At the beginning of August 1845, under the command of the elderly Sir John Franklin, the two mighty bombards HMS Erebus and Terror entered the Lancaster Channel in the Arctic Archipelago with the mission of finally discovering the Northwest Passage. But the pharaonic expedition and its one hundred and twenty-nine men are immediately plunged into the darkness of the polar night, the boundless silence of the ice. Back in England, people began to wonder: what happened to them? Luigi Guarnieri reconstructs the entire, astonishing epic of the Franklin search, recounting one hundred and fifty years of daring expeditions in a hostile land inhabited by mysterious Inuit tribes, and the superhuman exploits of intrepid and megalomaniacal officers, pious and drunk, brave to the point of madness, all driven by the boundless ambition to conquer the Far North and find Captain Franklin and his men.