In 1845 two of the finest ships in the Royal Navy sailed west to conquer the Northwest Passage and were never seen by European eyes again. What followed was a slow-motion catastrophe of ice, lead-poisoned tins, madness and cannibalism — and a 170-year search that only ended when the wrecks were found sitting nearly intact on the seafloor.
Start here: a full narrative walk-through of how the best-equipped polar expedition of its age vanished with all hands. Sets up every mystery you're about to fall into.
The master reference. HMS Erebus and Terror, steam-heated and stocked with three years of tinned food, entered the ice in 1845 — and the timeline of everything that went wrong afterward.
The National Maritime Museum lays out who Franklin was, why the Passage obsessed the Admiralty, and how confidence curdled into disaster.
The expedition's first winter left three sailors buried in the permafrost. When they were exhumed 140 years later, their frozen faces were almost perfectly intact — and full of clues.
The forensic anthropologist who thawed the Beechey graves and found bones and hair loaded with lead — pointing a finger at the very tins meant to keep the men alive.
How Parks Canada, sonar, and Inuit oral history that had been dismissed for a century finally converged on two shipwrecks resting in the dark.
The second wreck turned up almost eerily intact, exactly where Inuit testimony always said it would be. The ice finally gave up its secret.