Book review
The Frozen Unknown
illustration from Stapleton Collection/Corbis
An engraving after a drawing made during William Parry’s 1819-20 expedition.
By SARA WHEELER
Published: March 11, 2010
When European merchants, navigators and chancers began searching for a northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Henry VIII was still a bachelor. The mazy waterways were navigable for a scant three months a year, and as late as 1819 only two white men had seen the north coast of Canada. By the time a wooden ship finally pushed through, an indifferent world was looking elsewhere. But the fabled Northwest Passage has returned to the news pages as a warming climate unlocks its deep channels, allowing access to hydrocarbons below the seabed. Anthony Brandt anchors his robust new history, “The Man Who Ate His Boots,” in that modern context.
THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BOOTS
The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage
By Anthony Brandt
Illustrated. 441 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95
The editor of narrative anthologies of both polar regions, Brandt concentrates on the first half of the 19th century, a period in which the search for the elusive passage gathered momentum in the slipstream of post-Napoleonic peace. Having set the scene with reference to the Far North and its occluded waters in myth and tradition, he works chronologically through the expeditions, analyzing a range of cultural and social influences on the naval panjandrums who dispatched so many little ships to high latitudes. Science, for example, had become increasingly important, especially terrestrial magnetism, the climate change du jour.
Brandt includes discursive background material on, for example, politics and preferment, the ebb and flow of public support for exploration, and, of course, the personalities involved, like the compassionate dandy George Back and the handsome commander William Parry, whose 1819-20 voyage many historians still consider the most successful ever made in the Arctic. At the Admiralty, the powerful, stubborn second secretary John Barrow emerges as a comic paradigm of what Brandt nicely terms “cockeyed optimism.”
As for the expeditions: If men weren’t sledging through blizzards at 40 (or 50) below, they were wading through hundreds of miles of rotten ice, or sitting out black winters in a perishing ship’s hold while suffering the agonies of scurvy, a menace for generations. “Our surgeon . . . would be at work early in the morning,” wrote the 17th-century sea dog Thomas James, “cutting away the dead flesh” from men’s gums — though Brandt notes that James was thought a “wimp.” On one snowshoe epic across the Canadian North, tea froze in the tin cups before men could get it to their lips.
What a tragedy one cannot hear the voices of the indigenous guides who played such a vital role in the saga of the white man in the Arctic. One wonders what they made of it all.
The book is not a biography, as Brandt acknowledges. But Sir John Franklin, the shoe-eater of the title, takes center stage, as he was and remains the emblematic figure in the quest for the Northwest Passage. Like Margaret Thatcher, Franklin was the offspring of a Lincolnshire grocer. He joined the Royal Navy at 14, fought at Trafalgar and, by the time he married his ambitious second wife, Jane, was a veteran of high latitudes. It was on an overland expedition to the source of the Copper
mine River that, nearing starvation, he ate his boots. The voyage rocketed Franklin to celebrity status despite the fact that 11 men had perished.
In 1845, weighing in at 200 pounds, 59-year-old Franklin sallied north with 129 men, two ships and food for three years. The whole lot vanished into the pack ice of Lancaster Sound, and not one man was seen alive again. Brandt devotes the last quarter of his book to this climactic story.
After two years of silence, so many vessels chugged off to rescue Franklin that Lancaster Sound experienced its inaugural traffic jam. The trouble was, nobody knew where to look. As Brandt says, the Arctic was still mostly unknown, and Franklin’s written instructions “had come with the understanding that the course he chose would depend on the ice.” Volunteers rescued rescuers as seamen marched around in random directions while their colleagues expired under fluttering sledge banners. Lady Jane wrote to President Zachary Taylor, appealing for an American search expedition, but it was a private citizen, the New York businessman Henry Grinnell, who came up with two ships and paid to have them refitted for the Arctic. When Elisha Kent Kane, leader of the second Grinnell mission, returned, he was front-page news.
Meanwhile, the Irishman Robert McClure nosed into the Arctic labyrinth from the west in the H.M.S. Investigator. Looping round the east of Banks Island and debarking, McClure sledged north and, standing on a peninsula and looking out through a telescope, spied a frozen channel. Could it be possible, he wondered in his journal, that the water communicated with Barrow’s Strait, and might “prove to be the long-sought North-West Passage?” It did, and it was. Inevitably, it was an anticlimax.
Brandt reveals Franklin’s fate in the closing pages. Among other relics, fragments of human bone were found floating in the kettles of a camp on King William Island. Nobody back at home wanted to hear that. This time it was Charles Dickens who came to the rescue. The most famous author in England publicly concluded that the chaps were simply too decent to have set about one another with a knife and fork. It must have been the natives. “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel,” Dickens thundered. And of course, at bottom he was right about that, because the Inuit are just like us.
The stories in these pages are methodically arranged, soundly researched and well referenced, though Brandt admits he did not consult the major manuscript sources, building instead on previous studies like Ann Savours’s excellent “Search for the North West Passage.” He brings little that is new to a crowded field (a range of new editions of diaries, narratives and histories are scheduled to appear this year, including works by Kane, Parry and McClure), but he tells his story well, notwithstanding the enfeebling effects of saccharine interventions like “It was a pity,” a phrase deployed on one occasion after the Hudson’s Bay Company agent Thomas Simpson has had his head blown off; an irritating folksy tendency (“twiddling frostbitten thumbs”
; and uncomfortable anachronisms (“The Far North was his comfort zone”. But I welcomed the occasional poetic touch (“So began yet another minuet with the ice”.
While he has not uncovered new material, Brandt does achieve a modern synthesis between the hagiography of the old days and the more recent historical revisionism that casts Franklin as a bumbling, fat fool. Indeed, Brandt avers that Lady Jane was “just as tough, and at least as interesting,” as her husband. According to this book, Franklin was a martyr to self- pity, failed to adapt to local circumstances, and was contemptuous of his French Canadian voyageurs and humorless to boot. He seems, Brandt finally snaps, “to have had the emotional depth of a puddle.”
The author frames his account with the question of redemption. “Despite the wrongheadedness of the enterprise,” he suggests at the outset, “an air of transcendence arises from their sufferings.” But in the end he rejects exculpatory pieties, finishing his narrative with the image of “human arms and legs cooking in a kettle while starving men stare with deadened eyes at the ultimate consequences of this spectacular piece of folly.”
Sara Wheeler’s new book, “The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle,” will be published next year.
(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/Wheeler-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
Excerpt/Introduction: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307263926&view=excerpt)
The Frozen Unknown
An engraving after a drawing made during William Parry’s 1819-20 expedition.
By SARA WHEELER
Published: March 11, 2010
When European merchants, navigators and chancers began searching for a northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Henry VIII was still a bachelor. The mazy waterways were navigable for a scant three months a year, and as late as 1819 only two white men had seen the north coast of Canada. By the time a wooden ship finally pushed through, an indifferent world was looking elsewhere. But the fabled Northwest Passage has returned to the news pages as a warming climate unlocks its deep channels, allowing access to hydrocarbons below the seabed. Anthony Brandt anchors his robust new history, “The Man Who Ate His Boots,” in that modern context.
THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BOOTS
The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage
By Anthony Brandt
Illustrated. 441 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95
The editor of narrative anthologies of both polar regions, Brandt concentrates on the first half of the 19th century, a period in which the search for the elusive passage gathered momentum in the slipstream of post-Napoleonic peace. Having set the scene with reference to the Far North and its occluded waters in myth and tradition, he works chronologically through the expeditions, analyzing a range of cultural and social influences on the naval panjandrums who dispatched so many little ships to high latitudes. Science, for example, had become increasingly important, especially terrestrial magnetism, the climate change du jour.
Brandt includes discursive background material on, for example, politics and preferment, the ebb and flow of public support for exploration, and, of course, the personalities involved, like the compassionate dandy George Back and the handsome commander William Parry, whose 1819-20 voyage many historians still consider the most successful ever made in the Arctic. At the Admiralty, the powerful, stubborn second secretary John Barrow emerges as a comic paradigm of what Brandt nicely terms “cockeyed optimism.”
As for the expeditions: If men weren’t sledging through blizzards at 40 (or 50) below, they were wading through hundreds of miles of rotten ice, or sitting out black winters in a perishing ship’s hold while suffering the agonies of scurvy, a menace for generations. “Our surgeon . . . would be at work early in the morning,” wrote the 17th-century sea dog Thomas James, “cutting away the dead flesh” from men’s gums — though Brandt notes that James was thought a “wimp.” On one snowshoe epic across the Canadian North, tea froze in the tin cups before men could get it to their lips.
What a tragedy one cannot hear the voices of the indigenous guides who played such a vital role in the saga of the white man in the Arctic. One wonders what they made of it all.
The book is not a biography, as Brandt acknowledges. But Sir John Franklin, the shoe-eater of the title, takes center stage, as he was and remains the emblematic figure in the quest for the Northwest Passage. Like Margaret Thatcher, Franklin was the offspring of a Lincolnshire grocer. He joined the Royal Navy at 14, fought at Trafalgar and, by the time he married his ambitious second wife, Jane, was a veteran of high latitudes. It was on an overland expedition to the source of the Copper
mine River that, nearing starvation, he ate his boots. The voyage rocketed Franklin to celebrity status despite the fact that 11 men had perished. In 1845, weighing in at 200 pounds, 59-year-old Franklin sallied north with 129 men, two ships and food for three years. The whole lot vanished into the pack ice of Lancaster Sound, and not one man was seen alive again. Brandt devotes the last quarter of his book to this climactic story.
After two years of silence, so many vessels chugged off to rescue Franklin that Lancaster Sound experienced its inaugural traffic jam. The trouble was, nobody knew where to look. As Brandt says, the Arctic was still mostly unknown, and Franklin’s written instructions “had come with the understanding that the course he chose would depend on the ice.” Volunteers rescued rescuers as seamen marched around in random directions while their colleagues expired under fluttering sledge banners. Lady Jane wrote to President Zachary Taylor, appealing for an American search expedition, but it was a private citizen, the New York businessman Henry Grinnell, who came up with two ships and paid to have them refitted for the Arctic. When Elisha Kent Kane, leader of the second Grinnell mission, returned, he was front-page news.
Meanwhile, the Irishman Robert McClure nosed into the Arctic labyrinth from the west in the H.M.S. Investigator. Looping round the east of Banks Island and debarking, McClure sledged north and, standing on a peninsula and looking out through a telescope, spied a frozen channel. Could it be possible, he wondered in his journal, that the water communicated with Barrow’s Strait, and might “prove to be the long-sought North-West Passage?” It did, and it was. Inevitably, it was an anticlimax.
Brandt reveals Franklin’s fate in the closing pages. Among other relics, fragments of human bone were found floating in the kettles of a camp on King William Island. Nobody back at home wanted to hear that. This time it was Charles Dickens who came to the rescue. The most famous author in England publicly concluded that the chaps were simply too decent to have set about one another with a knife and fork. It must have been the natives. “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel,” Dickens thundered. And of course, at bottom he was right about that, because the Inuit are just like us.
The stories in these pages are methodically arranged, soundly researched and well referenced, though Brandt admits he did not consult the major manuscript sources, building instead on previous studies like Ann Savours’s excellent “Search for the North West Passage.” He brings little that is new to a crowded field (a range of new editions of diaries, narratives and histories are scheduled to appear this year, including works by Kane, Parry and McClure), but he tells his story well, notwithstanding the enfeebling effects of saccharine interventions like “It was a pity,” a phrase deployed on one occasion after the Hudson’s Bay Company agent Thomas Simpson has had his head blown off; an irritating folksy tendency (“twiddling frostbitten thumbs”
; and uncomfortable anachronisms (“The Far North was his comfort zone”. But I welcomed the occasional poetic touch (“So began yet another minuet with the ice”. While he has not uncovered new material, Brandt does achieve a modern synthesis between the hagiography of the old days and the more recent historical revisionism that casts Franklin as a bumbling, fat fool. Indeed, Brandt avers that Lady Jane was “just as tough, and at least as interesting,” as her husband. According to this book, Franklin was a martyr to self- pity, failed to adapt to local circumstances, and was contemptuous of his French Canadian voyageurs and humorless to boot. He seems, Brandt finally snaps, “to have had the emotional depth of a puddle.”
The author frames his account with the question of redemption. “Despite the wrongheadedness of the enterprise,” he suggests at the outset, “an air of transcendence arises from their sufferings.” But in the end he rejects exculpatory pieties, finishing his narrative with the image of “human arms and legs cooking in a kettle while starving men stare with deadened eyes at the ultimate consequences of this spectacular piece of folly.”
Sara Wheeler’s new book, “The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle,” will be published next year.
(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/books/review/Wheeler-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3
Excerpt/Introduction: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307263926&view=excerpt)
