One of historys greatest mysteries: Behind the deadly quest to conquer the Northwest Passage
In May 1845, one of England’s most storied naval officers, Sir John Franklin, launched an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage.Once thought to be ice-free, the legendary North Pole journey had been mythically described — without any real evidence — as an earthly paradise with palm trees, dragons, and 4-foot-tall pygmies.
Forget about blizzards, polar bears, and Arctic typhoons.But, Franklin and a crew of 128 men never made it out of the great Northwest. And what became known as “the Franklin mystery” has led to more than 175 years of speculation and “spawned generations of devoted ‘Franklinites’ obsessed with piecing together the story,” writes New York Times bestselling author and adventurer Mark Synnott in his travelogue-mystery, “Into the Ice, The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery” (Dutton).Synnott, a veteran of international climbing expeditions, including in the Arctic, Patagonia, the Himalayas, the Sahara, and the Amazon jungle, had become obsessed with what really happened to Franklin and his crew.Thus, he embarked on his 40-year-old fiberglass boat, Polar Sun, from Maine through the Northwest Passage in order to witness what Franklin encountered some nearly two centuries prior.
His greatest hope was to find the famous skipper’s records and diaries, possibly on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, where Franklin’s two ships became stranded in 1846 and froze in the sea ice just north of the island that lies between Victoria Island and Boothia Peninsula.“Nearly every shred of the Franklin expedition’s recorded history has been lost to the winds of time and . . .the story of Franklin’s expedition is one of cannibalism and chaotic disintegration of order although one small band may have survived for years,” writes Synnott who confesses he got caught up in his own “morbid fascination” with what happened to the skipper who was left stranded in the central Arctic. Fr...