Short answers, pulled from the story.
Commander Robert McClure became the first person to discover and transit the Northwest Passage between 1850 and 1854. McClure and his crew on HMS Investigator were rescued in 1854 after being trapped in the ice near Banks Island for three winters.
Roald Amundsen completed the first complete transit of the Northwest Passage solely by ship from 1903 to 1906. His vessel Gjøa reached a natural harbor on King William Island by the 3rd of October 1903 and remained there for nearly two years.
High concentrations of lead in the bones of three seamen were found by anthropologist Owen Beattie in 1981, likely caused by lead-based solder used to seal 8,000 tins of food. Records show Franklin died in 1847 and the crew abandoned the ships in 1848 before starving to death.
The Northwest Passage became open to ships without the need of an icebreaker in 2007, the first time the passage has been clear since records began in 1972. This event marked a new low of ice cover as seen in satellite measurements which went back to 1978.
The United States claims that the Northwest Passage is an international strait and transit passage allowing free and unencumbered passage. The dispute arose in 1969 with the trip of the U.S. oil tanker SS Manhattan and intensified when the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea passed through in 1985.