The death of Sir John Franklin and his 128 crew is the great catastrophe of the Canadian North. The expedition began in 1845 with extraordinary enthusiasm and optimism, yet four years later everyone was dead, their fate wrapped in a mystery that even today — more than a century and a half later — still leaves many questions unanswered.
The brutal crushing of such high expectations, the horrifying deaths the men suffered, and the 150 years of effort that have gone into discovering an answer make this a timeless, universal tale of hope, ambition, tragedy and plain bad luck. It intrigues us today because the answers may never be fully known. Time and the harsh Arctic elements have, almost certainly, destroyed any written messages from the doomed men. The search continues for the lost ships, Erebus and Terror, and the men who sailed them.
During my research for Graves of Ice, I discovered the real George Chambers’s great-great grandnephew and learned from him where George had lived and what his father, brothers and sisters did. This made George live for me in a way that a fully fictional character cannot. And I had the great fortune to meet, by happy accident, Tom Gross, who has gone into the Arctic every summer for almost 20 years, searching for clues about the fate of the doomed expedition.