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• Format Hardback | 368 pages
• Dimensions 155 x 234 x 28mm | 635g
• Publication date 12 Sep 2014
• Publisher Whitaker House
• Publication City/Country United States
• Language English
• Illustrations note Illustrations, black and white
• ISBN10 1629111597
• ISBN13 9781629111599
• Bestsellers rank 9,514

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• Format Paperback | 560 pages
• Dimensions 129 x 198 x 40mm | 395g
• Publication date 14 Jul 2016
• Publisher Head of Zeus
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• ISBN10 1784971618
• ISBN13 9781784971618
• Bestsellers rank 3,264

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• Format Paperback | 264 pages
• Dimensions 152 x 229 x 15mm | 390g
• Publication date 29 Nov 2017
• Publisher Gehenna & Hinnom Books
• Language English
• ISBN10 0997280360
• ISBN13 9780997280364
• Bestsellers rank 2,760,413

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• Format Paperback | 206 pages
• Dimensions 140 x 216 x 11mm | 246g
• Publication date 01 Oct 2017
• Publisher Unknown
• Language French
• Illustrations note Illustrations, black and white
• ISBN10 2924110882
• ISBN13 9782924110881

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• Format Paperback | 750 pages
• Dimensions 152 x 229 x 42mm | 1,080g
• Publication date 20 Jan 2019
• Publisher Independently Published
• Language English
• Illustrations note Illustrations, black and white
• ISBN10 1794473408
• ISBN13 9781794473409

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• Format Hardback | 448 pages
• Dimensions 163 x 236 x 43mm | 703g
• Publication date 03 Feb 2015
• Publisher St. Martin's Press
• Publication City/Country New York
• Language English
• ISBN10 0312577222
• ISBN13 9780312577223
• Bestsellers rank 18,409

A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier

by David Welky

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017 [2016].

Reviewed by Kenn Harper


In late June of 1906 Robert Peary stood on a mountain top on Ellesmere Island and surveyed Nansen Sound, still ice-covered, to the west, and beyond it a land that he called Jesup’s Land, which we know today as Axel Heiberg Island. And to the northwest? Much later he wrote, “… northwest it was with a thrill that my glasses revealed the faint white summits of a distant land…”

A few days later, having crossed Nansen Sound with his two guides, Iggiannguaq and Ulloriaq, he climbed Cape Thomas Hubbard. From there, he later wrote, “… with the glasses I could make out apparently a little more distinctly, the snow-clad summits of the distant land in the north-west, above the ice horizon…. in fancy I trod its shores and climbed its summits, even though I knew that that pleasure could be only for another in another season.”

Thus, on Robert Peary’s penultimate northern expedition, was born the legend of Crocker Land.

In 1913, another expedition left the United States, bound for northwestern Greenland. Two young men, George Borup and Donald MacMillan, were to have been its co-leaders, but Borup drowned accidentally in Long Island Sound some months before the expedition’s departure. In 1908-09 both had been tenderfeet on Peary’s last expedition, in which he claimed to have reached the North Pole. Both worshipped Peary. They knew that he would never return to the Arctic. But even before their return to America, they determined that they would come back – together they would find Crocker Land. The pleasure of “another in another season” would be theirs. After Borup’s untimely death, the mantle of leadership for the expedition they had planned, sponsored in the main by the American Museum of Natural History, fell on MacMillan.

David Welky, a historian with the University of Central Alabama, has written a history of the Crocker Land Expedition. A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier is a welcome, indeed long-overdue, contribution to Arctic history. At 502 pages, it is an exhaustive (but not exhausting) look at the expedition, its successes (few) and failings (many).

MacMillan’s expedition was planned to last two years. For some of its participants, it lasted four; others managed to leave the Arctic after three. MacMillan’s personal failure happened in the first year of the expedition. In the spring of 1914 he and Fitzhugh Green, an ensign in the United States Navy, crossed Ellesmere Island by way of Beitstad Fiord, then sledded north up Eureka and Nansen sounds to Cape Thomas Hubbard on Axel Heiberg Island, from where Peary had claimed his second sighting of Crocker Land almost eight years earlier. Accompanied by two experienced Inuit, Piugaattoq and Ittukusuk, they travelled northwest over the ice surface. On April 21, MacMillan sighted his goal, a huge island, complete with “hills, valleys, snow-capped peaks extending through at least one hundred and twenty degrees of the horizon.” He was ecstatic.

But there was nothing there. Piugaattoq told him it was nothing but pujoq – mist. MacMillan couldn’t believe him. For five days, they chased their phantom island – perhaps a continent – over increasingly dangerous sea ice. But finally MacMillan conceded defeat. “My dreams of the last four years were merely dreams, my hopes had ended in bitter disappointment,” he wrote. It was a “will-o’-the-wisp, ever receding, ever changing, ever beckoning.” He had been tricked by an Arctic mirage, a deceit of the atmospheric conditions of springtime and the shifting sea ice. Crocker Land was an illusion.

Welky delves deep into the origins of the Crocker Land myth. Peary, it turns out, had made no mention of his sighting of land to the northwest of Axel Heiberg Island in his diary entries made at the time, nor in the cairn records he left on site. Nor did he mention it on his return to New York, not even at a meeting of the Peary Arctic Club in December of 1906, at which George Crocker was in attendance. And not even in the draft of his book, Nearest the Pole. The name makes its first appearance in the published version of that book, and even there it does not appear in the text, but only on the accompanying map. The text, and that of a magazine article published at about the same time, refers only to the “faint white summits” and “snow-clad summits” of the distant land. What was Peary’s motivation in deciding, sometime between writing the draft and the final text of the book, that he would claim to have seen land far out in the Arctic sea? Simply this: His 1906-7 expedition was a disaster that had produced no tangible results, but he would need some result in order to secure funds for yet another expedition. Welky concludes, as have many others, that Peary was not averse to lying. He had “lied about reaching Greenland’s north shore” in 1892, and he was lying again when he “… saw a fata morgana…” and should have known that he was witnessing a mirage. “Nothing worth writing about in his cache notes or diary, but convincing enough to inspire a story about new land,” writes Welky. “Then he inserted the remarkable tale into his book in order to raise money.”

Welky sums up MacMillan’s (and Borup’s) belief in their mentor succinctly: “Crocker Land was an illusion that grew into a lie that took on a life of its own. Borup and MacMillan turned the lie into a dream…” But even in defeat, MacMillan maintained his belief in Peary. Welky writes, “When Crocker Land evaporated, he was convinced that the Arctic had deceived Peary, not that Peary had deceived him.”

The Crocker Land Expedition shattered more than MacMillan’s dream. One participant was, or became, a madman who literally got away with murder. This was Fitzhugh Green, scientist and would-be poet, who was the only white man with MacMillan on the actual search for Crocker Land. On the return leg, the two men took separate routes, each travelling with his own guide along the shores of Axel Heiberg Island. During a storm, Green misunderstood the actions of his guide, Piugaattoq, who forced the American to walk behind the sled to keep his toes from freezing. Green complained that he could not keep up, but Piugaattoq knew that keeping a steady pace was imperative. Green, feeling that his guide was abandoning him, shot the man, recording matter-of-factly in his journal, “I shot once in the air. He did not stop. I then killed him with a shot through the shoulder and another through the head.” Green confessed his deed to MacMillan. He was never charged nor punished. But the other white men of the expedition learned of it, and it drove a wedge through the camp.

All this within the first year. During the rest of the expedition, MacMillan managed to do some surveying, and Ekblaw made some heroic trips. But the early camaraderie disintegrated after the murder of Piugaatoq, and MacMillan proved himself an ineffective leader. One might expect the rest of the book to be anticlimactic, as it might well have been in the hands of a less skillful author. But Welky is a superb writer, and he mines the interpersonal relationships of the expedition’s participants – the loyalties, the friendships grown or torn asunder, the cultural insensitivities – as effectively as he describes the travel, the exploration into unknown territory, and the constant flirtation with death at the hands of the elements.

A less skilled author might have been tempted to focus on the heroism of the search for Crocker Land – for a journey over unpredictable ice in often-blizzard conditions, whether the objective is reached or not, or real or not, is heroism nonetheless and makes a compelling tale – and then relegate the denouement to a final chapter or two. But Welky has not taken this easy way out. He unwinds the expedition as meticulously as he had set it up. MacMillan’s party does not even reach northwestern Greenland until page 134 of this book – the author sets the stage for the expedition, its inspiration, the administrivia of its organization, the backgrounds of its personnel, in considerable detail. Similarly, he meticulously documents the last two years of the expedition, a stay in northern Greenland prolonged by the failure of relief ships to arrive or even be seaworthy. One bright point in what for some participants was a time of despair and boredom was MacMillan’s trip of pure exploration with only Inuit companions to the unknown region west of Axel Heiberg Island.

The illustrations for this book are well-chosen. One map shows the area and most of the relevant place names, but the reader might have benefited by the inclusion of more maps with more detail of the 1914 Crocker Land attempt and MacMillan’s 1916 journey. Welky has wisely avoided the use of the out-dated word Eskimo in his text, opting instead for the self-designation of the people of northwestern Greenland, the word Inughuit; this is a plural word, a variant of the more general Inuit, and the singular form for both is Inuk. But it can be a daunting task for the writer who does not speak Inuktun, the language of the Polar Inuit, to keep this nomenclature straight. On occasion Welky slips up and refers to “an Inughuit” or “a true Inughuit” – an impossibility – but is generally consistent in using Inuk as the singular form. In a footnote on page 461, he is in unfamiliar territory when he refers to McClure’s abandoned ship, Investigator, providing the Inughuit with a source of metal; but these were people in the western Canadian Arctic, who do not describe themselves as Inughuit – the proper term should simply be Inuit. He also uses the term Polar Inuit in reference to the people once known as Polar Eskimos. Welky has consistently used the spelling Battle Harbor for the telegraph station on the Labrador coast, but this is incorrect for it is an official place name and should be spelled in the Canadian manner as Battle Harbour. But these are minor quibbles in a book this good.

As the long centennial of the Crocker Land Expedition finally draws to a close in 2017, a reading of A Wretched and Precarious Situation would be an appropriate way to celebrate this little-known and much-misunderstood expedition.

Product details

• Format Paperback | 400 pages
• Dimensions 153 x 234 x 29mm | 484g
• Publication date 16 Sep 2019
• Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint ALLEN LANE
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• ISBN10 024135157X
• ISBN13 9780241351574
• Bestsellers rank 599

Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of H.M.S. Investigator and the McClure Expedition

By Glenn M. Stein.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. ISBN 978-07864-77081

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore


In October 1853 the sensational news was announced in London that the captain and crew of HMS Investigator had discovered the last link with previously known routes in the Arctic to complete a maritime North-West Passage, finally proving its existence after some three centuries of uncertainty. Those who had brought the news, Lieutenant Samuel Cresswell and the Mate Robert Wyniatt, were almost certainly the first individuals ever to make a complete transit through the passage, but at the time of the announcement the captain and most of his crew were still in the Arctic, far from completing the passage and still far from safety—and it would be another year before they returned home. The discovery had actually taken place in the autumn of the voyage’s first year, 1850, when a sledging party had reached the northern end of Prince of Wales Strait and seen, some 75 miles to the north across Viscount Melville Strait, the looming bulk of Melville Island, reciprocating the view that Parry had had in the opposite direction thirty years before. With that connection made—by sight, if not on the ground—the route of a complete northern sea passage from Atlantic to Pacific was finally known, though the way the men were obliged to come home, sailing in three successive ships connected by sledge journeys, ironically showed how unviable a route it was for vessels: it was the crew that came through the passage, not the Investigator.

But ships cannot write their own histories, so half a century before Roald Amundsen navigated the Gjøa through the passage, it was Robert McClure’s crew who stole the limelight, winning renown and a grand prize of £10,000 that went some way to lightening the mood of a nation still recovering from the disaster of the lost Franklin Expedition, which the Investigator had ostensibly been searching for. This achievement, hailed as a landmark at the time, makes it all the more odd that no monograph on the expedition seems to have appeared since the publication of the official account, based on McClure’s log but smoothed and polished by Sherard Osborn, in 1856. Now polar historian Glenn Stein has rectified the oversight by producing a book that aims to be, and largely succeeds in being, the comprehensive, scholarly account that will form the essential benchmark against which all future work on the expedition will be judged. A glance at the list of archival references, journal articles, monographs and reference works in the bibliography is enough to show the extraordinary range and depth of his research, and the voluminous notes and appendices show the use he has made of them.

Robert McClure was born in 1807 into a comfortably off Irish family, with a father and grandfather who had made their careers in the army. After an abortive start in a military career Robert quickly switched his attention to the navy, meaning he was entering a world in which family connections—the usual lubricant to promotion—could no longer help him, and at a more advanced age than those of equivalent experience. But in the way of ambitious naval officers he got himself noticed, rising to mate and then lieutenant while serving on anti-slavery patrols in the Caribbean and then coast-guard service. Stein’s diligent archival research has also revealed for the first time McClure’s previously unknown first marriage during this period (in 1831). When the chance came for an adventure he grabbed it with both hands, volunteering as mate aboard the Terror on George Back’s expedition to Repulse Bay in 1837. More years on the Great Lakes and in anti-slaving duties intervened before another shot of polar glamour when he was chosen as 1st Lieutenant of HMS Enterprise in James Ross’s Franklin search expedition of 1848–49, which however was stopped by ice before advancing far beyond the entrance to Lancaster Sound. The fact that both of McClure’s first two Arctic voyages were frustrated from achieving their purpose seems only to have increased his resolve, when finally given command, to make certain of success.

In 1850 the Admiralty’s next throw of the dice in searching for Franklin was to send ships in a pincer movement from the west as well as the east, so as soon as they had returned Enterprise and Investigator began to be readied for a voyage to the Pacific, where they would enter the Arctic via Bering Strait and search along the continental coastline in case Franklin’s men had made their way westwards along it. McClure commanded the Investigator this time, with the Enterprise—and the expedition as a whole—commanded by Richard Collinson.

McClure has been much criticized for bamboozling his superior in order to take the Investigator into the Arctic alone, unimpeded by a commander whose lack of Arctic experience probably made him an object of contempt in McClure’s eyes. But Stein reminds us that Collinson gave every indication of trying to do the same to McClure, rarely waiting for the slower vessel to catch up and losing visual contact for the last time as far back as the Strait of Magellan. Moreover, it was Collinson himself (in a letter that Stein reproduces) who suggested that McClure take the dangerous but time-saving shortcut through the Aleutian Islands, the manoeuvre usually considered underhand by McClure’s critics. It was not the only characteristic the two commanders shared. Both seemed incapable of maintaining good relations with their officers, taking the almost unique step in Arctic voyages of placing officers under arrest for extended periods. Simultaneously, both courted the favour of the rest of the crew, although McClure, unlike Collinson, undercut his own efforts in this regard by his harsh punishments for offences, several times ordering the maximum 48 lashes. Both were deeply suspicious of rivals—which goes far to explain their attempts to shake each other off—and both wished to control the official version of events, suppressing accounts of rival officers to make sure their own were taken at face value. But McClure had the quality that would have endeared him to Napoleon—luck—one that Collinson conspicuously lacked.

Chief in rank among McClure’s rivals on board was 1st Lieutenant William Haswell, whom McClure said openly should not be on board even before the ship had lost sight of Britain. Yet without any personal writings by Haswell the long-suffering officer virtually disappears from the book for long stretches, reflecting the way he was systematically sidelined by his commander. A more formidable rival was the surgeon Alexander Armstrong. Dismissed by McClure as a fairweather officer with exaggerated self-regard, Armstrong was nevertheless solicitous of the entire crew’s health, and it’s striking that most of them contributed to buying him a gold watch after their return to Britain, a token of affectionate esteem not recorded for any other officer. Most endearing among the senior crew was the Moravian missionary and Inuktitut translator Johann Miertsching, seemingly the only one McClure treated with consistent friendliness, and in whom he seems to have confided as a sort of confessor. As a German among Britons, a landlubber among sailors, and a convinced Christian among mostly nominal ones, Miertsching was trebly a fish out of water, but every time the crew came in contact with local people his communication made a decisive difference in overcoming mistrust and soliciting information on geography and other expeditions.

Stein’s book is effectively a counterpart for the Investigator to William Barr’s similarly groundbreaking account of the Enterprise’s voyage, Arctic Hell Ship (University of Alberta Press, 2007). Both authors have been faced with the same problem in writing about two exceptionally acrimonious voyages: a conundrum of sources. In one way voluminous (the databases of 19th-century bureaucrats compiling service records, medal citations, ships’ stores, dockyard records, and logs, along with institutional histories, published and manuscript correspondence, charts, plans, drawings, watercolours and engravings) in crucial respects the sources are seriously lacking (in both cases most of the private journals written on board are missing—either deliberately destroyed or suppressed and then lost). Or to put it another way, there is a plentiful supply of dull raw material and a rather limited supply of interesting raw material. Barr responded with a frustrating refusal to reveal his own views, or use his own judgement to think himself into the shoes of the men he was writing about. Stein is nothing like as self-abnegating a writer as Barr, but he too is overly reluctant (for this reviewer’s taste) in trying to illuminate for his readers what was going on inside his subjects’ heads, or attempting to present events from their varying points of view, beyond simply quoting the surviving written sources.

His main strength is as an archival researcher, so it’s no surprise that the book contains no fewer than seven appendices, of which appendix 2 is the most important: a thorough discussion of the primary sources, both surviving and lost. Although Stein leaves the reader to fill in the blanks, it seems likely that McClure, who had ordered all those keeping a journal to deliver them to him, deliberately destroyed them once it became clear he would have to abandon the Investigator, since a search the following spring could not locate any but Haswell’s—ironically the officer McClure most loathed; yet somehow it too later vanished. Only Armstrong managed to retain his journal, either by making a secret copy as he wrote (McClure’s mistrust of him was entirely mutual) or by somehow retrieving it, officially or unofficially, from under McClure’s nose once command of the crew had passed to their rescuer Captain Kellett. Appendix 7 reveals Stein’s specialist interest in a usually overlooked form of ephemera: medals. His research into the history of individual medals and the official citations that accompanied them opened a narrow but often invaluable shaft of light into the service records of many of the expedition participants. Along with admiralty service records and other official data these have enabled Stein to build up small vignettes of practically every man on board, which he organizes in concentrated form in Appendix 3 but also sprinkles in narrative form throughout the book whenever some individual action by them is reported, giving an unusually egalitarian flavour to his account.

The book is well illustrated throughout with contemporary engravings—some news illustrations, some generic—alongside the talented Lieutenant Cresswell’s evocative and well-known watercolours. There are a handful of good area maps, but as in so many exploration books, maps showing routes, whether of the ships or of sledge journeys, are sadly missing, depriving readers of the most intuitive way of absorbing and contextualizing placenames, directions and distances.

The book contains a few solecisms and errors: “Kent County” and “Dorset County” are not formulas anyone living there would use; crewman Fawcett’s “society” being coveted has nothing to do with friendly societies—the nascent mutual insurance and banking organizations—but simply meant that people enjoyed being in his company, as any reader of Austen or Dickens would recognize; Andrew Dunlop’s short biography of McClure has been misattributed to Kenneth Douglas-Morris through some alphabetization malfunction in the references. Readers with different awarenesses would doubtless find others. But in a book of such density and range of information, the brevity of this list is a testament to the seriousness of the author’s commitment to accuracy and scholarship. Only his decision to quote himself—more than once—when choosing chapter epigrams betrays a lapse of judgement and a pardonable trace of authorial vanity.

No doubt there will be other books on the expedition in the future, especially perhaps if the contents of the Investigator, whose wreck was relocated with much fanfare in 2010 (the subject of a brief epilogue here), are ever thoroughly investigated. Some may be written with a greater flair for language and a surer sense of narrative drive, but it is hard to see Glenn Stein’s monument to scholarly devotion and documentary research ever being surpassed.

Relics of the Franklin Expedition: Discovering Artifacts from the Doomed Arctic Voyage of 1845

By Garth Walpole

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017, $39.95

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore


Garth Walpole was an Australian archaeologist who early on became fascinated with Franklin’s final expedition, and who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the relics recovered from it by various searchers and held in the National Maritime Museum, London.  In later life he decided to expand this research and publish the results as a book, and had completed most of this work before he sadly succumbed to cancer in 2015. Before his death he had asked Russell Potter to edit the work for publication, and it has now been published by McFarland (who also brought out Glenn Stein’s Discovering the North West Passage). With the first major exhibition of the relics in more than a century due to open this summer, publication could not have been better timed, despite the poignant reminder that the author did not live to see the exhibition or garner the well-deserved attention his book would have engendered in its wake.

Although the first chapter is titled “The material biography of relics: A physical and spiritual relationship”, only the first couple of its 45 pages address the question of the spiritual meaning that individuals and cultures invest in historical artifacts. After that uneasy theoretical throat-clearing (perhaps a requirement of the original thesis), we are straight into a chronological account of the years after Franklin set sail in 1845, starting with the first tentative search expeditions by land and sea in 1848 and the first breakthrough – the earliest discovery of actual artifacts – in August 1850, on Beechey Island. At this point the chapter loses its chronological structure, and it is hard to see what organizing principle replaces it, though the complexity of events in that month, with several British and American ships operating around Beechey simultaneously, would always be hard to capture. Accounts of the reconnoitring of the various sites by different officers overlap, each one discovering not only the remains of Franklin’s first wintering but having to disentangle them from the traces of each other, as each party visited the same sites in turn. The action then moves on to Belcher’s expedition in 1852, then confusingly back again to 1850, and the chapter ends with Kennedy’s expedition in 1851. Only with the description of Franklin’s main camp at Beechey does the discussion become more clearly structured, with a focus on each site (garden, storehouse, cairn), and the artifacts found in them, as seen by each searcher in turn. Late in the day we come to the three graves, most iconic of the Beechey remains, though Walpole perhaps wisely limits his discussion to the discoveries made by the first searchers rather than trying to summarize the wealth of knowledge gained by Beattie and Geiger’s exhumation of the bodies in the 1980s.

Chapter 2’s title is similarly misleading (“The continued search for relics, 1851–1854”, though in fact it covers 1851–2010), again perhaps a relic of the original thesis. It is, however, a much better-organized narrative than chapter 1, benefiting from the historical accident that it relates a series of successive, rather than simultaneous, expeditions. In terms of the quantity of artifacts and information retrieved, the most important of these were the first four: Rae in 1854, McClintock in 1857–59, Hall in 1864–69 and Schwatka in 1878–79, all of whom, exploring within living memory of the expedition, also interviewed many Inuit who had been eyewitnesses of Franklin’s expedition, or had heard stories directly from those who were  – narratives that became cultural artifacts of as great a value as the many objects of repurposed wood and metal that the searchers traded from the Inuit.

But if the survival of these oral histories represents a triumph of individual and cultural memory, their tragic counterpart is the utter loss, apart from the single Victory Point document, of all written records from Franklin’s crews that might give more detailed information about their fate. A constant refrain throughout Walpole’s account of these expeditions is the raising – and then dashing – of hopes that written records might be discovered, as one cairn after another is hopefully dismantled, dug beneath and around, and then mournfully rebuilt when found to be empty. When Schwatka heard Inuit accounts of the strongbox carefully preserved by the men who had made it to the continental mainland at the place he dubbed Starvation Cove, he hoped that it might have contained the expedition’s records, but when he heard stories describing it being forced open, its contents discarded, and the box reused for its parts, he was shattered by the realization that the last best hope to recover any written account had gone. The barely intelligible gibberish of the Peglar papers, a few sheets of handwriting that happened to survive on or near a seaman’s body, seemed to mock the searchers with their pointless triviality.

Although the material objects collected by the search expeditions are thought of today as archaeological artifacts – part of a historical, public realm – for the first searchers many of them were intensely personal talismans. McClintock especially had known members of the lost crews, and made it his mission to restore as many personally identifiable relics as he could to their families, for whom they became treasured heirlooms of private grief. This is seen in the post-expedition histories of many objects that Walpole records, which show them re-emerging many decades later as a descendant, young enough or distantly related enough never to have known the crewmember personally, bequeathed them to a public collection. Engraved watches and cutlery, the most clearly identifiable items, were thus those McClintock made most effort to retrieve, though the sheer quantity and variety of material in the NMM collection originating in his expedition outstrips that from any others (they are all listed, grouped by expedition source, in the book’s Appendix B).

Uncertainty about the nature of many objects has caused problems in cataloguing and identification, however: is that piece of wood part of a doorframe or a hatchway? A table leg or a stanchion? Differences of opinion between searchers describing an object in a journal and conservators cataloguing them in a museum can lead to objects seeming to appear, disappear, and fluctuate in overall number. In addition, some objects seem to have been lost when collections changed hands from one institution to another. Walpole gives several examples of the kind of detailed worrying away at a description that is needed to resolve such nebulous uncertainties. It is not a task for those whose patience is easily tested.

The mostly keenly felt absence in the first two chapters is a modern map of the two search areas (Beechey and King William islands respectively) naming all of the places mentioned in the text (there are a handful of historical maps of both places, none comprehensive or easily legible). To those not already intimately familiar with the geography of these two remote islands, the descriptions of searchers moving from one place to another, and hearing of events in other places, will simply be impossible to picture or remember, since their relative positions will be unknown. This is a serious drawback.

After Schwatka there was a pause in the search of some fifty years, during which the Franklin expedition passed out of living memory. Since then other searchers – Burwash, Gibson, Larsen and others – mostly on shorter expeditions to smaller areas, have unearthed smaller quantities of material, bearing the steadily increasing signs of weathering as each decade passed. But in recent years aerial and satellite photography, the retreat of sea ice and cheaper travel have all made the remote search zone a more easily approached place, leading to the concerted effort that has now seen the discovery of both Erebus and Terror.

Chapter 5 is the most systematically organized, giving a chronological series of mostly 19th-century engravings and photographs of groupings of objects, with a key identifying each one with its modern NMM accession number. This chapter, when cross-referenced with the complementary listing in Appendix B mentioned above, provides the most permanent documentary and reference value of Walpole’s book.

Although beautifully typeset and printed, the book suffers from what seems to have been a mismatch of expectations between publisher and editor. Potter’s role, as he makes clear in his preface, has not been to rewrite or smooth out the author’s prose but to check the references and add information to fill the occasional lacuna. Unfortunately McFarland, perhaps unfamiliar with the role of an academic editor, seem to have misunderstood it as meaning that they did not need to have the text copy-edited or even, apparently, proofread, with the result that the number of typos, word substitutions, inconsistent spellings and ungrammatical sentences, which Potter must have assumed the publisher would deal with, reach sometimes distracting levels.

Now that Erebus and Terror have been located, we are on the cusp of a new era in the study of Franklin’s last expedition, in which the recovery of a host of new artifacts, apparently well preserved, unweathered, and unmodified by Inuit re-use, could potentially dwarf the number and quality of items collected with such pains over so many years by so many searchers on land. The holy grail – a trembling hope that we share with Hobson opening up the record tube at the Victory Point cairn – is that the ships may yet contain some written records, some crewmember’s journal, that will somehow be legible. The initial conditions seem good – the general state of preservation of the wood is exceptional, boding well for that of the organic material more generally – and we can only hope that the investigation planned by Parks Canada is not too slow or tentative to take advantage before further deterioration occurs.

Walpole’s book is thus published at a fitting moment. Like the exhibition due to open at the NMM in July 2017, it represents a summation of what is known and what has been recovered from Franklin’s last expedition in the first 165 years of searching. It is a memorial to the searchers, and a testament to the almost numinous presence that spoons, watches, and fragments of wood can acquire when these mute witnesses to a calamitous human drama are all that we have to go on.

Product details

• Publication date 30 Sep 2019
• Publisher Pearson Education Limited
• Publication City/Country Harlow, United Kingdom
• ISBN10 1292129360
• ISBN13 9781292129365

Product details

• Format Paperback | 96 pages
• Dimensions 184 x 248 x 10.16mm | 308g
• Publication date 24 Jan 2019
• Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Imprint Osprey Publishing
• Publication City/Country New York, United Kingdom
• Language English
• ISBN10 1472830741
• ISBN13 9781472830746
• Bestsellers rank 209,875

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• For ages 12-17
• Format Paperback | 320 pages
• Dimensions 130 x 196 x 22mm | 220g
• Publication date 07 Sep 2015
• Publisher HODDER & STOUGHTON
• Imprint Hodder Paperback
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• Illustrations note No
• ISBN10 1444766902
• ISBN13 9781444766905
• Bestsellers rank 7,573

Product details

• Format Paperback | 60 pages
• Dimensions 142 x 182 x 5mm | 68g
• Publication date 30 Apr 2007
• Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint PENGUIN CLASSICS
• Publication City/Country New York, NY, United States
• Language Spanish
• ISBN10 0143039962
• ISBN13 9780143039969
• Bestsellers rank 18,046