How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the desolate Canadian Arctic, to the mystery of the Franklin expedition, which disappeared in 1845 seeking the North-West Passage, and to a world of disagreement about what happened to it.
Ernest Coleman’s story of his search for clues to Franklin’s fate is delightfully prejudiced and pugnacious. The purpose of No Earthly Pole is, he writes, ‘to speak out in opposition to the clustering together of some academics and experts who have closed their minds’. Middle-aged lieutenant goes to the ends of the earth to defend the reputation of Queen Victoria’s Navy would make a lovely film.
The backstory: HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, carrying 129 men under Sir John Franklin, were last seen by whalers in Baffin Bay in July 1845. There was no further recorded sighting until the discovery of the wreck of Erebus in 2014 and of Terror two years later. Notes left ashore reported the ships surrounded by ice in 1846, Franklin dying in 1847 and survivors setting out to walk south in 1848. They never made it to safety.
Coleman is convinced he has found Franklin’s grave – but it turns out to be a pile of rocks over a lemming’s burrow
In subsequent years countless searchers, ships and coffers of treasure produced graves, skeletons, relics and rumours. An entire industry has been built on supposition: that the starving sailors turned cannibals; that they foolishly disdained to learn from the Netsilik Inuit, or were massacred by them; that they went mad, poisoned by lead from their tinned food. There is material to support any number of theories.
Enter Ernest Coleman FRGS, dauntless explorer and rumbustious despiser of academe, an Arctic Eddie the Eagle.
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