OTTAWA, Sept 12 (Reuters) - Explorers have found the wreck of HMS Terror, the second of two British ships lost in the disastrous 1845 Franklin expedition to Canada's Arctic Northwest Passage, Britain's Guardian newspaper said on Monday. The Arctic Research Foundation, a private group that sent a vessel to help look for the ship, found it in pristine condition at the bottom of a bay earlier this month, a spokesman told the paper. In 1846 Sir John, born in Spilsby, hand-picked 128 officers and men and set out to find the Northwest Passage, the long-sought shortcut to Asia that supposedly ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of the harsh, ice-choked Arctic. The latest discovery was made two years and a day after Canadian marine archeologists found the wreck of Erebus in the same area of eastern Queen Maud gulf where Inuit oral history had long said a large wooden ship sank.
The Arctic Research Foundation discovers the wreck of the Royal Navy's HMS Terror almost completely intact off the southern coast of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, 168 years after being abandoned during Franklin's lost expedition in 1848.