Harry Peglar and his papers

The "roundel" from Peglar's Papers

As imagined by AMC's writers, and vividly brought to life by Kevin Guthrie, Harry Peglar is a pensive, thoughtful, reflective man. Under the mentorship of subordinate officers' steward John Bridgens (John Lynch), who feeds him books from Shakespeare to Herodotus, he evolves into one of the key figures of the story, particularly as it reaches its later stages. It's no accident that the episode titles of two of the last three installments -- "The Terror Camp Clear" and "The C, the C, the open C!" are both lines taken from the mysterious "Peglar Papers," of which he was the presumed author, and which constitute the sole surviving written record -- aside from the "Victory Point Note" -- yet recovered from the expedition. So who was Peglar, in real life? Who was Bridgens? How much did the show's writers draw from his writings, and what can we learn from these cryptic, mostly backwards-written papers?

Peglar's old neighborhood

Thanks to the work of pioneering Franklin scholars Richard Cyriax and A.G.E. Jones, we know a bit more about Peglar than the other regular seamen aboard Franklin's ships. Harry Peglar was born in either 1811 or 1812; his father was a gunsmith with a shop at 12 Buckingham Row, Petty France (later Victoria Street), Westminster. As Jones observes, and as we can see on this detail from Stanford's Library Map of London, the Blue Coat (now Blewcoat) School was quite nearby, and Peglar might possibly have attended (the building still stands, though now used as a fashionware shop. Like other similar charity schools, it would have provided young Harry with the sort of rudimentary education that was, at the time, thought all that poor children needed, or could use.

This modest training was supplemented when Peglar entered the Marine Society, which prepared young men for navy or merchant service; on his entry in 1825, he was noted as being able to both read and write. He was only there a month before being dispatched to the Solebay training station for his final practical training, after which he was issued a set of sea-going clothes, along with needles and thread, a canvas bag, a prayer book, and a copy of the Reverend Sellar's Abridgement of the Bible (one can imagine that his tendency to quote or paraphrase passages from these books must have had its roots here).

His career at sea was an extensive one; before joining the "Terror" he'd served aboard more than a dozen ships, from the Clio in 1825 to the Temeraire in 1844, on voyages to China, Singapore, Bombay, and the West Indies. His conduct was generally noted as satisfactory, though he did earn one indication of unsatisfactory while aboard the Marquis Camden in 1833, where he was cited for drunkenness and mutinous conduct -- for which he was given two dozen lashes and disrated to an ordinary seaman. The lesson apparently took, though, as his conduct was good for the rest of his career, and he re-ascended the ranks, coming aboard Terror as "Captain of the Foretop" -- quite a senior grade.

The wallet that contained the papers

As his papers testify, though, his literacy in writing was somewhat wanting; he tended to spell phonetically (Jamaker for Jamaica, wissel for whistle, and sitty for city). It would seem unlikely that he was very widely read, as one would think that would have influenced his spelling habits, and a volume of Herodotus would seem quite a challenge! But the relationship with Bridgens (who was in fact more than a decade his junior) is the show's way of representing the fact that Peglar's infamous papers were found in the jacket pocket of a corpse on King William Island, that of a man who, when living, tied his neckerchief in a steward's knot, and wore a coat with cloth-covered buttons -- telltale signs of his shipboard status as a steward.

Two candidates have been proposed for this person from among the crew of the Terror: William Armitage, the gun-room steward, and William Gibson, the subordinate officers' steward (the same rank as Bridgens on Erebus). Both had served with Peglar before, giving ground for the presumption that the dead steward was, as a friend, hoping to carry Peglar's papers home (he in this theory being deceased). Recent work by Glenn M. Stein seems to indicate that Armitage was illiterate, whereas Gibson was not -- which could be a key detail. His paper "Scattered Memories and Frozen Bones: Revealing a Sailor of the Franklin Expedition, 1845-48" is available free from my website as a .pdf.

As to the papers themselves, they are their own special enigma; I've been quoted as referring to them as the "Dead Sea Scrolls of the North." Not only are nearly all of them written backwards, but they contain almost nothing relating to the Franklin expedution, with the exception of a blank page headed "lines writ in the Arctic" and the enigmatic "the Terror Camp Clear" (or, I should say, Eht Rerrot Pmac Raelc!) I've spent more than twenty years working to decipher them, with some success, following in the footsteps of Cyriax and Jones. Those who wish to go down the rabbit hole -- you've been warned -- may read my most recent analysis, which appeared a few years ago in the Trafalgar Chronicle. You can also search this blog for earlier posts about Peglar -- no stone has been left unturned -- I've even identified the torn newspaper clipping with which his wallet (see above) was lined -- but the enigma remains.