The ships were also fitted with hot-water heating systems, designed to maintain livable temperatures below decks during Arctic winters. They carried a library of approximately 1,200 books and a small hand organ. These details — the books, the organ, the heating system — reflect the expectation that the expedition would spend significant time in ice-enforced stasis and that maintaining crew morale and mental health during that confinement was a planning priority.
The ships sailed in May 1845 as well equipped as British technology and institutional knowledge of that period could make them. They were last seen in Baffin Bay in late July 1845, waiting for ice to clear at the entrance to Lancaster Sound. After that point, the physical record of the expedition’s history shifts from the documentary — letters, official reports, the ships’ logs — to the archaeological: the artifacts and bones that the land sites have produced, the wrecks of the ships themselves, and now the DNA from preserved teeth.
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## Lessons Not Taken: What Later Expeditions Learned
The search expeditions that looked for the Franklin party between 1848 and the 1870s gradually built a picture of the region that subsequent Arctic navigation would draw on. The Northwest Passage was finally navigated in its entirety by Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer, between 1903 and 1906, in a small vessel called the Gjøa. Amundsen’s route avoided Victoria Strait — where Franklin’s ships had been beset — and instead used the more southerly passage through Simpson Strait that had been charted by earlier search expeditions. The Gjøa spent two winters at the southeastern coast of King William Island in the harbor that is now the site of the Nunavut community of Gjoa Haven, named in Amundsen’s ship’s honor.