Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions

by John Franklin, Bil Gilbert (Introduction)

In 1845 Sir John Franklin and his expedition, sailing on the Erebus and the Terror , set out in search of the Northwest Passage. In their pursuit of that elusive water route across North America they all perished, their fate remaining unknown for many years. Franklin and his crew inspired a spate of books on exploration in the nineteenth century, and interest in his expedition has revived with the recent discovery of the bodies of several of its members, perfectly preserved by ice for nearly a century and half. Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions , originally published in 1859, is Franklin's own record of his earlier explorations that put the high arctic on the map, and includes his last letter and reports tracing the expedition's last movements. He describes the daily progress of his two overland expeditions from 1818 to 1827, which covered a thousand miles between the Great Slave Lake and the Arctic Ocean and charted fourteen hundred miles of coastline between Cape Beechey in present-day Alaska and Bathurst Inlet, to the north of Hudson Bay. It is a narrative filled with the exhilarating strangeness of everything about the Far North and unimaginable hardship endured heroically. Bil Gilbert's introduction is informed by a first-hand feeling for what Franklin was up against. Several years ago he followed much of the explorer's route, an experience that is described in Our Nature (Nebraska, 1986).

Genres: Canada

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1824

About the author

Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) was a British sea captain and Arctic explorer whose final expedition disappeared while attempting to chart and navigate the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. The entire crew was lost and its fate remained a mystery for 14 years. His flagship, HMS Erebus, was discovered in 2014 and sister ship HMS Terror (commanded by Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier) was discovered in 2016.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly interesting read, if you can get through Franklin's plodding narrative style. Franklin is unfortunately an awful writer, but the story is engrossing enough to make up for his literary faults. The story of his expedition down the Coppermine River is one of the greatest adventure stories I've come across. His crew wreck their canoes, are forced to travel overland across the barren tundra in winter, nearly starving to death, and have to contend with a murderous and cannibalistic voyageur.

Franklin's perspective is often amusing as he recounts nearly everything with the same stoic tone. He makes sure to tell us how much the compass needle is dipping each given day even when his crew is forced to boil lichen for dinner or even eat the leather from their boots.

It's very telling of the attitudes of the early European settlers of North America that Franklin in the same sentence will announce his discovery of an unexplored bay, giving names to all the islands in it, and note various Inuit encampments there and wonder if he might be able to get some supplies from them.

The book is instructive historically as an account of how people traversed across the wilderness of Northern Canada before the advent of roads and rail lines, and as an account of some early interactions between European 'explorers' and indigenous peoples. If you're interested in this history, this book is well worth reading, in spite of Franklin's limitations as a writer.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting account of the expeditions of Sir John Franklin to the Arctic region. The first expedition takes 80% of the book, with the second expedition being about 15% and 5% lent to the final one. The suffering and challenges of the expedition are discussed in through Franklin's journals primarily, and at other times through the journals of his compatriots. The book was tedious at times with page after page after page of going to this place or that, and not as much detail, but given their fatigue, near starvation, and him writing when chance afforded it, having any account is amazing. The book has definitely piqued my interest in reading more about polar explorers. and I plan to do so. My biggest reason for giving 3 stars was all the typos throughout the book. It really needs some editing to correct. I also would have liked to see maps and drawings that were mentioned in the text, which would have made it easier to follow all the place names. The maps included were impossible to read due to the small type and clarity of the map. Nonetheless, all in all an interesting book.