Leslie H. Neatby

In recent years, there has been a(nother) surge in interest in the expedition John Franklin led in the 1840s, which was intended to find the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific north of Canada. Much of this flurry of publications has been sparked by the discovery of the underwater hulls of Franklin's ships Erebus and Terror, but there have been a lot of other advances, too. Satellite photography has finally allowed us to produce truly accurate maps of the Arctic Archipelago. Modern weather models make it easier to both understand the weather reports of the early explorers and to safely visit the Passage ourselves. (Due to climate change, what was once an impassible complex of ice channels is now navigable almost every summer.) And there has been a lot of good archival research, too.

So is there any place left for a book published in 1970 that can't cover any of that? Surprisingly, I think there is.

The reason is the nature of the other books about the Franklin Expedition. The most recent ones, for instance, are largely about the hunt for Erebus and Terror. Others are about the passage themselves, or about scurvy, or lead, or bad canning techniques. This book has a different emphasis. It's mostly about the particular men (always men, except for Lady Jane Franklin herself) who went searching for Franklin. Some, like Leopold McClintock, were good and successful men. Some, like Henry Kellett and Richard Collinson, were good officers who didn't have much luck. Some, like Robert McClure, were bad officers who lucked out. And some, like Edward Belcher, were incompetents who suffered for it (if not as much as they deserved to). This book, more than almost any other, gives a view of all these men, so that you can come to understand, and like or despise them, without too much authorial interference.

Of course it's not perfect. There is no comprehensive map mentioning all the places named in the text -- a problem with every Northwest Passage book I've ever read. Even Google Maps isn't as helpful as it could be, because a lot of these places aren't really "places"; just vague designations. For example, Google Maps can't locate "Victoria Land," because that name was applied to a part of Victoria Island before it was known that Victoria Island was an island. So the name is gone -- but it mattered in the early 1850s! Even Victoria Island can be hard to find, because there are several of them, and Google Maps defaulted to a different one.

And, of course, the book can't cover what we've learned since 1970. So you'll need at least a couple of other books. But don't give up on this one just because it's old; it will probably have things to teach you that you won't learn in the other books.… (meer)