Customer Reviews

Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin, and the Discovery of the Queen's Ghost Ship

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What an historic HOOK this book has. In 1854 the HMS RESOLUTE is in the Artic searching for the lost John Franklin expedition. The RESOLUTE's captain gets stuck in the ice and abandon's the ship. A year later an American whaler discovers the RESLOTE drifting and deserted. The United States government reconditions the RESOLUTE and presents it as a gift to the Queen as an act of national friendship. Years later the Queen had the remains of the RESOLUTE carved into an ornate desk as a gift for President Hayes. And today that same desk still sits in the Oval Office. (Remember the famous picture with John John sticking his head out of JFK's desk.) This story alone would make for a great book but in what is a short 248 page narrative Mr. Sandler covers the totality of the British and American expeditions to the Artic as they all are in a rush to discover the Northwest Passage. Each chapter in the book is an example of excellent story telling covering a separate event or adventure. All amazing pieces of the story to building the big picture of what it took to explore and survive in the Artic. This is a fun, all be it light, overview of a topic you may not have given any consideration. I found the book very educational, entertaining, and very well presented. It even has an 18 page Epilogue reviewing what happened to the 36 explorer that make up the various expeditions. I might add here that I would recommend more highly the excellent book, The Ice Master about the doomed 1913 voyage of the karluk. This book really gets into the personal business of survival, luck and a super story. But not doubt about it, Martin Sandler has written a very entertaining page turner although with a more global overview.

Mr. Sandler can write well. The research quality is high. However, the completion of the book and its final editing are of very poor quality.

Several times in the book, very important small segments of the narrative are missing. For example, the book describes how McClure's ship gets frozen hard in the ice in Mercy Bay on Banks Island. It also describes how a sledging expedition from the Resolute gets to Winter Harbor on Mellville Island about 170 miles away and finds a message in a container from McClure. However, the event where McClure sledged from Mercy Harbor to Winter Harbor and back is entirely missing from the narrative. Thus, the narrative makes no sense. This omission is typical in the sloppy finish work of this book. Important earlier events that provide a logical understanding of subsequent events are randomly omitted from time to time.

Additionally, while Sandler puts forth a dozen good maps of the nineteenth century Artic, at least one quarter of the place names used in the narrative are not on any map. As it is unlikely that any reader has a nineteenth century Artic map, this makes the narrative completely unfathomable at times. There was an era when the creation of maps in history books was extremely expensive and horribly time consuming. This era is gone; any quality editor could check and rectify this significant problem with a full hard day's work.

Despite Sandler's good research and clear writing skills, I would not recommend this book. The book "Barrow's Boy's" is clearer and much better organized even though it is missing some excellent research on the personal qualities of the leaders that is found in Sandler's treatment here. However, it appears that this book was finally thrown together to meet a deadline and the final review, finish, and editing are very sloppily executed. This significantly diminishes what should have been a great history and frustrates and distracts readers so that they are quite dissatisfied.

I have not ever written a book review but, after having spent at least eight hours reading this book, I feel it important to report back to the author and editor the effects of their very poor finishing work.

It is exceptionally rare for a work of non-fiction to transport the reader to a landscape so alien that it defies the imagination, to meet characters whose particular combination of courage, determination, ingenuity, and vision drive them to feats beyond all experience. Resolute is such a story and were it not for Martin Sandler's scholarly writing, his copious end notes, appendices, and biographic epilogue, the reader might be forgiven for thinking it just so much fiction. But the images of skeletons languishing in open boats, of message cairns against bleak snowswept horizons, and the thought of hundreds of men cowering in the cold and dark for month after mind-numbing month awaiting the spring to break up the ice seizing their ships, cannot help but shock the modern reader. Sandler's scholarly history of the search for (and discovery of) the Northwest Passage, and of the search for the men who disappeared there both thrills and haunts us. It is extraordinary how much treasure, planning, and hope went into England's quest for a commercially viable route over the northern boundary of North America, but it is equally remarkable how large a role was played by wanton ignorance. The gentlemen (nearly all were eventually knighted), who took this stage, very rarely consulted the people who knew most about the geography and the terrain, that is, the whalers and the Inuit natives. And the disregard for fundamental science is startling. How could Second Secretary of the Admiralty, John Barrow, whose orders sent so many men into those icy seas, ever have imagined that the ice that blocked the sea at lower latitudes would somehow vanish as the pole was approached? And sending those men out with what amounted to experimental food canning technology amounted to negligent homicide.

Resolute is a book of history, of adventure, of biography, and to be perfectly truthful, it is also a book of horror. Read it for any of these reasons, but be prepared to be shaken up a little in the process.

RESOLUTE: THE EPIC SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE AND JOHN FRANKLIN, AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE QUEEN'S GHOST SHIP is true adventure history at its best, and a top pick for any general-interest lending collection. Historian Martin Sandler offers up a high-seas adventure journey set in the early 1800s, following a vanished famous explorer, some 39 attempted rescues, a ghost ship, and many discoveries. It makes for a fascinating, involving journey that reads with the drama of fiction but is entirely factual history.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

"Resolute" is interesting, it kept me reading, no doubt about it. It speaks of some artic exploration prior to the Franklin Expedition and much past it. It is amazing to see how many ships were sent out to find this lost explorer and his crews. I recommended it, with some reservations. There are not enough maps, or perhaps the maps that are printed would do if they had been more detailed. Too many times Mr. Sandler mentioned places, I went to the maps and found no trace of the areas he was spending much time describing. Also, each chapter had 1, usually page-long note at the back of the book. And while you can skip them if you like you will be missing valueable information. I don't see why the author didn't include them as part of the text or at least put them as footnotes on the same page.

Still there is a lot of history in this book. And so I recommend "Resolute" to anyone interested in 18th century artic exploration. It has many surprizes and is exciting.

This book is readable; I appreciate that. The age of Arctic exploration interests me, and this book is worth a read. Sandler does a good job with the maps and the names of the ships and their rews; the information does get bogged down a little when there are so many rescue missions underway in the early 1850's.

Great storytelling about the recovery of Resolute, her repairs and triumphal return to Britain, and her reincarnation as the Resolute desk for U.S. Presidents.

So much of the saga grew out of the arrogance of the British Navy refusing to consult with Arctic fishing experts or the native population.

Interesting read -- quite un-put-down-able through the second half. I recommend it.

The author has presented an impressive amount of information in one volume that spans a small period of time, historically. There has to be a substantial amount of setup to get to the point where he can start to go into the reasons and he covers Franklin's background, subsequent successes and failures and eventual disappearance with enough detail to be really informative without being too wordy and boring. This being the impetus for the meat of the book, it's absolutely necessary to deliver all this before he can really jump into the main story. Sandler handles this impressively. His grasp of the fact that so much of history is really the context in which it is received has been revelatory to me personally. If you pulled the story of the HMS Resolute out of the book, it could probably be presented in a less than 100 pages, but the delivery of all the details of what came before and after is makes that small, but core piece of the story THAT much more entertaining. Truly a book that delivers for any who are fans of historical novels, nautical history and especially fans of both.

Lost in the ice of the Arctic only to reappear again in open ocean in Sept 1855, the HMS Resolute would first venture to America, then returned to the Royal Navy, and again back to the Arctic! A mind boggling story for the search of the North-West passage and the loss of John Franklin, RN.
Makes the reader what these people were thinking, when they suffered, and how the died. Great read.

Several other reviews have given enough depth and details - I want to say that it's readable history. There are a lot of people who track thru this history and the author does a good job of not cluttering up the history flow with minutiae. That's in the Epilogue, Appendices and Chapter Notes. Only 4 stars because of the lack of maps.

Story is interesting, but it is about the quest to find the Northwest Passage. The Resolute had a relatively minor role in this effort. It was lost, was found, was reconditioned, was returned to England, and, finally, decommissioned. The best part of the Resolute's story is the famous Oval Office Desk. The book was difficult to read because Sandler had so many names and characters in the book. This made it very hard to follow. Good read, but slow and tedious to get through. Not one of my favorites.