A Book That Did Not Know Yet

Describing ships that become locked into drift ice and can neither advance nor retreat, the book adds that this "is supposed by some persons even now to be the case with the expedition under Sir John Franklin."

That sentence was printed in 1848. Franklin had sailed in 1845 with two ships and 129 men to find the North-West Passage, and nothing had been heard from them since. The book files him under a natural hazard, as a vessel that might still be out there, still drifting, still waiting on the ice to let go^[1].

What the author could not know, writing it, was that the expedition would never come back at all. Not one man of the 129 survived.