The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage (review)

Andrew Lambert's book on Sir John Franklin and the quest for the North West Passage was published by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom as Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation (2009) and appears in the United States from Yale University Press as The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage. British readers recognize Franklin as a member of the pantheon of national heroes, while even American audiences who might not know of his doomed Arctic discovery mission are certainly familiar with the quest for the North West Passage. Yet if titles of books set up and serve the arguments within their covers, the renaming of the book points to an indistinct focus, intention, and audience that haunts it. Is it a biography that rescues Franklin's reputation from twentieth-century revisionists? The final word on the mystery of Franklin's disappearance? The history of seaborne research on geomagnetics? An account of the network of men whose close affiliations and competition in public and private reveal new links between emerging science, world politics, and global exploration in nineteenth-century culture—a Victorian version of Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men (2002) played out in the Admiralty, Fitzrovia, and frozen wastes?

Frankly, it is difficult to say, and the argument's indistinct focus likely will make it a frustrating read for its natural audiences, including Arctic enthusiasts; readers interested in connections between science, politics, and culture; and scholars interested in the intersection of material and intellectual history. Yet the extensively researched Gates of Hell is nonetheless valuable for its many provocative connections between Franklin, his circle, the scientific quest for data on magnetism, British imperial aspirations, and Arctic voyages.

Certainly Franklin appears ripe for reassessment: celebrated in the nineteenth century for his early exploratory successes and his popular accounts of his travels, his unexplained disappearance in the Arctic is now understood as the harbinger of a doomed imperialism. Lambert writes against this view, sketching a forceful, ambitious Franklin who, diverted from naval promotions due to peace with France, parlayed his considerable scientific interests and navigational skills into a remarkable career of colonial administration and national celebrity. The account documents Franklin's ample acquaintance with both the practice and theory of navigation, as well as the deep ties his celebrity allowed him to forge with the scientific community in London.

Chapters 5 and 6 add a detailed account of Franklin's service as lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, documenting the challenges the colony faced in the years before his recall, as well as Hobart's importance to James Clark Ross's Antarctic voyage between 1839 and 1840. In their juxtaposition to an account of Franklin's service in the Mediterranean and his Admiralty lobbying, the chapters illustrate the centrality of the Royal Navy to empire not only in active patrol of the oceans, but in colonial administration. Yet the biographical argument about Franklin's competence and sincerity suffers from the source of the evidence being Franklin himself. While it is true that Franklin's recall from Hobart was based on testimony by a muckraking colonial secretary he had dismissed, it does not necessarily follow that the civilizing mission of education and botanical gardens set out by Franklin and his wife Jane and detailed by Lambert was unsuccessful only due to a boorish settler and convict population; nor can we be certain that when recalled from the post, "he cared about these people, even those who had done their best to make his work difficult" (139). Those who believe Franklin to have been steadfast, upright, and ambitious yet humble throughout his career and thus wronged by history will be convinced by this portrait, but skeptics will not.

What emerges clearly in Lambert's picture is Franklin's connection to the decision makers in the...