I’ve always been interested in the history of arctic/polar exploration, so the brief mention of the attempts to discover what happened to the Franklin expedition caught my attention. PBS/Nova carried an interesting story about its fate back in the 1990s:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/franklin-expedition.html
Story is about an American expedition to map and survey the route for a Trans-Siberian telegraph line to connect Europe and North America via the Bering Strait in the mid 1860's.
The author references the Franklin Expedition several times in the book.