Friday, August 11, 2023 3:15PM
In 1847, Sir John Franklin and a crew of 128 men disappeared without a trace while searching for the Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
175 years later, a team of National Geographic explorers traveled to the Arctic to find evidence of their fate.
Explorer Mark Synnott and Nat Geo photographer and filmmaker Renan Ozturk navigated their way through a maze of potentially deadly sea ice in the Northwest Passage looking for answers.
“Our goal was to kind of recreate what Franklin went through,” said Ozturk to Eyewitness News. “They found the ships recently, but they never found the captain of his capers. So, we thought what better way to do this and solve a mystery is to put ourselves in the same position.”
The team sailed from Maine to Greenland, before encountering similar issues in the Arctic, where they entered what Ozturk describes as a “complicated” maze of ice.
“We got stuck in the ice for over ten days,” the filmmaker recalls. “We almost suffered the same fate.”
The adventurous effort to unlock the mystery is chronicled in this month’s edition of National Geographic and an upcoming hour-long special, titled ‘Explorer: Lost in the Arctic.’
“Hopefully we’ll just get people more and more interested in not only the Franklin mystery, but the state of the north.”
‘Explorer: Lost in the Arctic’ premieres August 24th on Nat Geo and August 25th on Disney+.
