The Arctic Evil and the Franklin Expedition Loss

In 1845, Sir John Franklin's elite British expedition to the Arctic vanished after their ships, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, became hopelessly trapped in ice. Later scientific analysis confirmed that the crew suffered from severe lead poisoning caused by their canned food and water systems, which likely contributed to madness. Inuit legends describing an "evil" that consumed the men were eventually understood to be a reference to the crew resorting to cannibalism in their final, desperate days.