Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin

• Published in: Arctic Vol. 56; no. 1; pp. 93 - 95
• Main Author: Davis, Richard C.
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Calgary The Arctic Institute of North America 01.03.2003; Arctic Institute of North America of the University of Calgary; Arctic Institute of North America
• Subjects: Careers; Discovery & exploration; Expeditions; Franklin, John, Sir (1786-1847); Reviews; Arctic region
• ISSN: 0004-0843; 1923-1245

This criticism is harsh, but Deadly Winter fails in too many ways. Although the biography purports to be current and to deal appropriately with related works on Franklin, Beardsley remains disturbingly unaware of numerous important books and articles that have been published in the past decade, many of them in Canada. For example, he writes that "almost a generation has passed since the last full Franklin biography, Roderic Owen's The Fate of Franklin (Hutchinson, 1978)" was published (p. xii). Yet John Wilson published John Franklin: Traveller on Undiscovered Seas in 2001. Similarly, Beardsley devotes nearly a third of the chapters in Deadly Winter to Franklin's land expeditions of 1819-22 and 1825-27, yet remains oblivious to the fact that Robert Hood's and George Back's journals from the first land expedition (Houston, 1974, 1994) and Franklin's journals from both expeditions (Davis, 1995, 1998) had already been published to facilitate exactly this sort of project. In these scholarly editions, the journals were carefully introduced and richly annotated, making the texts valuable reference points for Beardsley's lengthy treatment of the expeditions in question, had he been aware of their existence. Ironically, Wilson's biography of Franklin and the substantive introductions to the volumes of journals approach Franklin with the sort of balance Beardsley claims is needed to counter revisionist histories. On a similar note, Beardsley defends Franklin's treatment of the voyageurs by saying that "they were simply doing the job for which they were specifically hired and paid. It was the kind of work they did on a daily basis, except now they were doing it with Franklin, instead of on their normal fur trading routes" (p. 92). The fact is, however, that the voyageurs' contracts often stipulated that they would be fed a specific ration of meat or pemmican each day, and at an early stage of the expedition, Franklin was not able to fulfill these obligations as their employer. When some of the voyageurs-who were largely Frenchthreatened to quit their employment, Franklin imposed military rule, treating the men as if they had enlisted in the British Navy. According to George Back's journal (published in 1994 by a major academic press in Canada and, hence, easily accessible to anyone writing a book on the subject), Franklin threatened anyone who refused to work with "blowing out his brains" (Houston, p. 81). Because he relies solely on Franklin's public narrative for information, however, Beardsley can do little more than parrot what Franklin reported, and because Franklin himself could not understand that he had failed to hold up his end of a contract, it is unlikely that Beardsley would see the matter differently. Besides, Beardsley presents the situation in sharp black-and-white, with the voyageurs taking on the same unsavoury role as the "thoughtless" Yellowknives. If this were a far better book than it is, a judicious reviewer would remark favourably about its treatment of Franklin's relationships with his two wives. Beardsley assures the reader at the outset that this is "to be the story of Sir John Franklin's life" (p. xii), and not simply another account of all the public ventures that made him famous. To his credit, Beardsley devotes more than the usual space to Franklin's personal relations with Eleanor Anne Franklin and Jane Franklin, but there is really little else of a personal nature. And I am certain many women readers would take exception to Beardsley's flippant assumptions about gender, in the same way that aboriginal readers might wonder in what cosmic isolation Beardsley has been living for the past century. Yet despite the author's intention to do something different, Deadly Winter, like most books about Franklin, moves steadily through the commonly delineated stages and arenas of Franklin's professional career. And if it were a better book, a reviewer would have to remark on the serious problems with the printing of the book itself: for example, the text of footnotes sometimes appears unexpectedly as part of the main body of Beardsley's prose (p. 113, 137).