In the Arctic Seas

In 1857, Lady Jane Franklin made a promise to herself and to history: she would know what happened to her husband. Sir John Franklin had vanished twelve years earlier with his entire crew during their attempt to chart the Northwest Passage, and the Arctic had kept its silence. Francis McClintock, a veteran of polar exploration, took command of the small steam yacht Fox and sailed into the frozen unknown. This is his extraordinary account of that two-year odyssey, a voyage that began in failure when the Fox became trapped in pack ice off Greenland, and ended in one of the 19th century's most haunting discoveries. McClintock chronicles the relentless drive across frozen seas, the desperate hope, and the final, grim evidence of what befell Franklin and his men. This is adventure at its most unflinching: not the triumph of conquest, but the terrible clarity of truth.