North with Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames

After reading Iceblink by Scott Cookman l was attracted to this piece of fiction and it is brilliant, clear, concise and crisply written the author has obviously done a lot of research on this book. There is little doubt that some members of the expedition survived beyond 1848. For a brilliant revisionist history try David Woodman's book Unravelling the Franklin Mystery, Inuit Testimony. Based on Halls reaearch and his own Woodman has come as close to the truth as anybody about what really happened, based on the native Inuit testimony. Some members probably survived until 1851, poor Fitzjames where oh where did the relief expeditions fail him and his comrades miserably!

The Franklin Expedition has fascinated me for years, especially since some of my students created an interactive computer game, "The Mystery of Franklin's Fate," for Science World in Vancouver. I've even thought about writing a novel about it, but now John Wilson has saved me the work--and done a far better job than I could have!North With Franklin is the journal of James Fitzjames, one of Franklin's captains (some of the early passages are from his real letters). Wilson has the style and attitude just right, and blends his research very effectively into the story. We can see the ships, the men, the terrain. We see the first optimism fade as the ships are trapped in the ice and make no progress in the short summers. The first deaths, from TB, are painfully vivid to Fitzjames; by the end, each death gets only a cursory note, while the captain battles his own mysterious ailments and tries to keep the survivors alive. His journal is a series of letters to his sister-in-law, for whom he clearly feels more than he can admit. As the years pass and the expedition dwindles to a handful of desperately sick men, Captain Fitzjames comes at least to a clearer understanding of what has gone wrong--not just lead poisoning and scurvy, but a complacently arrogant belief in superior technology.John Wilson brings the expedition members to life again, each a distinct character (though of course the "people"--ordinary seamen--are seen through the eyes of an officer in a class-ridden society).The narrative seems so plausible that I half-expected to find the expedition's place-names on the endpaper maps--but whatever names they gave the bays and points vanished with them and their records. Still, North With Franklin is as close an account of the expedition's fate as we are likely to have, at least until Captain Fitzjames's real journals are found under some Arctic cairn.