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Product details

• For ages 0-5
• Format Hardback | 1 pages
• Dimensions 153 x 173 x 7mm | 136g
• Publication date 12 Nov 1996
• Publisher Good Year Books
• Language English
• Illustrations note Illustrations, unspecified
• ISBN10 0673362981
• ISBN13 9780673362988

Franklin’s Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus

By John Geiger and Alanna Mitchell

201 p., illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography

HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2015

Reviewed by David C. Woodman


The September 2014 discovery of HMS Erebus, one of two long-lost discovery vessels from the third Arctic voyage of Sir John Franklin, garnered international interest and will undoubtedly count as one of the greatest marine archaeological finds of the century. As the fitting culmination of a six-year effort in difficult conditions by Parks Canada and its partners, this discovery will undoubtedly result in a bookshelf full of new publications concerning its archaeological, historical, and even political implications (full disclosure: I have one in manuscript form). Franklin’s Lost Ship, as the first of these, has the advantage of primacy and immediacy, and serves as a good introduction to the story of the discovery of the wreck and the historical background.

Mr. Geiger, the primary author, after a career as a journalist and author, now serves as CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, a partner in the 2014 search. This book is one result of the Society’s role in the expedition, which was to bring the news of this expedition to the world, and set it in its geographical and historical context. As outlined in a formal contract between the partners, the Society was to engage in promotional and educational efforts and produce “a coffee table book devoted to the discovery.” Geiger, although not personally present at the moment HMS "Erebus" was found, was on one of the ships involved in the northern search area, and thus had ready access to the Parks Canada team that discovered the wreck. Alanna Mitchell, also a renowned journalist and author, assisted as co-author and the combined experience of the writers is reflected in the high quality of the writing throughout.

It's no reflection on his writing skills that Mr. Geiger has had the misfortune of producing two books dealing with the Franklin story that are both more memorable for the photos than for their text. Geiger, as co-author with Dr. Owen Beattie, produced one of the earliest Franklin-related books of the recent literary resurgence. Frozen in Time (1987) detailed the 1980s exhumation and investigation of three of Franklin’s crew who died during the first winter at Beechey Island. The evocative photos of the well-preserved faces of those seamen as they emerged from the permafrost helped to breathe new life into public awareness of the Franklin mystery. Yet unlike Frozen in Time, where the illustrations are remembered mainly for their dramatic impact, here they are used as integral elements to tell the story.

Almost every page features at least one image and many pages consist of nothing else; most are accompanied by informative captions relevant to the adjacent text. The images fall into three categories. The first are exquisitely beautiful Arctic land- and seascapes, which ably help the reader develop a sense of place and the conditions faced by both Franklin and his men and the participants on the modern expedition. Also included are standard images familiar to anyone interested in the Franklin story - maps, the "Victory Point" record, relics, Thomas Smith’s famous painting etc., as well as the expected portraits of Sir John, Lady Franklin, Rae, Hall and others. These assist in illuminating the historical sections of the book. Undoubtedly, the most welcome images are the photos from the 2014 expedition, many never before published. These show the participants at work, the highlights from dives on the Erebus and the relics recovered.

The book is sensibly laid out in alternating chapters dealing with a narrative of the 2014 expedition interspersed with historical background telling of Franklin’s doomed third expedition. This is a clever way to address the two main, but disparate, audiences for this book. The first audience, already steeped in the lore of Arctic exploration, will primarily want to read about the recent discovery of this important wreck. The second audience, coming to the subject anew and wishing more context than press reports provided, will appreciate the intervening expository chapters. A final epilogue considers the importance of the discovery in light of modern conditions of resource and community development, climate change and sovereignty issues.

The chapters dealing with the actual 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition are ordered in chronological sequence, although with northern and southern search groups operating concurrently there is some overlap. The text is a refreshingly straightforward telling of the main incidents, obviously gleaned from interviews with the participants themselves. It conveys both the difficulties of the long search and the flash of joy and excitement at the eventual discovery. Appropriate and ample credit is given to the Parks Canada, Hydrographic, and Arctic Research Foundation teams, all of whom invested years in the search effort. Other partners, both governmental and private, some of whom luckily joined the team just in time for the discovery, are also extensively covered. Indeed the full list of partners is presented no less than six times, with some lengthy personal and organizational biographical asides.

In an effort to place the Franklin expedition in context the historical chapters cast a very wide and impressive net. Starting with James Knight’s mysterious disappearance in 1719, subject of an earlier Geiger book, almost every expedition sent to find the Northwest Passage in the first half of the nineteenth century is mentioned.  The many Franklin relief expeditions and later efforts to determine his fate are given necessarily brief but informative sketches. The text shows an admirable familiarity with the historical background, and will serve the general reader, who is coming to the subject for the first time, as a welcome introduction. The book also provides brief but illuminating biographies of the main historical protagonists, with diversions into the geopolitical, scientific, and cultural significance of the Franklin expedition to both his contemporaries and to the current world situation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly considering the fact that his earlier book introduced the topic of lead poisoning as a contributory factor to the Franklin disaster, the subject of lead poisoning is repeatedly woven into the fabric of this new book as well. Geiger continues to promote the idea that solder from Franklin’s tinned food is the probable source of the lead, an idea that has been seriously questioned since it was first proposed. In one of the more purple passages of the book Franklin’s retreating crews are portrayed as “frail addled men” with the implication that their mental state had been compromised by lead-poisoning, another idea that has recently been called into question.

Another obligatory Franklin topic, cannibalism, is mentioned as well, although modern forensic work on the subject is ignored. Here the text cannot resist a dip into journalistic sensationalism, picturing the retreating men “likely carrying their comrades’ heads, arms, hands and legs … as a ready supply of calories,” which is, to my knowledge, totally unsupported by any evidence.

Throughout the book Inuit traditional accounts are consistently acknowledged as a primary reason for the discovery of the Erebus. This is true and fitting, however there is no discussion of how the traditions contributed, which is simply offered as a fact. The book also attempts to use other Inuit recollections to augment the history of the Franklin expedition as known from the sparse documentary and physical evidence. The text generally follows the “standard reconstruction” of a single, fatal, abandonment in 1848 and attempts to integrate Inuit remembrances of visits to the ships, of one sinking, of a large joint hunt, and of the “black men” to that traditional scenario. Most of these details are less amenable to the single-abandonment reconstruction and the authors remark that further discoveries on the Erebus , especially if accounts of living white men aboard should be confirmed by physical evidence, may cause a “wholesale rewriting of the history books.”

The technical aspects of the book are good. The page layout of images, text, and white space is well balanced and attractive, and the book itself is solidly printed on heavy, glossy stock.  Notes are used sparingly but sixty percent of them are taken from only five authors. The short select bibliography relies mainly on recently published work with half of the books having been published in the last ten years.

Franklin’s Lost Ship takes the story of the discovery of the Erebus up to the spring dives of 2015. As such it is a timely account for a public interested in that story, but it will not be the last word on this amazing discovery. The authors acknowledge this when they remark that “untold discoveries from this astonishing vessel are still down there,” and indeed Parks Canada’s September 2015 dives revealed new elements and spectacular artifacts that inspire both questions and wonder. Much more will be learned as further work proceeds on the five-year plan developed to properly assess the wreck. But for those of us who hang expectantly on every new development this is a worthy first installment.

Graves of Ice: The Lost Franklin Expedition

By John Wilson

Scholastic Canada, CDN$ 14.99
Ages 9-12

Reviewed by Kristina Gehrmann


In Graves of Ice, author John Wilson tells the story of Franklin’s Lost Expedition as part of the I am Canada series, a collection of stories about adventure and exploration geared toward a pre-teen audience. He has explored the same theme previously in the novel North with Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames; and in the young-adult book Across Frozen Seas. A biography of Sir John Franklin - Traveller on Undiscovered Seas is also part of his repertoire of many historical books and novels.

 The story is told from the viewpoint of one of the expedition's boys. Eighteen-year-old George Chambers can read and write, works as a clerk, and thanks to his father’s connections manages to get a spot aboard HMS Erebus, one of the ships to sail for the Arctic on Sir John Franklin’s much-awaited expedition. They are to leave England in May of 1845 to find and complete a Northwest-Passage through the Arctic, building on the achievement of former explorers. The general consensus is that there is merely a small part of the Passage yet to be discovered, that it is theirs for the taking, and that with the aid of modern technology it will now be claimed once and for all.

But a year or so before, our protagonist meets another boy: Davy, a half-orphan, who earns a modest living muck-raking in the mud. Davy invites George on a “treasure hunt” in the churchyard at night, and George, eager for adventure, goes along. It is in the following scene that the stark contrast between the two boys’ backgrounds and upbringing becomes most apparent. The reader notices that Davy intends to steal a corpse from the grave; but to George in all his stunning naïveté this doesn’t occur – indeed, he asks upon digging up the coffin, surprised, “The treasure’s in the coffin?”

Only then does he realize what they’re about to do. Horrified, he wants to get away, but Davy’s companion, a grave robber named Jim, gets ready to kill George, but then Davy steps in and stabs Jim to death, saving George’s life. The latter is now even more shocked to know what his new acquaintance is capable of, and wants nothing more to do with him and his life of crime.

In the next year, George has almost forgotten this scary episode when, to his horror, he finds the same grave-robbing street urchin serving alongside him as a cabin boy on HMS Erebus. Although they work on the same tasks, try to put their awkward start behind them and get along with each other, the differences in their personalities create conflict throughout the book. Davy is a tough kid who grew up in a harsh dog-eat-dog world, not always hiding his deep-seated suspicion of the aloof officers (“toffs”), while George, the well-mannered, slightly naïve young gentleman gets along well with Commander Fitzjames whom he’s been assigned to, shares the officers’ optimism about the expedition’s goals, and trusts them to make the right decisions for the good of all.

The journey starts off well enough. George and Davy have plenty of work to do, attending to the officers, assisting the cook, and learning to climb the rigging. They also make friends with fellow sailors. One of these, a Royal Marine named William Braine, will already be familiar to some readers as one of the expedition’s famous ice mummies exhumed in 1986.

As this book is intended for younger readers, it's not as long and descriptive as one might expect from a novel. Certain events are merely mentioned or implied and not shown, such as incidents of cannibalism that have occurred among Franklin’s men in the Arctic. A Franklin enthusiast might also feel that the officers’ characters are too roughly outlined and have not been done justice, but Crozier and Co. are not the focus of this book. The protagonists’ characterization is splendid. The often-overlooked ships’ boys David and George become more than mere names on the muster rolls, and one finds it easy to believe that this is how their real namesakes might have been.

And although the story is very compact the author has included many historically relevant and well-researched details: the provisioning and equipment of Her Majesty’s ships Erebus and Terror, scientific work and everyday routine aboard; and – most curiously – Commander Fitzjames’ not-so-glamorous background, a mystery that was uncovered only very recently and may, so I hope, inspire new characterizations of him in future works of fiction.

Once Erebus and Terror are beset in ancient ice off King William Island in September of 1846, the mortality rate on Franklin’s expedition rises. And contrary to the expectation, the ice seems to have no intention of releasing them even in the following summer. In April 1848, a group of 105 survivors, weakened by cold and sickness, know that they have no choice but to abandon the ships at least for a season’s hunting, and even then their prospects are grim: They are too numerous to shoot enough game to keep the dreaded scurvy at bay.

So much for the relatively few facts that are known. To these, the author adds several more fictional puzzle parts to show how the situation could have unfolded. For example, a group of Inuit visit the beset ships and their crews – and George tries to convince Davy that they actually have a lot to learn from these “savages”, to which Davy replies, “I shall hold with good old English ways”, illustrating the expedition leaders’ and organizers’ belief that whatever worked in the past surely will be successful today also. The discrepancy between the seemingly clear Northwest-Passage on a map and the reality of confusing, dangerous, unpredictable Arctic ice mazes was simply not yet understood.

Eventually George witnesses a mutiny, led by none other than his presumed friend Davy, and for a moment he is torn between loyalty to him and to his captain, Fitzjames. The uprising fortunately does not result in bloodshed but it leaves George in doubt: has he chosen the right side? Who will end up being right about which way to turn for rescue? This question may now prove critical.

Graves of Ice is a great introduction to the fascinating mystery of the Franklin Expedition for both young and adult readers. In fictional works on this subject, every author and novel offers a different view of how the expedition could have met its fate. The possibilities are many, and this book is a realistic scenario in which the puzzle parts seem to fit together well.

Product details

• Format Paperback | 256 pages
• Dimensions 172 x 235 x 17mm | 768g
• Publication date 20 Jun 2011
• Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• Edition Statement UK ed.
• Illustrations note w. col. ill.
• ISBN10 0141029528
• ISBN13 9780141029528
• Bestsellers rank 22,219

Product details

• Format Hardback | 400 pages
• Dimensions 162 x 240 x 35mm | 665g
• Publication date 03 Sep 2020
• Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint VIKING
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• ISBN10 0241425441
• ISBN13 9780241425442
• Bestsellers rank 46

Product details

• Format Paperback | 528 pages
• Dimensions 135 x 201 x 30mm | 363g
• Publication date 19 Jun 2018
• Publisher William Morrow & Company
• Language English
• Edition Statement Reprint
• ISBN10 0062664433
• ISBN13 9780062664433
• Bestsellers rank 2,027,888