No chain of islands on Earth is more vicious than the Arctic Archipelago. Like teeth lining colossal jaws, some ninety-four large islands, and 36, 469 smaller ones, stretch across a territory about half the size of the contiguous United States. They can bite down and swallow ships whole. Even the earliest, most hopeful, searchers, who mapped large parts of the archipelago as they looked for Erebus and Terror and their crews, knew it would take a miracle to find anyone in that gigantic maw.In his introduction to Ice Ghosts, author Paul Watson explains that the search for the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845 – which was itself an abandoned quest to find the Northwest Passage and which saw the loss of two British ships and 129 men – has been the most “extensive, expensive” and “abundantly written-about manhunt in history”. He writes:
At the heart of the Franklin mystery is why people would spend so much time, money, and effort, for so many generations, searching one of the most unforgiving places on Earth to discover what seems obvious: Franklin and his men challenged the Arctic, and the Arctic won.If this “why” was indeed the mystery that Watson intended to explore, he didn't quite hit the mark: Ice Ghosts is a dull and plodding recitation of historical events; one more volume on the pile of an “abundantly written-about” topic that adds little more than the author's own experience in the modern day – Watson was on the search vessel that found the Terror in 2016, and one can, therefore, understand why he would have rushed to print a book that affixes the Franklin mystique to his own name – but one wished he might have gone a little slower; attempted to answer that “why”. For a history lesson that catches the Franklin story up to modern times, this is a fine effort; for a “fast-paced historical adventure story”, look elsewhere.
I picked up Ice Ghosts as a companion read to Ed O'Loughlin's Minds of Winter; a novel which does attempt to explore the “why”; its form allowed O'Loughlin to explore the humanity behind the draw of the High Arctic and the search for Franklin's trail. The novel opens with a beautiful chapter about a ball that was held aboard the Terror and Erebus, tethered together off Van Diemen's land during Sir John Franklin's tenure as its Lieutenant-Governor, and it was an engaging introduction to the main players and their motivations. By contrast, Watson summarises these events this way:
If Francis Crozier, Franklin's second-in-command, had had the strength to turn and watch the well-wishers recede from Terror, it would have been with a broken heart and a sense of foreboding. Crozier had fallen madly in love with (Franklin's niece) Sophy when Erebus and Terror stopped at Hobart Town, the once-swampy capital of Van Dieman's Land, while serving with James Ross' Antarctic expeditions. But Sophy seemed infatuated with Ross, who was already betrothed to another woman. Crozier did not depart in an optimistic mood.Because I read these two books back-to-back, this paragraph came off as a tuneless clunker. But on the other hand, O'Loughlin didn't explain that soon after that ball, Franklin was recalled to Britain in disgrace and that he fought a hard campaign to be allowed to lead another expedition in search of the Northwest Passage in order to redeem his reputation; that his wife, Lady Jane, would push the aging Franklin hard in his campaign and that this might explain her own extraordinary efforts to mount search and rescue missions for many years after her husband's presumed death. So, there's a “why” for the Lady Jane funded/arranged expeditions, and near the end Watson descends to name calling to ascribe malevolent motives for a certain Conservative Canadian PM's relaunch of efforts to find Franklin's lost ships in 2008, but in between, Ghost Ships is overstuffed with dull research. The following is an example of an author eager to use everything he comes across:
Paranormal sources were literally all over the map with their search tips. Useful leads were as rare as the South African quagga caged up at the London Zoo.And the following is an example of an author who could have used a more ruthless editor to cut out the banal:
Ice is an obstacle few outsiders even try to understand in its confounding, immaculate complexity. Knowing that it's cold, hard, and slippery, and chills food and drinks nicely, is good enough for most of us.And yet, I did like some of the quirky historical bits: that the Terror was an active warship in the War of 1812 and its mortars firing on Fort Henry were the “bombs bursting in air” that inspired Francis Scott Key; that a tattered prayerbook recovered from a Franklin search effort was (maybe?) interred with President Lincoln. And so, to return to the ascribing of malevolent motives, cue the horns and let enter the Darth Sweatervest of Canadian politics:
A new leader had just taken power in Canada, and he had his own designs on the Arctic, including a strategy to market his broader conservative agenda through heroic tales of the North. Prime Minister Stephen Harper immediately began to ratchet the bolts on what quickly became an excruciatingly tight information-management machine. He set it to work gagging federal scientists, especially experts warning of human-driven climate change, and anyone else who might think of challenging his plans. Harper wanted the Arctic to be the shiny white wrapping around his government's darker policies.So, that might be off-putting to some. I appreciate that Watson put the Inuit and their knowledge in places of importance throughout this book – one can't help but conclude that the shipwrecks could have been found generations ago if their information had been gathered and treated as the expertise it obviously was (the place where the Terror was eventually discovered was one named by the Inuit, decades ago, a name that can be translated as “where it sank”; you could almost laugh). On the other hand, there's a difference between honouring a people's knowledge and promoting their superstitions: I got the sense, repeatedly, that Watson was making a case that it wasn't so much that Franklin had the misfortune to have travelled during a cycle of extraordinary ice, but that, as the Inuit believe, these qalunaaq (white men) brought a curse upon themselves and the land by their intrusion.
Again, Ice Ghosts feels like it was rushed to publication after the author happened to be present for the discovery of Franklin's second lost ship: The history is a long, mostly dull infodump of names and dates, and essentially, Paul Watson's is just one more in the list. As a final note and interesting coincidence, just yesterday, Britain officially gave the wrecks of the Terror and Erebus to Canada; one more factoid on the history pile. Three stars is a rounding up.
