The Terrors of the Frozen Zone, Past and Present
The dream of finding additional written materials goes back at least to the 1870's, when Jane Franklin asked Sir Allen Young to return to the Arctic in hopes of finding some; she died before he returned, and his expedition found no new papers. The cry of "papers" once again became the motivating factor for Schwatka's search of 1878-80, and while they made some remarkable finds of human remains and other artifacts, the only sheet of paper they recovered turned out to be -- symbolically enough -- a blank one.
We don't know yet whether this new find bears any legible writing -- it's apparently still in the laboratory where paper conservators are patiently working on it -- and of course, even if it did, there's no telling how informative it might be. Other items found earlier in this area were associated with Edmund Hoar, Sir John Franklin's personal steward, and among these a pencil case was prominent. Might the newfound folio be a sketchbook? Then again, why the quill? The best case scenario might be that it mig