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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60143 Hard The Franklin expedition of 1845: a note in a cairn and questions still open

Read the following passage.

A. In the spring of 1859, Lieutenant William Hobson, part of a search led by Francis McClintock, found a stone cairn at Victory Point on King William Island. Inside was a metal tube holding a single sheet of paper with two messages. The first, written in May 1847, ended cheerfully with 'all well'. The second, added in April 1848 and signed by the captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, was very different. It reported that nine officers and 15 men had died, including Sir John Franklin, and that the 105 survivors had abandoned the ships and were heading south.

B. The expedition had left England on May 19, 1845, with 134 officers and crew aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Its aim was to chart the Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Both ships had been built as Royal Navy bomb vessels, whose strong frames made them more likely to survive pack ice. Each was fitted with a railway locomotive engine and carried three years of supplies. In July a supply ship turned back, taking home several crew members, and 129 men continued. Whalers who met them in late July 1845 were the last Europeans to see them.

C. The ships spent their first winter at Beechey Island and were trapped by ice off King William Island in September 1846. In 1847, after more than two years with no news, the first searches set out, and over 30 expeditions followed in the next decade. Lady Jane Franklin paid for several private searches herself. In 1854, the explorer John Rae learned from Inuit near Pelly Bay that a large party of white men had starved and that some had turned to cannibalism. The British public was shocked, and Lady Franklin and the writer Charles Dickens attacked his report, but Rae defended the accuracy of the Inuit accounts.

D. Inuit oral histories also guided the modern search. Parks Canada began a new series of searches in 2008, and on September 2, 2014, Erebus was found in an area where Inuit had reported seeing a wreck. Terror was located on September 3, 2016, in Terror Bay, after information from an Inuk from Gjoa Haven. Yet the cause of the men's deaths remains uncertain. Lead poisoning from tinned food was long suspected, but a 2018 study found that the men's lead had built up over their whole lives. Not all of the crew's remains have been found, and researchers say more work is needed.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
A writer publicly criticized what one searcher had learned from Inuit.

- 2.
By the time the later entry was written, Franklin himself had already died.

- 3.
The men who left the ships were aiming for a particular river on the mainland.

- 4.
Machinery first designed for trains was put into both ships before they sailed.

- 5.
Details passed on by an Inuk helped searchers find the second of the two sunken ships.

- 6.
A few of the original sailors went home early, carried back by another boat during the first summer.

- 7.
Lady Franklin rejected the news brought by Rae because she believed he had hurried home to claim a reward.

- 8.
Recent research has cast doubt on a long-held explanation for why the men died.

- 9.
Two entries on the same paper, made about a year apart, differed sharply in tone.

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