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[Silexx]

Harper sat in front of the banner at the head of the table. On his right was Ryan Harris, a senior underwater archaeologist with Parks Canada. Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq, whose portfolio includes oversight of Parks Canada, was to the prime minister’s left. Next to her, in a prominent spot, sat John Geiger, CEO of the charitable Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

“This is truly a historic moment for Canada,” an elated Harper said.

To the shock of those gathered, the prime minister announced they had found the wreck of one of Sir John Franklin’s ships. Six years of searching in the Arctic and the investment of millions of dollars of public money had paid off.

A year after his two ships sailed down the Thames River in 1845 on their way to look for a Northwest Passage, Franklin’s vessels were beset in ice in the High Arctic. All 129 men aboard died, most in an excruciating battle against frostbite, hunger, and other ailments. Over the past 160-plus years, dozens of expeditions have looked for the lost crews and their ships. The most successful found sailors’ bodies, unearthing bones with blade cuts that betrayed the cannibalism of the desperate survivors. But the ships, where archaeologists hoped to find preserved logbooks or other records that could help explain why all 129 sailors and officers died, remained elusive.

“The ships were called the Terror and the Erebus,” 1847, (1905). Print Collector / Getty Images

“Franklin’s ships are an important part of Canadian history given that his expeditions, which took place nearly 200 years ago, laid the foundations of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty,” Harper said.

The discovery of a wreck was a personal and political triumph for Harper. As part of his Arctic sovereignty initiative, his government began funding expeditions in 2008 to find Franklin’s ships. Harper also made annual visits to the Far North. Aglukkaq, who joined him that day, is from Nunavut and is the minister responsible for developing Canada’s north, which Harper has called “a great treasure house.” Geiger, another important ally at the table, had joined them and a cadre of other PMO staffers, dignitaries, and insiders on the prime minister’s 2013 northern trip.

Now they were together to share a discovery steeped in historical and political import.

Geiger and the RCGS had joined the search for Franklin’s ships just a few months before the discovery. Parks Canada and others, including the nonprofit Arctic Research Foundation, had been on the hunt for years. They were also at the table, but it was Geiger’s voice that would dominate the early media coverage. As the Globe and Mail later reported, Geiger “became a lead media spokesperson for the search in the days after the discovery.”

Geiger began by painting a picture of the moment of discovery, placing himself in it. The Canadian Press, the national news service, reported:

The moment the ship was discovered this past weekend, said Geiger, “we were surrounded by ice — we were in a noose of ice — and so it was a real sense of connection, of immediate connection to Franklin and the men on those two ships.

“A few of us said a prayer to sailors lost at sea at that moment because we felt a real personal bond.”

Except Geiger was not there. He was on a different ship roughly 65 nautical miles away from the vessel that discovered the wreck.

The tightly scripted media rollout would see Geiger give interview after interview about the find, talking freely about the moment of discovery, and about the prime minister’s deep passion for the north. It would culminate months later with Geiger and Harper being awarded medals in separate ceremonies to mark their important roles in finding HMS Erebus, the ship that Sir John himself had sailed on.

Meanwhile, those who actually found the wreck, along with others who spent years on the search, seethed in anger as they watched what they saw as a historic moment being misrepresented to the public.

Few of those involved in the expedition would go on record about their frustrations with what they felt was Geiger’s mistelling of the discovery, and his efforts to convey core Harper government messages during interviews. One exception is Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Research in Motion, now known as BlackBerry, who was a leader of the Franklin search effort.

Balsillie watched in frustration as Geiger placed himself and the RCGS at the centre of the discovery. The final straw came when in April 2015 Balsillie watched the aforementioned documentary about the expedition on CBC’s The Nature of Things. It was co-produced by Lion Television, the U.K. film company that Geiger and the RCGS brought in as a partner. (Gordon Henderson, president of the Canadian co-producers 90th Parallel Productions, which revised Lion’s first cut of the documentary on a tight deadline, told BuzzFeed Canada that Geiger exercised no control over the film’s content.)

Three weeks after it aired, on April 30, Balsillie wrote a formal letter of complaint to Minister Aglukkaq and copied it to the PMO. Balsillie said he was “troubled that Canadian history is not being presented accurately and I have expressed my concerns to [Geiger] in the past.”

He added:

While I don’t want to speculate about the motivation of RCGS and its partners in creating an alternative narrative for themselves and their role in the Victoria Strait partnership I am concerned that official communication outputs, such as this documentary, contain versions of the search that are misleading to the Canadian public.

Balsillie said that he was warned that his outspoken objection could have serious personal ramifications.

Full story here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/paulwatson/the-wreck-of-erebus?utm_term=.tun1yx92E#.wakQQx3pKD

Tl;dr version: An historic discovery of an Artic shipwreck made by the Government was misrepresented in order to give credit to a private organization whose CEO has personal ties to the Prime Minister and who had little role into the discovery.

Also, the writing of this story has also seen some controversy as the author of the article left his job at the Toronto Star in protest after they refused to publish the story, hence why it is now found on Buzzfeed.

 

[Thelonelykoopa]

Hmm an example of poorly named ships meeting their untimely end in real life.

 

[ReadingRambo]

Wait so was it demon polar bears or not??

 

[Protein]

The Terror was a great book.

 

[Jebusman]

Tl;dr version: An historic discovery of an Artic shipwreck made by the Government was misrepresented in order to give credit to a private organization whose CEO has personal ties to the Prime Minister and who had little role into the discovery.

Wow.

What a shock.

I'm so surprised.

 

[Amalthea]

I hope Harper tried some of the canned food left by the expedition.