Reimagining the fate of a doomed Arctic expedition
Historical fiction; Minds of Winter, By Ed O’Loughlin, Riverrun, €19
In 1845, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, with 129 souls aboard, departed England, bound for what Alfred Tennyson called “the white north.” Their goal was to traverse the last unnavigated waters of the Northwest Passage, a region that has still never been comprehensively surveyed.
The expedition’s leader was John Franklin, the semi-disgraced former Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Franklin’s ships never returned. Icebound in the frozen seas of the Victoria Strait, the crews ...
