It shows an old ship’s captain with a map of the arctic laid out on his lap, and his daughter leaning against his knee, as he looks out into the distance – there’s a real sense of desolation to it. John Everett Millais’s 1874 painting The North-West Passage encapsulates this later national sentiment about the expedition. People wanted to believe that these men had sacrificed their lives for a worthy cause, something that reflected well on their country.

For Coleman, this type of learning has closed minds to the achievements of both Franklin and the Royal Navy in the Arctic.As more evidence emerged, the next stage was national mourning. With images from his expeditions, including detailed maps and archaeological finds, No Earthly Pole certainly achieves its goal to speak out in opposition to those who have learned their history from textbooks, written by scholars who were in turn tutored by yet more books rather than first-hand experience of adversity. Coleman’s hypotheses might raise a few eyebrows in academic circles – exactly as they are designed to do. The second part of the book is an examination of the 'misinformation that carried with it the disparagement and tarnishing of a great enterprise and the sullying of the memory of those who died whilst trying to survive it'. Coleman may be a hardened adventurer in the vein of his hero Franklin, but he is no match for an Arctic summer storm nor immune to starvation. There are mishaps and misadventures and the consequences of poor planning and bad judgement. In it he chronicles the sheer scale of that task in the world’s most extreme climate. The first part of this 350-page hardcover book is dedicated to his explorations of the Canadian Arctic in search of surviving evidence from the 1845 expedition. 'Their misfortune was nothing more or less than the unpredictable conditions of environmental adversity.Ī Royal Navy man himself, Coleman knows about environmental adversity. 'That they did not succeed was not the fault of poor leadership, incompetence, foolhardiness, vanity or impracticality,' he says.

The author is scathing of these 'closed-minded' philosophies, which he says come at the cost of both Franklin and the Royal Navy’s reputation. In Coleman’s opinion, some of the theories surrounding this ill-fated expedition have been shaped by political bias – taken over by academics and politicians both for questions of Canadian sovereignty and academic advancement. But to this day the fate of Franklin himself remains unknown. Rescue missions turned up tantalising clues: an abandoned sled, personal effects, letters from the crew, and two skeletons. Many theories have been put forward for their demise. None of the men were ever seen by westerners alive again. It was an obsession that chipped away at European understanding of North America’s extremities, sometimes at great cost to both vessels and lives.Īnd although the Franklin expedition was the best-equipped assault on the Passage launched at that time, its two vessels disappeared after sailing north from Baffin Bay. Theirs was a quest that had consumed some of Europe’s most accomplished mariners for almost four centuries. So much has been written about the ill-fated journey Franklin and his crews took to plot the North-West Passage that it has seeped into the popular consciousness. Through recounting his own forays into the world’s bitter north, he seeks to highlight the endeavour, determination, labours and pains of men to benefit the rest of humanity by the establishment of a water passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In No Earthly Pole, Coleman is 'determined to set the record straight' as he sees it. Coleman has taken part in four expeditions to the Arctic to uncover the fate of the 1845 expedition led by Captain Sir John Franklin that took the lives of 129 men from HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

Hms erebus book