Around the middle of the 19th century a new image of horror appeared in Victorian art. In 1864 Edwin Landseer exhibited something the like of which he had never painted before and never would again. In ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’, the man who had painted ‘Dignity and Impudence’ shows two polar bears, one howling above a human rib-cage, the other tearing at the sails of a ship crushed in the ice, all this in the bleak half light of what passes for a day in the Arctic. The picture is so terrifying that, hanging in the Great Hall of the Royal Holloway College, it is even now covered over when students take their exams.
Five years earlier, in his short story ‘The Haunters and the Haunted’, Edward Bulwer-Lytton had described a vision of the fate awaiting his demonic villain, a man who, like Cliff Richard, had arrested the processes of ageing.
‘The sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks wedge in the ship…And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the ship and its dead…That man is yourself ; and terror is on you — terror ; and terror has swallowed your will. And I see swarming up the ice-rock, grey grisly things. The bears of the North have scented their prey…’
It is clear that something had scared the daylights out of the Victorians, this at the time of the implacable advance of their Empire and of the moment of their greatest self-confidence, of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
That something was the unknown fate of the experienced Arctic explorer Captain Sir John Franklin with two ships and 128 men in 1845. He was in search of that centuries old chimera, the North West Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, but also, as Professor Lambert is insistent, of the earth’s magnetic field, a serious scientific enterprise. And he, his crews and his two ships, the Erebus and the ironically named Terror, had vanished from the face of the earth.
Yet this was not what scared the daylights out of his contemporaries. Nine years later one of his would-be rescuers John Rae of the Hudson Bay Company (the Admiralty alone would send 15 ships in search of him) met some Eskimos who told him they had come upon the last of Franklin’s men, and not one of these was left alive. But that was an incidental detail. From the state of their corpses they had eaten each other, and, again, that was just the beginning: it was the form the butchery had taken, the marks on the bones enduring to this day.
‘In most cases of survival cannibalism the heads and hands are removed, too human to be eaten,’ Professor Lambert writes knowledgeably.
‘These men were not so squeamish. They took the heads, ripped off the jaw bones and stove in the bases of the skulls to get at the nutritious and easily digested brain. After the heads were done they scavenged for scraps, defleshing the fingers, stripping off every last remnant with the grim efficiency of a meat-recovery machine.’
Only it wasn’t savages who had done this, it was sailors from the disciplined navy of the world’s most industrialised Christian nation, men led by Sir John Franklin, a Victorian hero whose statue was just the second to be put up to a naval officer in London. Yet, old and fat and tired, Franklin had died long before the horror came to his party.
Nobody comes well out of this. Dickens got involved, as Dickens would, in his magazine Household Words dismissing outright the Eskimo account as ‘the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber’. The fact that they were already there, surviving with ease in the pristine wastes of the Arctic, alone seemed an affront to Victorian expertise and Victorian values, but he went further. Surely the Eskimos had murdered the sailors, though, he was hedging his bets, ‘the coarsest and commonest men of the shipwrecked party’ might have done such things, not their officers. Gentlemen did not eat each other. It is extraordinary stuff. The explorers, he wrote, should be remembered for ‘their fortitude, their lofty sense of duty, their courage, and their religion’.
The trouble was that nobody knew what had happened, for, unlike with Scott, no written records survive. The Eskimos had found some papers, along with Franklin’s insignia of knighthood and some cutlery, but the papers they had thrown away, so this is a book constructed on supposition. Unfortunately supposition cannot fill 350 pages of text, and another 50 of footnotes.
The result is a wordy, repetitive book. On page 229 you learn that Sir Edward Belcher, one of Franklin’s would-be rescuers, is ‘able but pathologically irascible’, on page 230 that his is a ‘tempestuous, confrontational leadership’, and, again, he is ‘a nit-picking, bullying martinet’. Throughout there is a piling up of adjectives and of facts, as well as a long account of Franklin’s record as a Tasmanian colonial administrator, of the sort you expect in a post-graduate thesis, where nothing must be neglected, nothing overlooked. What is wrong with these academic writers, who spend their lives among books, yet find it impossible to write one?
If only Professor Lambert had chanced his arm at some imaginative writing. What was it like to have been in one of these ships when the ice closed in and all men could do was hope that it would break up, perhaps next year, perhaps the one after that? What is it like (for Professor Lambert has been there) to look out on the unbroken desolation of the Arctic ?
So much is forked in, then forgotten. There is Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, Franklin’s champion, who is said to have slept only five and a half hours a night, largely because of his guilt over an incestuous relationship with his sister. Eh?
But just that. And the infuriating reference to an American military expedition to the Arctic in 1881, where six men survived only through cannibalism, eating the black soldiers first, then the white, then officers by rank. Again nothing more, except that the leader, promoted to major general, survived and died in 1935. At times this is a very irritating book.