Here's the "final answer" as reported in The Gazette. . . .

By KEN MCGOOGAN

A Yellowknife heritage centre holds the final answer to questions raised by the opening of an Arctic "mystery box" excavated from a cairn in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut.

The wooden box, according to those who opened it Friday in Ottawa, contained no items related to Arctic explorers Sir John Franklin or Roald Amundsen. Officials from the Canadian Conservation Institute and the Nunavut government said the box, excavated at the beginning of September, contained only bits of a cardboard box, plus "pieces of newspaper, and what appeared to be tallow" beneath sand and rocks.

Yet a retired Hudson's Bay Company manager, Eric Mitchell, had said that in the late 1950s, the wooden box contained an inscribed photograph left by Amundsen in 1905. He knew this because he helped put it there. So where did that photograph go?

So the box contains no Franklin items. For that I was ready. But nothing related to Roald Amundsen? That was a surprise. But then my old friend Louie Kamookak clarified for me.  He was one of the two men with whom I once placed a plaque on the coast of Boothia Peninsula to honour the discovery, by John Rae, of the final link in the Northwest Passage. Louie is also the grandson of Paddy Gibson, the HBC man who dug up the Amundsen photo (of Neumayer) in 1927. George Washington Porter reburied it in the late 1950s. But then, in the late 1970s, Louie explained, another HBC man took the Neumayer photo and the slab of marble that Amundsen left and brought them to Yellowknife, so they ended up
in government storage. So that would be why the delay. Almost certainly, that HBC man left a note in the box before he reburied it -- a note explaining what he had done. So now, before they reveal the note,
those who dug up the box want to locate the Neumayer photo and the marble slab, so they can produce them at the same time.That's my thinking on it, anyway. Oh, and one more thing: Louie Kamookak would like to see the cairn honouring Paddy Gibson rebuilt. That doesn't seem a lot to ask.

Click on the above title and look to the right to see how our mystery-box story looked when it turned up on The National . . . All that's left is the Great Reveal, which should happen around Sept. 29 . . .

VIDEO: 3:06

* Franklin Expedition box unearthed An Inuit family says a box that was hidden for more than 80 years in the Arctic contains logbooks linked to the doomed Franklin Expedition, the CBC's Jay Legere reports.


Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/09/07/franklin-records.html#ixzz0z2IEgp3M