The Terror: Agony in the Arctic

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What's worse: being hunted by an eldritch horror, or slowly dying of lead poisoning in a freezing wasteland where the sun disappears for months? On this episode of Acceptable Losses, DK and Kirioth dissect the doomed voyage of the Terror and the Erebus. We're looking at the show, the book, and the grim historical reality of Sir John Franklin's 1845 lost expedition. With heavy-lifting historical research from Possum, we pull back the curtain on scurvy, starvation, cannibalism, and the relentless Arctic night.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Acceptable Losses podcast, where Kirioth is gonna send us screaming, pissing, and crying through some sort of grim, dark nonsense and probably ruin your day. But it's gonna be a great time, so strap in and maybe, you know, head over to Orchidate.com and check out some of the great Acceptable Losses merch that's there. You can be a weeb for Lincoln. You like sci-fi, right? There's a great shirt for that. I believe there's still coins there. There's great stuff. Check it out, Orchidate.com. There's a link in the description and on the screen. It's wonderful. Kirioth, how's the Patreon? Shy's asking why piss hasn't part of your intro, you disgusting weirdo. I don't know. It's just one of those things when you're scared, you scream, you piss, you just lose all control. It's just how it goes.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

I mean, it's it's a definite, you know, it's it's recognized. It's a recognized thing to is it to piss yourself in fear? Anyway, the Patreon is great. If you head over to patreon.com slash acceptable loss, you can follow for free if you do that, and then redeem the gift that we offer, which is the threads episode, which is a Patreon exclusive, you can get that. You also get episodes a week early, and you get Patreon exclusive episodes. There is a ton of stuff up there. It is absolutely worth checking out. So patreon.com slash acceptable losses. I don't want to say that Patreon make I don't want to say that it makes me come. I don't like that or makes you come or any I don't want it to I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Yeah, I yeah, I don't I don't I don't I don't think this is an equivalent thing, Shy. I don't think we're hitting laws of equivalent exchange with oh my god, I'm so scared I piss myself versus the Patreon made me come.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Can we mean to just not use the words piss or come within the first three minutes of the recording? Is that an option? Is that something that's allowed? Apparently not. So it is that look, it it is that good.

SPEAKER_04 2:14

It is that good. I just don't want to say it out loud, that's all.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

It's that good, everyone. Patreon. What a day. I I will say I am a little worried about today's episode because I did look at the schedule. Because I was like, you know, every time I wake up on an acceptable Austin, I'm like, you know what, let's just make sure I've got the right day, the right time. Check the schedule. It's like, oh, there it is. Kyrioth and DK, what are we doing today? Terror. And I was like, oh Jesus. Oh boy. Strap in, brother.

SPEAKER_04 2:51

Is that worrying for some reason?

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Um little bit. Well, well, let's just get into it and then you'll get a feel for what's going on very, very quickly. Yeah. So in 1845, two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, departed England in order to confirm the existence of the Northwest Passage, a route through the Arctic Ocean between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Finding and navigating the Northwest Passage wasn't a new venture. In fact, people had been searching for a passable route in that area for centuries. This expedition, led by Sir John Franklin, was just the latest and a long line of people hunting for this elusive route. Arctic exploration had never exactly been an easy thing to pull off, but the expedition led by Franklin would become one of the most horrifying for so many reasons. You could even call it unbearable. Ooh.

SPEAKER_02 3:47

Anytime it's like a joke there. Anytime it's like, oh yeah, it's like these old exploration vessels and they're going on like an Arctic journey. I listen, I'm such a dork. My mind immediately went to like, oh yeah, this is like Transformers in the WitWiki family that got caught in ice, and you know, Sam's trying to sell all their relics off and hawk them for a new car.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Going straight to the WitWikis of that reference. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what to tell you, man. My brain does not is not hardwired like everyone else's.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Oh, amazing. Amazing a WitWiki pull so early on. That is a deep pull, yeah. So today on Acceptable Losses, we'll be talking about the doomed voyage of the Terror and the Erebus, as told in the book turned series, The Terror. Now we also have a we have some Possum notes in this script as well. This was one of mine, but Possum's gone through and added a few things as well. And uh Possum has correctly pointed out, the author of the book is Dan Simmons, who unfortunately recently passed away. He was the author of the absolutely outstanding sci-fi series, The Hyperion Cantos, and the genuinely terrifying novel Carrion Comfort. The Terran novel is at many points dramatically different to the show. It really leans into the attitudes of the 1840s quite heavily as it's written as historical fiction, complete with shiplogs, journal entries, and dossiers. So as you can imagine, there's some unfortunate and more of the time things there, language-wise and about sexuality. Right.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Got you. That's unfortunate. Also, man, uh if someone's like, oh yeah, we're going on an expedition sailor, and it's like, oh great, I've been waiting for my big break. Where what ship am I going on? The terror. And it's like, no, I can wait a little longer. I you know.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

Now there is a reason for it being called that, which we will get to, but the fact that the ships are called the terror, and you know, like Erebus means darkness. So we're gonna go on a fun expedition on the terror and the darkness. Also obligatory, fuck Erebus. Obligatory, yes. Um yeah, so yes, we'll we'll we'll get into that shy. But yeah, the the book is also massive, almost 800 pages. So the vast majority of this episode is gonna be fixated on the show, as it does quite a bit of tidying up. But if you're interested in the story and particularly crozier, while also being able to handle some of the more problematic aspects of the 1840s, then the book is certainly one to check out. And when it comes to similar stories, the book Last Man Standing is a crozier biography that is very much in lockstep with the book, whereas the show is more in lockstep with the book James Fit FitzJames, Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition, since that character is barely mentioned in the book itself. Now, ordinarily, when we talk about heavy topics, there's the caveat that although the situations people may find themselves in could be real, the people themselves aren't. That doesn't like stop the gut punches. Like by the time we were done with Gears of War, I was uh I was glad that Don wasn't real, because goddamn, that dude had a terrible time. Oh yeah. Yep. And you know, everything that we talked about in Aniara, it you know, there's a healthy level of despair and empathy for Mima Roba and her fellow doomed passengers. But with this specific series and book, there is a little bit of a difference. Because Sir John Franklin was a real person. The Terror and the Erebus were real. They were real ships, crewed by real men whose names are listed on the ship's muster rolls, and they went on this very real expedition. And the names used in the show and the book are the names of the crew. So every person that you hear about is someone that existed. They weren't like there may be fictional elements to their characters, but they were real people, since it's for the most part relatively accurate historical fiction, but with an emphasis on what happened to the expedition in terms of the things that aren't fully known about it. So the historical parts are already the stuff of nightmares, and the art like that expedition is one of the most harrowing attempts at exploration you can read about. And then someone in the form of Dan Simmons went, Could we make this worse? Oh man, arguably.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

Potentially so. Although sometimes truth is stranger and more deranged than fiction. So sometimes you really don't need to change a whole lot to make it just the worst thing ever. Just retell the story, right? But this time they actively were like, well, you know what? Screw it, let's make it worse.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

There's oh god, there's there's there's stuff. We will like uh points we are going to dip into the like into the historical, mainly because the show I think does a really good job of representing the fictional and fantastical side of things, whilst also remaining fairly true to the timeline of the historical events, and it's it's fun the way it's lined up and the way the real people and the real stuff like informed the fiction and the way it was integrated. So we'll sort of mention it occasionally, but you know, main focus is the show itself. So the Terror and the Erebus would set sail in 1845 from Greenhythe in Kent, departing on the 19th of May with a crew of 24 officers and a hundred men. Both ships were bomb vessels designed and built initially for shore bombardment, hence the name. So, you know, if you're rocking up to bomb someone using mortars from a distance, a ship called the Terra and a ship called the Erebus. They are pretty good names for that purpose.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So initially the Terra is not actually an exploration vehicle. It is a shore bombardment craft. It was designed for okay, cool.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Yes. So the the Terror is a Vesuvius class and was built in 1813 and saw action in the War of 1812, which just as a reminder went on for two and a half years, hence the confusing timeline there. The first time I read it, I was like, wait, oh yeah, okay, I remember. And it was converted into a polar exploration ship 20 years later. The Erebus was a Heckler class and was constructed in 1826 and refitted for polar exploration around the same time. These refits saw these vessels turned into two of the most technologically advanced ships of their day. Both of them featured a steam engine driving a single screw propeller, along with their standard sails, along with a large stove connected to central heating, which is massive, in like the 1840s, reinforced bows and a system of iron wells that allowed the rudders and propellers to be safely stored away. And just as a fun aside, because it's mentioned in the show itself, the steam engines were taken from decommissioned locomotives from the London and Croydon Railway. Captain FitzJames even comments on the fact that the engine in the Erebus would have at some point taken him from London to Brighton so he could visit his aunt, which is just a nice little moment. Huh. That's kind of cool. The ships had libraries with more than a thousand books and three years' supply of food, including around eight thousand tins, which were produced seven weeks before the expedition set sail. Now, it should be noted here that provisions and such for a journey like this were meticulously planned out to fit within a certain time frame. It was three years worth of supplies because it was supposed to be a three year journey. The nature of these expeditions had little to no nuance at the time as overpacking could slow the mission down even further. Like weight was considered, and the losing of said weight over time, the speed of the ships, and the ability to catch a tailwind. 8,000 tins is enough for three years. But if you're having enough food for three years packed, seven weeks isn't a very long time in order to produce that amount of tins.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Yeah, that is that is that is a that's a tight window. You you are you are working overtime to produce, what did you say, eight uh eight thousand cans of tins? Eight thousand cans of food.

SPEAKER_03 12:25

In seven weeks. So you need to produce more than a thousand cans a week.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

It's it's it you had to be real hasty. Like, yeah, like basically basically two thousand cans, give or take. Like maybe, maybe like eighteen hundred, very quick maths. But that's that's that's a lot to do in not a lot of time.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Unimportant, but what sort of tinned food did they take on voyages like this? Was it just because like do when you think of like canned food today, it's like, oh yeah, we've got spam, we've got like canned veggies in that weird preservative Duwater stuff. What kind of stuff did they pack back then? Again, not important, so if you don't know, it's like not crucial.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Well, it uh on this is this like whole expedition and just this sort of era of exploration is one of the things that like took six months of on my life at one point where I just couldn't stop looking into it because it was so interesting. So it's stuff like you basically things like beef and gravy, vegetables, you'd have fruits and stuff, but it was all like it was basically here's a load of slop with a few chunky bits eight thousand times. Um to be fair, it wasn't just the tins, they also had salt meats as well, so meats that had been preserved in spam kind of thing. Sorry. Sorry, I love spam.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

Oh, that's true. Cause like I've I've definitely seen well, okay, I've I've seen shows and documentaries where it's like, oh yeah, they got like live chickens running around on on board, or maybe I'm just thinking of Moana. There's got one mad duration that that nobody wants to eat, and Moana keeps trying to fatten that thing up. But yeah, I feel like I've definitely seen livestock taken on vessels, whether it was cattle. Ah, cattle seems like it'd be too heavy, but like maybe like a smaller pig, poultry, and stuff like that, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

Yeah, if I like the earlier days or like earlier weeks of journey, stuff like that, they would have something that's live and then slaughter it on the way. Yeah. That kind of thing was was was pretty common as well. But yeah, they'd they would they would stop for freshwater in Scotland, then sail to Greenland over the course of 30 days. The last time the two ships would be seen by Europeans at least would be in July of 1845. Two whaling vessels encountered the expedition waiting for good conditions to cross to Lancaster Sound, an entrance to the now mapped out but at the time undiscovered, North West Passage. Now, in the real world, the two ships would halt for the winter just off a place called Beachy Island. They spent the winter of 1845 to 1846 in the ice there, then moved on once it had thawed. From there, they travelled down Peel Sound, and this is essentially where the series begins. Actually, well no, technically, the series begins in 1850, but we'll get back to that. In 1846, the Terror and the Erebus would be sixteen months into their expedition, and already things would be going wrong. A young man called David Young, holding the rank of ship's boy, which is someone who waits on the officers of a ship, would fall deathly ill. In the same time frame, the Erebus found its propeller jammed by ice blockage. As a result, a seaman by the name of William Oren fell overboard into the freezing Arctic and drowned at the impact of it.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

Oh, at the impact? I thought you were going to say he was trying to like clear up the uh the ice blockage, but it just it just stopped them so hard he fell overboard and drowned.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

He was in the rigging, and when the ice got caught, it made the ship shake and he lost his footing and down he went. Woof. A shock, like a genuine shock way to go. Just minding your own business and then overboard into freezing, you know, water. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

I I'm I'm sure I'm sure that like even if you survive the impact, that water is so cold your whole system gets shocked, and just within seconds you can't do anything, and you just Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

Yeah. Yeah, it's it's rough. It happens so quick in the show as well. It's like you blink and you miss it to the point where I think it's done really well because everyone's like, man overboard, and he's just gone straight away. Just nothing. There's nothing to react.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

That water's gotta be colder than like the Titanic, right? Like when the Titanic sank, water very cold. This is probably colder, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:54

It's it's real bad. It's it's like there is just ice everywhere, and they're moving relatively slowly, but still it's enough to shake him off. So unfortunately, William Oren overboard and drowned. Before David Young would die of his mysterious illness, he'd be confronted with a vision of a Netzulik man and scream to the assistant surgeon, one Harry Goodsur, that he wants us to run. Oh it's when I say this this series starts out ominous, it starts out real ominous. Oh, yeah. Just as a note. That's very ominous. Just as a note, Netsulik refers to Inuit people who live predominantly in Goa Haven, Kuraruk, and occasionally in Nanavut. For those unfamiliar, Inuit is the accepted term for the indigenous people of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Just wanted to throw that out just in case someone didn't know the word. Hell yeah. Anyway, poor David had a vision of a Netzulick man and was very unhappy about it. Shortly after that, he died, at which point a dodgy chap by the name of Cornelius Hickey stole a ring from his body. I'd say David wasn't even cold yet, but given where they are, it he probably probably was.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

Yeah. For a second I thought you were gonna say Witwicky, and I was like, oh my god, no way, dude.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

It turns out right Transformers really did the homework. The Erebus had to keep moving despite the still wind, so a man by the name of Henry Collins was sealed into a yeoldy diving suit and lowered over the side. Now, this is also something else that is kind of special about these ships. The fact that they had a diving suit to begin with, isn't it it was not a common thing back then. Yeah, I was gonna ask. Yep, you've got you you've got your big, your big sort of ball-shaped helmet. The the actual like overalls aren't quite as like puffy, but the way that he's lowered over is the most terrifying part of it. Because for these to work, essentially the person wearing it would sit on a wooden seat that had rope on either side and would be swung over the edge and then lowered into the water. Now, if they slipped off the seat dead. Yes. Oh boy. That that's it. Like in the show you can see he's like he's got his arms on either side of these ropes. It's basically like you know when you see kids have made a swing a swing in a in a tree. Yeah. It's it's effectively that, but there is a diving suit that is covered in weights attached to it. And if something happens or something snaps, or something comes undone, and he goes off the seat, he simply sinks to the bottom of the ocean and they cannot recover him.

SPEAKER_03 20:03

Oh man.

SPEAKER_02 20:04

Well, so because I was gonna ask, like, is it is it just the suit that's full of air? Like, how exactly does the dive suit work in the 1840s? Because obviously you don't have scuba. There is like it looks like there might be like a little oxygen tube attached to that one.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

Oh, they're just pumping it. Okay. And that's obviously you can't pull them up with that. Because I imagine if you start pulling on that, it just comes free, and then you're just double Dutch fucked anyway. Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Yeah, yep. It's it it requires bravery to be measurable on one of those things back then.

SPEAKER_02 20:45

Or just a uncommonly large disregard for your own safety and life.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

That that too. Something that is kind of cool in the show is that he it gives very strict instructions as to like one pull means this, two pulls means there's a kink in the line, three pulls means like bring me back up immediately. So it's clear that like he's trained in it, and it's not just like, hey, we've got one of these, you get in here. He's like, he's been through the process, but he's lowered over the side with a pole arm to dislodge the ice that's caught in the ship's propeller. And what what follows is one of the most tense, concerning bits of TV I've ever watched, and I'm actually not joking. The director nailed the quiet sense of dread and foreboding and really built it. The soundtrack as well is incredible. From the moment Collins is lowered down to the moment he's brought back up. Having seen the floating corpse of his friend, William Oren, reaching out to him, it's an absolute masterclass. It's so good. So, yeah, he is down there trying to free the ice from the propeller. He turns and sees the drowned sailor literally arms out. Reaching towards him, floating in his direction. It's so creepy. Oh man.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

And that's it's it's not like this is a zombie thing. It's just, you know, bad luck that you happen to be passing by the floating corpse and it does look like it's reaching out to you. This is this isn't like a zombie thing, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:19

No, it's it's also not clear that he's there. Something that is fairly frequently reported is hallucinations from Arctic divers, especially around that sort of time frame. So he could have just been freaking the hell out, and that's what he saw. Either way, I'll I will link you the scene like when we're done. It's it's really, really well done, but it's not what you want when you're trying to free the propeller. He does do it though, he manages it, and the voyage could continue. But the ships like the conditions around the two ships were worsening. Captain Francis Crozier would urge Sir John Franklin to only take the Terror East to weather the oncoming winter, but Franklin would ignore his advice and press on, save for the knowledge that the two ships were close to the passage. Yeah. In hindsight, not the call, uh as it turns out.

SPEAKER_02 23:14

It it it seems like a lot of tragic seafaring voyages go astray when someone's like, hey, probably a bad idea to go full force this way. Let's go around. It might take a little longer, but it's safer. Guaranteed we'll get there, no big deal. And the captain, like, nah, fuck that, I'm the captain. I've been at sea, I know what my ship is capable of. We're bearing forward, baby, and then oops, iceberg.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Yep, there's there's I mean, we'll we'll get into it, but it's it's worth it's worth noting at this stage that Franklin was a deeply devout man. And from what I gather, it's not just in the show, it's also something that was he was very like evangelical in reality as well. He had an unshakable faith in God, and in the show and book, at least, there are moments where it seems as though he's making his command decisions based on faith rather than listening to the advice of his officers. Something which feels especially egregious in hindsight since his second in command, Captain Crozier, had already been on three expeditions to the Arctic, led by a man called Captain William Edward Parry. Like that's not to say that Sir Franklin was completely inexperienced in Arctic exploration. He himself had led two overland expeditions along the Canadian Arctic coast, one of which went so badly that it nearly led to the death of all of his men, with only nine of the original twenty surviving, and it earned him the nickname the man who ate his boots because he and his crew were reduced to eating lichen and cutting the leather from their footwear to survive. Yikes.

SPEAKER_02 24:52

That is ow. I I can't imagine being so desperate. It's like, you know what? Yeah, let's start cutting the leather off our boots and nom nombing. I mean, you gotta do what you gotta do to survive, but it's like holy like I say I was starving, that wouldn't even cross my mind to start eating my boots.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Yeah, it's it you you've gotta be in a really bad position for that to be the option to take.

SPEAKER_02 25:19

Like it oh god. Also, there was there was a small part of me that you were like, oh, he's so um evangelical and he's so faithful, which is funny because his co-captain, I was really hoping you were gonna say, is an atheist, and I was like, ah.

SPEAKER_00 25:34

Oh, this is very much this is very much in the uh you you're Catholic. Everyone's Catholic.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

Yeah, I was then I was gonna say 1840s, who's gonna admit to being an atheist without you know getting shanked or something, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:49

There is a lot of like evangelical beliefs that drove many of the expeditions in the Arctic as well. So it's kind of it's sort of maybe not a given, but the vast majority are are you know, they're in literally and figuratively the same bone. Nice. Very good, very good, very good.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Very good, very good. I thought of it and then I was like, do I say this out loud? I don't know if I should. Um No, we gotta we gotta get you past that that fail-safe filter. You gotta we gotta we gotta break that barrier down and just let you let it rip. Just gotta blurt it out every time. Every time.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

Now, I I'm not trying to besmirch the memory of Sir John Franklin here, but it's also important to know the context in which he came by command of this expedition, because it really hammers home the idea that this whole endeavour was cursed from the start. See, Franklin was not the first choice. When Sir John Barrow, a leading figure in the Admiralty, was due to retire, he wanted to commission another expedition to find the Northwest Passage. He asked Captain William Parry, Crozier's old captain, but Parry declined. He asked another explorer, James Clark Ross, who also declined. James Clark Ross would also go on a search for Franklin's expedition a few years later. His third choice, one James FitzJames, the commander of the Erebus, was deemed too young by the rest of the Admiralty, and Captain Francis Crozier declined out of modesty, opting instead to captain one of the ships rather than lead the expedition as a whole. To say that Sir John Franklin was not the first choice is putting it mildly.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

And I I I guess if you're a man of faith, you're like, well, obviously God ordained it. There were so many choices ahead of me. I'm like I was like tenth in line. But hey, if they if if everybody else declined or chose something else and it came to me, oh God has spoken, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:40

There's yeah, there's gotta have been, like, right in the back, a little bit of I mean, it was meant to be, otherwise it wouldn't have happened. Like that sort of attitude. His uh his appointment was made reluctantly, and at 59 years of age, this would be his last expedition no matter the outcome. But captain of the expedition he was, and as such, he called the shot, and his call was that both vessels would continue on sailing west around King William Island, at the time referred to as King William Land, because as far as they knew, it was connected to North America. This would lead the ships into a chokehold or choke point that they would never leave. Now, there there is something about this because earlier I want to clarify something. I said these were some of the most technologically advanced ships, right? Mm-hmm. That is true. But their progress actually wasn't that good, even considering the conditions. And in fact, it could be argued that they were kind of unprepared from the jump because the Terra and the Erebus were heavy and slow. I mentioned before that the steam engines they were fitted with were from locomotives. You can't just stick one of those in a ship and attach a propeller to it. What? Why? It turns out that's not how that works, and yet that's kind of what was done. The steam engines produced an incredible 25 horsepower.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

Oh boy. I mean, hey, in 1840, that's that's probably a lot of horsepower. Like, I know all of us here in 2026 are like, what? Like, that's that's the speed limit on a school zone. What are you talking about, brother? And it's like, well, it's it's the 1840s.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

What if I told you that the steam tender that towed one of the ships up to Scotland was designed from the ground up to have a steam engine, and its steam engine produced 225 horsepower? I would not believe you. Well, no, I guess I wouldn't be because what you said that was like a more or less a tugboat, right? It was it was designed to have a like a maritime steam engine. It was designed for ships, it was built specifically for you know usage on the water, which these two steam locomotives just it's it's they just took a locomotive engine.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

They didn't make a boat engine, they just took a locomotive engine and strapped it in there. And oh, oh my god, that's the blue okay. I don't know what exactly I was expecting when you said that. Like a part of me was like, oh yeah, they just took like I don't know, like they just took this square engine. Yeah, like they took the engine block or something only, and like you just, you know, you halt. I did not expect the fuselage of a train to just be bolted into the ship.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Yeah, that's that's what they went with. Um and that meant that the ship's under engine power got to about four knots, which is not fast a lot.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

No, that is fast for a ship that size, that's so slow. I'm surprised they got here in like what'd you say? This is like 16 months into their journey? I'm surprised they got this far already.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Now, to be fair, under full sail they could go faster, but the engines were also heavy as hell, which increased the overall weight of the ships.

SPEAKER_02 31:18

Because you've got a train on board.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Yeah. And also, you there's only enough coal for 12 days of power.

SPEAKER_02 31:27

Oh, of course. They need coal. Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

Yep. Like a part of it is is due to the fact that there was not a lot of compensation for just how thick the ice was. Like ships being that slow are not uncommon for the time. And the thickness and heaviness of the ships was designed with the hype of cutting through what was presumed to be thick ice, but there was no real metric on how much front loading there needed to be. So a sort of combination of not really fully knowing what they were going into, retrofitting the ships or technically upgrading the ships with an engine that wasn't designed for what they were being used for, like that c and then not having enough coal to provide constant power, given that it's like a three-year expedition and they had 12 days worth of coal. And yet it it all sort of adds up to you're not going quick and you're potentially not smashing through the ice either.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Well, boy, we've definitely set up a horror scenario here. Foreshadowing is a literary tool that I've seen some authors use. Sadly, this is real though. Like, this isn't like an author foreshadowing this, this is just something that happened.

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Uh this is the thing. Outside of the character details, this is like the fiction and the history are the same thing currently. Which is is crazy.

SPEAKER_02 32:52

Like it's it's just oh that makes it so much worse because you just know I'm gonna you you you tell 'em. You tell 'em. Because I I don't want to do the thing that I always do.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

You tell 'em, you tell 'em. So before long, both ships would become trapped in the ice, locked in place, and completely unable to progress. There they would remain waiting for the ice to thaw for eight months until two parties were sent out to find leads, which are large fractures, in the ice. One of them would return early with complaints that their food was rotten, making it impossible for them to carry on, with the other finding a message carn, which is like a big stack of stones, and leaving a note for any future explorers who might pass that way. Two of the party, Graham Gore and David Bryant, would move off to look for another carn. The others returned to their sledgeboat, however, they found it overturned and ransacked, causing a not small amount of fear that there might be a polar bear following them around. Gore and Bryant, on their way back to the rest of the party, spotted something lurking nearby, and Gore would shoot it, believing he was about to be attacked by a bear. But he wasn't. Instead, he'd shot a Netzelik man, a shaman, who was now bleeding out onto the ice, while his daughter screamed.

SPEAKER_03 34:05

Oh no, oh it's so boy, this is not good.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

This is so bad. This is so bad. Well, don't worry. Don't worry, because uh cause then Gore got killed by a bear. Sort of.

SPEAKER_02 34:18

Oh, oh great, great, great.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

He's bear-like, at least. So this is this is Possum going through the book, and the description of the bear in the show and the bear in the book is different. I think budgetary constraints were part of it, to be honest, but the book goes far more heavily supernatural. So it should really be emphasized that a bear is the best approximation they can come up with. So there's the discussion in the book that uh the possums found for it, where it's its first description. In fact, you know what? You can read this. You can read this. This is a clock.

SPEAKER_02 34:55

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. A white shape, a form. I remember there were claws? No, arms, not at first, but claws very large, and teeth. I remember the teeth. A bear, Sir John said. An Arctic white bear. Best only shook his head. Tall, the thing just seemed to rise up under Lieutenant Gore. Around Lieutenant Gore. It was too tall, over twice as tall as Lieutenant Gore, and you know that he was a tall man. It was at least twelve feet tall, taller than that, I think, and too large, much too large. The bear was biting the lieutenant? asked Commander FitzJames. Best blinked and looked at the ready commander. Biting him? No, sir. The thing didn't bite. I couldn't even see its head. Not really, just two black spots floating twelve, thirteen feet in the air. Black. But also red. You know, like when a wolf turns towards you and the sun catches its eyes? The snapping and crunching was from Lieutenant Gore's ribs and chest and arms and bones breaking. Why that's awful. Why that's just awful. That's that's that's just terrible. So it's it's uh not a bear, just some sort of horrific monstrosity that might be a bear. Yeah. Sort of bear-like, yeah. Um I don't like the TV show version, because the like the the the way it's described makes it almost seem like I don't know how to describe it. It almost makes it seem like Yeah, there's a mystery. There's like this almost, I don't want to say ethereal nature to it, but there's just this completely like unknown, hulking beast thing. And like your mind just has no way to approximate it. And like for a while I was like, oh, it's just like a cloud of darkness.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

You're absolutely right. The the emphasis in in the book is is a lot closer to that sort of like ethereal, unknowable.

SPEAKER_06 37:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

Like just to be on the edge of understanding, it leans much more heavily in that direction. But for the show, they they they went they went more here's a here's a really big bear with a weird face.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

Yeah, it looks like a mutated bear or something. Yeah. That looks like some annihilation shit. The concept art. Yeah. It really does.

SPEAKER_00 37:30

I've not seen that before. That's that's really oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 37:35

I'm assuming they just I'm assuming there was just no way that they could do that. Like maybe like a budget Did did we did we mention budget restraints for the show being the cause of like why they did that instead of maybe the That's my sort of assumption.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

To be fair, it could also be that the show was aiming for something like relatively more grounded. The show feeds more into the like when things go bad for the expedition, it feels like the show leans harder on the historical side of things than the book did. So it could also be that there is an air of trying to maintain a certain realism to a point that they were going for.

SPEAKER_02 38:16

But not necessarily like trying to make a a horror show out of it. I mean, it's definitely a horror, but I think Right. But they don't want to go like full-on like a mutated uh impossible bear. They want to actually think, oh yeah, it's probably just like uh uh, you know, a hairless bear, a very rare hairless bear or something, and they didn't know what it was, you know. Then they're not going for the full like gaping dragon ass looking at that one is slightly more grounded in reality, like you said. Yeah. That's true. In general, the show does look pretty realistic. Those are great screen grabs from it, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

It's such a well-done show. Like the the whole feel of it and the way they've shot it, it's it's is good. It's real good. So, with the result of uh the shaman bleeding out, the party hurried the shaman and his daughter back to the ship where Mr. Goodser, the assistant surgeon, would attempt to help him. The daughter screamed that the man needed to die outside on the ice, but he would instead pass away in the depths of the terror. Goodsur couldn't help but notice that the man had no tongue. It had been deliberately removed at some point. The daughter, faced with the death of her father at the hands of these strangers, declared that she needed to control the turnback and that the ships had to leave or they would all disappear. Like, although it's not really like it's not clear what it really is at this moment in time, we should sort of really point out that the name of this thing implies that whatever this creature is, like, she knows what it is, and it's not a bear.

SPEAKER_02 39:51

Like Yeah, it's it's there's there's a lot of panic from her. Something tells me they don't listen to her because well, you know what? Stop. Go ahead, Garyoth.

SPEAKER_00 40:05

Now, this might be a bit of a hard left swerve, but we need to talk about what Hickey has been up to since he is quite an important character. So this is the guy Cornelius Hickey that stole the dead ship's boy's ring. And he was getting his end away.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

Why'd he steal the ring just for for for riches and this is expensive and I want it, and you're dead anyway, so screw you, or what Yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

Yep, pretty much. And uh and then he was he'd also been hooking up with officer steward William Gibson. It's 1847. I don't need to tell you that that sort of thing was simply not on back then. Yeah, meow, meow, meow, yeah. With her father dead, the daughter would refuse to speak to the men still keeping her on the ship. Ostensibly, this is for her own safety, although the book gets real weird with it in a way the show doesn't, but she simply wouldn't speak to them. Her father's body was dropped in a fire hole in the ice since burial wasn't an option, a fairly ignoble end for a man who was pretty much just minding his own business. A fire hole, by the way, is where it's literally what it sounds like. It's setting a fire on the ice and basically melting a hole through to the water so that you can then fish through it.

SPEAKER_02 41:14

Oh man, and they just they just drop the body through it, huh? Yep. I mean, I I guess that's as close to a burial at sea as you're gonna get here.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Well, the thing is the Net Slick had their own their own burial rituals, and they were just like, Yeah, he's dead, stick him in the hole, whatever. It's the closest thing we've got to dig in a grave, so just get him down there. Which deeply disrespectful at the best of times, let's be honest, let alone when you killed him.

SPEAKER_02 41:43

Like that's the Yeah. I mean, yeah, you can't just let the corpse fester though, because especially on a ship and you're you're out in the middle of nowhere, and unfortunately, like I I I guess I get it. But yeah, it's a little a little disrespectful.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

A little rough. Just a little bit.

SPEAKER_04 42:04

Just a little brutal.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

With the ship still firmly stuck, a weird bear-like creature on the loose, and no sign that the ice was cracking or thawing, Crozier would ask Sir John for permission to form a party to go and look for rescue. Franklin wasn't exactly happy with this defeatist attitude, and would tell Crozier that he would never be a capable leader, in no small part because Crozier was an alcoholic. The otherwise good relationship between the two men had started to fracture at this point, something which would potentially cause severe issues with the chain of command further down the line, if it wasn't for the fact that Sir John joined a hunting party to go after the bear. David Bryant would be killed when the creature ambushed the hunting party, and Sir John Franklin well, he'd be dragged into the fire hole with only his leg remaining on the ice. Woof Yikes. He he got he does not have a happy end. Nope. It goes real bad for Sir John.

SPEAKER_03 43:01

Oh, that's the actor who plays him?

SPEAKER_02 43:03

I forget what he He's in like he's in a bunch of stuff. I shouldn't say everything, but oh man, he's great though.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Iran Hines, I think is I think is I think I think that's his last name. Yes, Hines, that's it. Yeah. He's he's so good. He's also very good at dying, which seems to happen to him a lot. He's in.

SPEAKER_02 43:21

Um I feel like he does have that look of like sort of your smarmy, backhanded uh second in command, or like an old grizzled veteran who has never really made the best decisions, but it's like, oh, he's a grizzled veteran, you gotta respect him. And yeah, he probably he seems like that guy that's always gonna like you're just waiting for him to get his comeuppins a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

The thing is, in the in the show, he's really nice to his men. Like he he looks cruel. Oh no, don't say that. He's just bad at making decisions. Which is really unfortunate because he's in a in a position or was in a position where his Decisions are like the life or death of everybody on board. In terms of the real expedition, Sir John died on the 11th of June 1847. We don't know how, and we also don't know where his grave is, if one exists. But much like much like the show, again mimicking the real history, the leader of the expedition dies pretty early on, one of the first ones. Hmm.

SPEAKER_02 44:26

That's unfortunate. That's you you never want to see that happen. You never want the commanding officers to be the first ones to go, because then anarchy.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Yeah, that's when that's when things start to feel real rough, and it's um definitely a real shame for this particular expedition because things just get worse, as they so often do with anything we talk about. But yeah, Sir John, unfortunately, taken by the turnback, shoved down the fire hole, and to make matters worse, a cook aboard the Terror would find more rotten food in the tins. The ships were provisioned for three years. That was on the basis that none of the food would be spoiled and inedible. And yet.

SPEAKER_02 45:12

So how come the uh the food in the tin is inedible? Because like obviously they had enough food for three years, but is it like, oh yeah, we gave you enough food for three years, but the shelf life of the food is ten months?

SPEAKER_00 45:24

Oh, don't worry. We're gonna get to that because I literally went and looked up when when canning was invented for that section. So okay. I will anxiously await that. Yep, okay. We shall find out. At this point as well, Hickey, being a right prick, took the opportunity of Sir John's funeral to stay on the ship and take a shit on Gibson's bed because Gibson broke up with him. Wow. What a charmer. What a more what what a guy.

SPEAKER_02 45:52

Um he obviously handles breakup real well. Yep, yep. So Jesus. Also, did you call him a shitter, by the way? Is that what you is that what you did? Did you try and did you try and skim that one under the radar on me? Is that you try to you try to float that one?

SPEAKER_00 46:12

I don't I don't think I did, but now I'm not sure what I said.

SPEAKER_02 46:17

I mean he was a proper shitter, you're not wrong. He really was, absolutely. He was about that life, you're right.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Legitimately. You can't argue with it. The facts are right there. They're right there. It's on camera. Wait, it's on the bed. Now, with Crozier now in command of the expedition, a party led by a man called Lieutenant Fairholm was dispatched to look for rescue. Since Sir John was now gone and there was nothing to stop Crozier from dispatching someone to maybe get a bit of help on the go since they'd been stuck there for so long. Back home, the lack of contact or news from the expedition was starting to worry Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John's wife. The ships had been gone for two years at this point, and there was growing concern, despite the Admiralty stating that there was no reason to be alarmed. Imagine being that wrong. Wow. Meanwhile, he's this is the thing. Meanwhile, he's already dead.

SPEAKER_04 47:24

Like wild.

SPEAKER_02 47:27

Hooray, everything's going fine. I wonder how he's doing right now. Like I I just am I just imagine there's like one one shot of her reading this letter and being like, yay, I just everything's going so well. Hooray! And then jump cut to just a rotting corpse in the fire hole. It's it's so it's so rough.

SPEAKER_04 47:47

It's so rough.

SPEAKER_00 47:48

Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, back on the ships, the situation was still deteriorating. At this point, not only were the vessels still strapped still trapped in ice, but uh, you know, Sir John Franklin and multiple crew members were dead. And the expedition had entered polar night, with the sun remaining out of sight for two months. Newly promoted Captain James FitzJames would find Crozier's approach to command Blackluster, with the two men arguing and falling out. At the same time, Mr. Goodsur discovered that one of the seamen, Morfin, had grey gums, a sign of lead poisoning, and the bear would abduct another seaman, priva prompting a friend and Crozier to go out onto the ice in the permanent darkness in hopes of rescuing the poor sod. Both of the seamen were killed by the beast, their bodies left out for the crew to find. Oh not the behavior of a predator eating.

SPEAKER_02 48:44

Yeah, that that is that is not the behavior of something in the cold that is just hungry. That's that's not good. Also, Shy said, Good news, DK, no rot in there. Two co oh, of course. The uh the cold ice would more or less mummify them, wouldn't it? And preserve their bodies. Yucky. Well, I it's less yucky than you know, decomposing rotting corpses with maggots, I guess. Look, they just died yesterday. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:21

Yuck. Now at this point, Hickey had seen enough. He knew that the daughter, now known as Lady Silence, for her refusal to speak, had something to do with the creature that kept attacking them. He got a few men together and abducted her from the camp she'd set up close to the ships. Crozie was disgusted by this and would apologize to her, ordering Hickey's two accomplices, Manson and Hartnell, to be lashed. Hickey did not accept Crozie as authority on the matter, and so he was lashed as a boy, which means across the arse.

SPEAKER_02 49:51

Oh that's alright, I g I guess I Jesus. I mean, I guess no matter how you get lashed, it's bad, but like is that just adding a little extra salt to the wound that you're being lashed like a boy?

SPEAKER_00 50:08

Yep. More humiliating, and the pain is worse, not least because it lasts longer, because you can't lie down or sit down. You are trying to sleep in a hammock, which you know, there's only one position you can go for one of those to be comfortable, and you can't. So yeah, it's it's bad. You probably feel sorry for him, but don't. We'll get to why, don't worry. Um don't be sitting there going, Oh, poor guy. It's don't worry about him. It's cool, fuck this guy. With Lady Silence back on the ship, Mr. Goodsur tried to learn her language while teaching her his. This was partly down to the now in command Captain Crozier's desire to learn what the fuck this giant nightmare affair was about, which totally reasonable, I think. Yeah, absolutely reasonable, yep, yep, yep, yep. It should be noted though that Crozier unfortunately was not dealing with his shift in responsibilities all that well. His drinking had worsened, and in order to maintain the level of drunkenness he was accustomed to, he'd had some of the whiskey from the Erebus moved over to the Terror, causing additional friction between him and FitzJames, the now captain of the Erebus. This tension would catch the interest sorry, this tension would catch the interest of Hickey, who was still suffering from the lashing he'd received, and was feeling doubly betrayed by Crozier at this stage. After all, Hickey had at one point been invited to share a drink with the captain. He took this as a sign of favour. In reality, it was just an excuse for Crozier to have a drink at a time that would otherwise be frowned upon. Yeah, that's an alcoholic, all right. Yep. In order to try and get a finger on the pulse of the officers, Hickey would approach Gibson, giving him the ring he'd stolen from Young well over a year ago, with instructions to let Hickey know if there were any signs of dissent. Gibson unfortunately took this as a sign of Hickey feeling sorry, and did exactly that. Eventually, Crozier would lose his patience with Lady Silence and demand to know what the turnback actually was, and more importantly to him, how to kill it. She refused to answer his questions, and in a rage he would have her ejected from the ships, something that was interrupted by FitzJames wanting to know where the fuck his whiskey went. Bad news, brother. It's gone. It's just gone, that's it. I look. It'd be fair to say that things were falling apart to some extent at this stage, but it could definitely have been worse for them. The Tunback could have attacked the terror and maimed the Ice Master, Mr. Blankey, ruining his leg. So the Tunback would attack the terror and maimed the Ice Master, Mr. Blankey, ruining his leg.

SPEAKER_02 52:56

Wow, the foreshadowing is just insane there, Kiriat. That's just was that in the script? Is that is that was that a possession? Is that is that what happened?

SPEAKER_00 53:05

I wrote that.

SPEAKER_01 53:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 53:07

Well done. It could be worse. This awful thing could happen. By the way, this awful thing happened. It is worse now. Congratulations. Welcome to now.

SPEAKER_00 53:17

I wrote it, then I was like, that's stupid. I should probably delete that. And then I was like, no, I'm leaving it. Oh yeah. Great A choice. I'm glad you left it. Well done. Mr. Blanke, while being attacked by this giant bear with a disturbing human face, managed to set it on fire, allowing other crew members to shoot at it with a cannon, causing the nightmare creature to flee onto the ice. In the aftermath, Mr. Blanke's leg was amputated, with no anesthetic, of course, and Crozier decided that now is not the time to be wholly reliant on alcohol to get through the day. He instructed his faithful steward, Thomas Jobson, to turn officer and seaman alike away until he had gone through the withdrawal symptoms and emerged from the other side. Good luck, buddy. I mean, that is that is a level of willpower.

SPEAKER_02 54:05

Yeah. I don't I don't entirely believe he's gonna stick with it and he's gonna come out the other side having plenty of drink, but you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

Well, he'll surprise you. Now, before we uh before we before we move on, the thing that attacked Mr. Blanky. Of course, in the show we're talking slightly weird polar bear. Yes, Arctic bear. Yes. But in the book, the possum has got the description from the book here, so I'm going to hand this over to you.

SPEAKER_02 54:38

The tunback is in the book described as bear-like, but almost barely visible on the white snow and the ice. Its eyes are black with reddish shine, but they are piercing like a shark's eye when it sees its prey, unblinking, glossed, hungry. Physically, as is it's as if there was something wrong with a polar bear. Its limbs are too long and its neck more so. In fact, its neck its neck is almost serpentine, moving around freely and long with exaggerated canines. It seems to phase in from almost out of nowhere, as if it's in the snow itself. Ooh, yuck. Serpentine just a just a deranged polar bear with like this serpentine head of teeth.

SPEAKER_00 55:24

What a it's is a creepy as hell description. Iran. Polar bear from hell. Absolutely gross. Oh yeah, so way closer to the concept. Yeah. So in the midst of all this carnage, physical and mental, Mr. Goodsur followed a hunch about the grey gums of Seaman Morphin. The surgeon aboard the Erebus, Stephen Stanley, had all but ignored Goodsur's attempts to get him to investigate the matter. Goodsur then was forced to follow his instincts alone. He fed a can of food to Sir John's pet monkey and waited. The never ending night was coming to a close at this stage. The first sunrise of the new season was imminent, not only the first sunrise of the new season, but the first sunrise of eighteen forty-eight. At this point, the ships had been trapped in the ice from September of eighteen forty six, and Crozier's desire for the men to abandon the ships and attempt to walk to the Canadian mainland were finally being listened to. The distance of this desperate march would be two hundred and fifty miles across sea ice and harsh rock just to reach the mainland of an outpost of any kind.

SPEAKER_02 56:35

A two hundred and fifty mile walk is crazy. But I mean, obviously ain't nothing going doing at your ships, and you gotta do something. How I I was about to ask how long that walk would take. Why don't you tell me, Kirios?

SPEAKER_00 56:55

Well, before embarking on this huge journey, Mr. Blankey, now recovered from the amputation of his leg and having been furnished with a wooden one, suggested that Captain FitzJames should hold a carnival to celebrate the first sunrise of 1848, boosting the morale of the crews and injecting some much needed levity into what had so far been a truly disastrous expedition. An expedition that was still going from bad to worse. FitzJames had asked to speak to Blanke specifically as Blanke had been in a position very similar to this once before. And again, this is wild because this is true. Being stranded, not losing a leg, by the way. Well kidding. Just in case. Blankey had been first mate aboard the Victory, a ship captained by Sir John Ross. The Victory was undertaking an Arctic expedition and left London in 1829. The ship was blocked by ice in 1830. By 1831, they had to drag it through partially broken ice, where they got frozen once more. And by 1832, the Victory had only managed to travel another four miles. That is bad progress for three years sailing.

SPEAKER_02 58:11

Yeah, that's that's not good. That's yeah, you are. Yeah, that is a proper stranding.

SPEAKER_00 58:17

That is food was running out, so the ship was abandoned, and the crew had to walk to Fury Beach, some 200 miles away. I'm cutting a lot out here. It was a whole thing. It's basically a patron episode in and of itself if we wanted to do it. But the upside is they were rescued in 1833. Blankey was present for all of this. He knew how important a part morale played for men struggling to survive, and spoke to FitzJames bluntly about how close Sir John Ross came to dying at the hands of his crew as the expedition had fallen apart, and about the darkness that would cloud the mind and make it go wrong. Now that it all sounds really bad, and it gets worse when you consider that this was a failed expedition where only three crew members died. Yeah, that that that's that's that's that's s shockingly not bad, actually. It's it's so few casualties for something that severe, and yet Blankey in the conversation with FitzJames, which again is some incredible writing, talks about how it at one point he thought about splitting open Sir John Ross's head with a boat ax. And FitzJames is like, would you have done it? And there is the longest three seconds of silence we've ever heard in your life before Blanke just moves on to the Isabella picked us up in 1833, and it's like, oh no. Mm-hmm. He absolutely would have done it.

SPEAKER_02 59:51

Oh jeez. And I go I I I like that like that expedition, oh, it's only three people died, and then you know, cut to present time, and it's like we've already had more people than that die on this one.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:05

Yeah, yep. And and things like things were mentally dark for that crew of the victory, and yet the terror and the Erebus have already had to deal with more loss. And yeah, it's could could be real bad if you don't get that morale back up. I could say that there'll be a price for it later, but you have to do it now or nothing is going to happen. Like you you've got to you've gotta raise their spirits.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:35

Oh man, that I mean I mean it is a good idea, but at this point, I'm not sure how exactly you raise their spirits. Because even if you hold like a carnival, a festival, or whatever, like what are you even gonna like you don't have any food. A lot of it's spoiled. Like, what what are you gonna play pin the tail in the fucking donkey?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:52

Like what now to be fair, at this point, most of the crew don't know that the food is spoiled. Oh no. Yeah. Let's uh let's let's uh let's get to the carnival, shall we? Alright, yeah, tell me about the carnival.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:12

Oh jeez.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:13

Having mentioned that, aboard the Terror and the Erebus, there were also unexplained health problems with the crew, a lot of them physical, but the mental health of those aboard the ships was deteriorating as well, and things would continue to get worse, not least because Goodsur's experiment of feeding the monkey would yield horrifying results. Jacko, Sir John's pet monkey, would become violent and then die. Great! Having eaten from the tins of food. When Goodsur took this information to the ship's surgeon, it would be dismissed out of hand, or so it seemed. But but with the tents put up, costumes and musical instruments handed out and casks of rum rolled out, the carnival had begun. The crews were enjoying themselves, even Captain Crozier recovered from his alcohol withdrawal. He saw it out, he didn't have another drop. Sober. Oh, well good for him.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:03

Yeah, that is actually that is that is actually impressive that he just went cold turkey and, you know, dealt with it.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:09

That's crazy. He needed to he needed to lock the fuck in, and that's precisely what he did. Based. So he would join them, and so would Lady Silence. Her mouth full of blood, her tongue missing, she would return to the ship's mute, having performed a ritual to regain control of the tongue back. The ship surgeon, Stephen Stanley, would join the carnival late. Dowused in oil, he set himself on fire, having laced up the entrance to the largest tent and burned that too, having finally snapped after the long winter and the horrors of the creature that had been stalking the ships.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:50

Oh boy, that's uh ladies and gentlemen, this is not part of tonight's entertainment. No, it's bad. It's so bad. So the carnival has the opposite effect, I'm assuming. I mean, it seemed like it was going so well, and then, you know, self-immolation.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:10

Literally, literally gone up in flames. Perhaps the knowledge that the crew's food was slowly killing them too was simply too much to bear. Yeah, but they didn't know that, right? Well, the ship surgeon who is the one who set himself on fire, he he was told that by Goodsur. So it might be that that was the thing that pushed him over the edge.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:29

Right, right. But the rest of the rest of the crew doesn't know still. They're still un unknown. It's not like he was like, everyone, the ship's food is spoiled and rotten, and then light himself on fire.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:41

No, he just did it in total silence, which is in some ways weird. Yeah, that's that's not good. That's that's very bad. Don't don't like that. Funnily enough, his actions cause mass panic, and in the rush of trying to get the tent open, one Cornelius Hickey, because it's always Cornelius Hickey, brought out his knife and sliced through the canvas. Unfortunately, on the other side of the canvas was an assistant surgeon who was attempting to open the tent, and the knife penetrated through his stomach.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

Oh my god, there's no fucking way, dude. There's no fucking way.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:16

So with two of the ship's surgeons dead, good service left alone to care for the health of the crews.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:24

Holy shit. That is some great a bad luck. Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:32

It's so horrible. It's just like he was he was literally trying to help. He rolled a one. That is a critical, critical failure. And the thing is as well, it's hicky, so he didn't even feel bad. He was just like, oh.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:48

No, whatever. Well, I'm out. Push the body aside, rip the canvas open, we're good. Let's go. So you just killed a man.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:56

I don't give a fuck. He'll have been trampled by all the others leaving as well, so no one will notice. Which is awful, but also true. So yeah, with uh with two of the ship surgeons dead, Gordsu is left alone to care for the health of the crews, almost all of whom were about to begin a long, slow march in impossible conditions. A few token men stayed behind with the ships just in case the ice thawed. If such a thing happened, they were to take the terror back to land, while the rest of the crews loaded up the rowboats with all the provisions they could carry, began the trek to safety. They're not just dragging the boats like keel first, they're boats' sleds, so they got like a sled with a boat on top. Because if you get to a bit of open water, you're not swimming that round here, so you've got to take the boats if you have to make it anywhere. At this point, Captain Crozier had been informed of the lead poisoning, but was keeping it secret so as to not further alarm the men. This burden would increase when the bodies of the party led by Lieutenant Fairholm were found. They had made it only eighteen miles before being killed by the Tumbac. Was not alone in knowing about the canned food, however, because Hickey had noticed the captain and Lady Silence, who was travelling with the crews, avoid food from the cans. Oh boy. You're starting to see how this might unravel to some degree, aren't you?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:19

Yeah, yeah, I I sure am. This this sounds like a recipe for uh a very unsuccessful trek, but you know, what do I know?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:30

Well, as the crews trudged into the endless white and grey landscape, Morfin, in agony from the lead poisoning, grabbed a rifle, held the captain hostage, and then was killed. He was asking to be put down because of the pain. And his request was refused until one of the Marines shot him before he was able to kill Crozier. Now, this feels like a good time, if there is ever a good time, to talk about the lead poisoning.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:58

I I was actually about to ask, like, because I I don't know that I've ever seen or heard of someone with lead poisoning. From what we have talked about, it sounds like it's painful, but I don't know what the symptoms are. I don't know what it does to you. I don't know, like like, so I I am anxious to I don't know if I'm gonna say anxious, interested to learn what the symptoms of lead poisoning are.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:23

Oh, that's a horrible show Oh no, that automatically looks super, super like foreboding. So essentially your your your symptoms you've got abdominal pain, constipation, headaches, irritability, memory problems, numbness, and tingling in the hands and feet. It's not great and it can obviously lead to death.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:51

Yeah, the symptoms. So Shy posted like a a list of all the symptoms of lead poisoning. There's so many. Like it's bad. Yeah. It's just 100% don't want that. It's like everything it's just everything goes. Like it's just there it is a non-stop list of abdomen pain, nausea, diarrhea, wrist pain, tingling, general malaise, fatigue, weight loss, j the the whole nine yards, even sperm dysfunction, like it just absolutely crushes you.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:27

Yep. Yep. It's it's really, really awful. And this is where we kind of get into the into the canned food side of things. So canning, as in sealing food in metal cans or tins, was still a relatively new thing at the time of the Franklin expedition. While the basis for it had been discovered in 1809, the tin can process was patented in 1810, and it wouldn't be until 1824 that canned goods would be used in an Arctic expedition by one Captain William Edward Perry, funnily enough. These tins would be sealed with lead. Not a problem if the lead is on the outside of the can, but if it gets inside, lead poisoning. Then things go bad. When the contract for 8,000 tins was put out, there was only seven weeks until the ship set sail, and quality control was lacking, with lead soldering that was, and I quote, thick and sloppily done and dripped like melted candle wax down the inside surface.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:26

Oh shit. Oh that's so bad.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:32

Oh no. I just imagining that and imagining just like the solidified lead that just ran down into the food. Yeah, that'll give you lead poisoning for sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:49

And that's that's their food that they've got a lot of. Now the thing is, it interestingly, in terms of the real expedition, through like repeated studies, there isn't much evidence that many of the crew died directly from lead poisoning. Some of the food wasn't affected by lead soldering on the inside of the tins, but by the solder being per imperfect. So the food would spoil because they weren't sealed. Like I don't need to tell you or anyone else, don't eat rotten food, it's bad for you. All the eating lead is harmful even if you don't immediately die from it. Additionally, the wildlife in that area contained botulism type C, which can also show up in improperly canned food, by the way. Possum says that the easiest way to tell if it's going to kill you is if you open a can and the sound fizzes a little like a soda and slightly bubbles at the top. If that happens, chuck it in. Don't eat it, don't chuck it. Don't eat it.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:42

Man, that's that's oh I though I would I I would imagine at some point the people get desperate enough where it's like, oh yeah, this might be a little bubbly and weird looking, but like we're starving. This is all we have. There's just ice out there and a muta bear. Yeah. Yep. Yep. The lead didn't help.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:05

Let's just say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:07

Absolutely correct. The lead didn't help. So yeah, why just saying shot for the important information? The show like places a heavy emphasis on lead poisoning in some ways, and of course, starvation, but the real crews are most likely dealing with starvation, pneumonia, tuberculosis, scurvy, and of course freezing conditions, all potentially exacerbated by lead poisoning. And there are studies done in 2013 and 2016 that suggest that the crew as a whole were suffering from chronic zinc deficiency. So really that they were just not in any way nourished properly at all, and they had all sorts of awful running around their systems.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:53

What exactly does one like obviously there are two medical officers dead, but even if they were alive, is there any treatment in this era for lead poisoning? Is there anything you can do, or is it just like, well, there's lit we don't you've been poisoned by lead. Enjoy a absolutely painful, long drawn-out death. Is that just the diagnosis for lead poisoning in this era?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:20

You know what? I actually am not sure. I just know that it's in on the ships, I really suspect if there was a medicinal like solution for it, they probably wouldn't have had enough to all the crew.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:37

Yeah, even even if there was like some sort of medicine you could take, there's no way they had it or enough of it to deal with, oh yeah, all of our cans have bad soldering on them. I was just wondering, like, what what exactly do you do when you get lead poisoning in the 1840s?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:54

Well, the other thing as well is besides die. Technically, the the worst the worst thing would be the scurvy. Because that was running rampant through the crew as well, because the lemon juice carried by the ships, like it loses its potency over time. So there came a point where it simply wasn't helping with scurvy. And I I cannot stress just how deadly scurvy is, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:17

So Oh yeah, it was a huge killer back in the day, right? Like it is the entire reason they started having barrels of like lemon and lime juice, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:26

Yep. During the Seven Years' War, just under 185,000 sailors were enlisted by the Royal Navy, and of them, just under 134,000 were lost, either dying, deserting, or being discharged due to being physically unfit. The leading cause of death in that time frame was scurvy. Like, in terms of your proportions, that is absolutely horrific. 134,000 out of 185,000 were lost, and a good chunk of them were scurvy. That is mental. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:59

Also, Shai says she Googled it, and in 1840s, treatments were largely aimed at managing acute symptoms rather than removing lead from the tissues. Oh, so you're just trying to deal with the system symptoms as they pop up, huh? Yep. Oh, that sucks. I mean, I know it's the 1840s where it's like, you know, a minor infection could probably kill you, but oh man, that's awful. Just all round awful when the diagnosis is just deal with the stuff as it pops up, it's like, oh, and then yes, Gurvey as well is like, ah no.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:39

So I mean, even without the drama of the giant bear creature or the scheming of Hickey, this is a fucking nightmare. But we do have that drama on top. So Morphin, Morphin had been killed. In a moment of agony, he'd grabbed a rifle and been shot before he could harm anyone, all from the lead poisoning gained from the food that should have kept him alive. The man who shot him, Sergeant Tozer, informed Hickey of Lieutenant Fairholm's party being found dead, and Hickey already holding a healthy dislike for Captain Crozier, began recruiting men for a mutiny. Now, with the canned food being all but inedible, Crozier sent out regular hunting parties looking for game. Seals, seagulls, whatever they could get their hands on, the crew was starving and malnourished. Hickey was part of one of these hunting parties led by one Lieutenant Irving. Irving, Hickey, and a man called Thomas Farr came across some Netzlik. Irving went to meet them, leaving Farr and Hickey to stand watch, and a trade was made. A Netzulik man offered Irving some meat, which he gratefully accepted and ate. After this gesture he ran back to Hickey and Far so they could trade more items for food, only to find Hickey kneeling over Far's body. Hickey would Irving would shout Hickey's name, asking what was wrong, only for Hickey to stand up, throw off his coat, revealing that he was only wearing his underwear, and he would stab Irving repeatedly in the chest. Irving would die with Hickey's hand over his mouth, staring into his eyes.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:21

And he was gonna just, you know, or something. I was not expecting horror show hickey.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:28

Oh, the meat from the from the Netflix, from the like the native inhabitants, was fine, because they knew how to cook it and they knew how to prepare it so you didn't get botulism from it. But for there's a a lot of the uh testimony suggests that the crews didn't really want the food for whatever reason, which we'll sort of get into a bit later, but yeah, it's not as much trading for that as you would have thought given the situation. Irving's death, by the way, genuinely shocking. The speed at which Hickey repeatedly stabs him, combined with the haunting and distorted music, is horrific. It's made even worse when you realise that the song being played while Irving bleeds out is a slowed down and pitch-shifted recording of the song that he sang during the carnival. Oh lovely, you just Oh man, that's it's very well done. It's uh it was a tune called Hampstead is the place to ruralise, which if we're if we're just being, you know, completely uh over the top about this, from what I can tell, the song came about in 1861 or 1863. So technically you wouldn't have known it, but it's fine, because it worked really well. Um the whole the whole thing, like the sheer speed and brutality of it, it's not hugely graphic or bloody, but that followed by Hickey's reaction is really like it sticks with you. It is chilling, no pun intended, actually chilling. It's very well done. So, as Hickey crouched over the body, he would be hit with a memory of boarding the terror and presenting his papers. The officer in charge would have a moment of confusion because he'd signed the paper but didn't recognise the man in front of him. Hickey would state that he'd grow a beer he'd grown a beard, and the officer waved him aboard. At this point, it was immediately obvious that Hickey had never been on a ship before.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:18

Yeah, I was I was worried you were gonna say something like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:23

What followed this was another fun intersection between fiction and reality. Crozier and FitzJames updated the message in the carn it was left in so many, many months ago. This actually lines up with what search parties found at Victory Point where that carn was, with the first note being marked twenty eighth of may eighteen forty seven and the update being marked twenty-fifth of April, eighteen forty-eight. This update was to reflect the fact that the ships were being deserted. At this point, there were signs of scurvy showing in FitzJames and in quite a few of the other men as well. Now, if you weren't already of the opinion that there's something wrong with Cornelius Hickey, he goes on to pin the murders of Irving and Far on the Netzlik family that Irving had traded with.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:03

Oh no. Oh Hickey.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:07

Oh, Hickey. Oh Hickey.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:10

Hickey. You scamp.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:13

You Oh, Hickey, that kills people.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:19

Funnily enough, this would result in some of the crew rallying together and killing the family in the name of revenge.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:25

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:30

Thing is, Crozier was suspicious. I mean he's pegged Hickey as a wrong at this point, which fair enough. He ordered Lady Silence away from the camp, fearing that the men's paranoia would result in them harming her and ordered Mr. Goodsur to perform an autopsy on Irving, which found undigested seal meat in his stomach. Unfortunately, during this investigation, Hickey's friend Toza began arming the men that they'd recruited for a mutiny. With the result of the autopsy clear, Crozier had concluded that Hickey must have killed Irving and Far and ordered the executions of both Hickey and Toza. A fog had rolled into the camp as the men talked and schemed, leading to paranoia that more Netzulik might show up and try and harm the crews for their actions. During the execution, Hickey demanded that Crozier tell the crew the truth and started relaying some of the secrets kept by the captain to the men. What began as a tent standoff between the two turned into chaos when the Turnback, incensed by the murder of the Netzulik family, attacked the camp, ripping its way through man and tent alike. In the confusion, Hickey would slip out of the noose meant to end his life and escape, rallying those he had persuaded to mutiny. He and his men would steal one of the boat sleds and kidnap Mr Mr. Goodsur, fleeing into the mists, while the rest desperately fought off the Tunback. Go away with it. That's there's no justice in this world.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:55

Yeah, that's that's just also man, the fog that rolled in. I know that's the show, but man, that's probably because you said there was a big heavy fog that came in. Imagine trying to do anything in that. That's ooh. And he slips away with all his mutineers and Mr. Goodsur and everybody else has to fight off the Tunback and God, and the person they really want is oh, that's this is gone.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:21

This sucks.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:23

Now, Toza lagging behind would watch as the Tunback, having been seen off by rocket artillery fired by FitzJames, would stop to attack one last victim. Second Master Henry Collins, the man who went down in the diving suit, would be mauled, torn open, and his soul wrenched from his body by the beast. Jesus. Like it literally, in the show, it like sucks his soul away from his from his body. Like holy shit. What's his name in Mortal Kombat? Oh, Shang Sung.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:55

Your soul is mine.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:58

Yeah. Yeah. It does that to Henry Collins. Which goddamn. So rough. I was like, oh my god, it's I already knew it was like a supernatural freak bear, but it's eating souls. What the fuck is this?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:12

Yeah, not only did you get ripped apart, it ate your soul, your essence, your very being.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:21

The encounter with the Toneback would leave 32 dead and 23 unaccounted for. Oh. Cool. Oh like cursed. Just cursed from the ground up. The uh the loyal crew would attempt to continue on, though things would quickly go from bad to worse. FitzJames would become unable to walk and had to be dragged in one of the boat sleds with every shake and bump causing him agony. He'd asked to be euthanized. Crozier, reluctantly, did as he requested, losing a man he had come to think of as a brother. Now, not long before FitzJames had confided in Crozier, telling him that he was born out of marriage, not even fully English, and that his promotion to commander had come as a result of his paying to cover up a scandal that would have implicated Sir John Barrow, the guy who started this expedition in the first place, had hired or like appointed Sir John Franklin to lead it, that it would have tarnished his reputation. Crozier, rather than judge him, had commended him for his actions in command and his service record, and the two had, after months of bickering and not seeing eye to eye, become close. Now, in another instance of real of the real history of these ships and the men being leveraged for better fiction, the stuff about James FitzJames' parentage and his favour with Sir John Barrow, it seems to be true. So Sir George Barrow, Sir John's son, met FitzJames during the first Opium War with FitzJames appearing to pay someone off. From that point on, Sir John Barrow used whatever opportunity he could to promote FitzJames. His life and career, as alluded to in the series, was extremely impressive, which makes his fate all the more sad. But the bits that are mentioned do correspond with what we know of him from historical records. Cool. I mean, it's just all it's just It's a horrible way to learn about someone who seemed to be extremely impressed.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:12

Yes, seemed yeah. It's just like, oh great, this is his fate, though, and it's like, oh man. Also imagine walking all that way, pulling those boat sleds, like that sucks, dude. How how far have they traveled thus far?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:26

They they have not got that far. They they're not doing well. I mean, they're they're riddled with scurvy, lead poisoning, pneumonia, tuberculosis. And they had to deal with Hickey. So maybe a couple miles at Mo. There's a lot of illness in those guys dragging those very heavy boats full of heavy provisions. That's a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:51

Yeah, that sucks. They were never gonna make it, but you know, what do I know? Go on, Kira. I'm afraid I have one more horrific detail regarding.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:02

Alright, why don't you tell me? In the series, as we just mentioned, he'll be euthanized by Captain Crozier. In the real world, he died in May or June of eighteen forty eight, and based on the cut marks on his bones, was cannibalized by surviving crew members.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:23

I guess you gotta do what you gotta do to survive. And you've got lead poisoning and scurvy and no good food to eat, and you're pushing these things. Yeah. That's one of those unfortunate situations where it's just like, well, under normal circumstances, I would never dream of doing this. But he's dead. I'm not.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:47

I'm gonna do what I gotta do.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:49

Yep. Back in the series, another of the crew died not long after, and another, feeling nothing but heartbreak, wandered into the wilderness alone to die of exposure. Another of the crew, Hodgson, became so hungry that he cut leather from his boots and ate it. Even after Sir John Franklin's death, the sort of ghost of the man who ate his boots still lingered. Hodgson, it's it's such a horrible parallel that someone did that. And it's just like, oh no. We talked they talked about this. Hodgson came across Hickey and his band of mutineers joining them. It was pointed out by Mr. Goodsur that one of them, Gibson, Hickey's former lover, was dying of lead poisoning. Hickey, being nothing if not practical and demonstrably evil, would kill Gibson and instruct Goodsur to cut up the body for consumption.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:43

Oh, cool. Wait, what happens if you eat someone that is afflicted by lead poisoning? Do you also get lead poisoning? Well, this this this also comes up, but yes. Oh, okay. I I was just thinking about that, because when we were talking about cannibalism, like, well, everybody's got lead poisoning, and you know, if they've got it and you eat them, surely, bum but a bum, you've got it now too.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:07

Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, uh, you're just you're not shifting that. Even even when you're dead, it's still in there. Um Shy said, I watched BBC documentary on the Terra and Arabic, it's on YouTube for free and pretty good, and it is good. And like 50% of the experts agreed on cannibalism, 25% said it's hard to tell, and the last one was like, no British patriots would never resort to such things. Clearly, those Inuits murdered them. Yeah, yeah. It was a it was a massive scandal, like in in the Admiralty, or just like just in the UK as a whole, um, when the whole we think they ate each other thing was reported. There was so much pushback, and like it is simply impossible for the brave men of the Royal Navy to do such an awful thing. And it's like, mate, they had no food and they were walking 250 miles.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:00

In the Arctic, where no British patriot would ever do such a thing. Honourable men, them all. I wasn't there, I don't know. Why am I I don't know why I went to Australian, but that's fine, whatever. So from Australian probably wasn't there. That's true. Oh my, I'm sure they didn't do it. Those British flats are always been great to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:23

I'm gonna say something and I apologise to all the Australians. It's truth. He's eating his mate. I'm sorry, I can't.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:32

I did. I went from British to Australian to pirate real quick. Oh God. Oh ye land lovers, put another shrimp on the baby.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:46

I didn't know I needed to be a pirate, but I'm all in. Here we go, baby. Put it on a shirt.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:55

Oh God. Please don't put it on the shirt. I beg you. Let my shame die here now, as if it had lead boy saying.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:07

Slowly and painfully. Oh. So before we move on, I will say the uh the scene of Hickey stabbing Gibson in the back is again haunting. It's just so well done. The acting in the show, I I cannot I cannot stress this enough. It is phenomenal throughout. Like it is all at the very least exceptionally good. Like I it's it is so good. Anyway, one of the ship's boys turned traitor and lured Crozier and a few men out so that Hickey could capture the captain. Before unknowingly going into this ambush, Crozier and Ice Master Blanky would have a conversation about next steps, with Blanke stating that he wouldn't be joining the crew on the rest of the walk. What had remained of his leg had become gangrenous and he couldn't keep up with the rest of the march. This was devastating news for Crozier, with all the weight of the world on his shoulders, yet another friend was going to die out there on the rock and ice. Blankey asked for rope and forks and limped away from the crew, waiting for the turnback to hunt him down. While he waited, he'd take out his spyglass and look across the land to see sea ice in the distance. And with that, he discovered that King William Land was in fact King William Island. There was a sailable route to be found. He'd found the Northwest Passage.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:35

On his deathbed. Yes. With no one around for him to tell such information as they all walk in a direction where they have no idea. Yes. Man, what can it do? Look. It's it's it's it's it's rough. It's real rough.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:01

Okay?

SPEAKER_02 1:31:02

It's bad. Wait, what is this? Yo, Kyriath and DK, that's fucking weird. Wild news stories that was just posted about an hour ago are time. No way. On Wednesday, they announced four more matches had been made. They said DNA samples had been extracted from skeletal remains and matched with living descendants. Three of the sailors we have identified are from HMS Erebus, and they all died at Erebus Bay. Dr. Douglas Stenton, an adjunct assistant professor of UW's Department of Anthropology, said in media release the fourth, the only sailor from the HMS Terror to be definitively identified by DNA analysis was found 130 kilometers away. No way.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:44

This story was just posted an hour ago for real?

SPEAKER_00 1:31:48

God, that's so eerie. That's oh I don't I don't like it.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:55

I genuinely don't like that. You know, as I look outside my window, there's something that appears to be a polar b oh now. In California. What are the chances? What the hell? Hang on, there's a odd knocking at my door.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:13

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:14

Hey, you're in this with us, Shy. You hey, you're you you don't say we're all in this together. Pull one out for Craig. No canned food tonight, lads. You get get the fresh stuff. Craig was here too, remember that. Yep, yep, yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:29

Craig was here too. That's wild that is wild. Um so Blanke would wrap himself in ropes and bent forks and wait for the nightmare creature that killed so many of the men to find him. And find him, it did. He faced it with a knife in his hand and a grin on his face, and the last words he spoke were What in the name of God took you so fucking long?

SPEAKER_01 1:32:53

What a Chad!

SPEAKER_02 1:32:56

What a Chad! Oh my that is that is so based. Holy shit! What an absolute mad lad. Love him, best character, no doubt. So good. Absolutely incredible work.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:11

Love that, love that. Oh man. Meanwhile, Crozier would be lured into the trap set by Hickey. Of the three men who went with him, one was killed and the ship's boy joined Hickey's mutineers. Lieutenant Edward Little was instructed by Crozier to continue taking the rest of the crew in search of rescue, including the sick. Crozier went with the men sent by Hickey, arriving at their camp, bloodied and battered. Despite it only being a short walk, they had taken the opportunity to hurt him a bit on the way. At the main camp, Lieutenant Little demanded that a rescue attempt be made but was outvoted by the remaining crew. Not only that, but they made the decision to leave the sick and wounded behind, including Jobson, Captain Crozier's steward. Jobson died hallucinating that Crozier was sat at the end of a banquet table covered in rich food. The hallucination faded with the realization that everyone had left, and Jobson died believing that his captain had abandoned him. Oh wow, that's well, that's just that's oh oh man, that's oh okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:15

You're right.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:16

Sweet, I beloved.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:17

Flat out sucks. Absolutely awful.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:20

Yeah, that is that is just terrible.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:22

Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:24

In Hickey's camp, Harry Goodser was struggling with the actions he'd had to perform in cutting up the body of a crew member for the others to eat. As an assistant surgeon, he'd taken an oath to preserve life and look after the health of the crew, and his part in what happened, even though he was forced into it, was weighing on him heavily. While he was treating Crozier's wounds, he explained that when the time came, the captain was to avoid eating him if possible, and if Hickey insisted, Crozier should only eat the soles of his feet. Good sir would poison himself in an attempt to poison Hickey and his band of mutineers. Ah clever. And then he would cut his wrists, hoping to hide the actual cause of death from his tormentor. Oh.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:07

Clever and wildly depressing. Yep. Yep. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:16

I mean, I feel bad for literally everyone who died in this show, with the exception of one guy. Um but goods really got me because he was polite and helpful and friendly and was literally just trying to do his best to keep everyone healthy the entire time. And then he ended up being so weighed down by guilt and despair as something that he had no choice over that he like he ended it himself. And I just it's just it's just sad. It's just really sad. Even in the context of everything happening is sad, that somehow just it's it's just turned the sad up to eleven. Oh, yeah. And it's just it's just, you know, ticked over one. Oh yeah, it's awful. But he he was a good sir. He was, he absolutely was. But yeah, Hickey summoned No. Hickey summoned Crozier for supper where the captain would see Goodsur's body for the first time, flesh already cut. Hickey commented that Goodsur always wanted to be helpful, and that he could have wandered into the wastes and died there, but instead had made an offering of himself. The mutineers ate Goodsur, and under their watchful eyes Crozier was forced to eat too, opting for the toughest part of the body, the sole of the foot. Now, I know we've already alluded to this, but the cannibal aspect of this story is not necessarily fictional. There's you know some debate on whether it happened. At this point Bush soldiers would never at this point it's it's kind of most of the research is like, yeah, it i they did. Yeah. The real expedition seemed to have resorted to that, with bones found that had signs of cut marks consistent with defleshing. Horrible phrase. But I mean it you know what it means as soon as you hear it. And uh and others had signs of breakage and pot polishing, which happens when the end of bones heated in boiling water rub against the pot they're placed in. So there's unfortunately just evidence of it. Hickey had been getting increasingly erratic over the course of the last few weeks, and in no small way this was down to the presence of the turnback, something that he felt he needed like something that he felt needed to be dealt with. Following the consumption of Good Sir, Hickey ordered his band to drag their boat sled to the top of a hill, where the explanation for his behaviour was finally unleashed on the men who'd made the very bad mistake of trusting him. You see, the real Cornelius Hickey had told him that the expedition was a year long, that it would end on the other side of the world, and so he killed him and dumped the body in Regent's Canal and assumed his identity all so that he could get to the sandwich islands, desert, and start again.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:09

Yep, that uh sounds kind of sort of like what I thought was gonna happen when you were like, oh yeah, he presented his thing. It's like I remember stamping this, but you don't look Yeah, yeah, that's that's right round what I thought was okay, cool, great. It all comes to fruition. Lovely, fuck you, Hickey, or man that thinks man that's gossip playing is hickey.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:29

Yep. Fuck fake hickey. Oh Kai is awful. As he laid out this confession of murder and deceit, most of his band sat in stunned silence, or vomited, or held their stomachs, as the poison ingested by Goodsur and then eaten through him began to take effect. Hickey started to sing in order to get the attention of the tonback that had been spotted a few miles away and succeeded. Before long it had attacked the men, killing several while Hickey stood in the boat and raised a knife to his tongue, slicing it off and then offering it to the beast. The tonback looked at Hickey as though it recognized him, and then it bit him clean in half.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:09

Let's go!

SPEAKER_00 1:39:11

Hell yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:12

Let's go! Hell yeah, brother!

SPEAKER_02 1:39:14

I love the fact that Hickey cut off his I love the fact that he cut off his tongue and probably that probably hurt a lot, and he was like, ah I'm safe. Yep. Love it.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:26

Love it, love it, love it, love it, love it. Oh, it's uh it choked on his body as Crozier pulled on a chain it had swallowed. The chain had kept Crozier and three other men attached to each other and the boat sled. Finally, the Tumbax succumbed to its injuries and the poison it had eaten and died, leaving only Crozier alive, though with a wound across his chest. So, as uh Possum notes here, the horror of the creature in the show is because of its familiarity. It's a beast. The crew anticipated encountering something untamed and wild while they're on the path of expanding colonization, but there's terror in seeing something human in the thing you are conditioned to conquer. The human face of the turnback is uncanny, and the outsiders are toxic to it. It dies with the chains of the explorers in its throat, literally chaining the untamed nature into submission. We're supposed to fear this creature, but the land and its people manifested it to protect them from us. Yeah. It's very poetic. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:29

Oh, that's the guy that plays Crozia?

SPEAKER_02 1:40:31

I that's another actor that I've seen everywhere. Yeah. Love him though. Great.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:40

Man, what a cast. Right? It's like it's it's a solid. It is a solid cast. It's really good. Not long after, Lady Silence arrived and helped him, having to chop off his hand to get his arm out of the manacle that it was in, but then nursed him back to health. They travelled south together, eventually stumbling across the dead bodies of Crozier's men, with only Edward Little still breathing. Crozier would sit with him as he died. Cool. Now I will say Edward Little also confused the hell out of me the first time I watched the show because he has a bunch of gold chains pierced into his face when Crozier finds him. And he didn't have that throughout the rest of the show in in any way, shape, or form. It felt extremely out of left field. Like it could be that he was tormented by the crew before he died, or it was done in a bout of insanity or mania. The reason for it is not clear in the slightest. But it is once again a tie-in with reality because Inuit in that region found the remains of a British officer who had such piercings. Huh. So again, just you know, a a nod to a nod to like the real story of it, which immediately in the show kind of comes out of left field a little bit, but just one more thing to see, pause, and then go and look at Wikipedia for. Which happened a lot. The second time I watched it. The first time I was like, okay, I'm just gonna watch this. And then the second time I was like, okay, he said that. Is that true? Off we go. Of the men aboard the Terror and the Erebus, there would only be one survivor. Captain Francis Crozier settled with Lady Silence's people. Her real name was Silna, and she was exiled for losing Tumbak, but Crozier would stay in her village and adopt the Inuit way of life. Now in the book, as Parson notes, the beast doesn't die, it sort of disappears, and Crozier becomes a sort of spirit governor over it. It eats his tongue in a baptism-like event. Nature had killed and consumed the men, and thus Tumbak didn't need to continue pursuing. And I've also got a little quote for you here from the book.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:54

Or is that no? Oh no. Just curious if that's anyway. So how about this quote? His men, the men who trusted him to lead them to safety, are all dead or scattered. His mind hopes that some have survived, but in his heart, in his soul of his heart, he knows that any men so scattered in the land of the Tunback are already dead, their bones bleaching some unnamed beach or empty ice floor. He has failed them all. He can, at the very least, follow them. Charming. Just uh just a happy story with nothing but but but, you know, just love it and hope and joy to be found here.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:44

God. Now technically, technically, we go to the very start of the show. We've gone through in like chronological order, but now we go to the start of the show, like the the scene that starts it off. Because in 1850, Sir James Ross, one of the men who declined to lead the expedition five years ago, and he was probably thinking to himself, Thank fuck for that. Yeah, would arrive in the village with a translator asking after the men of Franklin's expedition. Crozier hid himself from Sir James, telling one of the Netzlik hunters to inform Sir James that everyone from the expedition was dead. The ships were gone, and that the Northwest Passage did not exist, with the last three words simply being we are gone. Woof. Yeah, that's uh that's uh that's depressing. It's it's rough. I like in reality, as far as anyone knows, Crozier didn't survive. None of them did. The crews of the Franken Expedition would die on the 250-mile-long march to Back River on the Canadian mainland. Had they reached the river, they would still have been hundreds of miles from the nearest western outpost. Now, something that we haven't really gone into so far is the idea of rescue or whether it was even possible. Realistically, the chances of rescue wasn't that good. The ice they were stuck in lasted something like five years. But it's not like yeah, it it was unnaturally cold. Like everything about this expedition was cursed. The food was ruined. The ships with the steam engines technically being something to help made them slow and were inefficient and ineffective. The uh conditions that they sailed into were just that didn't really happen. The ice didn't stay completely frozen solid all the way through summer, multiple years in a row. It is just a catalogue of if one of these things had happened, it would have been rough, but they might have been okay. But everything that could go wrong went wrong. The ice lasted so long over that like that sort of five four or five year stretch. But you know, people people did try. The Admiralty sent out an overland rescue party, two sea expeditions. Of course, in the series slash book, the crew was fighting a supernatural bear monster. Um in reality, like they'd had to abandon the ships, and they were fighting scurvy and lead poisoning and zinc deficiency and pneumonia and bots and explosion and exhaustion, which is kind of horrifying enough, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:21

By 1850, there were eleven British and two American ships searching for the Franklin expedition. They would find the remnants of a camp and three graves on Beachy Island, where the Terra and Erebus wintered before getting trapped by the ice off King William Land. Sorry, King William Island, as it turned out to be. Yeah. There is. There is something that is like I didn't know this, and I wanted to share this because I didn't know this until I was looking into this stuff for writing this script. So another expedition was launched in 1852 under the command of someone called Edward Belcher. He had five ships, HMS Assistant, Assistants, HMS Resolute, HMS North Star, and the steam tenders Pioneer and Intrepid. Before year's end, Assistants and Pioneer were frozen. Eventually the ice thawed, and due to a lot of overland scouting, Belcher thought that Sir John might have gone to a place called Baffin Bay, so he pushed his ships in that direction, promptly got trapped all over again. He and his crews ended up abandoning four of the five ships in 1854 and returning to England after being rescued, where he was court-martialed but acquitted. Like it's rough to think about how badly that could have turned out given what we now know of Franklin's lost expedition. But the thing that I found fascinating is that the name Resolute might sound s familiar, because it it is. HMS Resolute was one of the ships that was frozen and abandoned. It somehow broke free of the ice and drifted until it was picked up by an American whaling ship. America returned it to England, and the UK used some of its timbers to make a desk for the president, which is still in use in the Oval Office.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:59

I was gonna say this that's that's the I was gonna say the that's the resolute from Okay. Uh again, this is American brain, but the the the National Treasure movie. They have to go and uh the they have to solve this this puzzle, and one of the things, oh yeah, you have to go to the the dead the the the resolute desk because there's a contrived uh puzzle inside the desk. And I was like, oh yeah, that I I know about that desk because I watched it in the Disney movie.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:25

Yeah, it's just it's one of those things. Like I knew where the desk had come from, but I didn't know that the reason that it came from that or like the the the history of it was the fact that it was looking for the lost expedition, got frozen, and then drifted to be picked up by America. Yeah. It's just kind of kind of wild to think about how that came about. But yeah, the despite all the searching in the many expeditions, the full truth of what happened is still not fully known. There's been interviews with Inuit people in the area by various expeditions in the 1850s and 60s, and they all tell of a group of starving men falling to cannibalism, and bones of these men have been found on King William Island with DNA testing suggesting they belong to some of the crew, although it's probably impossible to find all of them at this point. There is a very optimistic thing by one researcher that suggested that 105 survivors mentioned in the Victory Point note may have made it back to one of the ships and sailed along the coast of King William Island until it sank. This optimistic interpretation means that it could be possible that some of the crew survived until 1851. That's still only three years longer than the rough dates given by other researchers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:49:40

So still not great.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:43

I I don't even know if that's better because it's like, oh yeah, after surviving all that, it's like, oh yeah, you sink.

unknown 1:49:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:51

Either way, it's not ideal. No. I I did want to as well, just I feel like maybe we weren't necessarily harsh on Sir John Frank. Franklin, but like he's gone on to be something of a legendary figure. A lot of his public recognition though comes from this final lost expedition. Outside of this, he led an extraordinary life. He saw action at the Battle of Copenhagen, he sailed round the coast of Australia, saw action in the Battle of Trafalgar, served in the War of 1812. He led two expeditions in the Canadian Arctic and another through the Arctic archipelago. And that was just him. Captain Francis Crozier and James FitzJames, they also had a list of notable adventures and accomplishments a mile long, as did so many of their crews. They were like they were going further than most people could imagine in an age where there simply was no safety net, entering places utterly hostile to them, maybe not without fear, but with purpose strong enough that it overrode that fear. They were genuinely extremely impressive people, and the fact that it ended that way is just a shame. I don't know how else to put it.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:02

Yeah, it's it's it's tragic and sad and also Shai said Inuit rumors collected between 1852 and 1858 indicate that Crozier and one other expedition member might have been seen in the Baker Lake area, about 400 kilometers, 250 miles, to the south. So she thinks that's why he's the last one to die in the show. He might have carried on for ten fucking years hanging out with the Inuit after everyone else died in 48. It's unlikely, but there are some rumors from locals pointing to it being possible.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:35

That means that that I mean that makes sense to me. That really does. Yeah. But yeah. So just for a little bit of a little bit of closure, in 2014 the wreck of the Erebus was discovered, and in 2016 the wreck of the Terror was discovered south of King William Island in an area aptly called Terror Bay. The Erebus was not found in Erebus Bay, which is a shame. It would have been great, but no. Um Erebay. I don't know I I don't know why. Erebay, Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:04

I like how you had to stop for a second. You could like you were going on and then boom, it registered, and you're like, Jesus fucking Christ. It took a moment for my brain to catch up with my ears. Um that's the greatest reaction I've heard from you ever.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:23

God damn. I couldn't really tell you why, but like the fact they've been found is oddly comforting. Like I know there's a lot of DNA evidence and there's a lot of testimony and stuff, but it's I think it's just another thing to to to exist as a memorial of what happened in a way. Definitely. It feels like it's something that deserves to be remembered for as long as possible. I mean, for me, the show, The Terror, is absolutely gripping and fascinating. And underneath all of it is the added horror of knowing that while the most fantastic elements of the story are just that, the reality is just as grim. The idea of a bear-like creature hunting you for disrupting the balance of the wild is definitely scary, but the idea of being stuck in ice for two years, trapped in this wasteland where nothing grows, the temperature alone can kill you, the sun disappears for weeks at a time, all while having to face the knowledge that the food you're relying on is poisoned or rotten or both, that if the ice doesn't thaw, you'll have to walk hundreds of miles on malnourished legs, and then having to do that anyway because there's no other choice, that induces a different kind of fear. What the fictional crews of the terror and the Erebus went through is the stuff of nightmares. What the real crews went through is so much worse because it was that.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:40

Very bleak, almost no hope. Yeah, it's that's that's uh no must.

SPEAKER_00 1:53:47

No thank you. There is uh there is one before we like close out the episode, there is one other person that I wanted to mention just briefly. So the show benefited hugely from an incredible and haunting soundtrack, with quite a bit of it provided by a musician and artist called Marcus Fjlstrom. Uh sadly, he died before the show aired, but his music was a massive contributing factor to the atmosphere and feel of it all. The title music for the terror was a track called LM118 from his album Library Music One, and I've used that album for background music while writing since I first found it through the terror. Marcus was born in 1979 and died in 2017, but in 2024 an album of his work, The Last Sunset of the Year, was released by the label he worked with. If you listen to nothing else on that album, just listen to Last Morning Watch 7. It is ominous, haunting, beautiful, and triumphant all at once. And it's one of my absolute favorites. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, hell yeah. So there we go. That that was the terror.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:59

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:00

That uh you know, when I looked at the schedule and saw terror, I was like, oh man, this is gonna be I d I'm not even I don't know what the hell's gonna. Boy, I this is this was not on my bingo card of of what I was gonna learn about today. It is sufficiently terror-filled, but poof.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:21

What a tale. It's a it's a when I say it's a weird one, I don't mean that in a bad way. Yeah. I'm just historical fiction is not something that I used to be interested in. But the way this was done, I think I don't know whether it's just because of the like the root or the base for the story being what it is makes it so fascinating and also like I mean genuinely like emotionally charged.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:48

Oh, absolutely. With the basically uh there's there's it's a no-hope scenario that you have to sort of like courage your way through on the off chance that maybe there's a glimmer of potential survival. Is yeah, emotionally charged, I feel like is is yep, good good way to describe it.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:11

Yeah, it's it's it's exceptionally well done. It is really, really done. Really done, really well done. It's because I just started reading what Shy put while whilst I was talking and my brain stumbled.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:24

So Shy said, uh Yeah, yeah, Shy hit us with the I just want to tell you that Possum and I are scheming to eventually make an episode about another shipwreck that is far, far more horrifying. A real story that is much scarier than fiction. So stay hype for that, boys. And it should be noted that that when Shy wrote far, far, the second far, all caps.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:48

Yeah, yeah. I I I I dislike a second I dislike a a second caps far. The emphasis is scaring me, and I don't I don't like it.

SPEAKER_02 1:56:58

Not a big fan of that. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Don't don't don't don't don't love that. So are you gonna make me do an outro? Yeah, I was about to say, hey Kiriah, take us home, buddy. It's that time, buddy.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:14

Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_02 1:57:15

You got this, you got this, you got this. It's either this or or you gotta eat from the can.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:21

I don't want to eat from the can. It fizzed when I opened it. Okay. And it's gray. Stop it. I'm trying to do I'm trying to do an out on the more you talk, the more time it gives me to think. That's probably still not at work. Okay. Here we go. Right. Thank you everyone for listening, watching, or both. If you liked what you heard today, remember to head over to the Patreon at patreon.com slash acceptable losses, where there's a bunch of Patreon exclusive episodes to catch up on. Whether you do that or not, we'll be back real soon with more grim dark horror. Until then, he was DK, I wasn't, she was shy, and we'll see you next time. See, I can do outros. Fuck you, eat shit at the lottery was flawless. I'm out.