Frozen in Time
The Fate of the Franklin Expedition
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3.8 • 11 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • “CHILLING … WILL KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT TURNING PAGES.”—The Chicago Tribune
This “remarkable piece of forensic deduction” (MARGARET ATWOOD) “captures the excitement and peril of the explorers’ harrowing journey” aboard the HMS Erebus, and offers “a compelling explanation of what might have transpired over their final weeks and days (including, in a final act of desperation, cannibalism). It’s a serious historical work, but also a riveting account of a truly extraordinary expedition." (THE NEW YORK TIMES)
In 1845, Sir John Franklin and his men set out to “penetrate the icy fastness of the north, and to circumnavigate America.” And then they disappeared. The truth about what happened to Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition was shrouded in mystery for more than a century.
Then, in 1984, Owen Beattie and his team exhumed two crew members from a burial site in the North for forensic evidence, to shocking results. But the most startling discovery didn’t come until 2014, when a team commissioned by the Canadian government uncovered Erebus, the lost ship.
Frozen in Time is a riveting deep dive into one of the most famous shipwrecks of all time, and the team of brilliant scientists that unleashed its secrets from the ice. It offers a thrilling account of Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition, and the scientific investigation that spurred the decades-long hunt for its recovery—now with a new afterword on the discovery of its lost ships: Erebus and Terror.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The discovery of the wreck of British explorer Sir John Franklin's ship The Erebus in the fall of 2014 is likely to renew interest in this book, first published in 1987 by forensic anthropologist Beattie and Geiger, now CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, and fortuitously reprinted before the shipwreck was discovered. Franklin was appointed to lead an expedition to discover the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic through the Arctic to the Pacific, but the expedition was lost in 1848. A number of relief expeditions revealed only scant information about the fate of Franklin and his crew, and the mystery remained for almost a century. This historical retelling is complemented by an account of the expedition led by Beattie in the 1980s, during which the remains of some crew members were found. It provided important evidence to answer questions about what ultimately killed the men and whether in desperation they resorted to cannibalism. The authors present a richly researched history of the expedition and the following relief expeditions and seamlessly merge the worlds of forensic anthropology and 19th-century history. Reading almost like a whodunit page-turner, Beattie and Geiger capture the thrill of making new scientific discoveries and finding important clues to solve a haunting mystery.
Customer Reviews
Great real life mystery
Interesting mystery solved of Artic exploration. Nice blend of present and historical facts. Very enjoyable read.
Good book until…
Interesting and well written until the authors start to write about themselves in the third person and in the same style as they write about the true Arctic explorers. That was a huge turn off.