“Common Disaster”?!: Three Works Revealing the Importance of Inuit Presence and Inuit Oral History [On the Writings about the Man in Charge / the Men Aboard / the Unceasing Searching for the Erebus and Terror]

I had a long list of names that I kept in my back pocket,but I’ve cut it down to one and your name’s at the topWon’t you share a common disaster?Share with me a common disasterA common disaster

—Cowboy Junkies (1996), “A Common Disaster” (Timmins)

We Canadians, it seems, cannot get enough of tales of disaster. Or is it that everybody loves a disaster story—provided one’s body is not its subject? Inexplicably, and until recently, however, one man (John Franklin), one nation (Great Britain), one gender (male), and one oversimplified narrative composed Canada’s most significant common disaster. The fact that this disaster involved and affected the Inuit—as innocent, often life-saving, bystanders and/or actors—is as important to note as the story of the Erebus and the Terror, but Inuit presence and realities have largely been ignored, while countless others who were lost from/went looking for/wrote about/built performances around the Erebus and Terror and their commander, John Franklin, all took centre stage. That name “Franklin” has now come to signify more than it ought, through the telescoping of loss and hubris.

This strange synecdoche is only a portion of what the three authors reviewed here, among many who have written on the subject since the early 1990s, have attempted to write against. Still, just one name sticks to the top of that list of songs/plays/books/other detritus of early nineteenth-century Arctic exploration: Franklin’s, the name that should be the most forgettable, given that what is known of the Northwest Passage is almost more in spite of this Britisher than because of him. After all, he was a man who managed, as Adriana Craciun notes, to lose on “his first Arctic command in 1819 … most of his men to murder, cannibalism, and starvation. But thanks to a unique publishing arrangement negotiated by the Admiralty and the prestigious bookseller John Murray, Franklin emerged from the scandal as both popular author and respected explorer” (82). In 1845, Sir John Franklin, that same explorer-author who’d done so poorly by his men but had become so celebrated through that 1819 misadventure, led those of the Erebus and Terror into Inuit territory. At some point not long after, he and the majority of his crew disappeared forever, only reappearing as corpses or bones (Thirty Years [1859?], v–vi).

A trinity of explorations, in book form, of what has perhaps become Canada’s most expensive shared catastrophe form the subject of this review. Arguably, the money, time, and energy used to try and solve the Franklin mystery—which has resulted in location of, first, in 2014, the Erebus, and, in 2016, the Terror—seems disproportionate to the happenstance. Nevertheless, the shared events and actors of this lost Arctic expedition continue to capture a significant amount of Canadian, British, and American collective imagination. Emblematic of that interest are the three books discussed here. In them, what became a tale of loss and the lost, search and the searcher, writing and authorship have combined to place Inuit oral history, land, and presence into the story of what happened in 1845. Revealed, first and foremost, is the importance of Inuit oral history in the Erebus and Terror saga. Traced, as well, in Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Craciun), Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition (Davis...