Paul Watson. Ice Ghosts. New York: Norton, 2017. Print.

Ice Ghosts carries the subtitle The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition. That is its subject. The Franklin Expedition, mentioned in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, has been a famous mystery about and for explorers. Instead of the Lost City of Z or the Seven Cities of Cibola or the Fountain of Youth, Sir John Franklin led the 1845-1848(?) expedition to find the Northwest Passage—a hypothetical sailing route north of the North American continent between Europe and East Asia.

Franklin was neither the first not the last to attempt this. Indeed, he had been on a similar expedition west of Greenland years before. He had also served as Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in Australia and made a famous trek across that island. He had been a hero in the Napoleonic Wars and was serving as a captain in the Royal Navy, hence the Sir John. Two of his best friends were the equally hardy Arctic and Antarctic explorer Sir James Ross and the intrepid Arctic explorer and naturalist Sir John Richardson.

Richardson accompanied Franklin on his first major Arctic exploration from 1819 to 1822. He would also be involved in the first of many attempts to find Franklin after his expedition went missing.

Franklin could have retired, but like Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem of the same name, he wanted one more chance at immortality and adventure.

…but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done…

So in 1845, commanding two converted bomb boats, the Erebus and Terror, he set sail from London to the northwest. The voyage was planned carefully, with enough fuel and supplies to last three years. Neither Franklin, his ships, nor any of his sailors ever returned.

The quest to find Franklin, the ships, or any survivors became a challenge for many.

Watson, himself a very experienced news reporter, details the preparation for and the known details of the voyage. The last written observations were sent from Disko Bay, Greenland, in July of 1845. They were last spotted by whalers off the coast of Greenland on July 26, 1845. Watson begins with the perspective of the English who mounted the voyage with special emphasis on Lady Franklin, who persisted on promoting searches for her husband for about fifteen years.

Beginning in 1850, a number of British and American expeditions joined the search. They learn that the Franklin expedition wintered over in 1845-1846 on Beechey Island. In 1854 Scottish explorer John Rae (accompanied by Richardson) met an Inuk hunter who told him of dozens of white men starving on King William Island, just north of the Adelaide Peninsula a few years before.

In 1859 Irish explorer Francis McClintock discovered some cairns erected by Franklin’s men with a brief note saying that their ships had been beset by ice for two years, that Sir John had died in 1847, and that they planned to trek to the North American mainland.

An American expedition in 1869 found some skeletal remains of British sailors identified as members of the Franklin expedition. They found some monogrammed flatware and dinnerware and other personal items as well as the graves of the three men who died the first winter on Beechey Island.

From this point on in Ice Ghosts, Watson mostly tells what the native Inuit people told through their traditions. A significant figure emerges—Louie Kamookak, born in the 1940s and educated in English-language schools. He devoted much time to collecting traditional stories passed on by his people. From tales sounding remarkably accurate of Martin Frobisher to recent hunting expeditions, the Inuit took care to repeat the significant stories and nature lore to pass on.l

Watson notes that many times European people did not believe that uncivilized tribal people had any tales to tell. There was also a confusion with place names, understanding foreign names on both sides, and even different ways of looking at geography.

For example, the prevailing winds in the region of Prince William Island are from the northwest, which the locals consider north. The maps they draw are oriented towards their home village, regardless of what compass direction may be at the top of the map. Mr. Kamookak was able to see things from both perspectives.

Speaking of maps, if there is a weakness to this volume, it is the maps. They are clear and show some of the main locations of towns and discoveries, but the text names many geographic locations which do not appear on any of the maps, so we are left guessing where they might be. I suspect even a lot of Canadians are not adept at Arctic geography.

Anyway, as a result of Louie Kamookak’s work, more artifacts and skeletons from the Franklin expedition were found. Eventually, there were some key discoveries. In 1980, people discovered the wreck of the HMS Breadalbane, a ship that had searched for Franklin and was abandoned while most of its crew survived. In 2010 another such vessel was discovered. Then in 2014 the Erebus and in 2016 the Terror were found at last. The top mast of the Erebus was only nine feet below the surface.

This is an exciting tale. This review just skims it. Because he has been there himself, Watson describes what the “Frozen Deep” Arctic is like. Among other things, Franklin picked what would turn out to be two of the most severe winters on record in the area to sail. In fact, it appears that the two ships may have been icebound through the entire summer of 1846.

As another aside, this reviewer’s uncle used to be a guide in northern Quebec working out of Chibougamau. While far north, it is south of the Arctic Circle and Hudson Bay, and considerably south of where Ice Ghosts is set. Still, the lake ice in that part of Quebec does not usually break up until June and by the end of September the lakes are frozen again.

There is a lot more in the book. Watson does a careful job of documenting and piecing together what happened to Franklin and his men and what happened to others searching for them. One of the men who found documents in a cairn in the late 1850s placed one page with the word martyr on it in Abraham Lincoln’s coffin when it was making its long public railroad journey from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois.

One of the ships searching for Franklin, the HMS Resolute, was abandoned after being on station for nearly four years. It was recovered nearly intact a year later by an American whaler, repaired, and returned to England with much fanfare. When the vessel was eventually decommissioned, Queen Victoria had two desks made from its timbers. One she gave to President Hayes in 1880. The Resolute Desk has been a fixture in the White House ever since, usually serving as the president’s desk in the Oval Office.

One suggestion—read this book in the summertime. I reserved this book from a library, so I had to read it when my time came up this past week. I was reading a book about huge mounds of ice, Inuit, and men dying of Arctic exposure in the middle of two snowstorms. It made me feel even colder. Perhaps it was appropriate and demonstrated how this story came alive, but we have to admit that some of the best stories—heroic, tragic, or both—portray man versus nature.

For those interested in birds, two species and one subspecies of North American birds are named after men featured in this story. The ship’s surgeon who explored in the region several times has Richardson’s Goose, the nominate race of the Cackling Goose, named after him. The name of the rare high Arctic Ross’s Gull honors Arctic and Antarctic explorer James Ross. Franklin himself was memorialized in the name of the Franklin’s Gull. Their names live on.