of most visits) in April 2015 were: the Vinland, Aurore, Donnelly, Thomson and Klondike mysteries. In just the last month alone, site visitors came from:
• Canada: 36.75%
• US: 16.99%
• Germany: 12.25%
• France: 4.93 %
• UK: 3.02%
• China: 1.86%
• Turkey: 1.53%
• Spain: 0.93% and not set/unknown: 13.2%

FUNDING/PARTNERS

GUMICH has received over $4 million in financial support from funding partners including the Department of Canadian Heritage and most recently a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant for the period March 2013 to March 2016.

GUMICH partners have included:
• University of Sherbrooke
• Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
• Queen’s University
• Mount Royal University
• University of Waterloo
• McGill University
• Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, York University
• Critical Thinking Consortium
• Arius 3D and Hot House Design and Marketing.

The project has also received contributions from dozens of museums, archives, federal government departments, independent researchers, broadcasters and various cultural institutions in Canada and abroad.

Partners specifically involved in “The Franklin Mystery”:
• Nunavut Department of Education;
• Government of Canada: Parks Canada and Library and Archives Canada;
• The Critical Thinking Consortium, the History Education Network (THEN/HiER), the international Historical Thinking Project and the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University;
• Mount Royal University and University of Toronto;
• With support from Stewart Arneil at UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre, who coordinated website development.