Frozen in Time

The Gates of Hell

Sir John Franklin’s Tragic Quest
for the Northwest Passage
by Andrew Lambert
Yale, 456 pp., $32.50

As is often the case with revisionist histories, this one demystifies and demythologizes its subject, the ill-fated British expedition to the Arctic led by a naval captain, Sir John Franklin. That Andrew Lambert intends to challenge the conventional version of the Franklin expedition is clear from the outset. He begins his prologue with this arresting sentence, which surely would have shocked the civilized sensibilities of mid-Victorian Britain: “We don’t know when it started, or who took the decision, but some time in May 1848 British sailors from HMS Erebus and HMS Terror began butchering and eating their comrades.”

Lambert thus asserts as fact what has, in the past, been considered arguable: that the crew of the Franklin expedition, stranded in the Arctic, engaged in cannibalism. The controversy surrounding this claim, according to Lambert, derives from the simple fact Victorian Britons did not want to imagine their fellow Englishmen as cannibals, and so ignored the evidence. Today, along with human bones which show evidence of being cut by knives, and accounts of the Inuit who encountered the crew (both of which were known and ignored by contemporaries who trekked to the Arctic in search of Franklin), there is forensic science to support the claim. But while this is undoubtedly the most gripping aspect of The Gates of Hell, cannibalism accounts for only a small part of Lambert’s history. It is, nonetheless, an important part of his thesis; namely, that, for a variety of reasons, chiefly a love of patriotic heroism, the “history” of the Franklin expedition was untrue from its first draft. Lambert seeks to correct the record.