Frozen In Time

The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

"It's as if he's unconscious," marvelled Owen Beattie as he lifted the slim body of twenty-year-old Chief Stoker John Torrington to the surface, the young man's head lolling onto his shoulder.

Estonian Edition

Jäätunud ajas, the Estonian edition of Frozen In Time published by Eesti Raamat (2005) can now be seen online at:
www.raamatukoi.ee/cgi-bin/raamat?20435

Editor's Pick

Archaeology magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America, recently rewarded Frozen In Time with an Editor's Pick (Volume 58 Number 2, March/April 2005)
www.archaeology.org/0503/reviews/picks.html

With a new introduction by Margaret Atwood

Introduction (abridged)

Frozen in time is one of those books that, having once entered our imaginations, refuse to go away. As I’ve been writing this introduction, I’ve described the project to several people. “Frozen in Time,” I say. They look blank. “The one with the picture of the Frozen Franklin on the front,” I say. “Oh yes. That one,” they say. “I read that!” And off we go on a discussion of forensic anthropology under extreme conditions. For Frozen in Time made a large impact, devoted as it was to the astonishing revelations made by Dr. Owen Beattie—including the high probability that lead poisoning had contributed to the annihilation of the 1845 Franklin expedition.

I read Frozen in Time when it first came out. I looked at the pictures in it. They gave me nightmares. I incorporated story and pictures as a subtext and extended metaphor in a short story called “The Age of Lead,” published in a 1991 collection called Wilderness Tips. Then, some nine years later, during a boat trip in the Arctic, I met John Geiger, one of the authors of Frozen in Time.

Not only had I read his book, he had read mine, and it had caused him to give further thought to lead as a factor in northern exploration and in unlucky nineteenth-century sea voyages in general.

Franklin, said Geiger, was the canary in the mine, though unrecognized as such at first: until the last years of the nineteenth century, crews on long voyages continued to be fatally sickened by the lead in tinned food. Geiger has included the results of his additional research in this expanded version of Frozen in Time. The nineteenth century, he said, was truly an “age of lead.” Thus do life and art intertwine.

Back to the foreground. In the fall of 1984, a mesmerizing photograph grabbed attention in newspapers around the world. It showed a young man who looked neither fully dead nor entirely alive. He was dressed in archaic clothing and was surrounded by a casing of ice. The whites of his half-open eyes were tea-coloured. His forehead was dark blue. Despite the soothing and respectful adjectives applied to him by the authors of Frozen in Time, you would never have confused this man with a lad just drifting off to sleep. Instead he looked like a blend of Star Trek extraterrestrial and B-movie victim-of-a-curse: not someone you’d want as your next-door neighbour, especially if the moon was full.

Every time we find the well-preserved body of someone who died long ago—an Egyptian mummy, a freeze-dried Incan sacrifice, a leathery Scandinavian bog-person, the famous iceman of the European Alps—there’s a similar fascination. Here is someone who has defied the general ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust rule, and who has remained recognizable as an individual human being long after most have turned to bone and earth. In the Middle Ages, unnatural results argued unnatural causes, and such a body would either have been revered as saintly or staked through the heart. In our age, try for rationality as we may, something of the horror classic lingers: the mummy walks, the vampire awakes. It ’s so di»cult to believe that one who appears to be so nearly alive is not conscious of us. Surely—we feel—a being like this is a messenger. He has travelled through time, all the way from his age to our own, in order to tell us something we long to know.

The man in the sensational photograph was John Torrington, one of the first three to die during the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845. The stated goal of the expedition was to discover the Northwest Passage to the Orient and claim it for Britain, the actual result was the obliteration of all participants. Torrington had been buried in a carefully dug grave, deep in the permafrost on the shore of Beechey Island, Franklin’s base during the expedition’s first winter. Two others—John Hartnell and William Braine—were given adjacent graves. All three were painstakingly exhumed by anthropologist Owen Beattie and his team in an attempt to solve a long-standing mystery: Why had the Franklin expedition ended so disastrously?

Beattie’s search for evidence of the rest of the Franklin expedition, his excavation of the three known graves, and his subsequent discoveries, gave rise to a television documentary and then—three years after the photograph first appeared—to the book you are holding in your hands. That the story should generate such widespread interest 140 years after Franklin filled his fresh-water barrels at Stromness in the Orkney Islands before sailing off to his mysterious fate is a tribute to the extraordinary staying powers of the Franklin legend.

For many years the mysteriousness of that fate was the chief drawing card. At first, Franklin’s two ships, the ominously named Terror and Erebus, appeared to have vanished into nothingness. No trace could be found of them, even after the graves of Torrington, Hartnell and Braine had been found. There is something unnerving about people who can’t be located, dead or alive. They upset our sense of space—surely the missing ones have to be somewhere, but where? Among the ancient Greeks, the dead who had not been retrieved and given proper funeral ceremonies could not reach the Underworld; they lingered in the world of the living as restless ghosts. And so it is, still, with the disappeared: they haunt us. The Victorian age was especially prone to such hauntings, as witness Tennyson’s In Memoriam, its most exemplary tribute to a man lost at sea.

Adding to the attraction of the Franklin story was the Arctic landscape that had subsumed leader, ships and men. In the nineteenth century very few Europeans—apart from whalers—had ever been to the far north. It was one of those perilous regions attractive to a public still sensitive to the spirit of literary Romanti-cism—a place where a hero might defy the odds, suffer outrageously, and pit his larger-than-usual soul against overwhelming forces. This Arctic was dreary and lonesome and empty, like the windswept heaths and forbidding mountains favoured by aficionados of the Sublime. But the Arctic was also a potent Otherworld, imagined as a beautiful and alluring but potentially malign fairyland, a Snow Queen’s realm complete with otherworldly light effects, glittering ice-palaces, fabulous beasts—narwhals, polar bears, walruses—and gnome-like inhabitants dressed in exotic fur outfits. There are numerous drawings of the period that attest to this fascination with the locale. The Victorians were keen on fairies of all sorts; they painted them, wrote stories about them, and sometimes went so far as to believe in them. They knew the rules: going to an otherworld was a great risk. You might be captured by nonhuman beings. You might be trapped. You might never get out...

Read Margaret Atwood's entire introduction in Frozen In Time

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Margaret Atwood is the author of more than thirty internationally acclaimed works of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her short story 'The Age of Lead', which refers to the forensic investigations into the Franklin expedition, was published in her collection, Wilderness Tips. Her essay 'Concerning Franklin' was published in her study, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. An account of her visit to Beechey Island was published in Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage, edited by Katherine Govier.

Introduction to the German Edition by Sten Nadolny

Introduction (translated)

The famously dreadful end of the Franklin expedition has been explained!

I have read many accounts and conjectures from the past century and a half, but only a few pointed in the direction that has now been confirmed. Most writers more or less consciously tried to add something new of their own: wish-fulfilment dreams of hard, healthy living, of the warmth of human trustworthiness in the eternal ice, hopes far beyond the Northwest Passage, utopias of the 19th century, and images of the shipwrecks of these same dreams in the 20th. All this has been mirrored, it seems to me, in the Franklin myth - until today...

He was already beloved in his lifetime, a peaceable, middle-class hero, full of kindness, a thoughtful researcher, strong against the temptations of idleness, of cowardice or bravado; a captain who never gave up. When, many years after his last expedition, sure proofs of its disaster were found, critics proclaimed themselves, who thought they saw flaws in him - conveniently, because people no longer believed in the powerlessness of Man against Nature, they believed in progress, steam-engines, canned food and the human denial of failure.

Franklin's life - as I interpreted and wrote about it years ago - appeared to me symbolic of my own time: persistent escape from communications that diminish knowledge, from nutrition that kills more certainly than hunger, medicine that is worse than illness, speed that takes up time, safety that surrenders to disaster. I had little idea how tragically true this was of Franklin's end.

Beattie's and Geiger's book was preceded in the world media by photographs of a man preserved in ice. But what makes the reading of this book so compelling is by no means an effect of horror. Instead, it is something of Franklin's own spirit: tireless, painstaking labour led to the solution of the riddle of the dead sailors of the Erebus and the Terror.

Sten Nadolny