The truth about what happened to the lost Franklin Expedition was a mystery for more than a century. Frozen in Time tells the story of the Expedition and the search missions sent out to determine what had happened to the crew. The Toronto Globe & Mail hailed it as a "Canadian classic" when first published in 1987. The book went on to become an international bestseller. One of the authors, Owen Beattie, is a Canadian anthropologist. The other, John Geiger, is an editor, author and the current CEO of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

On May 19,1845 two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, set sail from England. Led by Captain Sir John Franklin, the ships and their crew set out to discover the last unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage. In July of that year the whalers spotted the ships in Baffin Bay between Greenland and Canada. After that last sighting, the expedition and its crew of 129 men was never heard from again.

The audiobook lays out the known events of the Expedition. It also covers the early searches sent out from England after the ships did not return, and the more recent anthropologic efforts. Those early searches found evidence for cannibalism among the starving, stranded crew. The 1980s exhumation of frozen bodies and their amazing state of preservation are discussed in some detail. It’s quite the chilling tale and one I found hard to pull myself away from.

In the early 1980s, Beattie led anthropology teams on trips to what was then part of the Northwest Territories of Canada. They examined sites that earlier searches had identified with crew members of the lost Expedition. In 1984 they returned with forensic evidence from the exhumed and autopsied bodies of three Franklin Expedition crew members. The bodies had been buried on Beechey Island in the frozen North of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago .

What Beattie and his teams discovered when they analyzed that evidence led them to a new and surprising conclusion. They found that lead poisoning played a significant role in the deterioration of the health and ultimate death of the crew members. High concentrations of lead in the men’s bodies was traced back to lead used as solder in the cans of supplies brought aboard the ships. Chemical analysis confirmed the solder as the source.

The audiobook is a “revised” edition (corresponding to the 2017 paperback revised edition). Despite the fact that later teams reached different conclusions about the cause of death than Beattie's team had, his conclusions remain in this edition. This may make the book somewhat dated, but it didn’t matter to me as the new theories only change a small part of what the book covers.

The Expedition’s ships have also been discovered since Beattie and his team did their work. The wreck of the HMS Erebus was discovered in 2014, and the HMS Terror in 2016.

For a book about polar exploration and the hardships and loss of early explorers it’s hard to beat the story in this book. I give Frozen in Time Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐. ( )

This book first looks at the Franklin Expedition in the mid-1800s to find the Northwest Passage. Franklin and his entire crew of 129 people and two ships disappeared. In the years following, others set out to find them or some clue as to what had happened. In the early 1980s, Owen Beattie, a forensic anthropologist, and a team of others set out to the graves of three of the expedition members on Beatty Island to dig them up to do autopsies to see if that would tell them what had happened.

Surprisingly, I found the second half more interesting than the first. I guess all of it was potentially interesting to me, but I was surprised to be more engrossed in the parts as the modern-day scientists dug up the graves to find extremely well-preserved bodies and to read the details of their testing and what they found. Be warned that there are photos of the bodies that were dug up; of course, there are other interesting photos, as well. ( )

Learned so much. Love arctic stuff. ( )

In Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition, Owen Beattie and John Geiger trace the history of Captain Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to discover the Northwest Passage aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in 1845. Beattie and Geiger place Franklin’s Expedition in the context of Arctic exploration following the Napoleonic Wars, with the search expeditions of the mid-nineteenth century deifying Franklin and cementing the expedition in the national, and international, consciousness. They further explore the leading theories of the day for Franklin’s loss, including scurvy and the nineteenth century ailment of “debility.” After examining the historical record, Beattie and Geiger summarize Beattie’s 1980s expeditions to to King William Island and Beechey Island, in which Beattie examined bones and the graves of three Franklin Expedition crew, discovering the presence of elevated lead levels. This evidence, coupled with historical records of lead exposure from nineteenth century canning processes, helped to explain the underlying cause for the expedition’s mortality.

Beattie and Geiger conclude, “The story of how the Royal Navy failed to achieve the Northwest Passage is really that of how the world’s greatest navy battled, and was ultimately humbled by, a simple yet gruesome disease – scurvy, allied to a menace of which they could not begin to conceive: lead poisoning. The source of their defeat was not the ice-choked seas, the deep cold, the winters of absolute night, the labyrinthine geography or the soul-destroying isolation. It was found in their food supply, most notably in their heavy reliance on tinned foods” (pg. 254). In this, Beattie and Geiger compare the Franklin Expedition’s fate to other instances in which people took technological advancements for granted, leading to systematic breakdowns.

Frozen in Time will captivate readers interested in the history of exploration or the science of archaeology. The Franklin Expedition itself continues to play a role in international politics, as Canada works to declare the locations of the Franklin Expedition graves, the final resting places of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and the surrounding waterways as UNESCO World Heritage Sites in order to cement Canada’s claim to the Northwest Passage, now increasingly open as a result of climate change (pg. xviii). ( )

"Frozen in Time" is a fascinating look at the fate of the Franklin expedition. In the 1980's a series of scientific expeditions headed off to the Arctic to exhume the remains of three bodies buried before the expedition got into real trouble and disappeared. In a detailed analysis, Owen Beattie found the lead levels in the bodies was extraordinarily high, and he believes the expedition started to go awry as its members became ill with lead poisoning. He also found a bone that backed up the story of cannibalism that rocked England when it was first suggested.

I generally liked the book and found the scientific story interesting. I felt the Franklin information itself was a bit glossed over and was bugged that the book paints Lady Franklin as a devoted wife searching for her husband's fate without balancing out the story -- she was so devoted to glorifying her husband that she tried to destroy Arctic explorer John Rae for suggesting the crew turned to cannibalism in an attempt to survive.

If you already know a bit about the Franklin expedition and the many searches for the fate of the captain and his men, this book is definitely worth reading. ( )