It was also, at times, breathtakingly beautiful, with dazzling colours and glowing skies.įranklin’s ship was trapped in the ice in a remote and desolate area, which Inuit rarely visited, calling it Tununiq, ‘the back of beyond’.
The Arctic could be a place of freezing fog and heaving seas, and the expedition crews were sometimes at the mercy of the immense pressure of the sea-ice and the unpredictable behaviour of icebergs. Unfamiliar wildlife might be glimpsed, such as narwhals (which were called ‘sea-unicorns’), and splashes of botanical life, including vivid yellow poppies. Using these, we can come as close as we possibly can to understanding what the crews of Erebus and Terror might have seen and felt.Įxpeditions set off in the spring, so that they could get as far as possible before the winter, when their progress was halted. We don’t yet have any of the journals or logbooks that would have been written aboard ship.īut we do have lots of evidence from other sources about what the men might have gone through. The short answer is, we don’t know what life was really like.
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