Finding Franklin, Russell A Potter, 2016As a (very low grade) Franklin Expedition nerd, I thoroughly

Finding Franklin, Russell A Potter, 2016

As a (very low grade) Franklin Expedition nerd, I thoroughly recommend this both as an introduction for non-nerds, and also to minor nerds who will probably find things that they didn’t already know in there. It’s more the story of the search than the expedition - but that tells the story of the different theories about what happened to the expedition as part of it. It was written after the Erebus was found, but before the Terror was found, though that doesn’t really affect the narrative - it’s going to take years for the archaeology of those ships to be looked at, synthesised and published (it took over 30 years for the archaeology of the Mary Rose to be fully published - and the preservation there was only a third of a smaller ship). It also covers well the current politics around the ships and the expedition. 

One of the things that surprised me was that the “Peglar Papers” - some of the very little written material from the expedition, which are very difficult to interpret as they are obviously personal notes not intended for others to be reading - have not had any sort of imaging analysis to see if more text can be read than can be read with the naked eye. Nice discussion of the papers here. 

This is one of them, showing the difficulties: