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Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony
David Woodman's classic reconstruction of the mysterious events surrounding the tragic Franklin expedition has taken on new importance in light of the recent discovery of the HMS Erebus wreck, the ship Sir John Franklin sailed on during his doomed 1845 quest to find the Northwest Passage to Asia. First published in 1991, Unravelling the Franklin Mystery boldly challenged standard interpretations and offered a new and compelling alternative. Among the many who have tried to discover the truth behind the Franklin disaster, Woodman was the first to recognize the profound importance of Inuit oral testimony and to analyze it in depth. From his investigations, Woodman concluded that the Inuit likely visited Franklin's ships while the crew was still on board and that there were some Inuit who actually saw the sinking of one of the ships. Much of the Inuit testimony presented here had never before been published, and it provided Woodman with the pivotal clue in his reconstruction of the puzzle of the Franklin disaster.
Unravelling the Franklin Mystery is a compelling and impressive inquiry into a part of Canadian history that for one hundred and seventy years left many questions unanswered.
Unravelling the Franklin Mystery is a compelling and impressive inquiry into a part of Canadian history that for one hundred and seventy years left many questions unanswered.
408 pages, Hardcover
First published July 25, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 24, 2018
a 4.5
more here: http://www.nonfictionrealstuff.com/20...
When I think of all of the time that Mr. Woodman put into his research, let alone writing it up here in a coherent fashion, I'm completely awestruck. It took ten years for this man to research his book and another five to put it all together, and what emerges are a number of accounts offered by a number of different witnesses, painstakingly and thoroughly examined by the author.
This is the second edition of this book, originally finished in 1988 and published in 1991. In the preface to this second edition (2015), the author notes that it "could not have come at a more appropriate time," citing the 2014 discovery of Franklin's HMS Erebus, a find that has "widely been seen as validation of oral history," in "the area uniformly indicated by Inuit testimony." Woodman's book not only, as the back-cover blurb says, stands as a challenge to "standard interpretations and offered a new and compelling alternative" but as he states in the preface, questions "the prevalent dismissal of non-documentary sources." His assumption throughout his research was that "all Inuit stories concerning white men should have a discoverable factual basis," even though many historians had often completely ignored these oral traditions
"because of the inherent difficulties of translation and analysis. When historians did consult the oral record, they often selectively used tales that supported their own preconceptions or the physical evidence, while ignoring the other tales as impossibly vague or unreliable."
It is important to realize that the author doesn't claim to have definitive answers here, since as he says, the Franklin mystery is a "puzzle without the prospect of complete solution," but he does point out in the preface that the 2014 discovery of the Erebus "validates the long-known Inuit traditions" that he explores so thoroughly in this book. His tremendous research also allowed him to
"discover a scenario which allowed use of all of the native recollections, solved some troubling discrepancies in the physical evidence, and led to some significant new conclusions as to the fate of the beleaguered sailors."
While I'm just a very casual armchair explorer, Unravelling the Franklin Mysteryi s probably going to become known as one of the most significant works about the expedition, not just for the author's theories but mainly because of its focus on illuminating the importance of Inuit oral tradition. At the same time, it can be a difficult and most challenging book to read, since it often gets a bit confusing with threads of one story that are picked up in later chapters as he tries to connect dots between accounts, often causing me to have to go back and reread what was said earlier. The other thing I wasn't in love with were the maps in this book. I had several tablet windows open off and on while I read, each with a map so that I could follow the known progress of the expedition, the routes of previous polar expeditions, more specific maps of both coasts of King William Island and then, of course, the western side of the Adelaide Peninsula where the author posited that one of the ships had finally come to rest. Having said all that, I was immediately engrossed and I probably can't even look at another book about the Franklin Expedition for a while, because this one is so good.
Very highly recommended to anyone even remotely interested in the subject.
more here: http://www.nonfictionrealstuff.com/20...
When I think of all of the time that Mr. Woodman put into his research, let alone writing it up here in a coherent fashion, I'm completely awestruck. It took ten years for this man to research his book and another five to put it all together, and what emerges are a number of accounts offered by a number of different witnesses, painstakingly and thoroughly examined by the author.
This is the second edition of this book, originally finished in 1988 and published in 1991. In the preface to this second edition (2015), the author notes that it "could not have come at a more appropriate time," citing the 2014 discovery of Franklin's HMS Erebus, a find that has "widely been seen as validation of oral history," in "the area uniformly indicated by Inuit testimony." Woodman's book not only, as the back-cover blurb says, stands as a challenge to "standard interpretations and offered a new and compelling alternative" but as he states in the preface, questions "the prevalent dismissal of non-documentary sources." His assumption throughout his research was that "all Inuit stories concerning white men should have a discoverable factual basis," even though many historians had often completely ignored these oral traditions
"because of the inherent difficulties of translation and analysis. When historians did consult the oral record, they often selectively used tales that supported their own preconceptions or the physical evidence, while ignoring the other tales as impossibly vague or unreliable."
It is important to realize that the author doesn't claim to have definitive answers here, since as he says, the Franklin mystery is a "puzzle without the prospect of complete solution," but he does point out in the preface that the 2014 discovery of the Erebus "validates the long-known Inuit traditions" that he explores so thoroughly in this book. His tremendous research also allowed him to
"discover a scenario which allowed use of all of the native recollections, solved some troubling discrepancies in the physical evidence, and led to some significant new conclusions as to the fate of the beleaguered sailors."
While I'm just a very casual armchair explorer, Unravelling the Franklin Mysteryi s probably going to become known as one of the most significant works about the expedition, not just for the author's theories but mainly because of its focus on illuminating the importance of Inuit oral tradition. At the same time, it can be a difficult and most challenging book to read, since it often gets a bit confusing with threads of one story that are picked up in later chapters as he tries to connect dots between accounts, often causing me to have to go back and reread what was said earlier. The other thing I wasn't in love with were the maps in this book. I had several tablet windows open off and on while I read, each with a map so that I could follow the known progress of the expedition, the routes of previous polar expeditions, more specific maps of both coasts of King William Island and then, of course, the western side of the Adelaide Peninsula where the author posited that one of the ships had finally come to rest. Having said all that, I was immediately engrossed and I probably can't even look at another book about the Franklin Expedition for a while, because this one is so good.
Very highly recommended to anyone even remotely interested in the subject.
June 26, 2011
The traditional description of the Franklin Expedition takes as its last 'waypoint' the Famous 'Victory Point' note left by Crozier and Fitzjames. From this most analyts conclude that the Expedition trudged south in a vain attempt to find help, with the men simply dying along the way until there was nobody left.
In "Unravelling the Franklin Mystery", David Woodman takes the reader through the large and highly descriptive body of evidence drawn from Inuit who encountered Franklin Expedition members on King William Island and elsewhere. No one who reads this can have any doubt that the 'traditional description' cannot possibly be right. Men of the Franklin Expedition must have lived for several years beyond 1848 and made successive, determined attempts to reach safety.
As far as it is possible to do so David Woodman reconstructs at least episodes from this tragic story, if not the whole story. He treats the evidence extremely cautiously and lets the reader make up his or her own mind in each case. While the whole story is never revealed - can it ever be? - what Woodman has done is put an extremely powerful body of evidence into the hands of the general reader with great insight. Required reading.
In "Unravelling the Franklin Mystery", David Woodman takes the reader through the large and highly descriptive body of evidence drawn from Inuit who encountered Franklin Expedition members on King William Island and elsewhere. No one who reads this can have any doubt that the 'traditional description' cannot possibly be right. Men of the Franklin Expedition must have lived for several years beyond 1848 and made successive, determined attempts to reach safety.
As far as it is possible to do so David Woodman reconstructs at least episodes from this tragic story, if not the whole story. He treats the evidence extremely cautiously and lets the reader make up his or her own mind in each case. While the whole story is never revealed - can it ever be? - what Woodman has done is put an extremely powerful body of evidence into the hands of the general reader with great insight. Required reading.
August 1, 2023
A remarkable piece of armchair detective work which conclusively undermines the traditional they-all-walked away-from-the-ships-together-until-they-dropped-down-dead view of the fate of the Franklin expedition. Woodman presents the reader with a huge body of Inuit testimony (most of it dismissed or underrated for 150 years) and tentatively draws a much more complex picture of the fates of the Erebus and Terror and their crews. Gratifyingly, the discoveries of the wrecks in 2014 and 2016 seem to further vindicate much of this testimony and Woodman has stated that he attributes any contradictions (most notably the location of the Terror, which is still pretty close) to flaws in his analysis rather than in the testimony itself (e.g. over here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/...).
I'd seen fragments of the Inuit testimony referred to in various articles about the Franklin expedition and bought this book mainly because I was keen to read it all verbatim, but I got much more out of it than I expected. Direct interviews with indigenous nineteenth-centiry populations regarding their perceptions of and relationships with representatives of colonising powers (the Franklin expedition being first and foremost a colonialist enterprise) are rare, and it was refreshing to hear largely dispassionate analyses and interpretations of the behaviours and technologies of white Europeans from the Inuit perspective.
Woodman also looks at the demographics and interelations within Inuit society at the time, not only in terms of how they impacted on the transmission of information in the seventy-odd years following the ships' disappearances but also in terms of how they may have themselves been impacted by the presence of the expedition, such as the possibility that a joint hunt between the Franklin survivors and the local population may have kick-started several years of famine and depopulation. This isn't a big part of the book, but again it decentralises the fate of the Europeans in the Frankin narrative and rather puts paid to the complaints of generations of white historians that the Inuit didn't seem to go out of their way to rescue expedition survivors - they could presumably have put their communities in danger if starvation by doing so.
I'd seen fragments of the Inuit testimony referred to in various articles about the Franklin expedition and bought this book mainly because I was keen to read it all verbatim, but I got much more out of it than I expected. Direct interviews with indigenous nineteenth-centiry populations regarding their perceptions of and relationships with representatives of colonising powers (the Franklin expedition being first and foremost a colonialist enterprise) are rare, and it was refreshing to hear largely dispassionate analyses and interpretations of the behaviours and technologies of white Europeans from the Inuit perspective.
Woodman also looks at the demographics and interelations within Inuit society at the time, not only in terms of how they impacted on the transmission of information in the seventy-odd years following the ships' disappearances but also in terms of how they may have themselves been impacted by the presence of the expedition, such as the possibility that a joint hunt between the Franklin survivors and the local population may have kick-started several years of famine and depopulation. This isn't a big part of the book, but again it decentralises the fate of the Europeans in the Frankin narrative and rather puts paid to the complaints of generations of white historians that the Inuit didn't seem to go out of their way to rescue expedition survivors - they could presumably have put their communities in danger if starvation by doing so.
December 21, 2017
Sir john Franklin and his expedition to discover the Northwest Passage, disappeared in the Canadian Arctic. His two ships, Erebus and Terror, were found in 2014 and 2016, pretty much where Inuit oral testimony indicated.
Woodman takes us through the testimony of these witnesses to try and unravel the fate of the expedition's people. We know something of it as the expedition did leave some records but most of the logbooks etc (and the British Navy was fanatic about keeping records) have been lost and any artifacts have long since disappeared.
The book is dedicated "To Aglooka, whoever he was" Aglooka figures large in some of the Inuit testimony but we don't know which member of the expedition he was.
To get the most out of this book (imagine a court record) keep a notebook and pen handy to record who met who when and where, and get a decent map of the area, especially King William Island and the immediate surroundings. Along the way we get some hints as to the environment Franklin and his men found themselves in.
I only gave it three stars because I found the maps confusing and inadequate to easily follow the comings, goings and testimonies of the oral history.
Nonetheless, it was fascinating and I'm looking forward to hearing more as the Erebus and Terror may begin to yield some of their secrets.
Woodman takes us through the testimony of these witnesses to try and unravel the fate of the expedition's people. We know something of it as the expedition did leave some records but most of the logbooks etc (and the British Navy was fanatic about keeping records) have been lost and any artifacts have long since disappeared.
The book is dedicated "To Aglooka, whoever he was" Aglooka figures large in some of the Inuit testimony but we don't know which member of the expedition he was.
To get the most out of this book (imagine a court record) keep a notebook and pen handy to record who met who when and where, and get a decent map of the area, especially King William Island and the immediate surroundings. Along the way we get some hints as to the environment Franklin and his men found themselves in.
I only gave it three stars because I found the maps confusing and inadequate to easily follow the comings, goings and testimonies of the oral history.
Nonetheless, it was fascinating and I'm looking forward to hearing more as the Erebus and Terror may begin to yield some of their secrets.
December 5, 2024
Incredible research went into this book such that, 32 years after its publication, it remains the gold standard for bringing together, in one place, the various Inuit "traditions" associated with the 1845 Franklin Expedition. This is not an easy read because it is so difficult to tease apart all the stories and relate them to the Victory Point Record and what we know from the archaeological record. The author doesn't go easy on the reader - this is an academic book and all available stones were uncovered. To my mind, the story that Inuit visited Erebus before it sank off the Adelaide Peninsula is strongest, given we found the ship in 2014 pretty much where the Inuit said we would.
I would add that this book is vital reading for those who wish to read the other explorers who came in search of Franklin and interviewed Inuit extensively, particularly Hall and Schwatka. Woodman does an excellent job to correct these valuable accounts, in the hindsight of 140 years after their accounts. This book helps the modern reader to not be led astray by these still-valuble contemporary volumes.
I would add that this book is vital reading for those who wish to read the other explorers who came in search of Franklin and interviewed Inuit extensively, particularly Hall and Schwatka. Woodman does an excellent job to correct these valuable accounts, in the hindsight of 140 years after their accounts. This book helps the modern reader to not be led astray by these still-valuble contemporary volumes.
December 20, 2023
this is definitely not a book for beginners (like me lol) but i'm kind of in love with woodman's interpretation of franklin research, especially his consideration of the inuit. i'd love to know how recent discoveries have informed his thoughts this tbh. and the dedication to aglooka at the start made me tear up a little lol. this interpretation seeks to see people in a positive light, which i love (and also makes the shade towards john ross rlly funny). in conclusion, i was confused but i still enjoyed myself ! :)
December 16, 2019
An excellent book full of information and somewhat of an hypothesis as to some of the activity of the men after Franklin’s death. I had a few issues with it that kept it from being a five star book.
1) there is too much information here to be presented in paragraph format. If the desire is to reveal evidence or the best evidence of what was happening at a certain place at a certain time, then provide it in a chart format with a specific map. I was flipping back and forth to find a relevant map many many many times. I was tempted to make my own notes and summarize the info myself. Each chart could have a column where that story is evaluated. There could be competing stories in the chart with each row a different story. One story could show up in multiple charts.
The paragraphs could be used to show the overall stories if a given row is chosen as most likely.
For example, one chart could be for Terror Bay winter 1849 to 1850.
2) there is a very good section that presents evidence for trusting Inuit testimony. Then there is a section that goes in to the challenges such as lack of good interpreters in the case of the Franklin stories. But then throughout the book, if something about the testimony weakens it or calls it into question, that is just brushed off. If the interpretation is overall weak, why are we trusting any of these particular stories? Again I think each story in the charts I spoke of above, should have a column that evaluates the interpretation or other factors for that particular story. That way it is more clear what criteria we are using to trust a story or not.
1) there is too much information here to be presented in paragraph format. If the desire is to reveal evidence or the best evidence of what was happening at a certain place at a certain time, then provide it in a chart format with a specific map. I was flipping back and forth to find a relevant map many many many times. I was tempted to make my own notes and summarize the info myself. Each chart could have a column where that story is evaluated. There could be competing stories in the chart with each row a different story. One story could show up in multiple charts.
The paragraphs could be used to show the overall stories if a given row is chosen as most likely.
For example, one chart could be for Terror Bay winter 1849 to 1850.
2) there is a very good section that presents evidence for trusting Inuit testimony. Then there is a section that goes in to the challenges such as lack of good interpreters in the case of the Franklin stories. But then throughout the book, if something about the testimony weakens it or calls it into question, that is just brushed off. If the interpretation is overall weak, why are we trusting any of these particular stories? Again I think each story in the charts I spoke of above, should have a column that evaluates the interpretation or other factors for that particular story. That way it is more clear what criteria we are using to trust a story or not.
May 23, 2018
It helps to be familiar with the "accepted" narratives of the Franklin Expedition before digging into this, because a lot of it is built around how the Inuit accounts challenge the stories built by English/Anglophone explorers in the decades after the expedition disappeared. You will also want to have a map handy - consider photocopying the book's maps and making marks as you read. All that said, it's an interesting look into this evergreen historical mystery, especially in light of the discoveries of the Erebus and Terror wrecks in 2014 and 2016.
February 12, 2023
i am going to get to the bottom of this !
April 10, 2025
A hard to parse topic made harder because Woodman cannot get to the point. Still super interesting, he has obviously done his research, don't get me wrong. The absolute comedy of the lost Terror ship being found in the area called by the Inuit Keeweewoo, "sunk bay," in Umiartalik, "the area where you find white men's ships" makes up for it.
April 3, 2025
A very interesting consideration of the Inuit testimony regarding the Franklin. It really tickled my speculative curiosity about what happened.
May 10, 2020
3.5,
Echoing other reviews, great in-depth book, perhaps more in-depth than I wanted. Probably want to take copious notes while reading to completely follow. Wish the maps were better.
Echoing other reviews, great in-depth book, perhaps more in-depth than I wanted. Probably want to take copious notes while reading to completely follow. Wish the maps were better.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews