In 1845, 129 Victorian explorers sailed into the Arctic on two state-of-the-art ships with three years of food aboard, and simply never returned. It took nearly 170 years to find the ships and is still revealing names today through DNA.

This episode is a deep dive into Sir John Franklin's doomed search for the Northwest Passage. We explore the Victorian spaceship technology, the fatal navigational choice, the cannibalism the British refused to believe, and how modern forensics combined with Inuit oral history finally cracked the case.

• HMS Erebus and Terror had iron-reinforced hulls, locomotive steam engines and over 1,000 books aboard
• The Victory Point Note shifted from all well to 24 dead within 11 months
• Explorer John Rae reported Inuit accounts of starvation and cannibalism, which Dickens and Lady Franklin trie ...