Here be monsters
Dan Simmons's novel "The Terror" (Little, Brown, $25.99) is nearly 800 pages long, a feature not likely to endear it to the professional reader. Its Arctic setting, too, might be considered a handicap, given that it came into the house during the preternaturally cold spell of some weeks ago. But having survived both its length and location, I am here to tell you that this tale of a doomed expedition is the best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years. Based in real events and historical figures, it extrapolates from them to provide a haunting, precisely imagined fictional solution to one of history's most disquieting mysteries.
On May 19, 1845, two ships of the British Royal Navy, Erebus and Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin, set off for the Arctic Circle with orders to force a way through the Northwest Passage. After being sighted by whalers off Baffin Island , in the Canadian Arctic, the ships and their crews were never seen again by Europeans. Subsequent search missions and explorations found a few bodies, bones, and artifacts from the expedition on King William Island, some 550 miles by sea to the southwest. Also found, years later, were a couple of scrawled messages reporting that the ships had been ice-bound in the same place for over a year and a half and that the crew had finally abandoned them in search of rescue. Moreover, Eskimos told of the death by starvation -- and evidence of cannibalism -- of a group of Europeans, clearly members of this doomed voyage. These are the known facts (at least two first-rate websites are most informative on them: ric.edu/rpotter/SJFranklin.html and pbs.org/wgbh/nova/arctic/).
The Sir John Franklin of these pages is precisely the sort of man you would not want in command of a perilous venture. Wealthy, pampered, and rigid, he is dismissive of unwelcome facts, even that the tinned food is putrefying and otherwise tainted. He is bored by details, including vital ones concerning ice conditions. He will not hear advice that contradicts his druthers and is convinced of God's involvement in his life. To him, it is a given that the mission will be accomplished.
In fact, the whole expedition, the idea behind it and its implementation, is as heedless of reality as its commander. It has been equipped according to some fantasy of British propriety. No dogs have been brought for sledging over land and ice -- this is a maritime operation; clothing, layers and layers of woolens, is heavy and impossible to keep dry; shotguns have been provided for hunting -- as if the men were on some country-house outing; no one knows how to hunt or trap or construct shelter suitable to the Arctic. The crews spend three unwholesome winters on their swampy, stinking, rat-infested ships.
In pushing events forward into fiction, Simmons continues with historical verisimilitude and abundant, fascinating material detail, while opening the thoughts of his characters to the reader by rendering the story from numerous points of view. He has also added a dimension of the supernatural, most notably in the horrific shape of a creature who stalks the men of the expedition, wreaking murder and mayhem. I initially balked at this; but, as it happens, the existence of this thing is a brilliantly executed fictional conceit. A central character of the book, Captain Crozier of the Terror, a disappointed, alcoholic misanthrope, reads from "The Leviathan" in place of the Bible at a Sunday service for the combined ships' crews. The chosen passage is on the tendency of men to ascribe spirits to places, things, qualities, and emotions, thereby conjuring "a whole kingdome of Fayries, and Bugbears." These of course are, according to the nominalist Hobbes, names only, with no referent in reality.
But the fact is, the men of Terror and Erebus are stranded in a vastly alien realm, quite different from the rationalist, mechanistic world they have come from. They are now part of an icescape inhabited and apprehended by a people, the Inuit, whose cosmology does not distinguish between the natural and spiritual worlds in the European fashion. Under the circumstances, Hobbes's observations on the proliferation of spirits is open to an opposite, pretty scary interpretation. Indeed, what begins to seem unreal and lacking true referent are the names given so assiduously by the Europeans to the Arctic regions they "discover." They are names only, conjured out of a dream of possession, the expedition's version of knowable reality -- one that, in the end, has no relevance to what truly exists. And that is? I will say no more, except that even without this frightful creature, the book has as much purely human drama, excitement, and skul duggery as anyone in his rational, mechanistic mind could possibly want.
At the risk of seeming to trivialize the Library of America, I will say that its most recently published volume makes a splendid companion to "The Terror." "Capt. John Smith: Writings With Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America" ($45) throbs with the spirit of exultant exploration, resourcefulness, and endurance. But, more to the point, it is replete with disasters and disappearances, treachery and bloody revenge -- and the giving of names. It was Smith who gave us, among other innovations, the "River Charles" and "New England" itself -- though, as he points out with characteristic indignation, "malicious mindes amongst Sailers and others, drowned that name with the echo of Nusconcus, Canaday, and Penaquid; till at my humble sute, our most gracious King Charles, then Prince of Wales, was pleased to confirme it by that title, and did change the barbarous names of their principall Harbours and habitations for such English, that posterity may say, King Charles was their Godfather." About two-thirds of the book consists of Smith's writings from 1608 to 1631, complete with colored plates of his Roanoke drawings. The rest of the volume is made up of shorter pieces by 14 of Smith's contemporaries as well as further illustrations. James Horn has supplied an excellent chronology and notes.
Smith writes in an untrammeled 17th-century style that strikes a righteous note in insisting on the Christian mandate to convert and subject America's indigenous people. But, in its exuberance, it also wonderfully conveys the fantastic plenitude and opportunity of the New World, especially of New England. Disappointed with Virginia, whose settlers "doated on their Tobacco, on whose fumish foundation, there's small stability," Smith pinned his hopes on this region, so rich not only in cod, but countless other good things, among them "Clamps" and "Moos, a beast bigger than a Stag."
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
