Few know that the president’s desk in the Oval Office plays a part in one of the world’s most extraordinary sagas. In Resolute, noted historian Martin Sandler brings the story to light.

After Sir John Franklin and his ships disappeared in the Arctic while seeking the Northwest Passage, thirty-nine rescue missions were launched, including one by the Resolute, the Royal Navy’s finest vessel. In 1854, it became locked in the ice and was abandoned.

A year later, a Connecticut whaling ship discovered it drifting 1,200 miles away, a 600-ton ghost ship. The whalers boarded the Resolute and steered it through a ferocious hurricane back to Connecticut. The US government re-outfitted the ship and returned it to Queen Victoria, who, in 1879, had its best timbers made into a desk for President Rutherford B. Hayes—a desk still in use today.

This edition is updated with a new chapter on the discovery of Franklin’s ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, in 2014 and 2016 in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.