Top products from r/TheTerror

Episode 2 of The Terror is titled “Gore” – ostensibly for the HMS Erebus lieutenant whose ill-starred sledge party provokes the onslaught of the Tuunbaq on the Franklin Expedition, but also as a not-too-subtle reference to the gruesome manner in which it begins to decimate the crews – beginning, of course, with Graham Gore (played by Tom Weston-Jones) himself.

In real life, however, Gore’s journey was probably more triumphant. Or at least to the extent that any triumph is possible in an expedition in which all hands are ultimately lost.

1. The real Graham Gore was a well-liked officer just hitting 40 when the Franklin Expedition began – an old age for a capable lieutenant in wartime (he was, in fact, five years older than Captain James Fitzjames), but all too common, alas, in the shrunken peacetime Victorian Royal Navy, when promotion could be glacial, even for men with “interest” ashore. What is more intriguing is that we know more about Gore’s role (which admittedly, is not much) on the Franklin Expedition after its disappearance than we do almost any other man on it.
   
   
2. One of those few things we know about Gore is that he really did lead a sledge party to King William Island in May of 1846, because the only two written records which have been recovered to date from the expedition were notated as being originally deposited by Gore himself in message cairns. These were pre-printed admiralty forms in which basic details about an expedition’s status could be filled in, to be inserted in watertight metal cannisters placed in piled rock cairns, as records which might assist in any rescue or post-mortem of a Royal Navy expedition gone astray. Early in Episode 2, we see Gore completing and depositing the so-called “Victory Point Note,” which Russell Potter calls “perhaps the most evocative document in the long history of the Western exploration of the Arctic.” In episode 8, The Terror hints at why it became so evocative.
   
   
3. But why did Franklin send Gore and his party to King William Island in the first place? Both the show and the novel suggest it was only to leave message cairns and look for emerging leads in the ice pack. And surely the real Graham Gore was sent to accomplish these very objectives. But professional speculation about Gore’s sledge party has from the outset considered to have been something more ambitious: using the firm landmark of King William Island itself to bring together the Eastern and Western Charts of the Canadian Arctic at their narrowest separation, and thus in a qualified sense – and here is where the triumph comes in - to discover the Northwest Passage.
   
   
4. To understand how this could be so, it helps to understand that 19th century British exploration of the Canadian Arctic “came at it” from both directions: from the East, with expeditions like those of Sir John Ross commencing from Baffin Bay and Hudson Bay, but also from West, with RN ships making the long trip around Cape Horn up to the Bering Strait, or in the alternative, to trudge overland through western Canada to chart the northern coastline of North America (see attached map). Sir John Franklin himself had helped pioneer the latter approach early in his career (when he became “the man who ate his boots”) but his work was extended by Peter Dease and Thomas Simpson, who managed (1834) to reach even the southern shore of King William Island itself, not long after Sir James Clark Ross (1830-31) had managed to reach the northern side of the island, erecting the message cairn found seventeen years later by Gore in Episode 2. Tantalizingly, this left the unexplored edge of the western charts less than fifty miles away from the edge of the eastern charts. To bring them “together” – to locate a waterborne connection between the two map edges could be a simple matter of just walking south along the shoreline of KWI. For a hale and lightly burdened party of men traveling overland in spring, this could be a round trip journey of perhaps just 2-3 weeks. To a restless icebound Sir John Franklin, it would have been an extremely tempting proposition in deciding on Graham Gore’s travel orders.
   
   
5. The discovery of the Victory Point Note by Sir Francis McClintock’s expedition in 1859 unleashed speculation that Graham Gore had in fact done just that. Sherard Osborne’s 1860 history of the expedition, The Career, Last Voyage And Fate Of Sir John Franklin, vividly outlines the possible trek, and the likely heartbreak that would have awaited Gore on his triumphant return to Erebus, coming as it would have shortly before or after the death on June 11 of his chief Sir John Franklin, presumably from some sort of illness. This is not just impassioned Victorian Era laurel seeking, however. As Russell Potter notes, the presence of two message cairns from the expedition a relatively short distance from each other (just 8 miles -- possibly one day's march) “strongly suggests that Gore had been instructed to leave a record frequently, perhaps daily, on his southward trek. One might reasonably expect, then, several other such records were left along the coast, and might yet be recovered.” It is, Potter contends, “tantalizing to think of Gore's possible achievement of the long-sought dream of linking the eastern and western surveys of the Northwest Passage -- it seems hard to imagine he would have missed his goal.”
   
   
6. The Victory Point Note itself drops a hint at this possibility. The writing added to it the following spring (April 1848) by Captain Fitzjames notes that Gore has since died, as he is referred to as “the late Commander Gore” (which tracks with The Terror’s narrative) and that he had been given a field promotion to commander (which does not track with the show). Presumably this was done to move Gore into Fitzjames’ old slot as commander on Erebus after Franklin’s death, but a commander would hardly have been necessary for a diminished bomb ship crew. Could such an unusual honor have been a reward for closing the gap between the eastern and western charts, and finding the last link of the Passage? Either way, this is a rare point where both novel and show depart from the known facts of the Franklin Expedition, since the Victory Point note makes rather clear that Gore made it back alive and was subsequently given a very rare field promotion. Alas, it seems he did not live to enjoy it for very long.
   
   Later, of course, we know from relics and human remains that what remained of the rest of the expedition crews traveled much the same ground the following spring and summer, reaching the southern littoral of King William Island explored by Simpson fourteen years previously – and, for the most part, dying from scurvy and starvation at various points along it. The Terror is not completely remiss in this connection, however. In Episode 9, Tom Blanky is given what was likely Graham Gore’s honor, depicted planting himself on the shore along Simpson Strait, exultingly scrawling “Northwest Passage” on his map shortly before he meets his end at the hands (claws?) of the Tuunbaq.
   
   But perhaps it is fitting that an icebound passage ends up discovered by the ship’s ice master.

Michael Palin wrote an excellent book called Erebus that was released last year. I can personally recommend.

Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time https://www.amazon.com/dp/1771644419/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_DxToDb368MVE7

I recommend reading Roland Huntford’s book “The Last Place on Earth” (and/ or the miniseries based upon the book) which describes the race to the South Pole between Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition and Britains Robert Falcon Scott. The Norwegians used sled dogs and Inuit technology and won without a loss, the English used tractors and Siberian Ponies ... and were all lost. Brilliantly told.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375754741/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_3y-3AbRK4221T


Film (not pleased to see the price-gouging but for reference)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004RBC5LK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_DE-3Ab3TQ8VJV

I'm currently reading Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition. I picked it up after watching the series because I wanted to know more about what happened to the crew and such. While this book is good, it's not about that really. What it is about is basically the search for the truth of the expedition from early searches in the mid 1800's to exhumations of corpses in the 1980's when the book was originally published. This version is a rerelease with additional material added after the boats were found, although I haven't gotten to that part yet.

The Karluk was the absolute craziest story. I think this was the book I read about it- highly recommended https://www.amazon.ca/Ice-Master-Doomed-Voyage-Karluk/dp/0786884460

​

​

https://www.amazon.com/The-Terror-Season-1/dp/B07BDRPQTT
If anyone wants to pay 18-25$ for Season 1 and do a dirty deed, it's right there lol

The wiki article on the expedition is a great place to start. There's also a number of new books (like this one) that are coming out about the expedition, since Terror was finally located in 2016.

Gore's note and its modifications by Crozier and Fitzjames is a powerful sight to behold. The linked page has the full text written out, since the handwriting is difficult to read in the image. It's one thing to watch the show or read the book, but it's entirely another to see with your eyes the actual paper that these men—who were both similar to and very different from the fictionalized versions we know—touched with their actual hands.

Imagining them squatting in the freezing cold next to that tall cairn, slowly scratching out a message as their ink froze and their hands shook, all out in the middle of that blasted desolation—it's just really, really haunting.