Author provides new look at disastrous Franklin expedition

By CNN.com Senior Writer Jamie Allen

February 9, 2000
Web posted at: 4:23 p.m. EST (2123 GMT)

ATLANTA (CNN) -- It was the greatest Arctic expedition of its day, one of the greatest adventures of recorded time.

In the summer of 1845, Sir John Franklin and his British Admiralty crew of a 128 set out to find the mythical Northwest Passage -- a shipping lane over the top of the Earth.

The expedition had all the comforts of modern technology -- canned food supplies that should last years, steam engines and new propeller engines with retractable blades, one-inch-thick plates of steel separating the ship from icy impacts, desalination devices built into the stoves in case the water supply ran low.

Despite all this, however, the expedition ended in disaster. Everyone on board died. Some were found on the ships, others were located miles from the ships, and some were never found.

Scott Cookman, an Atlanta-based writer, first read about this story while on his own adventure, staying at a remote cabin in the wilds of Ontario, Canada.

"I was taking a long-deserved vacation," he recalls. "A few minutes before I got on the bush plane I picked up a book called 'Frozen in Time' by Dr. John Geiger.

"The thesis he put together in his book was that lead poisoning in the canned food probably caused the demise of the expedition," Cookman, 47, says. "But looking at that thesis, it didn't seem to hold water, so I decided to go looking around for a more plausible explanation for what might have killed off the expedition."

Cookman's search has come to a conclusion. In his new book, "Ice Blink" (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), Cookman blames the disaster on food poisoning. He has scoured cartons full of records that were later recovered from the expedition as evidence, and he uses that to build his case.

Cookman says the crew's canned food, which was a new technology at the time, was contaminated with the bacteria that causes botulism, which affects its victims with paralysis, problems with vision and breathing, and often leads to death.

"This is extremely lethal," Cookman says of Clostridium botulinum. "It's the most potent poison known to man. It's roughly six million times more toxic than rattle snake venom. It's 100,000 times more toxic than sarin nerve gas.

"We're talking an extremely potent poison which, even in minute quantities, is deadly and usually does kill in 48 to 72 hours. So my thesis of the book is that is indeed what happened to them."

More directly, Cookman blames the man who provided the canned food to the crew, a shady contractor named Stephan Goldner.

"If you look at his correspondence, the man's an extremely slippery character and he's straight out of a Dickens novel," says Cookman. "You couldn't write anybody more slippery than Mr. Goldner."

Cookman says the majority of the foods provided by Goldner -- red meat and root vegetables -- are particularly susceptible to contamination. Cookman also says Goldner's meat was unclean, containing animal intestines. And the way Goldner canned the food, Cookman argues, provided an "ideal environment" for the bacteria to fester and blossom.

If Cookman's thesis is correct -- and it has already been called "plausible" by one official at the Centers for Disease Control -- the picture painted is indeed a bleak one.

Not only did crew members begin to die off in record numbers on the expedition, but when the survivors took to walking across the frozen landscape hoping to find civilization, they took the canned food -- and their own death -- with them.

Cookman says the story needs to be told to a new generation that has long forgotten Franklin's last expedition.

"I don't think most Americans are familiar with the Franklin expedition," he says. "I think in the U.K. he's certainly lionized as a hero and I think there's much greater famiiarity with it over in England. But I don't think many Americans know about it, so I think it's going to be a new adventure story for them."

And Cookman believes modern society can learn something from the tragedy. The 1840s was a time not unlike our own, as people thought they had all the technology they needed to tackle any new challenge.

"It was time when people put great stock and faith in technology and man-made inventions to bring nature to heal," he says. "I think what's learned from the expedition is that man's overwhelming belief in technology is often a Chimera."

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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