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With the benefit of hindsight, it was perhaps tempting fate to send a ship named HMS Terror to find the fabled North-West Passage to the Pacific. That voyage, launched in 1845 alongside a second Royal Navy ship, HMS Erebus, was a journey not just into icy Arctic seas but into the unknown.

As far as contemporaries of expedition leader Sir John Franklin were concerned, both ships had disappeared forever. However, over the past decade the wrecks of both ships have been located. And, thanks in great

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