Review — Arctic Hell-ship: The Voyage of the HMS Enterprise 1850-1855

Arctic Hell-ship: The Voyage of the hms
Enterprise 1850–1855
by William Barr
University of Alberta Press (2007), 318 pp.

Three parts northern exploration and one part The Shining, William Barr’s Arctic Hell-ship tells the astonishing story of the hms Enterprise, half of a search team dispatched by the British Royal Navy in 1850 to find the missing Franklin Expedition. Northern exploration because Captain Richard Collinson did manage, despite his stubbornness and naïveté, to survey a small portion of uncharted land; The Shining because the other element here is the depths of paranoid delusion into which an isolated mind can descend while trapped on board an icebound ship for three consecutive Arctic winters.

Barr’s compelling account shows a captain who was an oblivious explorer, a lucky navigator, and an unbalanced man. He came within fifty kilometres of skeletal remnants of the Franklin Expedition, yet ignored obvious clues that should have sent him in that direction. While his safe passage through the Dease Strait would later earn him high praise from Roald Amundsen, Collinson failed to deduce that he was largely combing territory that had already been explored. Perhaps most bizarrely, he systematically turned on his crew, making unfounded allegations with alarming frequency. By the time the Enterprise emerged from the Bering Strait in August 1854, Collinson had placed every executive officer on the ship under arrest, leaving only the surgeon and assistant surgeon free.

The real strengths of Arctic Hell-ship are the depth and meticulousness of Barr’s research. His judicious inclusion of primary source material, most of it previously unpublished, gives the narrative additional colour and urgency. On the voyage home, a crewman notes that Inuit now demand liquor whenever they trade, and if they can’t get it, gunpowder will do: “I was forced to give them a 2lb. Cannister of fine powder [for a caribou leg] but before they would have been content with a few trinkets of little or no value.” By bringing such telling details to light, Barr puts his Hell-ship where it belongs: in the dark waters of history as the winds began to change.