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.