386: The Terror with Rich Napolitano

Dan LeFebvre

00:01

Hello and welcome to Based on a True Story, the podcast that compares your favorite Hollywood movies and TV shows with history. Today we’ll be learning about AMC’s The Terror, which is one of those TV shows that covers a different topic with each season. So for today, we’ll be covering the first season all about Captain Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to the Arctic. The first season came out in 2018, so let’s start by refreshing our memory with a quick synopsis. The story unfolds in 1845 when the Royal Navy sends HMS Erebus and HMS Terror into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. What begins as a proud Imperial mission slowly turns into a trapped, desperate fight for survival when the ships become locked in ice and the men realize they may not make at home. As the months pass, the crew faces freezing temperatures, shrinking supplies, and worsening morale. At the center of the story is Sir John Franklin, the expedition leader, who remains committed to the original plan even as conditions grow worse. His second-in-command, Francis Crozier, is more skeptical and increasingly sees how dangerous their situation has become. Around them, the crew wrestles with cold, hunger, illness, and the psychological strain of isolation while tensions rise between officers and ordinary sailors. Search parties, injuries, deaths, and mounting paranoia among the men is fueled by a mysterious and supernatural creature that seems to be stalking the men. Joining me today to separate fact from fiction in the series is Rich Napolitano, the host of an excellent podcast all about maritime history called Shipwrecks and Sea Dogs, which you can find at shipwrecksandseadogs.com. Before we chat with Rich, though, let’s set up our game for today’s episode. Now, if you’re new to the show, since Based on a True Story is all about separating fact from fiction in the movies and TV shows, you’ll get to practice your skills at separating fact from fiction in this podcast episode with a game of two truths and a lie. So I’m about to give you three facts that we’ll talk about in this episode. Two of those are actually true, and that means one of them is just an all-out lie. Are you ready? Okay, here they are. Number one, the two ships were provisioned for three years. Number two, we don’t know if Sir John Franklin actually died during the expedition. Number three, the crew wintered at Beachy Island. Got him? Okay, now as you’re listening to our story today, see if you can figure out which one of those is the lie. And if you’re watching the video version of this, you can see I’m holding up an envelope. The answer is inside this envelope, and we’ll open it up at the end of the episode to see how well you did. All right, now it’s time to connect with Rich Napolitano about the historical accuracy of the first season of AMC’s The Terror. There are 10 episodes in season one of AMC’s The Terror, so we’ll be going through the key plot points in the whole season. But before we do that, I always like to start with a ballpark idea of how well a TV show depicts history. And that’s especially true for a show like we’re talking about today because the TV series The Terror is based on a 2007 historical novel, also called The Terror, by Dan Simmons. So you have the TV series based on a historical novel, which is then based loosely on history being a novel still, historical novel. But with that in mind, if you were to give just the TV series a lot of grade for how well it depicts the history, what would it get?

Rich Napolitano

03:35

Well, you know, like many of your guests, probably this is a tough question to answer, but I will answer it. If all things considered, I would probably give it a D. Now, that’s not a bad thing because this is not intended to be purely a historical depiction of what actually happened. Obviously, there’s a lot of supernatural kind of sci-fi things going on in the story of the terror, season one. and it wasn’t intended to be perfectly accurate. It is really wrapping up an interesting story with a dramatic portrayal of some kind of supernatural creature. So I think that’s really well done, actually. It’s a fantastic series. I love it. I really do. I’ve watched it several times.

Dan LeFebvre

04:25

I mean, I wasn’t aware of it until you had mentioned it and going and watching that to prepare for this. If nothing else, The cinematography of it, it’s just beautiful. Like you get the vastness of where they are and the loneliness, the emptiness, there’s all of that element that I’m sure we’ll talk about throughout this episode, but it’s just, they did an amazing job bringing it to screen.

Rich Napolitano

04:52

And what’s really impressive about it, and if I had to give it a, if we could ignore all the supernatural stuff and just focus on the story of the Franklin Expedition, I would probably give it a B because the ships, the HMS Aerebus and Terra, are fantastically recreated. Very painstaking detail goes into those ships. The uniforms, the life on board the ships, the overall environment they’re in, everything’s accurate. It’s really well done in that regard. And there’s a lot of details in the story as well that match up or at least would be plausible since a lot of the story. We really don’t know, to be honest. And, of course, we’ll get into that. So there’s a lot of details that really match up well to the story. So that’s why if we could ignore the obvious supernatural stuff, I’d probably give it a B or B+.

Dan LeFebvre

05:49

Okay. I mean, that’s really good to know, too, because I think that’s something that it tells me that the show creators made this conscious decision to add something to it. But the parts where they’re focusing on just the history side of what we do know about the ships, they did a good job. They did their research.

Rich Napolitano

06:08

Absolutely, they did. Yes.

Dan LeFebvre

06:10

The first episode introduces us to the overall storyline throughout the first season. I like to start with the quote at the beginning of the first episode of the first season. And this is a quote from the series. In 1845, two Royal Navy ships left England in an attempt to finally discover a navigable passage through the Arctic. They were the most technologically advanced ships of their day. They were last seen by European whalers in Baffin Bay, awaiting good conditions to enter the Arctic labyrinth. Both ships then vanished. And that’s the end of the quote in the series. And while the text doesn’t say their names, we learned pretty quickly that those two ships are called HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, hence the name of the series. But because it says both ships vanished, that immediately makes me think everything in the series is just going to be made up, since it implies no one knows what really happened. So can you set up the expedition, and how do we know how much really happened to the expedition if they simply vanished, like the series says happened?

Rich Napolitano

07:09

So, yeah, you’re right. The ships absolutely were the most technologically advanced of the time. And I’ll get into the description of those ships. But just in general, that time, this was the Victorian era. This was a time of gentlemanly pursuits, honor, integrity, adventure, bravery, courage, all of these kind of chivalric characteristics that men should exhibit, especially aristocratic gentlemen. And most naval officers were highborn, as you would say. So this was really a noble effort. And this was also a time when the wars, there were no wars going on. The Napoleonic Wars were over. So the Royal Navy had been kind of not sitting around, but they didn’t have a lot to do. So they were really engaged in a lot of scientific pursuits, venturing into the poles, trying to map areas that had never been mapped before, and take magnetic readings and those kind of things. celestial observations. It was really a time of curiosity and adventure and discovery. So that really leads up to what’s happening now, is that, yes, there was a Northwest Passage that had been fabled for centuries at this point. It would be economically advantageous to be able to sail through the Canadian Arctic archipelago to Asia, a very lucrative tea trade. And up to that point, in order to get there, you know, the Panama Canal and Suez Canal had not yet been constructed. So they either had to go east around Africa, all the way to China, or west around South America and through the Pacific Ocean, and both of them took many, many, many months. It was a very dangerous journey, so finding a shorter passage was economically desirable. They also wanted to take some magnetic readings of the magnetic North Pole, and that was kind of a global effort that was going on at the time, too, that everybody was collecting this data to try to understand Earth’s magnetism. So that was part of the expedition as well. But by 1845, much of the Canadian coast had been mapped, the northern Canadian mainland coast, but not all of it. They had entered from the east around Greenland and through Baffin Bay, Lancaster Sound, and they had entered through the west, through the Bering Strait around Alaska. So they had charted a lot of the coastline from the west. They had charted a lot of coastline from the east, but that middle section was still a bit of an unknown. There was a kind of a blob right in the middle around what is today called Nunavut, and that’s where this takes place, this whole Franklin expedition takes place, or at least the bulk of it. So much of that had not been mapped yet, so there was a lot of conjecture or not really sure what to make of it or how to get through there. And at this point, they were hoping that this was going to be it, that Franklin was going to be able to get it, to be able to go through and finally sail through a navigable passage to the Pacific Ocean. Sir John Barrow of the Admiralty was one of the champions of this effort, and he really wished this to happen. So he put forth this expedition to happen in 1845. He himself was 82 years old, so he wasn’t going to lead it himself. He turned to Sir William Edward Perry, who was a veteran explorer, had actually been to the Arctic before. But he was also kind of exhausted and burnt out, so he declined. And then they chose Sir James Clark Ross, who was very popular at the time, had just finished an Antarctic expedition with HMS Terror and Erebus, as a matter of fact, with Francis Crozier. But he also was exhausted, and he promised his wife he was done, that he was no longer going to do any polar expeditions. Then they turned to James Fitzjames, and it was determined he was too young and too inexperienced. Then George Back was considered, but he was too argumentative for Sir John Barrow’s tastes. Then Francis Crozier was considered, but he declined, believing that Ross should probably have command or possibly Sir John Franklin. And in fact, that’s who was chosen. Finally, not the first choice or second choice or third choice or even fourth or fourth choice, but somewhere down the line choice. Now, he was 59 years old at this time, a bit out of shape as well, but he was highly respected and absolutely a veteran of Arctic expeditions and naval experience as well. He was at the Battle of New Orleans. He was at the Battle of Trafalgar. He was very experienced and highly respected. He had already done two Arctic expeditions, 1819 and again in 1827. One of them went well and one of them didn’t. We can talk more about that later. But he was no slouch, but he was just kind of, he was getting a little bit long in the tooth, and he wasn’t in great physical condition for such a hefty journey. So he wasn’t really the first choice. So that kind of explains how the expedition was, how it came about and why they were doing it. Now, as far as the ships themselves, the Erebus and Terror, these were excellent choices for Arctic expedition because they were former bomb ships. Now, basically, these were vessels with a flat platform, essentially with mortars, you know, artillery attached to them. They were meant for launching high arcing artillery onto shore. And because of that, they were really well constructed, very sturdy, very strong to withstand that kickback from the mortars. Erebus was built in 1813, served at the Battle of Baltimore, actually, during the bombing of Fort McHenry, when the American National Anthem was written by Francis Scott Key. The Star Spangled Banner. So it was there. And Erebus and Terror both served in the Antarctic expedition with Sir James Clark Ross. Erebus was built in 1826, also a bomb vessel. But both of these ships were refitted, strengthened, reinforced with iron plates on its hull. And given some of the most technologically advanced equipment, they even had locomotives, like train locomotives, to provide power for their steam engines. So they had a single screw or propeller as well as sails. So that gave them some extra power to try to break through the ice if needed. And it also had this ingenious system for heating. The locomotives generated this power to produce the steam, which was then kind of the excess steam was used to heat the ship internally. Yeah, so these were really well built ships and ready for action. Really well provisioned. It was a very well planned out expedition. They were given three years of provisions, food, water, tons and tons of food. We could go on and on about all the lists of things. But libraries, 1,200 volume library on the Terror and 1,700 or so on the Erebus. This expedition was ready to rock, fully prepared, excellent crew, experienced captain, experienced officers. It just didn’t work out.

Dan LeFebvre

15:56

well as you’re going through the the list of people that they picked or some maybe didn’t want to or the admiralty thought they weren’t right it kind of made me wonder was this uh maybe not just this expedition but in general an expedition um to the unknown like that what was it something that they wanted to do or was it more they were ordered to do and maybe not that excited get into the morale that’ll come into play later, but this is kind of making me lead that. Think about that is with Franklin being so low in the list of choices, it’s kind of like, I really don’t want to be here. I mean, that could lead to that sort of mentality, I would imagine, but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.

Rich Napolitano

16:45

Generally speaking, they all wanted to be there, at least the officers. This was a really excellent opportunity to advance. And it was a very high profile expedition. And it was a chance to get excellent experience, earn a lot of money, they were well paid. And if everything went well, a lot of times, when they got back, they were given some kind of reward monetarily from the government or from the Admiralty. Sometimes some of the more higher performing members would be given awards by, made a fellow of the Royal Society, those kind of things. So it really was a great opportunity, especially for the officers. Captain James Fitzjames of the Erebus was young at the time. He didn’t have any Arctic expedition experience. So he was really keen on learning. He was going to, he was actually put in charge of all the magnetic readings. And Crozier was meant to teach him. Crozier was an expert at the magnetic observations. And Franklin wanted Crozier to teach Fitz James, which is an important detail for something that we’re going to talk about later. But, yeah, this was definitely something that they were looking forward to. Crozier had just also returned from the Antarctic like Sir James Clark Ross. So he was a little bit exhausted, probably a lot exhausted, maybe not too terribly keen on going. But there were some other factors involved that will be pertinent later that I’ll talk about.

Dan LeFebvre

18:33

Okay, well, now that we have a better idea of the expedition, if we head back to the series, we start to get a foreboding sense of danger with the concept in the first episode. highlighted by the title of the episode called go for broke and we learn what that means when the expedition’s flagship HMS Erebus sustains ice damage causing her to run a lot slower and then the expedition’s second in command captain Francis Crozier from terror proposes to the expedition’s leader captain sir John Franklin on Erebus that they abandon the damaged Erebus and concentrate all their resources on taking terror through the open channels in the ice while they’re still there since it’s kind of a race against time before the ice freezes around them. So this go for broke idea is what the series proposes. But then, according to the series, it’s rejected by Franklin, who insists that they’re going to stick to the original plan, both ships trying to get through the icy waters together. And of course, we find out what happens in the expedition as the series goes on. But we do know that there was this idea to leave the damaged Erebus behind. Do we know if that was actually something, this go for broke concept, leaving the Arabs behind and just going with the terror instead? Was that something that actually happened?

Rich Napolitano

19:42

Well, the short answer is we have no idea. But I think a little bit of backstory is needed here before I answer that more fully. They left England and went to Orkney first to resupply, then around Greenland, and that’s the last time they were seen, and that would have been June of 1845. That is actually the last anybody really knew of them. It was the last time they were seen. After that point, after June of 1845, we really don’t know much except for one very important document. And that document is called the Victory Point Note. It was found in 1859 by Sir Francis Leopold McClintock. And it tells us what happened before this point that we’re talking about in the series, because the series, well, like I said before, I love it. It’s really well done. It doesn’t talk about any of this in the series, and it’s pretty pertinent. Before that point where they got stuck in the ice, they had that first winter, they sailed through Baffin Bay, through Lancaster Sound, reached a point in the winter of 1845 where it wasn’t going to be feasible anymore because obviously in the winter everything freezes up. So they do most of their journeying in the summer months. So they spent the winter at a tiny spit of land called Beachy Island. This is the winter of 1845 to 1846. And we know that because of this victory point note that was found by McClintock much later, obviously, in 1859. This note was found in a cairn, a stone structure, basically, on King William Island far to the south. But it says, 28th of May, 1847, HMS ships Erebus and Tear wintered in the ice at Beachy Island, and he provides the latitude, after having ascended Wellington Channel to latitude 77 and returned to the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John commanding Allwell, party consisting of two officers and six men left the ships on Monday, 24th May, 1847, signed Graham Gore, Lieutenant, and Charles F. DeVoe, mate. Now, this is going to be a really important document, but from this document, we know everything that happened, not everything, but we know their general route before they got stuck in the ice, that they overwintered at Beachy Island. And interestingly, this note says they wintered in 1846 to 1847. That was wrong. They were just wrong. They just got the date wrong. It was definitely 1845 to 1846. And we know that because of a subsequent note that we’ll talk about, the second part of this note that we’ll talk about later. So we know that they were stuck on Beachy Island for the winter. And when spring came, came they started heading south they they headed south through Peel Sound which is a you know the Arctic the Canadian Arctic archipelago is just this vast maze of little islands and channels and straits so I won’t get too too caught up in the weeds with that but just just picture them navigating through all these little channels and things until they finally come out in front of King William Island this is where they get stuck in the ice but there’s a really important factor in why they got stuck in the ice, because at that time, like I said, most of this area had been charted, but not all of it. And that portion of King William Island is right adjacent to a peninsula called Boothia. And the admiralty at that time believed that King William Island was connected, that it was a peninsula, and they actually just called it King William Land on their maps. So Franklin didn’t think he could turn to the east side of the island because he thought it wasn’t an island that he would be blocked. So he turned to the west into the much larger Victoria Strait. This happens to be a place where really large ice flows get blown down from polar winds from the north down into this kind of natural collecting point as kind of a dead end for all of this ice. And it just stacks up and stacks up into these huge ice ridges. And it’s really thick sea ice, not just flat ice like on a pond in Pennsylvania or something. It’s really crazy thick ice and stacked up ridges. So that’s where they get stuck. But it was because he didn’t think that he could get through to the east side of King William, King William Land, as he called it. So that’s where they get stuck. So this idea of going for broke, back to your question. We don’t know if Crozier said that or wanted to do that. He may have, but we simply don’t know. We don’t have any of the ship’s logs. We don’t know any of the conversations that happen. However, this is where I think it’s plausible, where I think the writers did a really good job in weaving in things that actually did happen, some other circumstances that make this plausible. For example, Crozier wasn’t entirely in a great mood on this expedition, so I think they do a good job of showing him as a little bit surly. He is in this series, sure. He is. He’s very, he’s certainly among other things, but, um, he, he had, he, like I said before, he was exhausted already. He, he, he had not been long since he got back from the Antarctic. So he was, he was pretty worn out. He also really wasn’t terribly sociable. Um, he wrote in a letter before they left Greenland, before the last time they were seen, he sent back, uh, some letters on the supply ship, HMS Rattler. He says, I cannot bear going on board Erebus. Sir John is very kind and would have me there dining every day if I would go. He has Fitzjames and two officers every day. This is shown in the series of Franklin being a little unhappy that Crozier won’t come have dinner with him because Crozier just kind of grew tired of it. He didn’t like having to go back and forth on the boats and the cold and the ice. He was a little bit tired of hearing John Franklin’s stories about how he was mistreated in Van Diemen’s land. That’s modern day Tasmania. John Franklin happened to be governor of Van Diemen’s land prior to this expedition, and it didn’t go well for him, and he felt like he was shafted and all this stuff. So he was always talking about that, and I think Crozier was a little bit just like, oh god, okay, right already about this. You have the same story again. And we know this. Yeah, same story again, every night at dinner. And we know this because we have some of Crozier’s letters that he wrote back home before they disappeared, before they left Greenland. He also questioned some of Franklin’s decisions. He wrote a letter to Sir James Clark Ross, and he says, what I fear is that we’re leaving so late, we’ll have no time to look around and judge for ourselves, but we’ll blunder into the ice and make a second 1824 of it. James, I wish you were here. I would have no doubt as to our pursuing the proper course. Like I said, he really thought James Clark Ross should have been in charge of this expedition. And he’s referring to 1824 because that was Franklin’s second Arctic expedition. Or yeah, that was the beginning of his second Arctic expedition. But his first one, Franklin’s first one was a total disaster. They had 11 of 22 men died. There was definitely cannibalism. One man was murdered to be eaten, and then that man was murdered by an officer for the cannibalism. There’s so many stories within this story. So Crozier had a little bit of, let’s say, not animosity. He really did respect John Franklin, but I think he was just a little bit done with all of the drama.

Dan LeFebvre

28:23

And happening so early on, too. I could imagine that would only grow and grow and grow, and you’re stuck together. And, I mean, they have separate ships, but still confined spaces.

Rich Napolitano

28:34

Very confined. In this series, too, when he’s talking to Crozier, when Crozier is talking to Franklin about abandoning the Erebus and everybody getting on the terror and getting out of there, he’s also at odds with James Fitzjames quite a bit. Now, we also know from Crozier’s letters that he was a little bit maybe jealous or at least had some animosity because Franklin put Fitzjames in charge of all the magnetic observations. Crozier was miffed by that. He had so much more experience. He wrote again to James Clark Ross, I find by the instructions that Fitzjames is appointed to superintend the magnetic observations. I will therefore take just so much bother them as may amuse without considering myself as one of the staff. So a little bit of Victorian era snark there, I think. So he was a little bit miffed about that. plus he had been this is another little bit of drama uh that’s portrayed in the show uh crozier was pining for his love sophia craycroft and they do show miss craycroft in the in the show she was john franklin’s niece and they had met in van diemen’s land tasmania and Crozier proposed to her and she rejected him for being too low-born and just a mariner and with not much potential. He proposed to her again later and she rejected him again. And Crozier kind of thought, well, if I do this expedition with her uncle, Sir John Franklin, and maybe I can win her back. Maybe I can win her heart by showing her my bravery. So that’s probably the reason why he really, or at least a good part of the reason why he went on this expedition.

Dan LeFebvre

30:39

I think they alluded to that in the series a little bit too. Yeah.

Rich Napolitano

30:43

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he was definitely grumpy and that’s very plausible. We don’t know, obviously, but it is very plausible that he was not in a great mood. They show him as an alcoholic as well. There’s no evidence of that whatsoever. He may have drank just as much as any other officer on the ship, I suppose. But there’s no historical evidence that he was a drunk. But it certainly adds to the drama. And I really like, actually, that they make him this kind of brilliant that he’s bitter about Fitzjames, a little bit at odds with Franklin, and just this lovesick, mopey, sad sack. Anyway, so we don’t know if he wanted to go for broke or not, but I think it’s a really useful literary device to throw in there to add some interest to the story.

Dan LeFebvre

31:42

You mentioned his name with Graham Gore. And if we move to episode two, the ships are stuck in the ice. So they send out search parties to look for leads in the ice. One of the officers and one of the parties, Lieutenant Graham Gore, is killed by a bear. Or at least they think it’s a bear. It’s a massive creature. They don’t really get a good look at it in the series. But what they do is shoot at it. And instead of hitting that, they end up hitting someone else out there on the ice with them. It turns out to be a net select shaman. They take him back to the ships along with his daughter, but he succumbs to his injuries. And then the shaman’s daughter is obviously upset, but through it all, the men are trying to figure out what this creature was that killed Lieutenant Gore. And the next woman calls the creature a Toonbuck and says that she has to control it now that her father has died, which seems to imply that there’s this supernatural element on the horizon here. We’ll circle back to some of that supernatural plot point later on. But I’m curious about how all of this started with the ships getting stuck in the ice, probably because they couldn’t move fast enough due to the damaged Erebus slowing them down. We talked about a little bit in the first episode. And then now that Lieutenant Gore is dead, there’s potentially something worse on the horizon with this supernatural element. But can you unravel how much this sequence of unfortunate events actually happened?

Rich Napolitano

33:02

Yeah, obviously, there’s the whole creature shaman lady silence thing. That didn’t happen. Well, maybe it did. I mean, obviously, that’s part of the supernatural lore to the drama. But as far as what actually did happen, Lieutenant Graham Gore did lead a search party of eight men with mate Charles DeVoe. And they walked from the beset ships in the ice, just sitting there trapped in Victoria Strait. They walked, you know, 10 miles or 15 miles or however it was about that much, across the ice to King William Island, to the very northwest tip of it. And it was there that they left the victory point note that I read to you earlier. They jot it. It’s like a standard admiralty form. It’s basically like a form letter that has a lot of standard information and then a place for a customized message, which they hand wrote. And that’s where they say, we wintered at Beachy Island. All is well. John Franklin in command. Basically, really important information, actually, because they give specific latitude and longitude, which is useful later to know where they were. so they did actually do that they did they did go out in search of open water possibly game seal something that they could shoot and eat but they didn’t find anything but they left they left this note in a cairn and then they traveled a bit further south down king william Island on the West Coast, and they left an identical note with the same exact message at a point that’s now aptly named Gore Point. So we know that they did that for sure, but they traveled several days, didn’t see anything, and after that we really don’t know specifically what happened to them. Most likely they returned to the ship. you know, no, no attack by a creature or polar bear or anything. It’s possible they could have died on the way back. We don’t really know, but we know they died eventually. But that actually did happen as far as what they, they did venture out onto the ice and leave that note. And, you know, what happened to those men specifically, hopefully they didn’t get eaten, but that’s, but that note’s really important because that’s really, That’s the only firsthand account that we have of what may have happened to them. Everything else is just kind of conjecture.

Dan LeFebvre

35:55

But they left a second note you said, too, that was identical, which even being identical, the information might be different. But that, to me, tells me that they made it back from the first expedition, venturing out on the ice successfully. So at least what we saw in the series didn’t happen. Yeah, right.

Rich Napolitano

36:12

I mean, the obvious creature attack was part of the fictional element. But at this point, they had not abandoned the ships yet. It’s May of 1847. They were still hoping to break free in the summer and sail south to Simpson Strait and get out of there. But two summers in a row, the ice was still too thick and they were trapped. So, you know, 19 months in total, they were trapped on these ships. Even the – it’s crazy. The amount of misery and just not only uncomfortable, but, you know, just it’s hard to keep up morale. And, you know, I think we’ll probably talk about that, too. But, yeah, stuck in the ice for 19 months.

Dan LeFebvre

37:22

Yeah, I mean, it’s a form of prison. I mean, basically, you know, I mean, you it’s we think of, you know, isolation is a form of torture, too. And so you have a mixture of these two things going on at the same time, not even to mention the the weather and the cold and, you know. And yeah, that’s. I couldn’t imagine. I’m happy here. Central heat and air. Scurvy free. Scurvy free. Well, I have a feeling that as we continue through the series, we’re going to lead further and further into the probably didn’t happen. And a great example of that is in the third episode, because we see the crew unceremoniously throwing the shaman’s body down this fire hole in the ice and, and then set up a trap to try to kill this Toonbok creature. And as if in response, the creature attacks the men and drags the leader of the expedition, Captain Franklin across the ice and throws his body down that same fire hole that they threw the shaman down. Do we know if that’s how Sir John Franklin actually died?

Rich Napolitano

38:29

Most certainly not. That’s not how he died. A really cool scene, though. I have to say. I mean, yeah.

Dan LeFebvre

38:37

It’s fitting for the scene. Well done.

Rich Napolitano

38:40

It was pretty exciting. Terrifying watching him slide down that hole into the abyss. But no, here’s what we know about the death of John Franklin. It is from the second portion of the Victory Point Note, which we will, I think it would be better to talk about it in detail in a bit, but we know that John Franklin died on the 11th of June, 1847. That’s all we know, that he died. No information about how he died, where he died, or where he was buried, or if he was buried. That’s it. That’s all we know, is that he died on the 11th of June, 1847.

Dan LeFebvre

39:22

I feel like if he died the way the series showed, they probably would have written that. A little more detail about what happened.

Rich Napolitano

39:29

Yeah, right. Much more exciting in the show. Chances are he died in his bed or on a surgeon’s table or something, you know. So that’s really all we know about Sir John Franklin’s death.

Dan LeFebvre

39:41

If we go back to the series, we’re up to episode four. It’s November of 1847 in the series, and it shows us back in England. We see Lady Jane Franklin, so John’s wife, or I guess now widow, although she doesn’t know that in the series. But that’s all happening a thousand mile away. So there’s no way that she would know. The lack of word from her husband, though, leads Lady Jane in the series to try to organize a search party. But the admiralty isn’t concerned yet. They tell her that if they haven’t heard anything by 1850, that’s when they’re going to search. This is one of those moments as I was watching it. really have to put ourselves in that historical context because these days you wouldn’t wait three years before even organizing a search party. But then of course they didn’t have the means of instant global communication like we do now. So can you help us get into that historical context? Was it normal for explorers to go years without any word at all? And for Sir John Franklin’s expedition specifically, was there any communication back home more or less was considered normal at

Rich Napolitano

40:38

the time? Communication was virtually impossible for these expeditions. So yes, it was normal to go two, three, four years even not knowing anything, having no communication. It was very common. This expedition was expected to last at least two years, probably three. They were provisioned for three years. And just for example, Franklin’s first Arctic expedition was from 1919 to 1922. And that went horribly wrong, as I mentioned earlier. In fact, they resorted to eating their leather boots. So he actually earned the nickname, the man who ate his boots. That was in the series too. That actually is true. His second expedition was almost three years, about two and a half years. The Ross Antarctic expedition was four years, 1839 to 1843. And so this expedition certainly was expected to take two years at least, three years most likely. So hearing nothing in two years, the Admiralty was nonplussed, we should say. They didn’t think anything of it. Like, this is normal because the only way they would get any information is if they happened to pass another ship pass on some letters that they would then take off, take on to England. But in that part of the world, there were no other ships. The only ships that would be there would be from the Admiralty, and they knew they didn’t have any other ships there. So there was no way to communicate. They would have to reach an outpost like Fort Resolution or, you know, from the Hudson’s Bay Company. And that was well to the south. So there was no way to get any word back. So obviously, Lady Jane Franklin, she wants some news. She’s worried. Totally understandable. Yeah, Admiralty wasn’t having it. And Lady Jane Franklin had a lot of influence. She was a very respected noblewoman. And so it wasn’t that they were just dismissing her out of hand. Even the fact that she had their attention was pretty impressive. But they weren’t worried. By 1848, they were worried. So that’s really when they agreed, okay, we’ll send some ships, but not until three years had passed.

Dan LeFebvre

43:13

That makes me wonder. You’re talking about some of these other expeditions that were taking three or even four years in Ross’s case. um but they were this expedition franklin’s being provisioned for three years that sounds to me like they didn’t add any buffer room at all like everything has to go according to plan because we expect this to take three years and we’re giving you three years worth of uh uh provisions like there’s no extra well you know if it takes three and a half or four years you know you it just seems like i don’t know for something like that it again it’s that historical context of, you know, I’m thinking now, um, I take a trip somewhere. I’m going to bring extra batteries for my phone. Like, you know, it’s the little things like that. Cause I might not need it, but I want to bring it just in case, you know, I want to have that little buffer, but I don’t know. It’s just, again, and something that’s really hard to wrap my mind around of just, this is a three-year expedition. You’re going to have three years worth of provisions. Good luck.

Rich Napolitano

44:09

Well, I’ll tell you what the backup plan is. The way that they, uh, provided a buffer, as you said, is a, they just stretched rations. Oh, just don’t eat. Yeah, basically you eat less. That’s what they did. So if necessary, they would reduce rations to three-quarter rations, then half rations, and on down the line until they ran out.

Dan LeFebvre

44:32

I guess we do see that some in this series. They start provisioning some of that a little bit more too. So I guess maybe that was standard protocol.

Rich Napolitano

44:40

It was. In fact, they said if they stretch the rations, they could make it five years.

Dan LeFebvre

44:46

Oh, wow. Okay.

Rich Napolitano

44:47

and there’s always the uh the chance of uh hunting some some animals or catching fish and they did to some degree uh do that but um that part of of the canadian arctic is pretty bare of wildlife there’s there’s really nothing there um fish but you know they weren’t experienced ice fishermen um so there really wasn’t a whole lot of fresh food for them they had to rely on what they had

Dan LeFebvre

45:16

there was something else that stood out to me in episode four with captain crozier he orders one of the crew to be well it’s the title of the episode punished as a boy basically that means being lashed across his naked butt for arguing but that’s that’s a punishment that i would assume to be done during normal times and even though there’s nothing about this situation that really seems normal to me the mere fact that they’re doing punishments like this tells me that perhaps the crew also doesn’t think that they’re in such dire straits yet maybe you know they have one and in England apparently isn’t too worried about it seems like maybe the crew isn’t either was there a point around here whether the expedition itself started to feel like maybe we’re in need of rescue like there’s it’s been a couple years and we’ve got a year left of provisions maybe we need to start

Rich Napolitano

46:00

doing something yeah I think that the by the winter of 1846 to our uh yeah the winter of 1846 47 their their first winter stuck down in Victoria street. I would assume that the crew, the, the lower level crew were probably getting a little worried, uncomfortable, cold, hungry. Uh, you know, even, even though these ships were, were extremely advanced for the time, they were still ships and the quarters are cramped and, you know, the, the, the regular crewmen didn’t have great accommodations. They slept mostly in hammocks, possibly a berth on the side of the ship, you know, a tiny, basically the size of your body, if you’re lucky. So they were probably getting pretty worried at this point. The officers, on the other hand, even if they were worried, were probably keeping it to themselves that because remember, this was really a time of honor and integrity, and you had to act like a gentleman. The attitude at that time of a Royal Navy officer was that they believed that they needed to understand the men, the crew, provide for them, keep them safe, protect them, and bring them home alive, almost like a parental obligation. In exchange for that, they demanded 100% obedience. So it was a kind of a different way of thinking about it than we would think of a military operation now. Obedience, sure, but in a different way. So these officers had to keep a good show of it. They had to show the men that they were staying positive and that everything would be okay, even if in the back of their mind they were worried too. Chances are there was a little bit of trouble here and there, but as there would be on any ship. Franklin, before he died anyway, would have had a pretty good command of the men because he was well-respected, even if Crozier was getting a little bit tired of him. Generally speaking, the men loved John Franklin. He was good to them. He was respectful of them. He did not believe in corporal punishment, so he was not somebody that was just going to hand out floggings, you know, for tiny minor offenses. Crozier, not so much. He was okay with it. Not that he was a sadist or anything, but Crozier is the one that ordered Hickey to be flogged. And of course, we don’t even know if that really happened, of course. But if it did, it would have been because Crozier was, he was okay with issuing corporal punishment.

Dan LeFebvre

49:08

Which, again, tells me, again, going back to the historical context, Because, you know, think of, I’m going to, for the crew to like their captain because this is the one that doesn’t flog me. Like, it’s like, I mean, yeah, it makes sense. But it’s like, okay, well, I feel like that’s a pretty low bar these days.

Rich Napolitano

49:30

Well, floggings were on the decline at that time. Certainly a century before they were much more common. But they still happened. And, you know, that really could be a thing. that they loved Franklin because they knew they weren’t going to get flogged. That’s very possible. But in general, he was well-respected. And especially by that, there’s a really good description of a ship getting crushed by ice when you look into Ernest Shackleton’s endurance expedition to Antarctica. You know, they describe the ominous, eerie sound of the ice crushing in on the boat every night, hour after hour, minute after minute. It’s creaking, it’s cracking, it’s groaning. Even the ice outside of the ship grinding past each other. It’s really loud when the ice flows smash into each other. It’s like an earthquake. So this is what they were enduring day after day. trying to get some rest, but knowing that any moment this ice could crush the ship. It’s very eerie and very stressful. So the amount of mental stress they were going through, I can’t even imagine. Certainly by that second winter of 1847 to 1848, they must have been getting low on food, and the quality of that food may have been in question, as we’ll discuss, I’m sure. This is one of the most remote places on earth. Zero chance of being rescued. Nobody was coming. And even if they did come, they probably couldn’t get there because it was all iced in. Excuse me. Because it was all iced in. So the officers are probably just trying to do their best to keep everybody happy. As happy as they possibly could.

Dan LeFebvre

51:36

Considering the circumstances, yeah. Right. Well, you’re talking about the food in episode five. We start to get the idea of the provisions that they have maybe being a problem. One of the cook notices that some of the food is starting to go bad thanks to the way the canned food is soldered together. I guess it’s not holding up to the cold. And in the show, we see one of the doctors, Good Sir, he tests this theory. he feeds Sir John’s pet monkey some food. And the answer doesn’t come in episode five. It comes actually, I think, in the next episode. But sure enough, the monkey starts to get violent and ends up dying. And this convinces good sir that the food stores that they have are going bad, which obviously is not a good thing. You’re stuck in the ice, thousands of miles from civilization. You just mentioned, you know, nobody’s coming to rescue you. Was the TV show correct to suggest that on top of everything else that we’ve talked about, now the expeditions food stores are going bad?

Rich Napolitano

52:32

You know, this is one of the most enduring topics of discussion about the Franklin Expedition. And the answer is yes, it’s entirely plausible and likely that there was problems with the tin food. And we actually do have some evidence to go on here. We know that for this expedition, they chose a new provisioner that was relatively new to the Admiralty. Goldner’s, it was called. Thomas Goldner, I think the guy’s name was. And he undercut everybody else like their usual suppliers. And he also filled their order in kind of a rush. That much we absolutely know. And 1984, so fast forward 140 years, a professor, Owen Beatty, of the University of Alberta, led a team to Beachy Island, where if you remember, they overwintered for 1845 to 1846. Three men died there during that winter, John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Brain. And he studied, he actually got permission to exhume their bodies. And he did so. And he found that those three men died of pneumonia, and they also had tuberculosis. So it was pneumonia caused by tuberculosis, essentially. Their lung tissue was almost entirely obliterated by the tuberculosis. So that was a major contribution to understanding, or at least it added some questions, because why did these three young men, they were all young, die so early, you know, within not even a year of the expedition? Did they have tuberculosis when they left? Did they get it on the ship? We don’t know. But they definitely had tuberculosis, and that’s going to be important. He also found on Beachy Island, because they had a winter camp there, there were some remnants of structures, like a work shed and a storehouse and these kind of things. And he also found a pile of rubbish debris, like where they would just throw their empty tin cans from their food. And there’s a great video, there’s a great documentary about this. He’s actually holding the can, and he says, look at this. And he’s pointing to the solder. There’s a big glob of lead right there on the, you can see it. He said, you know, this is certainly a problem, that this definitely would have interacted with the food and contributed in some degree to lead poisoning. So overall, yes, there were definitely problems with the food. It’s very likely that some of those solders were not very secure, which could lead to botulism. We don’t have proof of anybody having botulism. But is it likely? Probably. is it plausible? Certainly plausible. So lead poisoning was also found in those three men on Beach Island, 10 to 20 times what would be normal. The problem is the average person that lived in England at the time would have had roughly the same level of lead. They just had a lot of lead exposure at that time. Lead drinking mugs, lead plates, lead vessels to hold water, these kind of things. And the ship actually had lead-lined water tanks. And they had a desalination plant on the board too with lead pipes. So all of these things contribute to lead poisoning being a factor. But the food was certainly a problem. In the TV series, they definitely show that the food had been spoiled. I think there was a scene where one man opened a can. And that monkey, by the way, was real. There really was a monkey named Jocko on board. So that was kind of interesting to see. They didn’t make that up. I don’t know if they poisoned the monkey. So did the food contribute to their deaths? Likely. We don’t know, but my personal opinion is it’s likely. That being said, lead poisoning doesn’t usually kill somebody. It takes a tremendous amount of lead exposure to actually kill a human being. And really, it’s not believed now that lead poisoning led to their deaths. not directly. But lead poisoning can really cause a lot of problems. You know, it can be lethal, but at really high doses. But in general, it just causes confusion, nausea, vomiting, mental cognition problems. All of those things can definitely contribute to all of the other things that they were going through. And if that came from the food, it probably did, at least to some degree. It contributed to the lead that they were maybe exposed to from the water tanks. So the answer to your question is yes, it’s extremely likely that the provision-tinned

Dan LeFebvre

58:11

foods were a problem. I feel like it’s like they’re sent out there and it’s just like everything around you is going to try to kill you. Good luck. It’s like from the environment to, you know, the, the, the ice freezing into even the food and the perfect, like there’s nothing here that’s

Rich Napolitano

58:32

on your side. You’re just, man, that’s crazy. And think about this too. Like you said, everything’s trying to kill you. So they, they have some lead exposure, certainly maybe botulism. Scurvy would have started to become an issue as their food store, because they have very little fresh food. If you have fresh food, fresh meat, fresh vegetables, you’re not going to get scurvy. But they didn’t have any of that. That had long since run out. And their lemon juice supplies, you know, especially if it, if lemon juice freezes and then thaws and freezes and thaws now three winters, it’s going to lose a lot of its anti-scurbutic properties. So scurvy was probably an issue. And again, I’m going to go back to those three men that died on Beachy Island. Tuberculosis. Those men were on the ship. Tuberculosis is highly infectious. And they didn’t know at the time that TB was spread through respiratory droplets. They didn’t know it was airborne. Germ theory was still not a thing. They didn’t know about bacteria or other pathogens, microorganisms. So all of the men on both ships were exposed to tuberculosis. Combination of a lot of things trying to kill.

Dan LeFebvre

59:54

Even your colleagues are trying to kill you. They don’t know it, but they are.

Rich Napolitano

59:57

Absolutely.

Dan LeFebvre

59:59

Wow. Speaking of things that are trying to kill him in the series, and go back to the Toonbok, there was something rather unsettling because in that episode, we find out that it’s not just a regular polar bear. It’s chasing Blanky up the mast, and it looks like it has this human-like face. And when I saw this part, I couldn’t help but think of stories of creatures from sailors like krakens and mermaids and all sorts of real-world creatures. Now, we know mermaids have been misidentified and perhaps the result of hallucinations, maybe due to lead poisoning, things like that. But in your mind, where does the tombock fit with some of these other mythical sea creatures

Rich Napolitano

01:00:41

reported by sailors throughout history? You know, that’s a really interesting question. Mariners are terribly superstitious. Everything’s trying to kill them, of course. Yeah. Well, and I think that’s wise because it’s such a dangerous job, especially back then, you know, and even now. You know, the red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky in morning, Sailors take warning. Setting sail on a Friday is a bad idea. Killing an albatross is bad luck. Even having bananas on board, bad luck. Having a woman on board is bad luck. There’s all these things that are bad luck. And, you know, so I think Thunbach represents fear of the unknown, to put it simply. It symbolizes all of the things that are out there working against you when you’re in such an environment. And especially in an Arctic expedition like this. And, you know, you mentioned mermaids and kraken and things like that. I was thinking about how in Greek mythology they had, you know, Scylla and Charybdis and sirens. And all of these things that were dangers of traveling the world’s oceans or going on adventures, going into places where it was unknown. You didn’t know what was there. So if you don’t know what’s there, there must be monsters. So I think that kind of fits in here with Thunbach. Now, as far as I know, Thunbach is not a real Inuit legend. I had to do a little bit of research on this, not exactly my area of expertise, but I found that there is a similar legend called Tirarnak, probably brutalizing the pronunciation here, so forgive me, or Tagayakpak, sorry, from Alaska. And those words generally translate to weasel bear. So, Weasel Bear, that kind of fits in with how the Thunbach looks. Really creepy-looking creature. Narrow-bodied, really large, moves fast, like a demon, supposedly. But also, there’s one from Greenland called the Torn Garsuk. And this kind of fits in more with the Thunbach of how it was used in the series. That it was summoned by a shaman. to punish your enemies. And that’s kind of what the Thunbach was, at least as far as I could tell. The shaman summoned the Thunbach somehow and bound himself to the Thunbach to maybe prevent these white men, or kabloonas as they call them, from coming into their territory. So I think Dan Simmons really did a good job coming up with a legend. you know, some oral history from the Inuit to represent real legend of other Native Americans that have similar, you know, lore. You know, but I think the Thunbach really just represents the unknown, fear of exploration, not knowing what’s out there, kind of a symbol of all the things out there trying to kill you. That’s kind of how, that’s kind of my take on it, I think.

Dan LeFebvre

01:04:25

Yeah, no, I mean, that’s great. I think that’s a great take. I would agree that it’s, you know, if everything is trying to kill you and there’s the unknown, you don’t know what’s out there. The human mind is going to come up with the worst fear, the worst of the worst. And if you’re out there for months and months and months on your own, getting lead poisoning and all these other things too, like I can only imagine what sort of horrors and what sort of terrible creatures and things your mind might imagine are out there. Or like what you’re talking about before with the ice and the noise of the ice and all these, you know, creaking noises and all these other things that you hear, you know, you might just start to hear other things too. and what’s out there you don’t know i mean it’s not like there’s lights out there that you can look and see you know what’s out there it’s gonna be pitch black yeah like if you if uh you know

Rich Napolitano

01:05:23

especially when we were kids if you stare in the corner of your bedroom long enough that shadow

Dan LeFebvre

01:05:27

becomes a monster yeah yeah yeah or under the bed yeah monsters on the bed yeah exactly yeah yeah

Rich Napolitano

01:05:32

um and and you know something else that i was thinking about is that in the show toon bach was kind of this mysterious creature a nebulous i never knew where it was or where it was coming from. And as you were talking, I was thinking about all of the things that actually were trying to kill them are also kind of just out there and unknown. So the Thunbach was a killer that you can’t really run from, but same scurvy and tuberculosis and lead poisoning are things you can’t run from as well. So there’s kind of a connection there too, I think.

Dan LeFebvre

01:06:08

That they also didn’t really understand. You’re talking about everything being lead-lined because they didn’t know that that’s where that came from or the tuberculosis, not knowing how that spread. It’s just this curse or the supernatural or something that’s happening. I don’t know why

Rich Napolitano

01:06:23

it’s happening, but it’s happening. Yeah, no, it makes sense. Yeah, good point.

Dan LeFebvre

01:06:28

Well, if we move on to episode number six, in that episode, we finally see the decision to abandon ship coming from the new Erebus captain, James Fitzjames. But first, Fitzjames decides to hold a carnival to celebrate the first sunrise of 1848 as a way of boosting morale for the men. He does this because of a conversation with one of the men, Blankey, who recounts his time working under Captain John Ross. You talked about him before, but he talks about how they nearly died because of the decisions that Ross made, and Ross didn’t seem to care about his men. So, as Blankey put it, he had thoughts of killing Ross, and so Fitzjames obviously doesn’t want his men to have ideas of killing him, which is another thing to kill him. Everything else seems to be too. But so Fitzjames asks if he’s seen that same kind of darkness in the minds of his men here and Blankey says, I don’t have to have seen it to know it’s there. And then according to the show, the carnival that they hold does seem to help the men’s morale at least up until Dr. Stanley douses himself and sets tents and on fire, kills himself and several men and destroying even more of their provisions. Do we know what the morale was like for the men on the expedition?

Rich Napolitano

01:07:33

Well, not directly, because like I said, we don’t we don’t have any records about that. However, I think that this scene in the show is really well done and extremely likely that something like this actually did happen. Because we know from other expeditions that it did happen this way. For example, the Sir Sir William Edward Perry used to carry theatrical costumes like, you know, like they showed in the in the show. you’d have trunks full of this stuff so the men could perform skits and little impromptu plays for each other not only on board the ship but if they were if they had to overwinter somewhere they could make camp on the ice and perform these you know theatrical stage presentations basically there’s of course the time-honored tradition of King Neptune’s court when when you cross the equator. Anybody that’s never crossed the equator before, they put on this elaborate kind of hazing event for those people. So this was normal. Performing skits and musical presentations, singing songs. This was very normal on ships. Amundsen did it on his. He learned from Adrian de Gerlache during the Belgica expedition. Back when that was Amundsen’s first expedition, actually, he was second in command. That was an Antarctic expedition. But he learned from that expedition, Amundsen did, that you have to keep the men occupied. You have to keep their minds off of the misery. You have to keep them active because boredom is death. He saw men on that ship, the Belgica, going crazy, literally losing their minds, getting violent, getting, you know, hallucinating. And it’s all because of, you know, not only the physical exhaustion, but the boredom, the lack of mental stimulation. So it’s very likely that something like this happened. You know, did they have a huge carnival on the ice and did it burn down? Nobody knows. but did they do something similar? Almost certainly. They almost certainly did something. Some kind of musical thing, some kind of performances. Almost certainly this happened, yes.

Dan LeFebvre

01:10:07

I mean, it makes idle hands are the devil’s playground, I think, as the saying goes, that sort of thing. But then again, I think it’s an example of putting yourself in the historical context of you mentioned you know the the libraries that they had um to read but they were not going to have movies or tv shows to watch themselves or you know that sort of entertainment or even music to listen to or things like that and so um and being out there in isolation for that long and having to hear franklin’s story over and over again you know brochures already getting tired of that even before they, before the execution really got sorted.

Rich Napolitano

01:10:45

I really got a raw deal in Van Diemen’s land, you know. Well, Ernest Shackleton wrote quite a bit about what he had to do to keep his men sane. You know, he kept regular, regular schedules, mandatory exercise. They would have educational sessions where he would have them read something or they would discuss some literature. And some of the men obviously couldn’t read or write. And this is definitely true aboard Erebus and Terror. In fact, we know that they had books on board to help teach the men how to read and write for those who couldn’t. So that was probably going on too, some education of some of the lesser educated men. I guess you’re out there by yourself for

Dan LeFebvre

01:11:35

that long. Might as well learn how to read and write. Exactly. Make yourself useful. yeah well if we go back to the series in episode seven they finally abandon ship and start the march across land they do leave a few men on terror in case there’s a thaw but the rest of the men have this 800 mile walk ahead of them to get to the hudson bay company’s fort resolution i believe you mentioned that uh earlier uh only 18 miles into that walk they discover the bodies of this rescue party that was sent out a year earlier we saw them leave i think it was back in episode three, and they were supposed to find help and bring it back, but obviously that didn’t happen. How well does the series do explaining this long march?

Rich Napolitano

01:12:18

Pretty well, in general. The conditions that they exhibit in the show are pretty spot on. They’re hauling these incredibly heavy boats. These are the lifeboats or whale boats, basically, that were attached to the ship, they packed these boats full of supplies. And then they put them on these iron sledges. And they had to haul them. They didn’t have any dogs, no sled dogs. They had to haul them themselves. These boats were 30 feet long, give or take. And they had provisions on there, but they also took a lot of other stuff that later when McClintock found evidence of these, you know, artifacts of these boats and everything, they had ammunition, knives, axes, things that you probably would expect, some spare clothes, that kind of thing. But they also had, you know, a bunch of stuff that he described as quite useless, like rolls of sheet lead, empty pemmican tins, scarves linen scarves you know like why are they hauling this stuff in countless other items they’re just they were they were loaded with stuff um and so why did they take all that stuff we don’t know maybe they thought they could trade some of it with the inuit um maybe they were trying to preserve some sort of normalcy and have some luxury items on board the sledges. But something that’s pretty interesting about this is that, first of all, they mentioned that they left some people on board. Now, we’re not sure that that happened. And in fact, there’s some evidence that it didn’t. But there is Inuit testimony that has maintained to this day oral history, that they went to the boats and went on board, and they saw men on board the ships. So that’s interesting that the series included that in there, because by the Inuit testimony, there were men that stayed on the ships.

Dan LeFebvre

01:14:37

So that would have been after the parties left, the Inuits had that timeline that would have been after. Okay, interesting.

Rich Napolitano

01:14:43

Yeah, and it could have been much later after, but we just don’t know. But according to the Inuit, there were men on the ships. But that leads us to back to this victory point note, because Crozier orders that they’re abandoning ship. So they all set out on the ice. They all walk to King William Island across the ice. And when Crozier and Fitz James reach the cairn that Graham Gore left the original note in, remember the note where we overwintered in Beachy Island, etc. Well, they find this note and they add to it. They take it out and there’s no room left on the pre-printed form area. So they write it all along in the margins, kind of like you would do in school if you ran out of space. That’s basically what it looks like. You can still see this document today if you Google it. And this message says, in part, that HM ships, Terra, and Erebus were deserted on 22nd of April, leagues north-northwest of this, having been beset since 12th September 1846. Again, almost two years on the ice. Captain FRM Crozier landed here, three officers and crew consisting of 105 souls. Sir John Franklin died on 11th of June 1847, and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date, nine officers and 15 men. Signed FRM Crozier, captain and senior officer, and start on tomorrow 26th for Baxfish River. Also signed James Fitzjames, captain HMS Erebus. So this is that second portion of the victory point note that is so important. This tells us a lot. This tells us that Crozier and Fitzjames were still alive by this point, that only nine officers and 15 men had died at this point. Interesting, though, there were 24 officers and nine of them had died already. So why is that? It’s totally up to speculation, but almost, you know, roughly, you know, not close to, let’s say, 40% or so of the officers are already dead. Don’t know why.

Dan LeFebvre

01:17:03

Yeah, that’s interesting, because I would imagine that they, at least in the series, when you see the officers, they have much better accommodations. They have much better provisions. They have, you know, they’re having the meal around the table, you know. So I would assume that they would have better chances for arrival.

Rich Napolitano

01:17:23

And you would expect that. I heard one historian postulating that perhaps they used more, you know, maybe they had lead-lined drinking mugs or something to that effect. You know, who knows? It’s just an interesting, as far as the ratio goes, only 15 of the men, but 40% or so of the officers were already dead. So that’s interesting. It really is. But this portion of the victory point note is really important. And it’s the last firsthand evidence we have of what happened to them. They abandoned the ship, and here they are. They added to the victory point note, hoping someday some rescue ship comes and finds it. But they’re on their way. They’re hauling these really heavy sledges through this barren wasteland. That’s another really good thing about the series. When they show them on King William Island, it’s flat. There’s nothing there. It’s desolate. Almost zero wildlife. This land had all been ground down by glaciers, you know, millions of years ago. So there’s nothing there. They’re in dire straits. That’s why they’re heading south.

Dan LeFebvre

01:18:48

You were talking about the note earlier. I think it was, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was on Beachy Island you mentioned when they stayed there for the winter, you mentioned that they got the year wrong. Do we know or is there speculation perhaps that all of these dates maybe are incorrect? Like maybe they just were they were counting the dates wrong or something like that? If they if they got it wrong on Beachy Island now. Would they be incorrect in their calculations for time, maybe? I mean, there’s no way for us to know. I don’t know.

Rich Napolitano

01:19:17

No, I don’t think so, because in this second portion of the note. They I believe it was Fitz James that wrote it. He said specifically they had been beset since 12th, September 1846. so that would have been the fall of 1846 so they couldn’t possibly have still been in beachy island

Dan LeFebvre

01:19:39

in 18 by that time okay so it’s just a one-time thing that they just happened okay okay yeah

Rich Napolitano

01:19:45

gram gram gore just it was just a mistake on his part okay okay well i was thinking too it’s it’s

Dan LeFebvre

01:19:52

be easy i’m imagining you know again kind of going back to a prison thing like chalking off the days right oh you miss one count it’s all gonna run together It’d be easy to do, I would imagine.

Rich Napolitano

01:20:04

But what was really cool about the series is they show Fitz, James, and Crozier finding, you know, they take it out of the cairn, they roll it out, it looks in the show exactly like it really looks. And they show them writing with the fountain pen, you know, Franklin died on this date. So that was really cool to see because they reenacted that perfectly according to what that

Dan LeFebvre

01:20:26

document actually looks like. In episode seven, we see one of the men, Hickey, he murders two other men, Irving and Farr, and he murders them in cold blood. They come across a friendly group of Netslick, and then we find out in a flashback that he killed the real Hickey to take his name and place on the ship. Do we know if there are any infiltrators on the expedition like Hickey

Rich Napolitano

01:20:50

is in the show? We don’t know, but it would be highly unlikely. I would say definitely not. We have letters from before they left Greenland from many of the men and all of the officers. There’s no mention of anything like this. So had anybody stowed away, they probably would have known by then because it took them a month to get from Orkney to the west side of Greenland at disco bay so in that month they probably would have known if there was somebody that had stowed away and we also know that hickey cornelius hickey was his name he was a caulkers mate he was an actual crewman and he did exist uh he was not an imposter that was actually cornelius hickey on board um so the show took some liberties there with that interest really good of course of excellent drama. But unlikely that there was actually any stowaways. It would have been really dangerous because back in those days, stowaways would have quite likely been executed.

Dan LeFebvre

01:22:00

If everything else didn’t kill many.

Rich Napolitano

01:22:03

Yeah. They were going to die anyway. But, you know, my opinion, take it for what it’s worth. I don’t think so. I think it’s highly unlikely there were any stowaways.

Dan LeFebvre

01:22:15

well that might answer my next question then because if we move on to episode number eight called terror camp clear because back at the camp mr hickey then claims that it was the netzalik who killed the two men as he’s starting to gather supporters for a mutiny against crozier and the other hand crozier suspects hickey of killing irving and far and that is confirmed when dr good sir cuts open irving’s stomach to reveal seal meat that he was fed by the netzalik just before hickey killed Do we know if there was a mutiny happening like we see in the series?

Rich Napolitano

01:22:50

Once again, no, we don’t know for sure. There’d be a blanket across all of them. Well, yeah, really. I mean, I’m sorry about that, but.

Dan LeFebvre

01:22:58

No, no, no. I mean, that makes perfect sense. But that’s one of those things too of like, we don’t know, we don’t know, but they kind of make it up for the series.

Rich Napolitano

01:23:06

But what we do know comes from other, what was normal at the time and what happened on other expeditions. Again, unlikely, because we know that those officers were well-respected among the men. So it’s doubtful that there would have been a mutiny. But, you know, on the devil’s advocate side, the amount of stress and fear and desperation they were going through was considerable at that point in time. So is it possible that maybe a faction of men broke off and said, we’re going to go this way and do this instead, and we’re not listening to you anymore? Maybe. In fairness, it may be as likely as not, but my personal opinion is no, because I just feel like they would have stuck together or tried to support each other as best as they could. I think we know that eventually they did separate into different groups based on where the artifacts are, where their camps were. hard to say. I mean, that’s a really good question. It’s certainly plausible. I guess just my own personal opinion is that it probably didn’t happen.

Dan LeFebvre

01:24:39

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, for an expedition like this, too, even before you leave, I would assume you kind of have an idea what you’re getting into. Like, you’re going to the middle of nowhere for years, and there’s probably going to be a chance that you’re not going to come back but the flip side of that too is i could also understand it being plausible as you’re saying because um you might from the safety of england you might be like yeah i kind of know what i’m getting into and then when you get out there it’s like okay this is this is very very this sucks you know and it just continues on everything’s trying to kill you and every all this stuff so i could see how you know what you think at the beginning of a mission versus you know when you get into the expedition. Yeah, I could see it as being plausible too. Yeah.

Rich Napolitano

01:25:31

And when they’re hauling those sledges, which weighed thousands of pounds each, across this desolate wasteland of King William Island, a good number of them probably were thinking, I didn’t sign up for this. So maybe, I guess is the best answer I can give you.

Dan LeFebvre

01:25:54

Well, here’s another kind of out there question about the way this series shows something too, because at the end of episode eight, as Crozier has Hickey arrested for his deeds, the Toombok attacks the camp as a form of retribution for killing the Netzlik family. Hickey and his men escape. We find out in the next episode that 32 are killed. We actually see one of those deaths close up where it almost looks like something supernatural is going on. The Toombok is eating one of the men. It kind of looks like, or I think it’s even talked about, I don’t remember if it’s in this episode or the next one, it talks about how the Toombok is eating the souls of its victims. and earlier we were talking about how Humbach fit in with other mythological beasts reported by sailors but were any of those reports or was it more, were there any of them that were kind of supernatural in this way in the series it’s eating the soul or were they more just like you’re talking about fear of the unknown or was there supernatural element to it or

Rich Napolitano

01:26:45

I think it was mostly not supernatural per se but probably just a a fear of the unknown, like we talked about before, and possibly some extrapolation, almost like a game of telephone where a giant sturgeon, you tell one guy, then that guy tells another guy, and by 10 guys down the road, it’s a mermaid. Or they see a giant squid, and that turns into some kind of dragon. So I think that’s probably how those things happen over time and and especially back you know when when humans really first started traveling the oceans you know hundreds of years ago i mean you’ve seen those maps where there’s the sea monsters and all kinds of things out in the water or some maps where they still thought the earth was flat you were going to fall off you’re going to fall yeah this you know and and again it just comes back to you don’t know what’s out there so they make things up um But I also think, you know, tell me what you think about this. And I’m no great, like, literary analyst or anything, but I was trying to think of why Dan Simmons wrote it this way, of having a Thunbach, this creature, terrorizing the crew, other than that it’s just a great story. But I was thinking that maybe the Thunbach is somehow Simmons was trying to communicate that almost like a modern day apology for, you know, white men interfering with the natives of the Canadian Arctic or, you know, I don’t know, some kind of, I don’t know if that’s the case. But, you know, what do you think? Is that something that you think he might have meant by the Thunbach?

Dan LeFebvre

01:28:39

Yeah, I mean, I’m speculating because I don’t know what his intentions were in writing it that way, but I could definitely see that where it’s, because it does seem to be, the Tombok is all about restoring the natural order of things. And this crew, or these two ships, are upsetting that natural order. They’re not supposed to be there, basically, is kind of the, you know, and everything’s trying to kill them. know nature’s trying to kill him but um the tumbac is almost you know it seems to be a bringing to life what you know mother nature’s is trying to kill like a visualization of all these things that it’s hard to on screen or on on paper it’s hard to um make tuberculosis interesting because you know you can’t see it transferring right but you can see this this creature attacking and that sort of element or lead poisoning is not fun to watch on tv but you know this sort of action and and um i could see that almost you know um impersonation of a lot of these natural elements bringing which kind of in my mind goes back to um the supernatural element of it too where uh it’s all these natural elements but then bringing them all together into that fear of the known too, where there are things that we don’t know, talking about the lead poisoning and the tuberculosis, as we mentioned before, they didn’t know why these things were happening. There’s a lot of stuff they don’t know why these things are happening. We just know that there’s terrible things happening. And how do you visualize that? How do you show that? Other than having it be something where it’s completely in their mind, where they’re all just, you know, it was all a dream or they’re all flat, you know, nightmares and you know, that sort of thing. I don’t know how

Rich Napolitano

01:30:35

you do that without doing something supernatural like the tomb bar. Yeah, that’s an excellent point. I mean, it certainly adds a lot of interest to a story where, first of all, we don’t know what happened. And second, watching people die of disease isn’t that interesting or exciting. So yeah, that’s a good point. Sorry, I turned the tables. I asked you a question.

Dan LeFebvre

01:31:00

No, that’s a great question. I mean, and that’s something too that I think leads to, how do you take a story like this of something where we don’t know a lot about talking about every question well you don’t really know but trying to connect some of those dots and tell a story you still have to do that to make it a TV show that’s interesting to watch

Rich Napolitano

01:31:22

yeah and it is

Dan LeFebvre

01:31:25

yeah yeah well we are up to episode 9 of the TV series speaking of and as if things aren’t bad enough things are going from bad to worse. Fitz James Scurvy is so bad that he asked Crozier to euthanize him. Crozier is captured by Hickey’s group in a confrontation that leaves Hartnell dead. Blanky’s not doing well, so he decides to make himself bait for the Toon Buck. He covers himself in forks in hopes of being eaten and killing Toon Buck in the process. That’s what he hopes, at least. Meanwhile, Hickey’s starving men resort to cannibalism. But there is a slight silver lining because Blanky happens to stumble upon what they’ve been looking for this whole time. the Northwest Passage. Of course, he dies a few minutes later in the episode, so it’s unlikely that anybody’s ever going to know that he was the first person to see the passage. But that kind of makes me wonder, something we kind of alluded to with this, but these hardships and tribulations that we’re seeing, and I know we talked about every episode, we don’t really know, but how do we, is the only way that we know that these things happened, or are there other things that we know how some of these things we’re seeing in the series actually happen?

Rich Napolitano

01:32:32

Well, the victory point note is one of the main sources we have for knowing at least where the men were at any given time, or at least at those specific times. But we do have other evidence. We have a lot of artifacts that have been discovered mostly along the west side of King William Island and the southern shores of King William Island as they were trying to sledge down the west coast and then get south. They were trying to cross the Simpson Strait and get across to the mainland Adelaide Peninsula. And so we can kind of follow that trail. There’s a couple of spots. There’s what’s called the boat place that McClintock found where there were some skeletons and a whole bunch of those useless items that we talked about earlier. and there’s two main camps there’s one on the west coast of the island at Erebus Bay that seemed to be a stopping point of some kind where they camped and then another one on the southern shore of Terror Bay and quite a bit has been found there but interestingly you mentioned Lieutenant John Irving earlier that in the show is depicted as being murdered by Hickey. Really interesting that his grave site was found, or at least it’s reasonably certain it’s his skeleton. It was found alone with no others around, quite a distance from where any other remains were found. DNA analysis has shown that it’s very likely him, but everything that was found with him were items that belonged to him. So it’s almost certain that those remains are Irving’s. So it’s interesting to me that that matches up in the series where Hickey murders Irving. They were kind of off by themselves on a sand dune, basically, or gravel dune, whatever that was. So they did a good job portraying that. You know, I’m sure that Hickey didn’t really kill Irving, but where his grave was found was kind of in an isolated spot like that where he died in the show. So I thought that was pretty well done. And they show Blankey overlooking what he says, oh, this is the last link of the Northwest Passage. And he was overlooking a body of water, which is now called the Ray Strait, between King William Island and Boothia Peninsula. Of course, we don’t know if he actually did that. But that waterway was later found by John Ray in 1854, who was a vastly underrated man. I did an episode about him as well. So that was interesting that they mentioned that. They didn’t call it the Ray Strait because it wasn’t called that yet. In fact, that waterway is what I was referring to earlier that they felt didn’t exist, that it was all connected by land. Something else that they portrayed well as far as the trials and tribulations they were facing. Just hearkening back to episode one, David Young is the young man, the cabin boy that dies on the surgeon’s table. Dr. Harry Goodsar was tending to him. He dies of tuberculosis. David Young was an actual member of the crew. He didn’t die on the ship. He actually was found. His remains, interestingly, were just found, along with William Orin. He is the man portrayed in the series that falls overboard and dies in the frigid water. They can’t get him out and he drowns. So those two men were real members of the expedition. And just recently, I mean, weeks ago or last month of May of 2026, their remains were positively identified using DNA analysis by a University of Waterloo researcher and his team, Douglas Stenton. They compared DNA against known family members of members of the crew, and they were able to match it, those two men, as well as Harry Peglar, who McClintock found Harry Peglar’s skeleton. And they identified the jawbone of James Fitzjames. Yeah, really, really interesting stuff. So all of those people were real that they showed in the show. That’s not how they died, but still, great job in depicting the actual names of the men that were on the ship.

Dan LeFebvre

01:37:44

Well, were they, do we know, did they die close together? Because we mentioned the one guy being kind of further away. Does that imply that these others were found next to each other?

Rich Napolitano

01:38:01

Harry Peglar was found at the boat place. There were two skeletons there. I’m not certain where exactly they found David Young and William Orin, but it was definitely on King William Island and not in the water. Okay.

Dan LeFebvre

01:38:19

Not the way they showed it. Right.

Rich Napolitano

01:38:21

So it wasn’t exactly how they showed it. But if you remember, I mentioned they didn’t depict any of the overwintering on Beachy Island. So I think what they were doing in the series was using the death of David Young of tuberculosis kind of as a representative of the deaths of the three men on Beachy, John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Brain, of dying of tuberculosis. So just kind of maybe trying to fill in the gaps there a little bit with that sequence being cut out.

Dan LeFebvre

01:38:55

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

Rich Napolitano

01:38:58

Yeah. So the artifacts they found, though, really do help us know, as you were asking about the evidence, that really helps us know where they went. Did they go south and then start heading back? Maybe, but we don’t know. But we do know where they were at least at one time.

Dan LeFebvre

01:39:20

Was there anything from the analysis of those that would lead to determining cause of death?

Rich Napolitano

01:39:30

yes and no uh no evidence of tuberculosis or anything like that however the jawbone of james fitz james was found with knife marks on it specifically cut marks not you know

Dan LeFebvre

01:39:48

not damage that might be from an attack but like cannibalism like we see in the series

Rich Napolitano

01:39:53

Yeah, so it very strongly suggests that cannibalism took place with his body. It doesn’t definitively prove it, but it highly suggests it. And there are other remains that they found of bones of men that have not been identified that have similar marks that indicate some kind of butchering process of removing the flesh from the bones, which is exactly what the Inuit reported to John Ray in 1854. So the evidence is backing up that oral history from the Inuit people.

Dan LeFebvre

01:40:37

Yeah. Well, too, like you’ve mentioned before with, I think it was the 1824 expedition, I think you said, of Franklin where there was cannibalism there too?

Rich Napolitano

01:40:48

Well, it was actually his first, his 1819 to 1822 expedition, what’s called the Copper Mine Expedition. That’s the one that went horribly wrong. And there was some cannibalism during that expedition as well.

Dan LeFebvre

01:41:03

Well, there’s something that maybe might be a little more documented. Happens back in England in this episode when you see Lady Jane getting help from Charles Dickens to fund rescue for her husband’s expedition. Was Charles Dickens actually involved like that?

Rich Napolitano

01:41:18

He was. Yeah. I’m maybe a little bit biased here, but if there’s a villain in this story, it’s Charles Dickens. Really? Yeah. Okay. And I’ll tell you why. Okay. And he absolutely refused to believe any of the reports of John Ray. Just in short, John Ray was a renowned explorer, surveyor of the Arctic, Canadian Arctic, really an incredible man. But in 1854, it was his third expedition. He wasn’t even searching for Franklin. He was just mapping coastline. He was trying to find, he was trying to chart the last unknown coastline in that area. It was up there near Boothia for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He wasn’t part of the Admiralty. He was on foot. He didn’t even have a ship. But he encountered some Inuit folks that, and he had a translator, a man named Ulikbuk, translate for him. And these Inuit people produced artifacts. They had silverware, spoons, forks, knives engraved with the initials of officers of the ship, FRM Crozier. They had Sir John Franklin’s Royal Order of Merit, the big metal, big shiny metal with his initials on it. They had a silver plate that said Sir John Franklin on the back, inscribed. One of them was wearing a cap with a gold cap band wrapped around it, and he, Ray, recognized that that cap band was from a Royal Navy cap. So he traded with them to take all these artifacts, and there were a lot. There were just miscellaneous things, eyeglasses, silverware plates, all kinds of just small personal items. And they told him their own oral history of what they found. that they saw these men, kabloonas, the white men, dragging these boats down the coast, and that they all looked terrible. They were starving, and they had black sunken eyes and black mouths. So that all indicates scurvy, you know, very starvation and scurvy, very clearly. They say they were headed back. They were headed south. They communicated only with gestures, he told John Ray, but they determined that the white men were trying to get down, cross over the street, cross over the strait, and get to the river, which would be Bax Fish River, or it’s just called Bax River today. And that’s what the white men had communicated to them. But then the next winter, they returned and the men were all gone and they found that they actually did cross the street. There was a small group of men that had made it across to the mainland to Hadalei Peninsula, but they were all dead. They found an overturned boat and a bunch of corpses and some metal artifacts and various things scattered around, but they didn’t make it. But they actually did make it to the mainland, but they couldn’t quite make it to the river. So that was their oral testimony, among other things. They said that they saw the boats. One of the boats was south, had drifted south of the island, and the only amassed were sticking up. They said, like I mentioned before, they went onto the ships and there were men on board. So John Ray takes all these artifacts and goes back to England and relays all of the oral testimony from the Inuit folks. And Lady Jane Franklin and Charles Dickens were having none of it. Oh, I left out the important part, that the Inuits said that they were absolutely evidence of cannibalism, that they saw bones in pots. in that the men had just human legs in the sledge that they were hauling, things like that. So there was definitely testimony of cannibalism, and Ray and Lady Franklin were not having it, and just went on this attack. Not so much of John Ray. He was careful not to do that, but he called the Inuits, to paraphrase, he called them basically savages. they’re liars, untrustworthy. How could we possibly believe anything these savages ever say? They probably attacked the men themselves and killed them. And it went back and forth. He published this in his publication, a journal, basically, a magazine, kind of. It was called Household Words. And it went back and forth between Dickens and Ray was trying to defend his evidence and testimony in the Inuit people, and Dickens just kept up with the attack, so much so that Ray really became discredited. People just didn’t believe it. They didn’t want to believe that these noble members of the Royal Navy, these gentlemen, these officers, and other, you know, dignified Englishmen could possibly resort to cannibalism. And in one of Ray’s letters, he wrote, from the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life. And that just didn’t sit well with the people of the time. Again, it’s a Victorian era. They just didn’t want to believe it. And Ray was vastly discredited and just kind of continued on with his surveying career. And it really hasn’t been until the last couple of decades that his reputation has been restored. He’s really starting to earn a lot more respect. And it’s all because of Charles Dickens, mostly. So that’s why I said he’s kind of the villain of this episode.

Dan LeFebvre

01:48:01

Yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back to what you’re talking about at the very beginning. He’s talking, you know, the Victorian area and being all about honor and, you know, gaining this, the honor of the expedition and all of that. And so I could see how back in England, you’re in the comforts of home. You’re not going to imagine that, well, Lady Jane, his wife, I imagine would be like, you know, there’s no way he would resort to this or his men would resort to this sort of thing. and almost having a slight against the name, you know, and holding that. Again, I’m just speculating, but I could see how that would be something that would hurt her reputation. And if she was respected, maybe that would hurt her some. And, yeah, it’s just, it’s sad that, you know, shoot the messenger approach of, you know, Ray’s just, this is what happened.

Rich Napolitano

01:49:02

And what’s interesting, too, is the beginning portions of all of that back and forth in Dickens’ publication, we didn’t know yet about the Victory Point Note. That wasn’t found until 1859. So they didn’t know that Franklin had died, for sure, although he had been declared dead. They didn’t know, because the Victory Point Note says exactly when he died. So following that, we do know that had cannibalism took place, Franklin wouldn’t have been involved because he was already dead. That doesn’t mean others didn’t resort to it, but he would not have.

Dan LeFebvre

01:49:45

Yeah, but they wouldn’t have known that. Yeah, like you said, they wouldn’t have known that at the time. And so they’re operating off of, I mean, we don’t even know everything now, but back then they knew even less.

Rich Napolitano

01:49:56

That’s an excellent point. That’s right.

Dan LeFebvre

01:50:00

well we are up to the final episode of the season everything comes to an end as nearly everybody dies including the tomb block who chokes on hickey’s body that leaves only one left from the expedition crozier although at the very end it fast forwards to you two years in 1850 when some other white men arrive at the net select village and crozier himself hides but he tells them or he tells the nisse like to tell the white men that all of the men are dead and gone and there’s no way to the passage. So even though Crozier doesn’t die at the end of the series, he does leave his former life behind and seems to stay with the Nitzlik. Did the series accurately show us how the story of the Men of the Erebus and Terror came to an end?

Rich Napolitano

01:50:41

Well, mostly yes. Except for Crozier surviving, it actually is pretty well done. They struggled mightily through the ice and snow, and a lot of them just fell from exhaustion or succumbed to their diseases right where they stood. So, you know, Crozier may have been one of the last to survive. I think that’s kind of an interesting take by the series because he was very experienced. He was used to the conditions of, you know, such frigid weather. had been on several polar expeditions. So, you know, and he was a pretty strong guy. So I’d like to think that he was one of the last few to survive. But yeah, I think it wraps up pretty well in those terms that they all died of, you know, a combination of starvation, scurvy, tuberculosis, perhaps botulism, exposure, and other maladies perhaps. So I think it’s interesting, especially given how we found them. We found these camps and the overturned boats, and the fact that the boats were overturned tells me they were using them for or trying to use them for a shelter of some kind, which means they had more or less given up trying to continue on the march. At least some of them. My opinion is some of them probably stopped at Erebus Bay and tried to make a camp there and hope that somebody came along. Some more probably camped at Terror Bay, and then a handful continued on and actually made it across to the Adelaide Peninsula before they died at Starvation Cove, is what that point is called, aptly.

Dan LeFebvre

01:52:41

It’s a horrible name for a place, but understandable why it would be called that.

Rich Napolitano

01:52:45

Yeah. And there’s artifacts found there too along the way. So we do know that they made a pretty long march. At least some of them did. And left behind not only their bones, but the boats and all the things that belonged in, that they were carrying in the boats, along with some useless things like metal hoops and lines of silver or lines of lead sheets. they found books and all kinds of personal items that really do help us understand at least where they were going or at least where they were trying to go. So that, you know, that plus the victory point note, plus the oral history of the Native people there, that’s really what we have to go on as far as what we understand to have happened.

Dan LeFebvre

01:53:42

Well, we have covered a lot, but of course, there’s so much more to the story we could ever cover on a single episode. So is there anything about the true story we haven’t had a chance to chat about yet that you want to make sure gets included?

Rich Napolitano

01:53:55

Yeah, you know, in the story, in the show, they call Francis Crozier a gluca. And that’s the very first shot of the whole series in episode one. They show Sir James Clark Ross talking to the Inuit folks in the tent, and they point to a photo of Francis Crozier and they say a gluca. That almost certainly didn’t happen. A gluca was a real term that they used in it kind of broadly for many of the white men. It meant one with long strides. They called Dr. John Ray a gluca as well. So that was interesting. James Clark Ross did go search for Franklin, but he never made it to where they were. He got blocked off north of there at Somerset Island and had to overwinter. He got stuck as well. And he never even published an account. He didn’t find anything. So he didn’t publish anything about his search because he didn’t find anything. um now the long term that a lot of searches happened for the franklin expedition i mentioned the first couple james clark ross john ray although he john ray specifically set out on his second expedition to search for franklin with uh richardson but they didn’t find anything there as well but uh certainly uphold mcclintock charles francis hall frederick all of them found evidence, talked to Inuit folks, got oral testimony, and it all backed up what John Ray was told before, and it all backed up the evidence they were finding. So, you know, those really help fill in the gaps of the things that we don’t know. And interestingly, just to maybe wrap up, they did find the ships. Erebus was found in 2014, right where the native people said that it would be, about 10 miles or so off the northwest coast of the Adelaide Peninsula to the south. So it was about, I don’t know, roughly 100 miles or so from where they got stuck in the ice. So somehow it drifted or was sailed there. It’s kind of a mystery that people like to debate. It was found in pretty good shape, actually. They identified the ship. They’ve got some artifacts off of it. No logbooks, unfortunately. And the Terror was found off the southwest coast at Terror Bay. It was in a little bit more beat up shape. It was kind of on its keel a little bit or tilted over. Um, but it was also found where it was said to be that, you know, all of these facts are lining up with what the oral history says. So Parks Canada has control of those wrecks and they, they, uh, you can, you can look that up on their website. They’ve got some great videos and, uh, photographs of the things that they’ve uncovered. I don’t think there’s any plans to raise the ships, but they have excavated it.

Dan LeFebvre

01:57:27

It makes me wonder if only Charles Dickens and Lady Jane had listened to what Ray had said about the oral history. Maybe it would have been found in time. I don’t know. Maybe to save some, obviously not all, but maybe there would be a different ending to the story.

Rich Napolitano

01:57:48

yeah uh you know i don’t think anything would have saved them frankly sorry for the bad pun unintended i think they were doomed as soon as uh as soon as franklin decided to turn west into victoria strait instead of heading around the east side of king william land as he called it that pretty much doomed them from there. They had some pretty unusually cold winters and it just didn’t melt in the summer. Couldn’t get through and they were stuck. And that pretty much sealed

Dan LeFebvre

01:58:27

it for them. Thank you so much for coming on the show to chat about the terror. For anyone in my audience who wants to hear more maritime tales, you have a great podcast called Shipwrecks and Seadogs. So before I let you go, can you give my audience a recommendation for an episode that they can queue up in their podcast app to listen to right after we wrap up? Absolutely. The whole

Rich Napolitano

01:58:48

story of the Franklin Expedition is in episode 115, and that is an update that I made from an older episode that I did years ago. But I included all this new information about the DNA analysis and that they found William Orrin and David Young and linked Fitz James’ jawbone. So I included all of that in this updated version. That’s episode 115. And episode 116 that I did as a follow-up about Dr. John Ray, who was really important in terms of the Franklin Expedition. And also just a really great man, underrated. I highly recommend listening to those. And that’s at Shipwrecks and Seadogs on all major platforms. Listen to them on any podcast app. texandseadogs.com or YouTube.

Dan LeFebvre

01:59:43

And of course, I’ll add those links in the show notes as well. Thank you again so much for your time, Rich.

Rich Napolitano

01:59:48

Dan, thank you so much. It was absolutely a pleasure to be here on your show. Thanks so much.

Dan LeFebvre

02:00:03

This episode of Based on a True Story was produced by me, Dan Lefebvre. Hop in the show notes or head on over to basedonatruestorypodcast.com slash 386 to find a link to Rich’s podcast so you can queue up an episode to listen to as soon as we’re done here. And while you do that, let’s find the answer to our two truths and a lie game from the beginning of the episode. As a quick refresher, here are the two truths and one lie again. Number one, the ships were provisioned for three years. Number two, we don’t know if Sir John Franklin actually died during the expedition. Number three, the crew wintered at Beachy Island. Did you figure out which one is a lie? I’ve got the envelope right here, so let’s open that up. And the lie is number two. Rich told us about the note left at the cairn, which told us that Sir John Franklin died on June 11, 1847. So even if we don’t know how he died, we do know when he died, thanks to that note. As always, thank you for your continued support, listening to and sharing this episode based on a true story with someone that you think would enjoy it. And if you are watching the video version of this, stick around for the credits. If you can find out my cat’s name and email it to me, I’ll send you a free sticker. Thanks again for watching, and I hope to hear from you soon. *music*