Twelve years later 14-year-old Peter Griffin joins the crew of the tiny steam yacht Fox on an expedition to discover their fate. Peter resolutely endures the close quarters on board ship, the cold and the dark, and the dangers of the forbidding Arctic landscape. As they travel further and further from home they find strange fragments, traces of men who have travelled before them. Soon they make discoveries that suggest the terrible fate suffered by Franklin and his men.

Based on historical accounts, Mystery in the Frozen Lands offers one boy's perspective of one the greatest of all Canadian disasters.