Hubris Kills: The Disappearance of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus

There are definitely wrong ways to search for the Northwest Passage.

On the wall of my home office is a framed newspaper article from August 1850, in which an unnamed correspondent describes the hunt for the remains of the Franklin Expedition; it’s accompanied by an etching of sailboats attempting to navigate around an iceberg near the Arctic Circle.

I first became mildly obsessed with the Franklin Expedition in middle school, when I stumbled upon a reference to it in a book about the world’s most famous mysteries. Two British ships (the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus) disappear in the mid-1840s while attempting to navigate the Northwest Passage? Pure adventure fodder. For years, I tinkered with writing a fictional narrative about it, but I could never get the voice right, no matter how much research I did.

Then, in 2007, Dan Simmons published his novelization of the expedition, titled “The Terror.” Because he’s a horror…