In May 1845, 129 British sailors set sail into the Arctic, never to be seen alive again. Their goal: to navigate the North-west Passage, the legendary sea route through the Canadian Arctic linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The expedition, led by Sir John Franklin on board two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, ended in one of the worst disasters in polar exploration history, with the death of all 129 crew members.
Almost 180 years later, today, DNA science is doing what 19th-century search parties could not: put names to the men who died there.
