Frozen in Time
Now I'm reading and enjoying Frozen in Time, and it's fascinating! I had already read Resolute which covered a lot of the same stuff, but it was a more poorly-rated book (I just bought it on deep discount because it was polar) and it was more about the rescue efforts, all those various expeditions. And actually, it was good for that, because Frozen in Time doesn't go into as much detail about them.
I already knew a lot of the basic facts and finds, like the bodies buried on Beechey Island (coooool) and the "boat place" and the letter in the cairn, and I'd seen pictures of artifacts found, and those were all little details I was proud to pick up on in The Terror.
Oh, and in answer to my own question somewhere about the seance, I think it must have been in Resolute that I read it, but supposedly there were some girls who would channel the dead spirit of their 4-year-old sister (Louisa "Weesy" Coppin), and one day their aunt asked them to ask her where Franklin's expedition was (since it was so big in the news, the search expeditions and all.) Supposedly the daughter Anne doing the seance drew a chart of the arctic on the floor, and then ghostly writing appeared on the walls saying the words, "Erebus and Terror. Sir John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Regent Inlet, Victory Point, Victoria Channel" which is the place where the note was left in the cairn and very near where the ships were abandoned - though nobody had discovered it yet! That little 4-year-old dead girl was amazing! She and Franklin must have been best buds in heaven.
Anyway, back to Frozen in Time. I'm so impressed with all the research Dan Simmons must have done for The Terror, because there are so many little things from different sources that he included in his book. For instance:
In Frozen in Time, there are excerpts from Peglar's badly-spelled actual diary (and I never knew it existed! I thought that one letter in the cairn was the only piece of manuscript surviving! And the diary excerpts in The Terror are direct quotes from the real diary.) And where the searchers found a body with his diary, which also had the writing of another unknown man, they also found a comb with a few strands of hair, and a clothes brush (which, in the novel, were the things that Peglar's friend Bridgens took with him when he wandered out to die). And when they found Irving's body, he'd been buried with his telescope (which in the novel he'd been letting the Esquimaux look at before he was killed) and there was a fancy handkerchief placed under his head (which in the novel was placed there, returned to him by Lady Silence.) Also from Inuit testimony searchers heard that one of the ships had come south (like in the novel the Terror did, which Crozier found much later, empty) and that they'd broken into it with their axes (also happened in the novel - and actually I remembered that from the Nova documentary) and found one dead body which had long teeth (which is like the body Crozier found in his bunk in the novel.) So cool!
Oh, and I did remember about the "boat place," where in the novel Hickey and Manson die, and I remember that it had lots of weird stuff in it like chocolate and silverware, but I didn't realize that when the searchers found the skeletons, one of them was quite intact and the other one looked like it had been torn up by animals. Creepy. I wonder what they did with that boat and the skeletons. They probably buried the skeletons - but the boat? Oh, and it said that the boat was pointing back towards the direction of where Erebus and Terror had been abandoned, instead of pointing south where the other men went.
I'm so captivated by the Franklin expedition and the mystery of it all. I really don't quite understand why. The mystery is just so tantalizing! Like Amelia Earhart.