History plus

Just finished a book that was unusual on many levels, so I thought I'd share. The Book was The Terror by Dan Simmons. It calls itself a historical novel. Dan has taken a historical story and embellished on it a bit.

The story is about two ships trying to find the Northwest Passage - a sea passage from England to China going through the waters of Northern Canada. Apparently they knew the waters freeze over int he winter, so all ships making the trip planned on being frozen in and wintering on their ships as part of the journey to China. As of the trip being written about, no one had found a Northwest Passage yet.

The first odd thing was reading this book in the winter. Here I was reading about ships frozen in the Atlantic, and trying to live on a ship with very little heat temps 30 to 40 below zero. Reading it in the middle of January - making the 15 degree commute feel as if it were -40 here in Boston. I should have saved the book for a 90 degree day.

Second item, there happened to be a PBS type special on the Northwest Passage on TV while reading the book. The special was about the guy who finally did find the Northwest Passage. Rather than take a massive ship like other explorers did (and as the Terror did), he took a smaller lighter ship, and was able to avoid the winter ice floes and take smaller passages between islands. This particular captian also spend his winter hanging out with the natives, so he ws able to keep warm and learn the ways of the locals, keepign him and his smaller crew alive over the winter. The exact opposite of what happened to the crew of The Terror...

After i finished the book, I did some light research on the HMS Terror and the ships captian. Apparently Dan Simmons did more research than I had though. I thought Dan hd taken a light story and went with it. Apparently people in England were concerned enough when The Terror never returned that several rescue missions were sent out, including searches for the wreck as recent as 2008. A great outline of The Terror can be found on Wikipedia.

I don't usually blog about books, but after reading this one, and doing some research on my own, I found Dan Simmons' interpretation of what might have happened on The Terror to be even more fascinating. (Dan also takes a lot of liberties as to what happened day-to-day on the ship, and adds a bit of a supernatural twist to the story, so this isn't a history book).

But in one last little twist, there is a biography that recently came out on the captian of The Terror, Captian Francis Crozier. Odd Timing? Or Dan's inspiration? Either way, the true biography looks to be interesting reading in and of itself.

Check out both books - you might enjoy...