The Terror Read Online Free PDF Page A

through his undershirt and still-fixed collar.
    “Admiral Sir Thomas Martin’s wife sent us a delightful card today and a wonderful bouquet of flowers. She’s the last to be heard from, but I must say the roses are beautiful in the foyer. Did you see them? Did you have much time to chat with Admiral Martin at the reception? Of course, he is not that important, is he? Even as Controller of the Navy? Certainly not as distinguished as the First Lord or First Commissioners, much less your Arctic Council friends.”
    Captain Sir John Franklin had many friends; everyone liked Captain Sir John Franklin. But no one respected him. For decades, Franklin acknowledged the former fact and avoided the latter, but he now knew it to be true. Everyone liked him. No one respected him.
    Not after Van Diemen’s Land. Not after the Tasmanian prison and the botch he had made of that.
    Eleanor, his first wife, had been dying when he left her to go on his second major expedition.
    He knew she was dying. She knew she was dying. Her consumption — and the knowledge she would die from it long before her husband would die in battle or on expedition — had been with them like a third party at their wedding ceremony. In the twenty-two months of their marriage, she had given him a daughter, his only child, young Eleanor.
    A small, frail woman in body — but almost frightening in spirit and energy — his first wife had told him to go on his second expedition to find the North-West Passage, this trip by land and sea to follow the North American coastline, even while she was coughing up blood and knowing that the end was near. She said that it would be better for her if he were elsewhere. He believed her. Or at least he believed that it would be better for himself.
    A deeply religious man, John Franklin had prayed that Eleanor would die before his departure date. She hadn’t. He left on February 16, 1825, wrote his darling many letters while in transit to Great Slave Lake, posted them in New York City and Albany, and learned of her passing on April 24, at the British Naval station at Penetanguishene. She had died shortly after his ship left England.
    When he returned from this expedition in 1827, Eleanor’s friend Jane Griffin was waiting for him.
    The Admiralty reception had been less than a week ago — no, just precisely a week ago, before this confounded influenza. Captain Sir John Franklin and all his officers and mates from
Erebus
and
Terror
had attended, of course. So had the civilians on the expedition —
Erebus
’s ice master, James Reid, and
Terror
’s ice master, Thomas Blanky, along with the paymasters, surgeons, and pursers.
    Sir John had looked dashing in his new blue swallow-tailed coat, blue gold-striped trousers, gold-fringed epaulettes, ceremonial sword, and Nelson-era cocked hat. The commander of his flagship
Erebus,
James Fitzjames, often called the handsomest man in the Royal Navy, looked as striking and humble as the war hero he was. Fitzjames had charmed everyone that night. Francis Crozier, as always, had looked stiff, awkward, melancholic, and slightly inebriated.
    But Jane was wrong — the members of the “Arctic Council” were not Sir John’s friends. The Arctic Council, in reality, did not exist. It was an honorary society rather than a real institution, but it was also the most select Old Boys club in all of England.
    They’d mingled at the reception, Franklin, his top officers, and the tall, gaunt, grey members of the legendary Arctic Council.
    To gain membership to the Council, all one had to do was command an expedition to the farthest arctic north… and survive.
    Viscount Melville — the first notable in the long receiving line that had left Franklin uncharacteristically sweating and tongue-tied — was First Lord of the Admiralty and the sponsor of their sponsor, Sir John Barrow. But Melville was not an old arctic hand.
    The true Arctic Council legends — most in their seventies — were, to the nervous