henryclervals:

So you’ve finished ‘The Terror’

Book recommendations to fill the hole left by AMC and Dan Simmon’s account of the Franklin Expedition

‘The Company’ – Arabella Edge

“I, Jeronimus, am a man of phials, a measurer of powders on bronze scales, a potion brewer, an opium and arsenic merchant. The primped and perfumed Amsterdam burghers came to me in droves requiring cures for fevers, love balms, the miscarriage of a bastard child, and, of course, poisons. Ah, poisons.”

So speaks Jeronimus Cornelisz, a thirty-year-old apothecary who transforms before our eyes into a murderous madman.

The Company is a novel based on the 1629 voyage of the Dutch East India Company flagship Batavia, bound for the colonies with a cargo of untold riches. Among the passengers is Cornelisz, a man ousted from polite society by sordid rumors of necromancy. Corrupt to the very marrow of his soul, Cornelisz considers himself God’s equal, the rightful heir to gold, silver – even another man’s wife. So twisted is he by lust and greed that he incites a mutiny, running the ship aground on a reef.

All is lost – the ship is wrecked, its passengers dying, the treasure trashed at the bottom of the sea. “The apothecary will heal us,” the survivors pray, believing themselves lucky to be alive. In the name of benevolence, Cornelisz seizes command of their island refuge. The brave castaways stir with hope – until the killing begins. For forty frenzied days, Cornelisz decides who shall live and who shall die, leaving his victims with just one wish – that they had gone down with the ship.

Soaked with the blood of the innocent and the wicked, The Company plunges, with the weight of history, deep into the heart of darkness.

 ‘Fields of Ice’ – Arabella Edge

Fields of Ice tells the dramatic story of Franklin’s third and final expedition to the North-West Passage through the eyes of the ship’s cook, Canot. The Erebus and the Terror set sail from Greenhithe on 19 May 1845. On board were Sir John Franklin, a crew of a hundred and twenty-nine men, and three years’ provisions. Franklin’s plan was to find the North-West Passage, a northern sea route to Asia that had eluded European explorers for hundreds of years. He was never heard from again.

When Franklin failed to report back, his wife started a major campaign to try to find her missing husband. Alongside Sir John Franklin’s journey, Fields of Ice tells the story of Jane, Lady Franklin, a strong, redoubtable woman, who spent years trying to raise money and support to send out expeditions to find her husband and his men

 ‘In The Heart of the Sea’ – Nathaniel Philbrick

Tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever - an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick.

“With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed - at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow…”

In the Heart of the Sea brings to new life the incredible story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex - an event as mythic in its own century as the Titanic disaster in ours, and the inspiration for the climax of Moby-Dick. In a harrowing page-turner, Nathaniel Philbrick restores this epic story to its rightful place in American history.

In 1820, the 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton bull sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea under horrendous conditions, the survivors clung to life as one by one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.

In the Heart of the Sea tells perhaps the greatest sea story ever. Philbrick interweaves his account of this extraordinary ordeal of ordinary men with a wealth of whale lore and with a brilliantly detailed portrait of the lost, unique community of Nantucket whalers. Impeccably researched and beautifully told, the book delivers the ultimate portrait of man against nature, drawing on a remarkable range of archival and modern sources, including a long-lost account by the ship’s cabin boy.

At once a literary companion and a page-turner that speaks to the same issues of class, race, and man’s relationship to nature that permeate the works of Melville, In the Heart of the Sea will endure as a vital work of American history.

 

‘Dead Sea’ – Tim Curran

A space between spaces. When the Mara Corday, an aged freighter, enters the Graveyard of the Atlantic, nightmares become real. The crew finds themselves trapped in a realm where time doesn’t exist and unimaginable horrors dwell.

Lost in a becalmed sea, in a netherworld where evil manifests itself in hideous forms, the survivors of the Mara Corday have an eternity to find a way out - if they aren’t killed first by the creatures stalking them.

 ‘The God of Spring’ – Arabella  Edge

“Leave the fine stallions, converging battle troops, and court commissions to the Vernets and their honored friends. Here was his space. Scorched, implacable skies, clouds raining dust. An ocean so tumultuous and vast it would hurt your eyes to stare at it for long. Men huddled on an improbable tempest-tossed raft. Mere planks lashed by rotting cords. Perhaps he had chanced on a subject for the king’s Salon at last.”

Set in Paris in 1818, during the upheavals of the French Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration, “The God of Spring” tells the story of painter Theodore Gericault.

Having won a gold medal at the prestigious Salon for his painting “Charging Chasseur” at the tender age of twenty-one, Gericault is now, seven years later, searching for the subject of his next masterpiece. But he is lovesick, hopelessly addicted to his benefactor-uncle’s young wife, Alexandrine, six years his senior. Every moment without her is an eternity.

At the house of his worldly neighbor he hears the story of the shipwreck of the French frigate “Medusa” off the shores of the West African coast and the abandonment of one hundred fifty souls on an unseaworthy, makeshift raft. The catastrophe has fascinated and horrified the French public, with its tales of betrayal, madness, murder, and cannibalism. “Against all odds,” Gericault is told, “Henri Savigny, the frigate’s surgeon, evidently returned to Paris alive.”

When Gericault finds Savigny and his mate, he has discovered a pair of unlikely muses who hold the key to the rendering of the painter’s next great work. If only he can maintain his sanity.

“The God of Spring” is the story of grand passions. In prose that vividly evokes its setting, Arabella Edge has brought to life the creation of an epic painting.

‘Dark Matter’ – Michelle Paver

January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely, and desperate to change his life, so when he’s offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it.

Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year, Gruhuken, but the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice: stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return–when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible.

Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark… (feat. explicitly gay main character)