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May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth is a privileged glimpse into the
private correspondence of the officers and sailors who set out in
May 1845 on the Erebus and Terror for Sir John Franklin's fateful
expedition to the Arctic. The letters of the crew and their
correspondents begin with the journey's inception and early
planning, going on to recount the ships' departure from the river
Thames, their progress up the eastern coast of Great Britain to
Stromness in Orkney, and the crew's exploits as far as the
Whalefish Islands off the western coast of Greenland, from where
the ships forever departed the society that sent them forth. As the
realization dawned that something was amiss, heartfelt letters to
the missing were sent with search expeditions; those letters,
returned unread, tell poignant stories of hope. Assembled
completely and conclusively from extensive archival research,
including in far-flung family and private collections, the
correspondence allows the reader to peer over the shoulders of
these men, to experience their excitement and anticipation, their
foolhardiness, and their fears. The Franklin expedition continues
to excite enthusiasts and scholars worldwide. May We Be Spared to
Meet on Earth provides new insights into the personalities of those
on board, the significance of the voyage as they saw it, and the
dawning awareness of the possibility that they would never return
to British shores or their families.
In 2014 media around the world buzzed with news that an
archaeological team from Parks Canada had located and identified
the wreck of HMS Erebus, the flagship of Sir John Franklin's lost
expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Finding Franklin outlines
the larger story and the cast of detectives from every walk of life
that led to the discovery, solving one of the Arctic's greatest
mysteries. In compelling and accessible prose, Russell Potter
details his decades of work alongside key figures in the era of
modern searches for the expedition and elucidates how shared
research and ideas have led to a fuller understanding of the
Franklin crew's final months. Illustrated with numerous images and
maps from the last two centuries, Finding Franklin recounts the
more than fifty searches for traces of his ships and crew, and the
dedicated, often obsessive, men and women who embarked on them.
Potter discusses the crucial role that Inuit oral accounts, often
cited but rarely understood, played in all of these searches, and
continue to play to this day, and offers historical and cultural
context to the contemporary debates over the significance of
Franklin's achievement. While examination of HMS Erebus will
undoubtedly reveal further details of this mystery, Finding
Franklin assembles the stories behind the myth and illuminates what
is ultimately a remarkable decades-long discovery.
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