Desperate measures

Franklin, Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation, by Andrew Lambert, Faber and Faber, £20.

IN 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin led a large and well-equipped expedition to complete the conquest of the Canadian Arctic and to find the fabled North West Passage connecting the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. It all went horribly wrong.

By May 1848 sailors from HMS Erebus and HMS Terror began butchering and eating their comrades. Their ships were frozen into the ice, their rations were exhausted, there was no wild game and most if not all of their officers had died from disease or starvation.

We don’t know whether they killed the living or confined their attentions to the already dead. But about 40 or 50 of them certainly ate their shipmates in large numbers. And the butchery was grimly efficient. In most cases of survival cannibalism, the hands and head are discarded as being too repulsive. But in this case every scrap was used — the brains were eaten and flesh meticulously stripped off the finger bones, then the bones cracked open for their marrow.

When Inuit hunters first reported this nobody believed them. Servicemen of the Royal Navy couldn’t possibly behave like this. But over the years more evidence was uncovered — bones, knives, cooking utensils — and modern forensic techniques have been used on them. There’s no doubt it did happen.

The story has been told many times and the interpretations have changed over the years. The Victorians portrayed Franklin and his men as Christian heroes, battling against impossible odds in the cause of the glory of the British Empire and the advancement of science. But all professional historians are revisionists — that’s how they make their living — and gradually the emphasis changed. The expedition was portrayed as an accident waiting to happen and Franklin as a bumbling idiot.

Andrew Lambert, who has written the latest book, is also a professional historian — in fact he’s Professor of Naval History at King’s College London. What he has done is to swing the pendulum of revisionism back a bit. He admires Franklin and thinks he was uniquely qualified for the job (although he was short, fat, elderly and had been relieved of his previous job as governor of Tasmania under something of a cloud).

He is particularly good on the motives for the expedition. By 1845 nobody really believed that the North West Passage was a viable trade route. But the British were very conscious that charting new territories gave you a claim to owning them and they wanted to get there before the Russians, the Americans or those annoying Scandinavians with their superior polar exploration technology. They also knew that Britannia only ruled the waves if she had superior navigational skills and they desperately wanted to get close to the Magnetic North Pole to learn more about compass anomalies.

The story is fascinating and Andrew Lambert is a good writer. His repairs to Franklin’s reputation are done in a fair-minded way and with meticulous attention to detail. But it’s this very attention to detail that some readers may find off-putting. The finer points of British Victorian politics and the machinations of the various learned societies that controlled British science at the time tend to slow the narrative down. But if you’ve an interest in polar exploration, naval history or extreme survival (or, in this case, failure to survive) then it’s well worth getting hold of.