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The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage
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About The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History Of
Product Description The enthralling and often harrowing history of the adventurers who searched for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth-century British exploration. After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying to do since the sixteenth century: find the fabled Northwest Passage, a shortcut to the Orient via a sea route over northern Canada. For the next thirty-five years the British Admiralty sent out expedition after expedition to probe the ice-bound waters of the Canadian Arctic in search of a route, and then, after 1845, to find Sir John Franklin, the Royal Navy hero who led the last of these Admiralty expeditions and vanished into the maze of channels, sounds, and icy seas with two ships and 128 officers and men. In The Man Who Ate His Boots, Anthony Brandt tells the whole story of the search for the Northwest Passage, from its beginnings early in the age of exploration through its development into a British national obsession to the final sordid, terrible descent into scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism. Sir John Franklin is the focus of the book but it covers all the major expeditions and a number of fascinating characters, including Franklin’s extraordinary wife, Lady Jane, in vivid detail. The Man Who Ate His Boots is a rich and engaging work of narrative history that captures the glory and the folly of this ultimately tragic enterprise. Amazon.com Review A Q&A with Anthony Brandt Question: In The Man Who Ate His Boots you tell the rousing and often horrifying story of the search for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth century British exploration. Why did so many people invest such time, energy, and effort in to this search? Anthony Brandt: There’s no simple answer. In part it had seemed since the 16th century--when the Spanish and the Portuguese were claiming all the easier routes to the Far East--like a peculiarly British mission to find this great unknown route to the East via the north; and after 1815, when the Napoleonic Wars ended with such a decisive British victory and the seas were theirs, the chance to use idle ships and idle seamen to find it became too attractive to resist. The British now thought they could do anything, no matter how difficult, especially at sea. But it was also to some degree the product of one man’s enthusiasm, and that was John Barrow, the powerful second secretary of the Admiralty, who believed in an open, unfrozen, polar sea; and he had an ally in the first lord of the Admiralty, the second Lord Melville, who supported the idea and was able to gather Parliamentary support. The British people were excited by the idea, too, and got behind it. Question: Was the mission a fool’s errand? Anthony Brandt: It proved to be so, and there were skeptics from the beginning. But at the time the Arctic was completely unknown. The map was blank above 80 degrees north in all areas, and above 70 degrees north in most. Nobody knew what the Arctic Ocean was like, or whether there even was an Arctic Ocean for that matter. For all they knew Greenland might extend to Asia, and some mapmakers thought it did. Others firmly believed that salt water could not freeze. The Greenland whalers knew better, but they weren’t scientists, they were commercial fishermen, and men like Barrow paid no attention to them. They weren’t gentlemen. In retrospect, then, it certainly seems like a fool’s errand, but life does not happen in retrospect, and what seems foolish now seemed like a noble effort at the time. Question: Your title refers to John Franklin’s 1819 failed expedition where 11 of the 20 men in the exploration party died of starvation and the survivors were forced to eat their boots! Franklin’s expedition is perhaps the most famous, but there were dozens of missions sent to the Arctic in the first half of the nineteenth century, one failure after another. Each of the commanding off
