The truth behind The Terror: how an Arctic expedition became a horror story for the history books

The Terror: it's Master and Commander, with monsters. The horror series from producer Ridley Scott, which was originally shown on the US channel AMC in 2018 and now finally arrives on BBC Two, follows a boatload of arctic explorers on the run from a vengeful spirit that dwells in those frozen wastes.

Ice-monsters may be fictional (at least, one would hope so), but the show is based on historical fact. It's the latest retelling of the doomed 1845-46 expedition of Captain John Franklin and Francis Crozier, and their two ominously named ships – Erebus (one of the rivers in the Greek underworld) and Terror.

All 129 members of the expedition disappeared without a trace, and the wreckage of their ships was not found for more than 150 years. In that time, myths circulated about the crew's fate. Dan Simmons's 2007 novel The Terror – the inspiration for the TV series – imagines occult forces were at work. The truth is almost as strange.

Franklin (played on screen by Ciarán Hinds) had a chequered reputation. His military credentials were impeccable – he had served in the Battle of New Orleans and at Trafalgar – but his career as an Arctic explorer was plagued by bad luck. When, in 1819, he attempted to chart the north coast of Canada on foot, 11 of his 20 men died – and at least one was murdered. The starving survivors were reduced to eating their own shoes, and rumours of cannibalism cast a shadow over their return. When Franklin left for a second trip to the Arctic in 1825, his wife – the celebrated Romantic poet Eleanor Anne Porden – was suffering from tuberculosis. She died shortly after he set sail.

By the 1840s, Franklin's standing was at a low ebb. An undistinguished six-year stint as Governor of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) had come to an end in 1843 amid political squabbling and savage attacks on his character in the local press. Back in London and kicking his heels, he was soon given a chance to redeem himself.

Sir John Barrow, the doddery 82-year-old Secretary of the Admiralty, was gripped by the search for the Open Polar Sea – an iceberg-free shortcut to the Pacific via the North Pole. Many had tried and failed to find it, largely because it didn't exist. But in 1845 Barrow announced plans for a new expedition to locate it once and for all – or, failing that, to chart the Northwest Passage, a safe route around the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

Franklin, almost 60 years old himself, was not the first choice. But William Parry, the famed explorer who in 1819 almost succeeded in finding the North West Passage, refused to go. Barrow's second choice was James Clark Ross – who had successfully captained the Terror and the Erebus through the Antarctic – but Ross had promised his wife he would take a break from pole-bothering.

In the end, Franklin was given command of the Erebus only because no-one else wanted it. Francis Crozier, a working-class Irish officer (played by Jared Harris in the TV drama) who had explored Antarctica with Ross, was chosen to helm the Terror as Franklin's right-hand man.

They left Greenhithe, Kent in May 1845, in two of the Royal Navy's finest ships, with enough provisions to keep them fed for three years. After a brief stop in the Orkney Islands, they passed Greenland and in July came within sight of British ships at Baffin Bay. After that – nothing. They were never seen again.

The fate of Franklin was a cause célèbre, discussed daily in the press. Lady Jane Franklin (the captain's second wife) feared the worst, petitioning parliament to take action. An anonymous ballad about her sorrow was published, called "Lady Franklin's Lament"; a century later, Bob Dylan tweaked the lyrics and recorded it as "Bob Dylan's Dream".

The Government advertised a reward of ￡20,000 – the equivalent of almost ￡2 million today – for anyone who could find and rescue the missing crew, or ￡10,000 for any information on their whereabouts. Franklin's disappearance gave him a new heroic mystique; he was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral, despite not being around to accept the role.

None of the many search parties found Franklin, but Joe Biden has a reason to be thankful for their failure: it gave him a rather stylish desk.

In 1852, Admiral Edward Belcher set out with five ships, and ended up getting four of them immovably stuck in the ice. One was the HMS Resolute. It was abandoned by the crew, who began an arduous march across the ice to safety – only to bump into another group of desperate and frostbitten British sailors: Robert McClure and the crew of the Investigator – another ship which had set out on the search for Franklin two years earlier, before disappearing, with McClure missing presumed dead.

Like the Resolute, the Investigator was abandoned to the ice, and McClure's crew had set out across the country on foot and by sled – accidentally becoming the first to traverse the Northwest Passage in the process. When he finally made it back to Britain, McClure was given a knighthood and ￡10,000 for the achievement.

But the Resolute was to be given even more of a hero's welcome; the empty ship was recovered by an American whaler in 1855, restored by the US government, and returned to Queen Victoria amid much pomp as a gesture of goodwill a year later.

When the Resolute was finally retired in 1879, the Queen ordered a desk to be made from the ship's timbers, which she donated to President Rutherford B Hayes. It has been used by almost every US president since then, and still stands in the Oval Office of the White House today.

As the years passed, the Admiralty became less enthusiastic about throwing its resources into a wild goose chase through some of the world's most dangerous seas. The turning point came in 1854 when the papers got hold of a leaked report by a Scottish surgeon called John Rae.

Known to the Inuit as Aglooka, or "Long Strider", Rae had been exploring the north of Canada, mainly on foot, for a decade. He learnt how to build igloos, and with the help of an Inuk translator called William Ouligback befriended the Inuit traders living near Naujaat, or Repulse Bay.

One of them was looking to sell something unique: a silver plate, engraved with the words "Sir John Franklin, KCH". Rae bought it at once – along with a handful of other relics from the Erebus. From the locals' third-hand accounts, he learnt where they had come from.

Three years earlier, another Inuit group had sold a seal to a party of 40 starving Europeans, who were travelling with a small boat and sleds, having abandoned their ice-lodged ship. Returning to the area a few months later, the Inuit found more than 30 corpses – some buried, others lying scattered across the ice.

In his report to the admiralty, Rae wrote: “From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource – cannibalism – as a means of prolonging existence.”

Rae's letter made its way into The Times, causing a national outrage which forever tainted his reputation. His revelations were considered too ghastly to credit. Rae received the promised ￡10,000 reward for information, but unlike almost everyone else involved in the search for Franklin, he was never honoured with a knighthood.

Through a mutual friend, Lady Franklin got in touch with Charles Dickens – then the editor of an influential fortnightly journal called Household Words – and asked him to tear down Rae's account. Dickens obliged, publishing a lengthy essay offering other explanations for those gnawed corpses. "Had there been no bears thereabout, to mutilate those bodies; no wolves, no foxes?" he wrote.

Rae refused to budge. "Neither bears, wolves, nor foxes, nor that most ravenous of all, the glutton or wolverine, unless on the verge of starvation, will touch a dead human body," he wrote back, speaking from his own long experience of the Arctic.

Still, Dickens had another theory at hand. Perhaps "Franklin's gallant band" had been "set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves". He attacked the Inuit as "a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber", before concluding, "We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel."

This tirade succeeded in damaging Rae's public reputation, but in private the Admiralty were inclined to believe him – and considered the matter closed. They would fund no more expensive rescue-missions. Lady Franklin begged them to keep trying, without avail. In 1857, she raised the money for a final search party herself, led by the Irish explorer Francis McClintock on Lady Franklin's own small ship, the Fox.

McClintock's diary from that time still makes for gripping reading. At one point, he was near starvation himself: “Our provisions were running very short, therefore the three remaining puppies were of necessity shot, and their sledge used for fuel." But after months of "frost-bitten faces and fingers", a breakthrough came in March 1859.

While camping at the Magnetic North Pole, McClintock met four Inuit men there returning from a seal hunt, and spotted a naval button on on one Inuk man's clothing. He explained the button had come from "some white people who were starved upon an island", who had been travelling by land after their two ships became lodged in the ice. One ship sunk, while the other was forced aground at a place they called Ootloolik.

Following their directions, McClintock began searching for the ship's remains, interviewing everyone he could find. One old woman recalled seeing the survivors' long march across the ice – "They fell down and died as they walked along." On May 25, he stumbled upon a grisly piece of evidence to support her account: the bones of an officer's servant, still in his "blue jacket with slashed sleeves and braided edging", who had apparently been left behind as the others marched on without him.

"Of this skeleton only a portion of the skull appeared above the snow," McClintock wrote, "and it so strongly resembled a bleached rounded stone that the man I called from the sledge, mistaking it for one, rested his shovel upon it, but started back with horror when the hollow sound revealed to him its true nature."

Meanwhile, his lieutenant William Hobson had split off to lead a separate search – and made a discovery of his own. "About 12 miles from Cape Herschel I found a small cairn built by Hobson's party, and containing a note for me," McClintock wrote. "He had found a record – the record so ardently sought for of the Franklin Expedition – at Point Victory, on the NW coast of King William's Land."

The single sheet of paper had been sealed in a rusting tin – the same type of badly made container used for their food provisions, which it is now believed may have given Franklin's crew lead poisoning.

The note was signed by Graham Gore, a lieutenant on the Erebus, and the ship's mate Charles des Voeux. "28th of May, 1847. HM ships Erebus and Terror wintered in the ice," it read. "Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well."

At first, their message gave McClintock hope. "But, alas!" he wrote, "round the margin of the paper upon which in 1847 those words of hope and promise were written," a later, more desperate note was "faintly traced".

This barely legible message, scribbled in the margins, was signed by Crozier and another crew-member, James Fitzjames. It explained that they were planning to trek many miles to the Hudson Bay territories along the Great Fish River, having abandoned their ships.

"April 25, 1848. HM ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April... having been beset since 12th September, 1846," it read. "Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss of deaths in the expedition has been to this date nine officers and 15 men... This paper was found by Lt Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831... where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in June, 1847."

McClintock was profoundly moved by what he read. "This little word late shows us that poor Graham Gore was one of those who had passed away within the twelvemonth," he wrote. "In the short space of twelve months how mournful had become the history of Franklin's expedition; how changed from the cheerful 'All well'... So sad a tale was never told in fewer words."

It wasn't the last trace of Gore. Though McClintock never found the remains of the ship, or the dozens of bodies described by the Inuit, a few days later he made one final discovery – the remains of a boat mounted on a sleigh that Crozier's party had been dragging across the ice.

"There was in the boat that which transfixed us with awe, viz., portions of two human skeletons!" One was of a “slight young person”, the other of a “large, strongly made, middle-aged man”. They were found with two cocked and loaded guns, and half a dozen books – mainly religious, except for a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. One of the books was addressed to Graham Gore; one skeleton, he guessed, must have been Gore's.

McClintock was shocked to find the sleigh filled with "dead weight". It carried almost 40 pounds of chocolate, and an assortment of bric-à-brac: "silk handkerchiefs... towels, soap... tooth-brush and hair-combs... eleven large spoons, eleven forks, and four tea-spoons, all of silver... two roles of sheet-lead, and, in short, a quantity of articles of one description and another truly astonishing in variety, and such as, for the most part, modern sledge-travellers in these regions would consider a mere accumulation of dead weight, of little use, and very likely to break down the strength of the sledge-crews."

If Crozier's crew had not been slowed down by this haul of trinkets, some of them may have made it back alive. After this grim discovery, McClintock was done with his search, returning to England where a knighthood awaited him.

There were later efforts to find traces of Franklin's ships, but none bore fruit until 2014, when Canadian archaeologists using the same kind of robotic devices deployed in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 finally discovered the wreck of the Erebus near the Queen Maud Gulf in Nunavut. Human remains discovered nearby showed knife-marks on bone, finally providing evidence to support John Rae's claims of cannibalism.

Remarkably, just two years later, the Terror was discovered still lodged in the ice 60 miles away, after an Inuit sailor, Sammy Kogvik, told the head of Canada's Arctic Research Foundation about a large piece of wood he had seen protruding from the ice that looked exactly like a ship's mast. The discovery could have come sooner; Kogvik first spotted the mast six years earlier, but didn't feel like mentioning it to anyone at the time.

In 2017, the British government gave the wrecks to Canada, where they are being preserved for future generations. With the discovery of Franklin's ships, it seems most of our questions have been answered – but the sense of mystery created through a century-long search can never truly be dispelled. The Terror proves that the tale of this doomed voyage can still grip the imagination.

The Terror begins 9pm on BBC Two, March 3