UBC: Lambert, The Gates of Hell

The Gates of Hell: Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage by Andrew Lambert

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Lambert wants to prove that Sir John Franklin was neither weak nor indecisive nor a poor leader. Unfortunately, every time he put forward evidence of same, to me, it looked like evidence that Franklin was exactly the things Lambert was trying to prove he wasn't: weak, indecisive, and a very poor leader, especially in a crisis.

Also, this book is not about "Sir John Franklin's Tragic Quest for the North West Passage." For one thing, part of Lambert's thesis is that Franklin didn't set off into the Arctic to discover the Northwest Passage at all, that he was collecting geomagnetic readings--if he was trying to find anything or reach anything, it was the magnetic north pole. But more importantly, this book isn't really about Franklin's last voyage. It's about Franklin's career beforehand, and about the search for Franklin afterwards--and decidedly about the scientific obsessions of the day--but there's almost no discussion of the voyage of the Erebus and the Terror and what happened to their crews. Since--carrion crow that I am--I was looking for a book about the catastrophe of 1845, I was disappointed that the title of the book and the content of the book did not match very well.

But I wouldn't even have minded that if the book had been a better book. I found Lambert to be a poor historian: e.g., after quoting at length Thomas Arnold's horrific letter to Franklin about Franklin's appointment as governor of Van Diemen's Land: "If they will colonize with convicts, I am satisfied that the stain should last, not only for one whole life, but for more than one generation; that no convict or convict's child should ever be a free citizen; and that, even in the third generation, the offspring should be excluded from all the offices of honour or authority in the colony" (95), Lambert, while asserting that "Arnold's potent mix of evangelical faith and moral purpose would be the key to Franklin's government" (95), entirely fails to mention whether Franklin agreed with him about the inheritable nature of iniquity or whether the ideas in this letter had any discernible influence on how he governed. And, honestly, I am going to regard with skepticism any historian of nineteenth century British naval history who can write the sentence, "For a man of faith, used to the honest, open and frank world of naval service where the national good outweighed personal ambition, the experience [of governing Van Diemen's Land] was traumatic" (137)--especially given how the behavior of many of the naval officers in this book blatantly demonstrates its falsity.

Although I grant that there's nothing he can do about the overwhelmingly masculine nature of his subject matter, I was annoyed by his treatment of Jane Franklin, whom he called variously "Jane," "Lady Franklin," and "Lady Jane"--while never taking the liberty of calling her husband just plain "John." It's a small point, but indicative of the potential for much larger problems. He was also utterly uninterested in anyone who was not a commissioned officer, which replicates the social biases of his subject rather than examining them.

Ultimately, I found this book frustrating. Lambert is trying to exculpate Sir John Franklin from the judgment history has made of him, and he has written a poor work of history in the (failed) attempt.



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