The Terror: Men Against the Arctic and the Tuunbaq

We were homeward bound one night on the deep,
Swinging in my hammock, I fell asleep.
I dreamed a dream, and I thought it true,
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew.
                    —“Lady Franklin’s Lament”, a traditional ballad

How did the HMS Terror, a Vesuvius-class bomb ship, built in Devon, which fought during the War of 1812, including the bombardment of Fort McHenry at the Battle of Baltimore—the battle that inspired the poet Francis Scott Key to write the “The Star-Spangled Banner”—end up frozen and abandoned in Arctic ice three decades later, with the loss of all hands?

This question is addressed, as compelling entertainment, in The Terror, an AMC television series of ten episodes about Sir John Franklin’s 1846 Royal Navy expedition of two ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, to the Arctic Archipelago in search of a North-West Passage.

The series is based on the 936-page novel The Terror, written by Dan Simmons. The book has a single promotional blurb on the front cover by Stephen King, who calls it one of the most memorable reads of 2007: “a brilliant, massive combination of history and supernatural horror”.

I take special notice of books that bear Stephen King’s recommendation. Years ago, they led me to two other novels, long before they had become blockbuster films: The Godfather by Mario Puzo, and Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. Both books, and their subsequent films, were cultural game-changers. Stephen King is a voracious reader, a generous mentor, and has a particular gift of predicting this kind of popular masterpiece.

The Terror, in its own way, has the same potential. It has created a remarkable fusion of meticulous historical research and fictional horror. Alison Flood of the Guardian wrote:

I emerged from the novel shivering, terrified and Arctic-obsessed … I couldn’t put it down … a truly chilling horror story, made even more terrifying when you remember that much of the horror Simmons describes is based on reality.

In the novel’s acknowledgments thirty-six books are listed as source material, including A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin by F.L. McClintock (1859). Simmons also made extensive use of the notes and correspondence from the Francis Crozier Collection at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. The dedication acknowledges the cast and crew of the 1951 science-fiction horror film The Thing, whose plot concerns the discovery of a crashed flying saucer and a plant-based alien life-form deep in the Arctic wilderness. In an interview with Nightmare Magazine, Simmons said:

I’d been hunting for some way to write about the Antarctic because that has been my interest since 1958 as a little kid. They had the International Geophysical Year where they created American bases … in the Antarctic, and that interest has never waned for me, just the great, glorious tales of the endeavour and all the explorers, even the ones who … died down there. I wanted to find something scary set in Antarctica, but the biggest, scariest animal I could find was a penguin, so I made a joke to my editor about a killer penguin and that’s when I stumbled across a footnote that led me to another footnote that told me about the John Franklin expedition disappearing with no trace … two ships, 127 men.

The novel includes detailed maps, particularly of King William Island, where the expedition’s final land trek occurred, and it opens with a Herman Melville quote, on the terror of whiteness, from Moby Dick: “not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark”. Like Melville’s great white leviathan, a huge bear-like predator, whose tracks “appeared to be longer than a man’s arm” is central, as a preternatural metaphor.

The plot pivots around Sir John Franklin’s historical expedition, but the true protagonist of both the book and the series is the second-in-command, Francis Crozier. Alasdair Stuart, in Barnes & Noble’s Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog, said:

Played by genre all-time great Jared Harris, Captain Francis Crozier is very much a character to watch. The Terror puts all its characters through hell, but Crozier is arguably the one who spends the most time there. A principled officer, a high functioning alcoholic, and a man seething with rage at the fact his nationality (Irish) means his career will be permanently stymied, he’s a mercurial, glowering figure.

In the series, the ship that Franklin (played by Ciaran Hinds) commands, the HMS Erebus, hits an ice floe, damaging its propeller. Crozier, commander of the Terror, is concerned that they will be stuck in the pack ice through winter and advises consolidating the men onto one ship, the Terror, in an attempt to backtrack and sail south before it is too late. Franklin, clearly with his eye on discovery of a North-West Passage, over-rules Crozier and both ships continue, as best they can, in the hopes of reaching open water. But they become trapped.

After spending one winter locked in ice, Franklin sends out small groups to hunt for game and a possible way through. One search party mistakes a Netsilik Inuit man, and his daughter, clothed from head to foot in fur, for polar bears and opens fire, mortally wounding the man. As the crew is attending to the man, a huge, unseen creature emerges from the ice and kills one of the crew, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. The dying shaman confides to his daughter, played by Nive Nielsen, that she is now responsible for restraining this creature, the Tuunbaq. After the murder of her father, the daughter refuses to communicate with them and is nicknamed “Lady Silence”. After she escapes, Franklin leads a small armed party in an attempt to hunt down the Tuunbaq, but the creature overpowers them, killing Franklin.

Before leaving England, Crozier had been rejected by Franklin’s niece, Sophia Cracroft, due to his “station”—she refused him on the grounds that she could never be a “commander’s wife”. Obsessive memories of their single erotic encounter contribute to his disillusionment with the mission and his descent into alcoholism. Crozier has brought a personal stash of 324 bottles of whisky, “long since reach[ing] that point of being the kind of drunkard where quantity always trumped quality”, and he plans to kill himself when the whisky is finished.

The Tuunbaq attacks again and is revealed to be a gigantic white bear-like creature with humanoid features. Its savagery and stealth are reminiscent of the shadowy monster in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Someone suggests the animal could be “one of the last members of some ancient species—something larger, smarter, faster and infinitely more violent than its descendant, the smaller north polar bear we see in such abundance”.

After Franklin’s death, Crozier assumes command of the expedition and resolves to sober up, removing himself temporarily from duty for the painful withdrawal, temporarily delegating command of both ships to James Fitzjames (played by Tobias Menzies).

Tins of food in the ships’ store are discovered to have been incorrectly soldered (as canning was a relatively new invention) spoiling most of the contents and creating lead-poisoning which is beginning to affect the men. Fitzjames proposes abandoning both ships, with a plan to lead the men out on foot. Crozier recovers and rejoins the crew, agreeing with Fitzjames’s plan. Caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey and Lieutenant John Irving, while on a hunting party, encounter a small band of Netsilik Inuit who, in a spirit of goodwill, offer Irving food. But Hickey, beginning to lose his mind, murders Irving, and claims he was killed by the natives. In revenge, the crew kills the entire Inuit family, including the women and children.

Crozier suspects Hickey has lied and, after sufficient evidence, Hickey is sentenced to hang. But before the sentence can be carried out, the Tuunbaq attacks again and, in the confusion, Hickey and the other mutineers escape, with weapons and supplies, taking Dr Henry Goodsir hostage with them. They establish their own camp a fair distance away from the main camp and begin cannibalising their dead shipmates.

Crozier is surprised by some of Hickey’s men, made a prisoner, and escorted to the mutineers’ camp. Goodsir, accepting that he will be killed soon anyway, comes up with a heroic plan: poisoning himself and cutting his wrists, thereby deceiving Hickey’s men as to the cause of his death. He knows that his flesh will be fatal when they consume it. After they eat his body, the crew slowly begins to sicken. The Tuunbaq attacks again, killing Hickey and the ailing men, but it perishes from ingesting the poisoned bodies. Crozier, the only survivor of the expedition, is badly wounded by the Tuunbaq. Lady Silence returns, nursing him back to life, but is later blamed by tribal elders for the death of the sacred Tuunbaq and exiled. Crozier, persuaded that this is the Inuit way, does not follow her.

The final episode ends with the arrival of a British search party hunting for possible survivors. Crozier conceals himself, instructing his Inuit family to mislead them that everyone from the expedition has perished and there is no North-West Passage.

Remarkably, the awesome and convincing cinematography of the expansive Arctic environment throughout the entire production was shot on indoor sets, utilising cutting-edge 360-degree visual effects. (The primary set of the 1951 film The Thing was an ice storage plant in Los Angeles.) One of the executive producers, Soo Hugh, said in an interview in IndieWire:

Though taking a film crew to the Arctic’s icy seas was obviously never on the table, most of the series wasn’t even shot outside, and the scenes that were took place during a Croatian summer that crept up to eighty-four degrees. The frigid cold cutting through this period drama was created the new-fashioned way: with CGI wizardry.

For the effects, another executive producer, Ridley Scott, brought in the “same vendor and same methods” that he had used on his hugely successful film The Martian.

Netsilik Inuit were consulted and hired as actors and consultants. The Tuunbaq is a fictional creation, but is based on Netsilik lore of the Tuurngait (killing spirit), a soul-animated killing machine created thousands of years ago by Sedna, Spirit of the Sea. Simmons dedicates an entire chapter in the book—a crash course in Inuit spirituality—to explain the origins of this demon.

According to legend, Sedna controls all life in the ocean including ice tornadoes and is a vengeful goddess, requiring placating with favours and gifts. The Tuurngait incarnates through fish, caribou or white bears and can only be controlled by shamans with the assistance of idols or trinkets worn on their body. The Inuit believe that when a spirit dies it continues living in an adjacent world: the spirit world. Inuit hunters breathe into the mouth of a just-killed seal in respect for the seal’s life. A bad hunt is attributed to a displeased spirit.

Canadian film-makers and Inuit researchers Joan and John Goldi said:

They had to pay a deep respect to the spirit of the animals that they hunted, so that the spirit reappeared in another animal that could sacrifice its life again. If they did not pay their respects to the spirit, the spirit would reappear as a demon.

The Tuunbaq had been banished, for transgressions, by Sedna, from the spirit world onto the physical plane of the Arctic, where its form was fixed into the most dangerous of predators, a grotesque mutation of the white polar bear, the only predator on earth that regularly preys on humans. It has been killing and hunting Inuit for centuries and one of the crucial jobs of the shamans was to keep it contained.

These shamans have been “bred” over generations to have powers of clairvoyance, and the gift of “thought-sending”. They are known as sixam ieua—spirit-governors-of-the-sky—and their tongues are removed so they can no longer communicate with other people, but only with the Tuunbaq, via the mysterious technique of “throat-singing”.

These superstitions of the Inuit are counterpointed by the equally bizarre fears of ordinary sailors:

 “Demon,” Crozier says, in contempt. “These are the very seamen who believe in ghosts, faeries, Jonahs, mermaids, curses and sea monsters … I’ve seen you scratch the sail to summon wind.”

There are several differences between the book and the television adaptation. In the novel, Lady Silence is tongueless—“chewed off while she was very small … and so close to the root of the member that there is no possibility that she did this to herself”—but in the series she can speak. She later mutilates her tongue with a knife in order to take over from her father as a shaman.

In the series, Crozier and Goodsir speak in Inuit to Lady Silence, but in the novel they are never able to understand each other. Lady Silence is only able to communicate with Crozier, long after the entire expedition is dead, using “talking strings”—a kind of “cat’s cradle” of string pictographs made with both hands, which are traditionally used in Inuit culture to instruct children.

In the novel, during Crozier’s alcohol withdrawal, leadership of the expedition is passed to First Lieutenant Edward Little, but in the series this position is correctly handed over to the third-in-command of the expedition, Captain James Fitzjames.

The Tuunbaq, in the novel, can only be kept in check from its hunger for killing humans by an Inuit shaman. But in the series, an elder attributes the scarcity of game, which is causing starvation in the tribe, to the incursion of the white explorers, and instructs Lady Silence to guide the Tuunbaq to the expedition’s camp in order to correct this imbalance. The Tuunbaq is killed in the series; but in the novel it survives.

In the television adaptation, Henry Goodsir drinks poison in order to outwit and kill the mutineers, but in the novel, he leaves a clear cautionary note on his body, warning the men that if they try to eat him, they will die. This is done to ensure that his body will not be desecrated after his death.

The series closes with Lady Silence (whose Inuit name is Silna) exiled from the tribe. She slips away secretly in the middle of the night. When Crozier shows concern, and wants to follow her, no one in the tribe will assist him. However, at the end of the novel, Silna is pregnant with Crozier’s child and they continue to live in the tribe. Crozier receives an Inuit name, Taliriktug (strong arm), and learns their language.

In the book, Crozier returns to the site of the Terror and sets it on fire; its charred ruins sink beneath the ice. In reality, the ship was recovered in 2016 by an Arctic Research Foundation expedition, and found to be in excellent condition.

Simmons’s novel contains beautiful passages throughout, such as this description of an Aurora Borealis:

Crozier comes up on deck to find his ship under attack by celestial ghosts … shimmering fields of light lunge, but quickly withdraw, like the colourful arms of aggressive, but ultimately uncertain spectres [with] ectoplasmic skeletal fingers … the jagged ice field around the ship turns blue, then bleeds violet, then glows as green as the hills of his childhood in Northern Ireland.

When the sun disappears completely, from November until February, it is as “black as the inside of an eel’s belly outside, no stars, no aurora, no moon, and cold, the temperature on deck … sixty-three degrees below zero”.

While the series is a male-oriented adventure, the novel is spiced with erotic passages. Here is part of Crozier’s memorable tryst with Sophia Cracroft:

“Platypuses lay eggs, you know,” continued Sophia, “like reptiles. But the mothers secrete milk, like mammals.”

Through the water he could see the dark circles in the centres of the white globes of her breasts.

“Really?” he said.

“Aunt Jane, who is something of a naturalist herself, believes that the venomous spurs on the hind legs of the male are used not only to fight other male platypuses and intruders, but to hang onto the female when they are swimming and mating at the same time. Presumably he does not secrete the venom when clinging to his breeding partner.”

“Yes?” said Crozier, and wondered if he should have said No? He had no idea what they were talking about.

During their love-making in a pond, Crozier has a reflection that is one of the subtlest lines of erotic poetry I have read: “How can anything be wetter than water? he wondered.”

Simmons describes the free, laughing sexuality of the Inuit:

Local natives took sexual intercourse so lightly that men would offer their wives and daughters to whalers or Discovery Service explorers in exchange for the cheapest trinket. Sometimes, Crozier knew, the women just offered themselves up for the fun of it, giggling and chatting with other women and children even as the sailors strained and puffed and moaned …

This passage is evocative of the 1960s film of Eskimo life Savage Innocents, with Anthony Quinn (which inspired the Bob Dylan song “The Mighty Quinn”), in which Inuk, played by Quinn, offers his wife to a hunter friend, Anarvik, as a gesture of respect and compassion for his loneliness. “You may laugh with my wife for awhile,” he says. “You have permission. A little change does her good. Makes her eyes shine.” But Anarvik is less than enraptured by the offer. Inuk tells his wife, “This man is tired of asking for favours. He wishes to laugh with a woman of his own.”

Nive Nielsen, who portrays Lady Silence, is an Inuk (the singular form of Inuit) and a singer-songwriter who has a band, the Deer Children. She has sung for Queen Margrethe of Denmark, and was in the 2005 film The New World. The term Eskimo, or Esquimaux, translates as “eaters of raw flesh” and is considered derogatory, as it was used by the early British explorers, and Inuit (literally, “Real People”), is the preferred term.

In the series, Greta Scacchi plays the small and somewhat ineffective role of Lady Jane Franklin. The real Lady Franklin was wealthy and influential and sponsored seven expeditions to find her husband. In 1836, when Sir John Franklin was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, she became his second wife. Songs were written about her, and Bob Dylan borrowed from the traditional ballad “Lady Franklin’s Lament” for his 1963 song “Bob Dylan’s Dream”. Simmons describes her bedroom:

Crammed carpet to ceiling with animal skeletons, meteorites, stone fossils, Aborigine war clubs, native drums, carved wooden war masks, ten-foot paddles … a plethora of stuffed birds and at least one expertly taxidermied monkey … more like a museum or a menagerie than the boudoir of a lady.

Lady Franklin purchased 130 acres of land in Hobart for a botanical garden, “Ancanthe”, and was instrumental in making Tasmania the intellectual capital of the colonies. She was the first woman to climb Mount Wellington and the first woman to travel overland from Melbourne to Sydney. Conflicts between the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir John, and the colonial secretary of Van Diemen’s Land, John Montagu, resulted in Franklin and his wife being recalled to England in 1843.

There were nine HMS Terrors, five before Franklin’s ship and three afterwards. One was burnt in 1704 by the French, six were sold off, one was sunk in a German air attack in 1941, and two were lost. Franklin’s ship had been a war vessel, with two mortars and ten cannon, that had participated in the Burning of Washington and the Battle of Baltimore. In the American national anthem’s well-known lyrics, much of “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air”, were delivered by HMS Terror. Due to her strong framework as a military ship, the Terror was ideal for withstanding polar ice and was converted twenty years later for exploration, proving its mettle in the George Back Arctic Expedition of 1836 and the Ross Expedition of 1839.

In the nineteenth century, polar expeditions were major political and social events. Fortunes and careers, including knighthoods, were sought by military men willing to venture into unknown and dangerous waters. In Dr Harry Goodsir’s private diary, presented in the novel in alternating chapters, he writes, “More than ten thousand well-wishers and Persons of Importance crowded the docks at Greenhithe to see us off. Speeches resounded until I thought we would never be allowed to depart … bands played.”

The final journey of the Terror was Franklin’s third expedition to the Arctic. He had attempted to find the North-West Passage in 1818, and again in 1824. Now fifty-nine years old, it had been an unfulfilled dream of his for thirty years. He may also have seen this final attempt as a way to redeem himself from the humiliation of his dismissal from Van Diemen’s Land.

Five years before the fatal Arctic expedition, the Erebus and the Terror had been part of an earlier expedition, under the command of Captain James Ross, leading to the discovery of Antarctica. Mount Erebus, on Ross Island, next to its inactive sister, Mount Terror, is currently one of the most active volcanoes on Earth.

There will be a second season of The Terror next year, titled The Terror: Infamy. According to advance promotion it will “centre on an uncanny spectre that menaces a Japanese-American community from its home in Southern California to the internment camps to the war in the Pacific”. This sounds to me as if the producers are trying to stretch their winning blend of history and horror into an extended franchise, which is the dismal trend with sequels.