Correspondence Between Sir John Franklin And Charles Babbage

Author : Andrew D. Lambert
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300154860
Total Pages : 449 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Download or read book The Gates of Hell written by Andrew D. Lambert and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our foremost naval historians, the compelling story of the doomed Arctic voyage of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, commanded by Captain Sir John Franklin. Andrew Lambert, a leading authority on naval history, reexamines the life of Sir John Franklin and his final, doomed Arctic voyage. Franklin was a man of his time, fascinated, even obsessed with, the need to explore the world; he had already mapped nearly two-thirds of the northern coastline of North America when he undertook his third Arctic voyage in 1845, at the age of fifty-nine. His two ships were fitted with the latest equipment; steam engines enabled them to navigate the pack ice, and he and his crew had a three-year supply of preserved and tinned food and more than one thousand books. Despite these preparations, the voyage ended in catastrophe: the ships became imprisoned in the ice, and the men were wracked by disease and ultimately wiped out by hypothermia, scurvy, and cannibalism. Franklin's mission was ostensibly to find the elusive North West Passage, a viable sea route between Europe and Asia reputed to lie north of the American continent. Lambert shows for the first time that there were other scientific goals for the voyage and that the disaster can only be understood by reconsidering the original objectives of the mission. Franklin, commonly dismissed as a bumbling fool, emerges as a more important and impressive figure, in fact, a hero of navigational science.