The Last Logbook: Franklin's Lost Expedition

Two Royal Navy ships sailed for the Northwest Passage in 1845 and never came back. A single sheet of paper, written on twice a year a part, is most of what we know.

In May 1859, on the northwest coast of King William Island, a British naval officer named William Hobson pulled apart a pile of stones. Inside, sealed in a metal cylinder, was a single sheet of paper — a standard Royal Navy record form, the kind sailors threw overboard in bottles to track ocean currents.

It had been written on twice, a year apart. The first message, from May 1847, ended with two words: All well. The second was crowded into the margins around it in April 1848. The ships had been abandoned. Sir John Franklin was dead. Twenty-four men were gone, and the one hundred and five who were left were setting out on foot toward a river hundreds of miles to the south.

None of them were ever seen alive again by another European.

This episode follows the expedition from the day it left the Thames to the DNA laboratory that is now, one name at a time, identifying the dead — including the officer whose handwriting fills those margins.