On a Monday morning in May 1845, two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, set out from Greenhithe, England, to chart a northwest passage to India and China. They departed with 134 crew members commanded by Sir John Franklin, 59, a decorated explorer famous for his previous journeys to the north. The ships were former bomb vessels that had been refitted with iron plating, furnaces and steam engines. They carried the latest magnetic surveying instruments and were provisioned for three years: The ships’ manifests listed 32,289 pounds of preserved meat, 1,008 pounds of raisins and 580 gallons of pickles. Also aboard were 2,000 books, a hand organ and a daguerreotype.

Three years after setting out, Franklin and his 129 men (five had been discharged and sent back home within three months) were missing. The British public, and Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, held out hope that they were still alive, and the admiralty dispatched its first search parties along the largely uncharted route that Franklin had followed. In 1850, three graves, two dated January and one April 1846, were discovered by American and British searchers on Beechey Island, an uninhabited speck, less than two square miles, in northernmost Canada.

No further traces were found until 1854, when John Rae, a Scottish explorer searching for the men, met some Inuit at Pelly Bay, southwest of Baffin Island. They were carrying personal items from Franklin’s crew found at abandoned camps. A gold cap band. A telescope. The Inuit also described seeing kettles containing cooked human remains. Rae reported this disturbing news to the admiralty, and it was published in the London papers. Charles Dickens, in an 1854 edition of his weekly Household Words, dismissed the accounts Rae collected as ‘‘the vague babble of savages.’’ Finally, in 1859, an official naval record was found in a stone cairn at Victory Point, on the northwest coast of King William Island, a rippling expanse of tundra 150 miles above the Arctic Circle. The record held two messages. The first ended with ‘‘All well.’’ The second, written in shakier script, reported that Franklin was dead. With the Erebus and the Terror stuck in ice, the men abandoned ship on April 22, 1848, and began a march, presumably to a trading post 600 miles south.

In the years since, the mystery of what happened to those men has inspired countless writers and artists. Wilkie Collins, Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Margaret Atwood all wrote fiction based on the Franklin expedition. James Taylor, Iron Maiden and the Breeders wrote songs about the sailors and their ordeal. Hobbyists and scholars connect on Facebook and blog forums to pore over evidence and crowdsource keys to the question of how, exactly, the men died.

From 1849 to the present, some 90 search parties have set out to find the fate of Franklin and company. A toothbrush was found lying atop the windblown tundra. A lowering mechanism for the ship’s lifeboats was discovered when ice melted in the summer. Recently, dinner china was found in the debris field of the Erebus, preserved by ice water.

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, has more than 400 of the relics from the expedition, recovered by 19th-century search parties. Personal belongings, like bone combs and soap, are emotional to contemplate. A piece of uniform found beneath a skeleton in 1859 was placed in Abraham Lincoln’s coffin by a dignitary. Franklin’s fiddle-pattern cutlery is in usable condition.

Bits and buttons keep turning up in a trail of Victorian breadcrumbs strewn across the tundra. Some artifacts, like files and tins, have been repurposed by the Inuit as sledge runners and knives, and some relics are nearly dust, like the scraps of a naval overcoat found frozen to the bleached bones of a skeleton. But each fragment flickers with a life.