Of ships and ice packs
By Sara Wheeler |
April 11, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
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. Anthony Brandt anchors his robust history, "The Man Who Ate His Boots," in that modern context.
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.
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 handsome commander William Parry, whose 1819-20 voyage many historians still consider the most successful ever made in the Arctic.
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. On one snowshoe epic across the North, tea froze in the tin cups before men could get it to their lips.
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 Coppermine River that, nearing starvation, he ate his boots. He rocketed to celebrity status, despite 11 men dying. In 1845, 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.
The stories in these pages are methodically arranged, soundly researched and well referenced but although Brandt brings little that is new to a crowded field he tells his story well.
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. Anthony Brandt anchors his robust history, "The Man Who Ate His Boots," in that modern context.
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.
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 handsome commander William Parry, whose 1819-20 voyage many historians still consider the most successful ever made in the Arctic.
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. On one snowshoe epic across the North, tea froze in the tin cups before men could get it to their lips.
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 Coppermine River that, nearing starvation, he ate his boots. He rocketed to celebrity status, despite 11 men dying. In 1845, 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.
The stories in these pages are methodically arranged, soundly researched and well referenced but although Brandt brings little that is new to a crowded field he tells his story well.
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