Franklin: Tragic Hero

Andrew Lambert (Faber, £20)

The discovery of the Arctic sea route to the Pacific was the greatest lure in naval history. The North West Passage was the Holy Grail of exploration. It was the ice-bound setting for a disaster that for years sent shock waves through Victorian society.

Trapped in the ice under the command of Sir John Franklin, two ships — the Erebus and Terror — simply vanished, along with their 129 officers and seamen. The quest for them in one of the world’s most inhospitable regions was to result in a dual legend of heroism and scandal.

Certainly not averse to danger, Franklin was “the man who ate his boots” to stay alive on an earlier expedition. When he and his crews disappeared without trace, his formidable wife Jane relentlessly badgered the Admiralty to discover Franklin’s fate and ultimately erected a memorial to her husband. Many ships were sent out for their rescue and after years of futility John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company unearthed evidence, with the help of the Inuit, of mutilated corpses and extensive cannibalism, raising a debate that would convulse 19th-century England.

This is a marvellous book by a splendid writer of the sea. Lambert’s sweeping narrative, once he has us in the grasp of the white wilderness, takes us effortlessly into a fabled history of mariners who for 400 years had sought to break this treasured trade barrier. It’s a story often told, but Lambert not only offers compassion for Franklin but digs deeper to reveal a more original source for the ships’ enterprise: to study the earth’s magnetic field in the wastes of the far north. As Lambert writes, it was a scientific mission of “doomed endeavour” which came to define the history of the Arctic.

* Andrew Lambert will speak at the Woodstock Literary Festival lunch on September 17. For details, call 01865 305305 or see www.woodstockliteraryfestival.com.