The Navy declared Franklin's crews dead in 1854 while his wife paid for the search, and the wrecks found 160 years later belong partly to the Inuit

Sir John Franklin sailed in 1845 with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to find the Northwest Passage. The expedition went silent. His wife, Jane, lobbied the Admiralty and used her own money to help fit out five search ships between 1850 and 1857. In 1853 she wrote to him, "It is my heart's sole thought." On 31 March 1854 the Royal Navy recorded the crews as having died in service^†. That year John Rae heard from Inuit that white men had starved near the Back River and bought silver objects from them that had belonged to the officers. Lady Franklin commissioned Leopold McClintock's Fox, bought by public subscription, which sailed in 1857. In May 1859 its search party found a note on King William Island recording Franklin's death on 11 June 1847 and the abandonment of the ships. She saw to a statue in Waterloo Place and a monument in Westminster Abbey, and was the first woman given the Royal Geographical Society's Founder's Medal. She died on 18 July 1875^†. A Parks Canada expedition found Erebus in September 2014 and Terror in Terror Bay in September 2016, with the help of Inuit oral testimony. Under a 2018 arrangement the United Kingdom keeps the first 65 artefacts raised from Erebus, and the wrecks and other artefacts are owned jointly by Canada and the Inuit^†. Parks Canada calls the site the first national historic site jointly managed by Inuit. It is not open to visitors.