Ice Blink: The Tragic Fate of Sir John Franklin's Lost Polar Expedition

i periodically go on a Polar Exploration binge & reread the books in my library, in some sort of logical order. this time I read "Ice Blink" immediately on the heels of Beattie's fascinating "Frozen in Time," & IB did not come off well. The comparison with Beattie's book really made the main problems with this book stand out in stark relief.Cookman's theory is that the Franklin Expedition was done in by botulism poisoning; this does have merit. He clearly did considerable research into the incredibly slimy (in all senses of the word) practices of 'victualer' Goldner & the criminally lax & greedy actions of the Admiralty in allowing Goldner to provide revolting, inedible, & probably highly contaminated canned food (will people never learn that relying on the lowest bidder can bring catastrophe? apparently not. The admiralty kept using Goldner for over a decade despite knowing that something like 50-70% of his "food" had to be dumped...not trashed, but sold to the proles...another charming Admiralty habit. Who cares if the bloody peasants get poisoned, especially if you can make a few pence off 'em first?).The problem is not so much with Cookman's theory but with his absolute determination to prove it at all costs, up to & including ignoring any data which may get in the way. At times he twists himself into ludicrous knots to do so. I suppose it wouldn't have been to his liking to admit that someone else's book & theory had any merit, but he mentions Beattie's work & then totally ignores everything the test data showed. The lengths to which he goes to blank out Beattie's irrefutable data --that the bodies Beattie exhumed & autopsied had phenomenally high & recently acquired lead levels-- are positively hilarious at times. One of the symptoms of lead poisoning is mental confusion & lack of reasoning ability; rather than admit that maybe, just maybe some of the frankly insane decisions made by Crozier & his bunch could've been due to lead, Cookman states flatly & in several ways that they're incomprehensible, there's no possible way to explain them. Yes there is: they were mentally disoriented from lead poisoning. That's completely possible. But that would require Cookman to acknowledge that Beattie's book & work had validity, & apparently he'd rather do anything but that, including look like a fool.Another issue I have with "Ice Blink" is the way he delivers amazingly cogent, exciting, and appropriate conversations between the lost members of the Frank Exp without ever once hinting that these conversations are made up out of thin air. There are no records from the expedition after they vanished, except for the extremely brief & basically nonsensical note Crozier left. Granted, the book is more interesting with these conversations, but Cookman really should have made it clear that they were productions of his own imagination; to the contrary, he makes it sound as if these are quotes, without ever revealing where the quotes came from, i.e. inside Cookman's own head. Theorizing interactions between members of Franklin's party is fine, as long as you make sure to point out that you're theorizing.He frequently quotes from other Polar explorers, including Shackleford, as a way of saying "it was probably like this for Franklin's men." This is fine, but he rarely resists the opportunity to toss in some dig which makes Franklin's group sound more heroic & like they suffered much worse. He'll quote Shackleford's experiences of manhauling boats over dreadful ice, then snidely remark that Shackleford's men were in much better shape (not necessarily so) & that they only had one or two boats while Franklin had 10 (or whatever the higher number was). Well yeah, but Franklin had a freakin' mob, Shackleford had barely a dozen; of course Franklin had more boats, he had more men to drag them. The only reason to tear down other expeditions to make your own subject sound better is pettiness, and it grates. Cookman does this a lot, and it really got annoying.But in this, Cookman follows a long line of people who tied themselves in knots in attempt to lionize Franklin, to make him sound a lot more competent and accomplished than he was. It's clear, if one reads a lot about the various expeditions & explorers to the Poles, that Franklin & his group did a LOT of things wrong. For one thing, he had way, way too many people. The Inuit, who live in that marginal habitat all the time, stay in very small groups for an excellent reason; there's not enough to support a large group. Even if Frank & Co were willing & able to 'live like the savages' (which they weren't, thinking themselves vastly superior to the natives), there's not a chance that they could've acquired enough to keep that many alive. Which also explains the supposed "callousness" of the Inuit party who encountered Crozier & his group of remainders; they gave them some hard-won meat, which they could ill afford, then scrammed because they knew full well that it's not possible to feed that many mouths, Kabloona or Inuit.Cookman even goes as far as saying that all the tons of insane, useless stuff they dragged over the ice, killing themselves in the process, was perfectly reasonable: the curtain rods were surely carried to make lightning rods (well....maybe), the sterling place settings & crystal goblets & such were needed because they had to eat off of something (a small tin cup per man would'a made a lot more sense & a LOT less weight), anvils & iron stoves & silver boot brushes & all the crapola of Victorian life was actually reasonable to take along. No, it wasn't. They were nuts from lead poisoning &/or scurvy &/or starvation....or so demned Victorian that it equated to 'too stupid to live.' (what's really astonishing is that the British Polar parties never did learn from their mistakes).I followed Ice Blink with Ken McCoogan's excellent "Fatal Passage, the Story of John Rae." Now there was a guy who learned how to survive in the Arctic. This proved to be part of his downfall & excoriation, because the Victorian British thought anyone who consorted with, much less lived like, those savage, brutish, animalistic natives was less than human...plus he was Scots, so was at least halfway to beast-hood already. Rae really did do what time has attributed to Franklin; discover the almighty grail of the "Northwest Passage" (which, ironically, was never of any use because of the ice). He also discovered the fate of the FE, for which truth (they resorted to cannibalism...c'mon, who could blame them?*) he was pilloried by Lady Franklin, Charles Dickens, & the rest of Victorian England.Even McCoogan at times got carried away with the wonderfulness of John Rae, but at least his subject rightly deserved heaps of praise. Cookman ties his 'logic' and his prose into interesting origami shapes to make sure that his botulism theory & Franklin come out on top (McCoogan, bless his heart, proposes that lead poisoning AND botulism probably helped wipe out Franklin's men, which is completely reasonable, given the facts).*Update (May '17): I just read Lambert's very so-so book on (supposedly) the Franklin expedition; it's really more of a Franklin biography/hagiography, plus a LOT about the political, miliitary, & social infighting, & the planning & execution of the rescue expeditions. Lambert posits the new (to me, at least) idea that neither the Franklin nor any of the other British polar explorations (including the rescue attempts) were about the NWP, or mapping or expanding British territory, or anything else; they were about gathering data for Sabine's magnetic theories. New one on me. And Lambert spends an amazing amount of time trying to prove that Franklin was a perfect genius & his expeditions all wonderful successes. He, too, succumbs to the "there's only one possible explanation for the failure" monomania so common to polar history writers; his bugbear is scurvy.*If I were to die on a polar expedition or life raft or whatever, I'd sincerely hope my comrades would increase their chances of survival by consuming my stringy carcass, even if I had a gamy leg. As long as they waited til I kicked off from my own causes, that is.

This review was skeptical at the start of reading "Ice Blink" since the author, Scott Cookman, admits to being introduced to the story of the Franklin Expedition in 1988 after picking up Dr. Owen Beattie and John Geiger's classic account "Frozen In Time." How much could this author add to a story that has been examined in numerous studies already? Well, it turns out, quite a bit. Cookman's main contribution is his impressive research into the Stephan Goldner's Preserved Provisions company. The details on how Goldner cut corners on the manufacturing of cans, the processing of "food" (including things that were never considered food), the preparation (or lack thereof) of the victuals, and the delivery of the goods is eye-opening. The book includes a photo of a Goldner brochure listing all the impressive and exotic foods he claimed to sell. Unlike other studies, Cookman does not concentrate on the lead content of the food that seeped in from the sloppy soldering of the cans. Instead, he focuses on other contaminates in the food resulting from poor food preparation. For this reviewer, "Ice Blink" provides a new perspective on the loss of the Franklin Expedition. Cookman follows the Goldner story through the Admirality's inquiry into Goldner's practices and its ultimate findings.Cookman also provides excellent background information on Sir John Franklin and, to a lesser extent, second-in-command Capt. Francis Crozier and Commander of the Erebus, James Fitzjames. The daily life inside the ships (including diet) is also described very well and includes an illustration of the living arrangements. Cookman uses the experiences of other expeditions (i.e. Shackleton's Endurance and Robert Falcon Scott's journey to the South Pole) in describing some of the details as to what Franklin's crew endured. Considering no one from the expedition lived to tell his tale or left journals behind that survived, Cookman also uses a lot of assumptions in his account of the events on the Erebus and Terror. For example, he has Franklin gathering his men around to inform them they would be spending another winter in the ice and then, ten days later, dies (pg. 138). Of course, it is impossible to prove this meeting ever occurred. Cookman also uses a lot of poetic license when describing what was going through Capt. Crozier's mind during the arduous march to find safety on King William Island. The topic of cannibalism is examined using the stories of the Donner Party and the Essex for reference, but the assumption Cookman makes that Franklin Expedition members eventually killed fellow crewman for food as opposed to waiting for death to occur naturally is not proven in this book (pg. 181).Other Criticisms of this book are that, at the start, Cookman often exhibits an informal and sarcastic tone. On his 1819-22 overland Arctic expedition, "Franklin set out like an unprepared summer camper" (pg. 19). Franklin's courtship with his first wife "contained about as much heat as afternoon tea" (pg. 23; no explanation is given for this statement). The author maintains that "not many high school graduates today meet [the] qualifications" for joining the Royal Navy (pg. 15). Fortunately, this style does not continue throughout the book. As other reviewers have noted, Cookman uses a lot of repetition in a book which is relatively short (under 200 pages not including appendices). Finally, the often misused phrase "begs the question" is used incorrectly (pg. 115). Despite these criticisms, "Ice Blink" is an important addition to the examination of the Franklin Expedition due to the information provided on Stephan Goldner and his canned provisions.

Loved this book. I've ready and have many on The Franklin Expedition. This is well written and absorbing, a book never forgotten,

Sir John Franklin's expedition was new to me in all but the most cursory details. I thought this book might be an easy way into the subject, but it was not.Plagued by two tiny maps which were such poor quality as to be illegible and with Sir John Franklin portrayed as some sort of hapless clown, desperate to prove himself following a lifetime of failure, the worst part of this book for me was the way that it 'revealed the plot' through the captions underneath the poorly-reproduced photographs. I already knew the entire story by the time I was a few pages in owing to this inept piece of publishing.The account was biased in the extreme, most of it being taken up by a vilification of Stephen Goldner, the "facts" of which seem to be based on speculation rather than evidence. Contrary to what the other reviewers have said, I didn't even find this book engagingly readable.Overall, I am still left looking for an unbiased and thought-out account of Franklin's expedition. This certainly wasn't it.

Sí porque lo de enviar a un más que cincuentón a luchar con el Artico tiene bemoles. Y todo por influencias cortesanas. Eso derivó en uso de material inadecuado, comida en malas condiciones (los comienzos de la industria de los alimentos enlatados) y un tono totalmente de proeza imperial. La naturaleza les bajó los humos y los puso en su lugar. Nadie sobrevivió a pesar de recurrir al canibalismo. Pese a estar en Inglés se lee muy bien. Muy recomendable para aventureros de butaca que quieran sacar partido de su inglés. Y después con un barquito de doce metros el noruego Admunsen "descubrió" el paso del noroeste. Bueno, con permiso de los anuik que ya no habían hecho antes.

A fascinating book about the ill-fated Franklin expedition. It would have been even better if the author had not frequently resorted to speculative remarks presented more or less as facts. NOTE: Do read FROZEN IN TIME by Beattie/Geiger - the 2 books complement each other nicely (not least of all because of the photos of the dead men in the Beattie book)

Extremely detailed, but also too speculative in some places. Read this book with some of the others that describe the Franklin expeditions.