Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen’s Ghost Ship

Few know that the president’s desk in the Oval Office plays a part in one of the world’s most extraordinary sagas; in Resolute, noted historian Martin Sandler brings the story to light.

After Sir John Franklin and his ships disappeared in the Arctic while seeking the Northwest Passage, 39 rescue missions were launched, including one by the Resolute, the Royal Navy’s finest vessel. In 1854, it became locked in the ice and was abandoned. A year later, a Connecticut whaling ship discovered it drifting 1,200 miles away, a 600-ton ghost ship. The whalers boarded the Resolute and steered it through a ferocious hurricane back to Connecticut. The US government re-outfitted the ship and returned it to Queen Victoria, who, in 1879, had its best timbers made into a desk for President Rutherford B. Hayes--a desk still in use today. Rare photographs, paintings, engravings, and maps illustrate the book throughout. This edition is updated with a new chapter on the discovery of Franklin’s ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, in 2014 and 2016 in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

This legendary maritime epic is perfect for fans of David Grann’s The Wager and Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea.

Martin Sandler has received many honors, including winning the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for 1919: The Year That Changed America; two Pulitzer Prize nominations; a Boston Horn Book Award for The Story of American Photography; and seven Emmys. His Library of Congress American History series has been a national bestseller with more than 500,000 copies sold, and he is one of the few historians to have published with the Library of Congress. Sandler was creator and cowriter for the acclaimed twelve-part This Was America tv series. He has taught American history and American studies at the University of Massachusetts and Smith College. Sandler lives in Cotuit, MA.