An exhilarating collection of non-fiction from the bestselling, double Booker Prize-winning phenomenon. In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds.
Frozen in Time
INTRODUCTION (2004)
"Frozen in Time by Owen Beattie and John Geiger is one of those
books that, having once entered our imaginations, refuse to go away.
It made a large impact, devoted as it was to the astonishing revelations
made by Dr. Owen Beattie— including the high probability
that lead poisoning had contributed to the annihilation of the ....
Franklin expedition.
I read Frozen in Time when it first came out in 1987. I looked at
the pictures in it. They gave me nightmares. I incorporated story and
pictures as a subtext and extended metaphor in a short story called
“The Age of Lead,” published in a 1991 collection called Wilderness
Tips. Then, some nine years later, during a boat trip in the Arctic,
I met John Geiger, one of the book’s authors. Not only had I read
his book, he had read mine, and it had caused him to give further
thought to lead as a factor in northern exploration and in unlucky
nineteenth-century sea voyages in general.
Franklin, said Geiger, was the canary in the mine, although unrecognized
as such at first: until the last years of the nineteenth century,
crews on long voyages continued to be fatally sickened by the lead
in tinned food. He has included the results of his researches in this
expanded version of Frozen in Time. The nineteenth century, he said,
was truly an “age of lead.” Thus do life and art intertwine.
Back to the foreground. In the fall of 1984, a mesmerizing photograph
grabbed attention in newspapers around the world. It showed
a young man who looked neither fully dead nor entirely alive. He
was dressed in archaic clothing and was surrounded by a casing of
ice. The whites of his half-open eyes were tea-coloured. His forehead
was dark blue. Despite the soothing and respectful adjectives applied
to him by the authors of Frozen in Time, you would never have confused
this man with a lad just drifting off to sleep. Instead, he looked
like a blend of Star Trek extraterrestrial and B-movie victim-of-a-curse:
not someone you’d want as your next-door neighbour, especially
if the moon was full.
Every time we find the well-preserved body of someone who
died long ago—an Egyptian mummy, a freeze-dried Incan sacrifice,
a leathery Scandinavian bog-person, the famous ice-man of the
European Alps—there’s a similar fascination. Here is someone who
has defied the general ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust rule, and who
has remained recognizable as an individual human being long after
most have turned to bone and earth. In the Middle Ages, unnatural
results argued unnatural causes, and such a body would have been
either revered as saintly or staked through the heart. In our age, try
for rationality as we may, something of the horror classic lingers:
the mummy walks, the vampire awakes. It’s so difficult to believe
that one who appears to be so nearly alive is not conscious of us.
Surely—we feel—a being like this is a messenger. He has travelled
through time, all the way from his age to our own, in order to tell us
something we long to know.
The man in the sensational photograph was John Torrington, one of
the first three to die during the doomed Franklin expedition of 1845.
Its stated goal was to discover the Northwest Passage to the Orient
and claim it for Britain; its actual result was the obliteration of all
participants. Torrington had been buried in a carefully dug grave,
deep in the permafrost on the shore of Beechey Island, Franklin’s
base during the expedition’s first winter. Two others—John Hartnell
and William Braine—were given adjacent graves. All three had been
painstakingly exhumed by anthropologist Owen Beattie and his
team, in an attempt to solve a long- standing mystery: Why had the
Franklin expedition ended so disastrously?
Beattie’s search for evidence of the rest of the Franklin expedition,
his excavation of the three known graves, and his subsequent
discoveries gave rise to a television documentary, and then—three
years after the photograph first appeared—to Frozen in Time. That
the story should generate such widespread interest 140 years after
Franklin filled his freshwater barrels at Stromness in the Orkney
Islands before sailing off to his mysterious fate was a tribute to the
extraordinary staying powers of the Franklin legend.
“They knew the rules: going to an Otherworld was a great risk. You might be captured by non-human beings. You might be trapped. You might never get out.”
For many years the mysteriousness of that fate was the chief drawing
card. At first, Franklin’s two ships, the ominously named Terror
and Erebus, appeared to have vanished into nothingness. No trace
could be found of them, even after the graves of Torrington, Hartnell,
and Braine had been found. There is something unnerving about
people who can’t be located, dead or alive. They upset our sense of
space—surely the missing ones have to be somewhere, but where?
Among the ancient Greeks, the dead who had not been retrieved
and given proper funeral ceremonies could not reach the Underworld;
they lingered in the world of the living as restless ghosts. And
so it is, still, with the disappeared: they haunt us. The Victorian age
was especially prone to such hauntings, as witness Tennyson’s In
Memoriam, its most exemplary tribute to a man lost at sea.
Adding to the attraction of the Franklin story was the Arctic
landscape that had subsumed leader, ships, and men. In the nineteenth
century, very few Europeans—apart from whalers—had ever
been to the Far North. It was one of those perilous regions attractive
to a public still sensitive to the spirit of literary Romanticism—
a place where a hero might defy the odds, suffer outrageously, and
pit his larger-than-usual soul against overwhelming forces. This Arctic
was dreary and lonesome and empty, like the windswept heaths
and forbidding mountains favoured by afficionados of the Sublime.
But the Arctic was also a potent Otherworld, imagined as a beautiful
and alluring but potentially malign fairyland, a Snow Queen’s
realm complete with otherworldly light effects, glittering ice palaces,
fabulous beasts—narwhals, polar bears, walruses—and gnome-like
inhabitants dressed in exotic fur outfits. There are numerous drawings
of the period that attest to this fascination with the locale. The
Victorians were keen on fairies of all sorts; they painted them, wrote
stories about them, and sometimes went so far as to believe in them.
They knew the rules: going to an Otherworld was a great risk. You
might be captured by non-human beings. You might be trapped.
You might never get out.
Ever since Franklin’s disappearance, each age has created a Franklin
suitable to its needs. Prior to the expedition’s departure there
was someone we might call the “real” Franklin, or even the Ur-
Franklin—a man viewed by his peers as perhaps not the crunchiest
biscuit in the packet, but solid and experienced, even if some
of that experience had been won by bad judgment (as witness the
ill-fated Coppermine River voyage of 1819). This Franklin knew his
own active career was drawing toward an end, and saw in the chance
to discover the Northwest Passage the last possibility for enduring
fame. Aging and plump, he was not exactly a dream vision of the
Romantic hero.
Then there was Interim Franklin, the one that came into being
once the first Franklin failed to return and people in England realized
that something must have gone terribly wrong. This Franklin
was neither dead nor alive, and the possibility that he might be either
caused him to loom large in the minds of the British public. During
this period he acquired the adjective gallant, as if he’d been engaged
in a military exploit. Rewards were offered, search parties were sent
out. Some of these men, too, did not return.
The next Franklin, one we might call Franklin Aloft, emerged
after it became clear that Franklin and all his men had died. They
had not just died, they had perished, and they had not just perished,
they had perished miserably. But many Europeans had survived in
the Arctic under equally dire conditions. Why had this particular
group gone under, especially since the Terror and the Erebus had
been the best-equipped ships of their age, offering the latest in technological
advances?
A defeat of such magnitude called for denial of equal magnitude.
Reports to the effect that several of Franklin’s men had eaten several
others were vigorously squelched; those bringing the reports—such
as the intrepid John Rae, whose story was told in Kevin McGoogan’s
2002 book, Fatal Passage—were lambasted in the press; and the
Inuit who had seen the gruesome evidence were maligned as wicked
savages. The effort to clear Franklin and all who sailed with him of
any such charges was led by Lady Jane Franklin, whose social status
hung in the balance: the widow of a hero is one thing, but the widow
of a cannibal quite another. Due to Lady Jane’s lobbying efforts,
Franklin, in absentia, swelled to blimp-like size. He was credited—
dubiously—with the discovery of the Northwest Passage, and was
given a plaque in Westminster Abbey and an epitaph by Tennyson.
“Beattie’s team found human bones with knife marks and skulls with no faces.”
After such inflation, reaction was sure to follow. For a time in the
second half of the twentieth century we were given Halfwit Franklin,
a cluck so dumb he could barely tie his own shoelaces. Franklin was
a victim of bad weather (the ice that usually melted in the summer
had failed to do so, not in just one year, but in three); however, in the
Halfwit Franklin reading, this counted for little. The expedition was
framed as a pure example of European hubris in the face of Nature:
Sir John was yet another of those Nanoodles of the North who came
to grief because they wouldn’t live by Indigenous rules and follow
Indigenous advice—“Don’t go there” being, on such occasions,
Advice #1.
But the law of reputations is like a bungee cord: you plunge down,
you bounce up, though to diminishing depths and heights each time.
In 1983, Sten Nadolny published The Discovery of Slowness, a novel
that gave us a thoughtful Franklin, not exactly a hero but an unusual
talent, and certainly no villain. Rehabilitation was on the way.
Then came Owen Beattie’s discoveries, and the description of
them in Frozen in Time. It was now clear that Franklin was no arrogant
idiot. Instead, he became a quintessentially twentieth-century
victim: a victim of bad packaging. The tins of food aboard his ships
had poisoned his men, weakening them and clouding their judgment.
Tins were quite new in 1845, and these tins were sloppily
sealed with lead, and the lead had leached into the food. But the
symptoms of lead poisoning were not recognized at the time, being
easily confused with those of scurvy. Franklin can hardly be blamed
for negligence, and Beattie’s revelations constituted exoneration of a
kind for Franklin.
There was exoneration of two other kinds, as well. By going where
Franklin’s men had gone, Beattie’s team was able to experience the
physical conditions faced by the surviving members of Franklin’s
crews. Even in summer, King William Island is one of the most
difficult and desolate places on earth. No one could have done what
these men were attempting—an overland expedition to safety.
Weakened and addled as they were, they didn’t have a hope. They
can’t be blamed for not making it.
The third exoneration was perhaps—from the point of view of
historical justice—the most important. After a painstaking, finger-numbing
search, Beattie’s team found human bones with knife
marks and skulls with no faces. John Rae and his Inuit witnesses, so
unjustly attacked for having said that the last members of the Franklin
crew had been practising cannibalism, had been right after all. A
large part of the Franklin mystery had now been solved.
Another mystery has since arisen: Why has Franklin become such
a Canadian icon? As Geiger and Beattie report, Canadians weren’t
much interested at first: Franklin was British, and the North was
far away, and Canadian audiences preferred oddities such as Tom
Thumb. But over the decades, Franklin has been adopted by Canadians
as one of their own. For example, there were the folk songs, such
as the traditional and often-sung “Ballad of Sir John Franklin”—a
song not much remembered in England—and Stan Rogers’s well-known
“Northwest Passage.” Then there were the contributions of
writers. Gwendolyn MacEwen’s radio drama, Terror and Erebus, was
first broadcast in the early 1960s; the poet Al Purdy was fascinated
by Franklin; the novelist and satirist Mordecai Richler considered
him an icon ripe for iconoclasm, and, in his novel Solomon Gursky
Was Here, added a stash of cross- dresser women’s clothing to the
contents of Franklin’s ships. What accounts for such appropriation?
Is it that we identify with well- meaning non- geniuses who get tragically
messed up by bad weather and evil food suppliers? Perhaps. Or
perhaps it’s because—as they say in china shops—if you break it, you
own it. Canada’s north broke Franklin, a fact that appears to have
conferred an ownership title of sorts.
It’s a pleasure to welcome Frozen in Time back to the bookshelves
in this revised and enlarged edition. I hesitate to call it a groundbreaking
book, as a pun might be suspected, but groundbreaking
it has been. It has contributed greatly to our knowledge of a signal
event in the history of northern journeying. It also stands as a tribute
to the enduring pull of the story—a story that has passed through all
the forms a story may take. The Franklin saga has been mystery, surmise,
rumour, legend, heroic adventure, and national iconography;
and here, in Frozen in Time, it becomes a detective story, all the more
gripping for being true."
Extracted from Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood, out now.
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