Bitter Passage by Colin Mills

 I have always been fascinated by explorers and have had the pleasure to study them academically. The expedition of Sir John Franklin in 1845, to seek out the Northwest Passage in the Arctic has the extra mystery in that the two ships he took (HMS Terror and HMS Erebus) never returned and no messages from the crew ever arrived home. Four years after their disappearance, Franklin’s wife and others organised many searches for the missing men, and this novel is a story about how such an event may have been.

The two main characters in this account are based on real people and they are very different. They often clash in their viewpoint, one admiring Franklin to hero status while the other aspires to professional recognition. They connect as they both want to find out what happened to the ships and crew. Their thoughts are shown in sharp contrast as the author jumps from one character to the next and fortunately there are only on a few characters in each scene. The crew members they refer to are names I recognise from historical accounts of the expedition, which makes the story have a genuine thread.

The first half of this book is very slow, with the men making their way through the challenges presented by the ice, descriptions of the landscape and their ailments as well as hunting the few animals that exist in this environment. After the the fifty per cent mark however, the story lifts through some discoveries and life and death situations. My reading patience pays off.

This is a well written if a tad tedious book at times, impeccably researched in historical information, although I’m not sure whether using the spelling ‘Esquimaux’ for the indigenous peoples makes it more authentic. A story about survival, guilt, loneliness and ambition, and how people can believe in a collective truth despite knowing otherwise. 

There are many books surrounding this expedition and I have read quite a few, the last one being Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror Expedition: Lost and Found by Gillian Hutchinson, which highlights the latest findings. The only other fictionalised version I have read is The Terror by Dan Simmons.