New research has identified four members of the doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage, including the owner of a paper-stuffed wallet that has long mystified historians

A 19th-century painting of HMS Erebus , one of two ships involved in John Franklin's 1845 expedition to the Arctic Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

In 1859, a search party looking for traces of the lost Franklin expedition to the Arctic stumbled upon the skeleton of a man “slightly built, and perhaps above the common height.”

Nearby, they found a clothes brush; a comb; and a wallet containing several papers , including a seaman’s certificate for Henry Peglar , captain of the foretop on HMS Terror , one of the two ships involved in the ill-fated expedition. Curiously, the man’s clothing was more typical of a Royal Navy steward or officer’s servant—ranks far below Peglar’s senior status.…