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  1. On a Monday morning in May 1845, two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, set out from Greenhithe, England, to chart a northwest passage to India and China. They departed with 134 crew members commanded by Sir John Franklin, 59, a decorated explorer famous for his previous journeys to the north. The ships were former bomb vessels that had been refitted with iron plating, furnaces and steam engines. They carried the latest magnetic surveying instruments and were provisioned for three years: The ships’ manifests listed 32,289 pounds of preserved meat, 1,008 pounds of raisins and 580 gallons of pickles. Also aboard were 2,000 books, a hand organ and a daguerreotype.

    Three years after setting out, Franklin and his 129 men (five had been discharged and sent back home within three months) were missing. The British public, and Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, held out hope that they were still alive, and the admiralty dispatched its first search parties along the largely uncharted route that Franklin had followed. In 1850, three graves, two dated January and one April 1846, were discovered by American and British searchers on Beechey Island, an uninhabited speck, less than two square miles, in northernmost Canada.

    No further traces were found until 1854, when John Rae, a Scottish explorer searching for the men, met some Inuit at Pelly Bay, southwest of Baffin Island. They were carrying personal items from Franklin’s crew found at abandoned camps. A gold cap band. A telescope. The Inuit also described seeing kettles containing cooked human remains. Rae reported this disturbing news to the admiralty, and it was published in the London papers. Charles Dickens, in an 1854 edition of his weekly Household Words, dismissed the accounts Rae collected as ‘‘the vague babble of savages.’’ Finally, in 1859, an official naval record was found in a stone cairn at Victory Point, on the northwest coast of King William Island, a rippling expanse of tundra 150 miles above the Arctic Circle. The record held two messages. The first ended with ‘‘All well.’’ The second, written in shakier script, reported that Franklin was dead. With the Erebus and the Terror stuck in ice, the men abandoned ship on April 22, 1848, and began a march, presumably to a trading post 600 miles south.

    In the years since, the mystery of what happened to those men has inspired countless writers and artists. Wilkie Collins, Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Margaret Atwood all wrote fiction based on the Franklin expedition. James Taylor, Iron Maiden and the Breeders wrote songs about the sailors and their ordeal. Hobbyists and scholars connect on Facebook and blog forums to pore over evidence and crowdsource keys to the question of how, exactly, the men died.

    From 1849 to the present, some 90 search parties have set out to find the fate of Franklin and company. A toothbrush was found lying atop the windblown tundra. A lowering mechanism for the ship’s lifeboats was discovered when ice melted in the summer. Recently, dinner china was found in the debris field of the Erebus, preserved by ice water.

    The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, has more than 400 of the relics from the expedition, recovered by 19th-century search parties. Personal belongings, like bone combs and soap, are emotional to contemplate. A piece of uniform found beneath a skeleton in 1859 was placed in Abraham Lincoln’s coffin by a dignitary. Franklin’s fiddle-pattern cutlery is in usable condition.

    Bits and buttons keep turning up in a trail of Victorian breadcrumbs strewn across the tundra. Some artifacts, like files and tins, have been repurposed by the Inuit as sledge runners and knives, and some relics are nearly dust, like the scraps of a naval overcoat found frozen to the bleached bones of a skeleton. But each fragment flickers with a life.

  2. Soup tin
    The tin has been opened at one end with a hammer. (Note: All object descriptions are adapted from the website of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.)

    In 1984, Owen Beattie, a Canadian anthropologist, exhumed the three Beechey Island graves in order to examine, X-ray and autopsy their contents. The permafrost had preserved John Torrington, John Hartnell and William Braine perfectly, even keeping intact snow dusting Torrington’s coffin, indicating a light flurry the day he was buried in 1846. Franklin had given the men proper burials in navy wool-covered coffins trimmed with decorative handles and cushioned by wood shavings.

    Three years later, Beattie and a writer, John Geiger, published ‘‘Frozen in Time,’’ in which they argued that Franklin’s men had suffered from acute lead poisoning. The most likely cause: 8,000 tins of food, sloppily soldered with lead. The levels of the toxin Beattie found in the three frozen sailors could have produced symptoms of malaise, irritability, convulsions, anorexia and coma.

  3. A fragment of a white cotton shirt
    The stripes are in a trelliswork pattern and a honeycomb pattern with a zigzag border.

    There are color photographs of the frozen sailors online. Torrington was 19 when he sailed as a petty officer on the Terror. He has pale eyelashes, bare feet and narrow hands. His clothing is delicate: shell buttons, linen trousers and a fine blue stripe on his cotton shirt. A blue-and-white polka-dot kerchief is bound under his chin and around his head, keeping his jaw in place. His expression is calm. There is a passage in ‘‘Frozen in Time’’ I keep going back to, in which Geiger describes Beattie’s lifting Torrington’s body from his grave, after days of pickax work and slow thawing:

    ‘‘He was very light, weighing less than 88 pounds, and as they moved him his head lolled onto Beattie’s left shoulder; Beattie looked directly into Torrington’s half-open eyes, only a few inches from his own.’’

    It is a Pietà in warped time. A man cradles a boy 123 years his senior.

  4. Timber
    A fragment of wood, possibly the edge of a bowl.

    On Sept. 2, 2014, a team of researchers and divers, backed by 13 partners including the Arctic Research Foundation, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Canadian Navy, and led by a 43-year-old Parks Canada underwater archaeologist named Ryan Harris, found the H.M.S. Erebus, upright and intact. It was lying in 33 feet of water in Queen Maud Gulf, just north of mainland Canada. This news, in Canada at least, where I’m from, was big. My dad sent me commemorative stamps. They recovered the ship’s bell — often considered the soul of a vessel — and hoped the wreck might illuminate how the crew’s ordeal unfolded. In New York, I excitedly brought up the discovery at dinners, over coffee and at the playground, only to find that just a handful of people knew about Franklin.

  5. Pencil case
    The surface of the item is engine-turned with two raised bands decorated with flowers and foliage.

    I’m not a reporter. I paint and draw, make conceptual books and graphic novels. I get fixated on things, on pieces of history, on patterns and form. Most of my work, and life, is preoccupied with objects and the value we place on them.

    One night, in a London hotel bar, I have a drink with my friend Mark. We talk about Franklin. Mark asks me what ‘‘Erebus’’ means anyway. I shrug. We look it up on his phone. He reads the definition aloud: ‘‘One: a personification of darkness in Greek mythology. Two: a place of darkness in the underworld on the way to Hades.’’

    I go upstairs to my room, order soup and for three hours scroll through the National Maritime Museum’s online catalog of Franklin expedition relics, losing myself in the virtual vitrines. I take screen grabs. Pieces of iron, snow goggles and forks stack on my computer desktop.


  6. Photo
    Soup tin Part of the label with instructions for preparing the contents still remains. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  7. Photo
    Purse A beaded silk purse sewn to a metal frame. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  8. Photo
    ‘Christian Melodies’ A book of Christian verses belonging to Lt. Graham Gore of the H.M.S. Erebus. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  9. Holy Bible
    The book is in pieces with no cover.


    The German word for Pietà is Vesperbild, translating roughly to ‘‘picture of evening.’’

    The Latin word ‘‘Vesper’’ is related to the Greek ‘‘Hesperides,’’ three daughters whose parentage has been traced to Nyx and Erebus.

    I begin to map out a Vesperbild, painting all of the Franklin artifacts.

  10. Telescope lens
    Either an eyepiece or a correcting lens.

    The contemporary Franklin narrative continues to dismiss Inuit testimony, as Dickens did. A 2014 BBC News article, a 2015 Nova documentary and the National Maritime Museum website, as of today, claim that Franklin was last seen off the coast of Baffin Island. The authors neglect to add: by white people. The crew members were seen alive, over the course of a few years, by the Inuit. Then they were seen dead.

  11. Fish hook
    Attached to a piece of bone.

    On one of the hottest days of the summer, I meet the ‘‘Frozen in Time’’ author John Geiger in a Toronto restaurant. He is now C.E.O. of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Over Arctic char, he recommends books about Inuit testimony of their sightings of Franklin’s men, telling me, ‘‘The Inuit had always known where one of the boats sank — their oral history is incredibly accurate.’’

    By the end of lunch, he has invited me to join an expedition the R.C.G.S. is organizing on King William Island, Nunavut, an island the size of Jamaica with a population of 1,200. It is one of the last places Franklin’s men were seen. Louie Kamookak, 56, an Inuit historian specializing in aboriginal knowledge, will be taking a group of students from Gjoa Haven, a 95 percent Inuit hamlet on the southeast coast of the island, to sites where Franklin relics have been found.

  12. Ulu knife
    The ivory blade is edged with a tin can.

    In the late 1840s, on the southwest coast of King William Island, a small Inuit hunting group encountered 30 white men who asked for food. The Inuit traded whale blubber and seal meat for a knife, then watched as the men melted the blubber and cooked the meat over it, losing the blood and fat considered by the Inuit to be the most nutritious parts.

  13. Sextant eyepieces
    Two eyepiece lens caps of sextant tubes.

    Since the 2014 discovery of the Erebus, Parks Canada has made a five-year plan to continue to search for the Terror and to dive to the Erebus and eventually go inside the ship to try to find clues. If there are human remains, they could help identify the last survivors of the party.

    The window for dives is small. The Arctic summer is brief, and waterways open up for only a few weeks, if at all, each August and September. A 40-year-old fishing boat, the Martin Bergmann, has been the dedicated vessel on which the dive team lives and works. It belongs to the Arctic Research Foundation, created by the Canadian businessman Jim Balsillie, a former BlackBerry C.E.O. turned philanthropist. I am invited to visit the Bergmann while it’s at anchor in Cambridge Bay, 200 miles west of Gjoa Haven.

  14. Photo
  15. Vesta case
    A brass matchbox. It contains three dead matches and a piece of white wool.

    I imagine Richard Wall, the cook on the Erebus, trying to light a match to the camp stove. He can’t feel his fingers, black with frostbite. Three matches go out before he finally lights one to a small piece of wool and then to the paper in the stove. Half the men won’t touch the tinned food. Wall spits in the snow. His gums are bleeding. He wiggles his bottom teeth with his tongue as the pemmican thaws.

  16. Musket ball
    A lead musket ball.

    In 1859, a search party discovered an abandoned boat in the northwest part of King William Island. It was mounted on a sledge and contained two skeletons and a heavy heap of items like cutlery, books, plates, soap, chocolate and worsted-work slippers.

    A few weeks before my trip to King William Island, I spend some time at my parents’ house near the Niagara escarpment. I think they are on the hoarder spectrum and worry I am too. A glance behind the barn reveals five fenders, eight worn-out plastic shovels, a dryer, a small fridge, a wheelchair, two axles, a sign holder and a toilet seat. I understand why my father is holding onto these things. It all might come in handy. Franklin’s crew members probably planned on trading their things with the Inuit they hoped to encounter, but the sheer weight of the load — estimated at 1,400 pounds — would have exhausted the suffering men.

  17. Material
    Fragments of velvet.

    At a camping store, I keep stopping in front of the Freshette, a plastic funnel allowing women to urinate standing. It is $22.95. I want it.

    I wonder how cold it will be. I look it up. The weather looks O.K. for late summer, 35 degrees dropping to 30 at night. The day before my departure, I try on all my new cold-weather clothes and look in the mirror. I start to shiver. It is 84 outside, and the air conditioner in my bedroom is blasting. The ‘‘smart wool’’ of my long underwear is itchy. The technical fiber in my shirt smells weird. I think about the navy-issue woolens the crew wore. I’m sure a few of the men suffered from eczema, as I do. Psoriasis. God knows. I like how prepared I look. Maybe some of the men were vain like me. Scurvy and lead poisoning would be hard on the vain.

    I remove my clothes and pack them. In the morning, I’ll take a flight to Toronto for a connection to Edmonton. From there I’ll fly to Yellowknife and catch a prop plane to Gjoa Haven. The trip takes 13 hours. I will be gone for 10 days. I already miss my 2-year-old daughter.

  18. Gloves
    Two left hands, not a pair. There is a small heart worked into the palm of both hands.

    On Beechey Island in 1846, someone laid a pair of gloves on the ground to dry. They placed stones on the palms to keep them from blowing away. I imagine a sailor with two left hands. Then I imagine a girl, learning how to cast and purl, knitting them for her older brother. Not realizing her mistake until he tries them on the morning he leaves.

    Thomas Evans was 18 when the expedition sailed in 1845. He lived with six siblings and his grandfather in Kent, and was listed as a ship’s boy in the H.M.S. Terror muster roll. The left-hand glove is worn in the usual way, the thumb rubbed down, holes in the index finger, palm stained. The left-hand glove that was worn on the right is cleaner, its wear on the opposite side. The heart-shaped embroidery on its palm is clear. Evans reassures his tearful sister that they fit perfectly.

  19. Bone comb
    Found in an abandoned boat.

    I wake up in the Amundsen Hotel to a glowing blue window. In the room next door, a woman coughs. I dress and go outside. It is dusty and bright, and the sun casts shadows that are almost fluorescent. The horizon is martian, and it makes me feel insignificant yet strong. There are children everywhere in Gjoa Haven. Fat, ruddy faces like ripe fruit, in little sunglasses. Their mothers smiling, smoking, some carrying them in handmade floral cotton back-slings called amaut.

    I continue walking. In the bay, the tide is out, leaving seaweed-covered rocks exposed. They look like the tops of green-haired men, sunk up to the brow line. Like they have male pattern baldness. I think again of male vanity.

  20. Tourniquet
    A surgeon’s tourniquet. The strap is missing.

    Louie Kamookak is tall and broad, and doesn’t speak much. On the morning of Sept. 5, we load two motorboats and head west. The water is smooth and we spot a seal in our boat’s wake. The goal of the King William Island expedition, as set out by Kamookak and the R.C.G.S., is to pass on what remains of the oral history of the Franklin expedition to the next generation of Inuit. I sit behind Josephine Kamookak, Louie’s wife, and their daughter, Jade, who is 12. A student, Shaunya, 18, sits beside me. In a second boat are five others, including two more students, James and Michael, both 16. David Qirqqut, a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, drives the boat, and his father, Jimmy, 78, sits behind him. We are headed to Peabody Point on the southwest coast of the Island, known to the Inuit as Malerualik, or ‘‘the place where one could follow after caribou.’’ I like this straightforward way of naming. The Erebus was found near an island called Umiaqtalik, which translates to ‘‘there is a boat there.’’

  21. ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’
    A pocket edition of the novel by Oliver Goldsmith.

    Kamookak knows the cellphone numbers of everyone in Gjoa Haven by heart. When he speaks, it’s in a precise monotone, and the bare minimum; often little more than a shrug. I soon realize that oral tradition is about listening, not speaking. I ask what makes the Inuit good listeners. ‘‘They have nothing else to distract,’’ he says. ‘‘The lights go out, it’s dark, the elders tell a story, you listen and you fall asleep. It’s very quiet in an igloo.’’

  22. Buttons
    Domed, with traces of thread attached.

    I show Kamookak a picture of four brass buttons from the National Maritime Museum collection. He thinks they should have been left at the abandoned camp where they were found. ‘‘When an Inuit dies, he is buried with his belongings,’’ he explains. ‘‘It’s bad luck to take a dead person’s stuff.’’ If an Inuit needs something that was left with the deceased, like a tool or an article of clothing, he or she will make a miniature replica and switch the two. At a grave site, Kamookak leads us in the Inuit tradition of circling the grave clockwise, to show respect for the dead.

  23. Photo
    Fishing line Wound on a leather holder and found in the abandoned boat at Erebus Bay. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  24. Photo
    Fish hook Made from expedition copper attached to bone. Found in the possession of the Inuit. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  25. Photo
    Knife Made from materials salvaged from the expedition’s discarded equipment. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  26. Wallet
    A leather wallet containing newspaper clippings and notes.

    Malerualik is not far from where a skeleton was found in 1859 by Francis Leopold McClintock of the search vessel the Fox. He writes: ‘‘I came upon a human skeleton, partly exposed, with here and there a few fragments of clothing appearing through the snow. The skeleton, now perfectly bleached, was lying upon its face.’’ The skeleton was presumed to be Henry Peter Peglar, captain of the foretop on the Terror, but is likely to be Peglar’s friend, Thomas Armitage, the gun-room steward.

    When the wallet was found on the skeleton, the discoverers thought the notes were written in German, but in fact they were written backward. Theories about the papers vary: paranoid notes from a brain addled by lead poisoning, evidence of division among the ranks, notes being written between the crew in code. The handwriting is sophisticated and tidy. The papers include (backward) phrases like ‘‘whose is this coffee’’ and ‘‘O death wheare is thy sting.’’

    I wonder if one line, ‘‘all my art Tom,’’ meant Peglar and Armitage were in love. Traditionally, when ships wintered over in the Arctic, the crews would put on concerts and pantomimes to offset the boredom. Illiterate sailors were taught to read. Parlor games were played. I wonder if Armitage was carrying souvenirs of a winter night spent below decks killing time.

    Peglar: I’ll wager I can write that song backward.
    Armitage: My arse you can.
    Peglar (winking): Backward and in a circle, mate.
  27. Neckerchief
    Fragments of a knotted black silk neckerchief.

    In my tent, I think about Thomas Armitage, found nearby, face down. Just — splat. How everyone thought he was Peglar until the knot in his neckerchief — not a style the captain of the foretop would assume — gave his rank away. But maybe Peglar was wearing his friend’s scarf? I think about people who don’t die in their own clothes.

    The two pairs of pants I have with me are not mine. One pair is North Face fleece, with knee and bum patches, lent to me by a friend. The other is an old pair of hunting trousers found at a yard sale. They are men’s but at some point have been roughly tailored to fit a woman. The legs evidence years of someone else’s stains and wear. If I died in either of these pairs of pants, people would get the wrong idea.

  28. Sledge harness
    The belt went diagonally across a man’s shoulder and was attached to a rope connected to a sledge.

    I begin to consider my family and friends in terms of how their qualities would be tested in severe temperatures or situations. My brother would show grit but impatience. My father might mutiny. My mother would starve herself to feed others. If I were hauling 600 miles across the Arctic, I’d choose J. for stamina and his uncomplaining nature; A. for her medical skills and ability to play music; N. because he’s optimistic and multilingual; H. for her understanding of the natural world; T. for her scientific mind, though she probably would not hesitate to fry my liver and eat it if I died.

  29. Saw
    A saw made from a straightened cask hoop.

    Thomas Honey, a carpenter on the Terror, has been given orders to make a saw. He uses a file to cut the serrated teeth, his progress painstaking because his hands are frostbitten. When he is finished, he brings the saw to John Peddie, a surgeon, where he has laid the stiffened body of Thomas Terry, a boatswain. Honey walks a few paces and retches into an icebank.

  30. Shotgun
    The gun has a broad steel trigger with a pineapple-type finial.

    On our third day, the wind picks up. Jimmy Qirqqut points out a ring around the sun. Bad weather. Simpson Strait, the narrowest waterway between King William Island and the mainland of the Adelaide Peninsula, is white-capped. I ask Kamookak about the likelihood of returning home by the afternoon, and he shrugs and turns his tent so it is not broadside to the wind. I do the same with mine. Josephine, while uphill at the makeshift toilet, spots some caribou. A cry goes up through camp. The students grab guns and head upriver. I walk to a peak, where four of us — the women and the elders — pass around binoculars.

    When we see that Michael has made a kill, Shaunya and I head across the rocks. As we walk, my attention is caught by the lichen on the rocks. It is bright orange, making the ground look sprinkled with Cheetos dust. She tells me Michael is a sharpshooter who turned down an opportunity to go to a national competition in Montreal because he didn’t like the idea of the long flight. They are butchering the caribou, a large female, when we arrive. It’s like watching a pit crew. The students are covered in blood. Within 10 minutes, the organs are tied up in a large furry package. One boy slings the hindquarters over his shoulders, the other strings together the trunk with twine, Shaunya carries the guns. The velvety antlers are left behind.

  31. Paddle
    The letter A is carved on the oar blade.

    After a lunch of rich caribou liver, fried and peppered, and starchy pilot crackers, Kamookak decides the wind has died down enough for us to head home. We quickly pack up. The small boats are difficult to handle in the chop. Halfway across Douglas Bay, a deep inlet on the south coast of the island, we reverse and pull into a cove. It’s too dangerous to continue. We climb out and sit on the shore. It gets colder. We’ll pitch camp here if the wind does not die down. I throw some rocks, trying to hit a ‘‘Toy Story’’ diaper that has been left on the ground. I remember a line from Barry Lopez’s book ‘‘Arctic Dreams’’: ‘‘To travel in the Arctic is to wait.’’ My flight to Cambridge Bay to meet the divers’ ship, the Bergmann, is in 18 hours. Time feels gummy, as if it’s stretching and compressing. In 1847, the ice in Victoria Strait, directly west of King William Island, where the admiralty recommended Franklin sail, did not melt during the summer. Nor did it melt in 1848. The ships were stuck.

  32. Stanchions
    Three metal stanchions.

    I make my flight. In Cambridge Bay, one of two settlements on Victoria Island, a sprawling peninsula-frilled landmass directly west of King William Island, there is a storm coming. The truck won’t start. Adrian Schimnowski, the operations director for the Arctic Research Foundation, calls for a jump. While we wait, I sit in the back seat of the car with Marc-André Bernier, a slender French Canadian, earnest and poetic, who is head of the dive team for Parks Canada; and David McIsaac, mustachioed and quick to joke, the Bergmann’s captain. We talk about the weather. We really talk about the weather. In detail. The consequences. The margins. Arctic weather is tricky. The Inuit wait and watch, but the kabloona — the white person — likes to make elaborate contingency plans. Bernier uses the word ‘‘vis’’ a lot. He says it four times before I realize he means visibility. After spending the last four days looking at the aurora borealis and rings around the sun, I’m suddenly talking about how wave chop and rain affects silt and vis.

    When we finally pull up to the small hotel, the doors are locked. Because the ship is at anchor and the divers and crew are staying ashore, I ask if I can stay on the boat. Schimnowski shrugs. If you want to.

  33. Photo
    Spectacle lenses Found in the abandoned boat at Erebus Bay. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  34. Photo
    Packet of needles Found in a tent that most likely belonged to the officers. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  35. Heel
    Part of a shoe.

    I’ve been carrying 4-by-6 prints of daguerreotypes taken of some of the H.M.S. Erebus officers. A curly lock of hair falls over the forehead of James Fitzjames, the ship’s commander. Harry D. S. Goodsir, the ship’s naturalist, holds his hand to his temple, pensive. James Reid, ice master, clutches a telescope. Franklin’s portrait is blurred. He looks stout and bleary. Letters from the ship’s surgeon, Stephen Stanley (collar popped, smiling), report that the day the picture was taken, Franklin had the flu. He seems preoccupied. He had amassed years of Arctic experience, but his 1819 expedition to the Coppermine River resulted in the deaths by starvation of 11 crew members, a murder and Franklin’s having to subsist on shoe leather and soup made from lichen. He was able to spin this into a popular book, ‘‘To the Shores of the Polar Sea,’’ and he became known in London as ‘‘The Man Who Ate His Boots.’’

    Franklin’s reputation, since the late 19th century, has made the rounds from hero to fool. But Ryan Harris, the lead diver who discovered the Erebus in 2014, leapt to Franklin’s defense when I suggested that the mission had some blind spots. ‘‘Franklin and his men were doomed the moment they received orders from the admiralty. He followed those orders to a T and into the worst choke point in the Arctic Archipelago.’’ Harris, the most successful searcher in 170 years, is loyal to the captain: ‘‘The notion that Franklin was anything but a sterling naval officer I just can’t accept. He followed his orders faithfully and died.’’

  36. Teacup
    The cup is made of glazed porcelain with a broad blue rim band.

    The Bergmann is built like a little blue teapot. Short and stout. There is nothing sleek, nothing gleaming or high-tech about it. I peek in the pantry. Tea, maple syrup, cereal. A map of the Arctic Archipelago is spread beneath a Plexiglas tabletop. Atop it sit a deck of cards, a pair of aviators and ‘‘The Quest for the Northwest Passage,’’ by Glyn Williams.

    Straight off the kitchen is the lab, formerly a fish hold. This is where most of the onboard cataloging, diagraming and technical work is done. Heavy neoprene wet suits hang, feet suspended a few inches from the floor, and rainbow-colored multibeam sonar images of the Erebus hull are taped to the walls. My bunk is tucked into the bow, in a three-person cabin dubbed ‘‘the executive suite.’’ Yellow foam mattresses are covered with faded plaid, floral and geometric patterned sheets.

    I sleep well. When I wake in the dark morning, gently rocking, a feeling of peacefulness comes over me. I walk through the lab, pushing past the rows of empty wet suits.

  37. Sailmaker’s palm
    The device is used to push a needle through stout fabric.

    Filippo Ronca, an underwater archaeologist responsible for the safety of the crew, tells me the hose that supplies air to a diver is called the umbilical. The cold, Ronca explains, is not the most dangerous element in Arctic diving. The most worrisome aspect is how remote the team is from emergency assistance. Ronca recounts how once, as an exercise in compassion, he tried to fix a shovel handle with no tools: ‘‘I just worked on it and worked on it, and just imagined what Franklin’s guys would have gone through. Four hours and a couple of bloody fingers later, I was able to fix it.’’

    The divers have been working around the clock during the tiny window of ice-free water the Arctic summer provides. By the time they return to Ottawa, they will have put in 25 days of diving over the past two years. They’ve managed to trim all the seaweed off the Erebus, retrieve artifacts and test structural stability. But they still have not gone inside.

    Ronca shows me a printout of a picture of his family he keeps inside a Ziploc bag in his wet suit when he dives. The paper is creased and worn. It has been folded and unfolded many times.

  38. Purse
    A beaded silk purse sewn to a metal frame.

    William Wentzall, able seaman, turns in his hammock and feels the frame of a purse press into his armpit. He pulls it out of his pocket and holds it to his nose and lips. Hannah, his wife, gave him her beaded purse, containing a lock of hair from their first son, William, who was buried on Christmas Eve 1842. When Wentzall left to sail on the H.M.S. Terror, Hannah was heavily pregnant.

  39. Spectacle lenses
    Oval white glass lenses.

    In the final weeks of my research and writing, I scratch my cornea badly with the end of a paintbrush. My 20/13 vision, of which I am overly proud, is reduced to 20/50 in my left eye. It hurts to look at light. I feel off balance, bumping into doorjambs and grabbing twice at the refrigerator door. The theme of visibility has shadowed me for the last year: The Franklin story is riddled with gaps in foresight, lack of wisdom, snow blindness, faith in navigation, even clairvoyance (the ghost of a little girl was consulted by Lady Jane Franklin as to where the ships were abandoned). The story of any wreck is told in hindsight. I think again about blind spots.

  40. Packet of needles
    The needles are in a brown paper packet with a green printed label.

    Back in Toronto, I sit down with Jim Balsillie, the founder of the Arctic Research Foundation, in the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel. We drink mint tea. ‘‘Up there, the penalty for blind spots is death,’’ he says bluntly. He points out that so many Inuit myths end in death: ‘‘Here is the story of a husband who didn’t share his food with his wife, so he died. Here’s the story of boys and girls who were not respectful of the ice monster, so they died. Here’s the story of the little girl who didn’t tie up her mukluks right, so her feet froze off and she died.’’ My pen explodes, and he gives me his.

  41. File
    A file blade without a handle.

    When I return to New York, the two movies everyone is talking about are ‘‘The Martian’’ and ‘‘The Revenant.’’ Both are survival stories. First I see ‘‘The Martian,’’ in which the astronaut Mark Watney gets stuck on Mars. In the final scene, Watney advises his students: ‘‘At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you.’’ He continues: ‘‘You can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin, you do the math, you solve one problem, then you solve the next one, and then the next, and if you solve enough problems you get to go home.’’ I think of 129 men who didn’ t go home. I walk out into the multiplex lobby. I feel as if I’ve just watched an episode of ‘‘Curious George.’’

  42. Nail
    A nail with no head.

    I see a matinee of ‘‘The Revenant’’ on New Year’s Day. In it, the frontiersman Hugh Glass also solves problem after problem. Where Watney removes shrapnel from his abdomen, Glass cauterizes a severed windpipe with gunpowder; Watney heats his rover with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, while Glass uses a dead horse as a duvet. (Luke Skywalker did this with a tauntaun in 1980.) In the end, instead of taking full credit for his success, as Watney does, Glass realizes the futility of revenge in the face of grief and leaves his fate in God’s hands. Each narrative is triumphalist. After a year of thinking about Franklin, I’m not so interested in triumph; I’m more interested in tragedy. Has our appetite for artistic tragedy waned as we get daily reports of shootings, suicide bombs, still more lead poisoning?

  43. Lens cap
    A brass objective lens cap.

    Hugh Glass reminds me of my favorite character in the whole Franklin story, the Scottish explorer John Rae, who was renowned for his physical endurance and respect for natives. Were he part of the Franklin expedition, he probably would have survived. Still, I doubt anyone could turn Franklin’s story into a triumphalist narrative. He and his men died. We are left with stuff. So much stuff. And more to be recovered.

    What are we looking for?

    I ask Bernier and Harris, the Parks Canada divers, if their theories about what happened to Franklin have changed with the discovery of the Erebus. Harris points out that the location validates the Inuit accounts of where the ship sank, but adds, ‘‘We don’t have any earth-shattering observations to make at this point.’’

    Bernier adds: ‘‘We haven’t seen any big conclusion one way or the other.’’

  44. Snow goggles
    Spectacles with tinted lenses in a case.

    I look out the window of my new apartment to the building across the street. I’m wearing a pair of bone snow goggles I bought on my last day in Gjoa Haven. I can see the mortar between each brick and can read the ‘‘Friedrich’’ logo on the air-conditioning units. Things seem closer and clearer. The design is crude but perfect: a hollowed-out bone, a dent for the bridge of a nose and two narrow slits. I take them off, place them on my bookshelf and think of the pairs Franklin’s crew fashioned out of reading spectacles.

  45. Photo
    Sea boot With a square toe and a rounded top shaped to fit the calf. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  46. Photo
    Pocket chronometer Found in an abandoned boat at Erebus Bay, King William Island, in May 1859. Credit National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
  47. Curtain rod
    Two pieces of a curtain rod.

    The steward Tom Jopson glances over Capt. Francis Crozier’s quarters for the last time. Crozier has ordered all to abandon ship. On his way out, Jopson pauses in the doorway and looks at the linen curtains hanging on a rod. He turns back, unhooks the rod, discards the drape and tucks it under his armpit.

  48. Sea boot
    With a square toe and a rounded top to the leg shaped to fit the calf.


    The Northwest Passage was finally navigated by Roald Amundsen in 1906, in the Gjoa, a 70-foot boat with a crew of six, for which the hamlet is named. Franklin was Amundsen’s inspiration. But the first commercial freighter transit of the passage happened only in 2013, when the M.S. Nordic Orion was helped along by Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers and climate change.

    At the eye doctor, the vision in my left eye is only 20/50 until I am handed a pinhole occluder to look through. My vision improves to 20/25. When I ask my doctor how obstructing vision makes things clearer, she explains that the occluder, a plastic sievelike disc, cuts down on periphery, focuses vision and can correct myopia.

    To travel, hunt, survive, to simply see in the Arctic, the aperture needs to be smaller.

  49. Pocket chronometer
    The glass is missing, and the condition is very rusty.

    I wonder if my 400 Vesperbild are just another blind spot. A hundred and twenty-nine men disappeared into the landscape, their lives eclipsed by grisly remains and random belongings. Have the artifacts further eclipsed the tragedy? Do they divert our gaze? What if the Erebus is left where it is? I imagine the divers, in the Inuit tradition of respect, swimming slowly around the wreck clockwise and then going home.

    I’ve been making replicas of the artifacts by painting them. By occluding the value of these pieces, I’m trying to see the men and their lives. I think about how David Qirqqut, when we were camping one night, described the traditional Inuit sense of time: The new moon every month has a meaning, and the Inuit have a name for each new moon, relating to a detail of an animal or the landscape. The bright half moon in the sky, he explained, means it is the time of the year when the velvet of the caribou antlers is coming off. There is no new year.

Correction: April 3, 2016

An article on March 20 about Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage misstated the date in 1848 when Franklin and his crew abandoned their ships. It was April 22, not April 25. The article also misspelled the surname of the first explorer to navigate the Northwest Passage. He is Roald Amundsen, not Admunsen.