"Death in the Ice" Comes to Mystic

Inkstand from HMS "Resolute," courtesy Mystic Seaport Musem

It's been a long voyage. "Death in the Ice," which combines relics of the Franklin expedition recovered in the 19th century with new finds from HMS Erebus brought back and conserved by Parks Canada since her discovery in 2014, first set sail, (as it were) at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in the summer of 2017. Its second stop, at the Canadian Museum of History, began in March of this year, and ran through September. And now it comes into port at the Mystic Seaport Museum, in a stop that is both a fresh step on its voyage and also a sort of homecoming. For it's not far from here, in New London, where HMS "Resolute" first docked after being found adrift at sea, and -- even closer -- at the Starr Burying Ground, a fifteen-minute drive away in Groton, where Tookoolito, Charles Francis Hall's translator and guide during his nearly decade-long search for Franklin, lies at rest along with two of her children. The extraordinary roles played by Americans in that search have never been more evident, even as -- for the most part -- the story of the Franklin expedition is less well-known here than in Canada or Britain. There have been harbingers of change, though -- beginning with AMC's extraordinary television series "The Terror," and continuing with the warm reception given here to Michael Palin and his book Erebus: The Story of a Ship -- that this is about to change, and the exhibit in Mystic is about to launch a fresh cannonade.

Mortar shell fired by HMS Terror on the town of Stonington

And, appropriately enough, one of the items unique to this version of the exhibition is a mortar bomb, fired from the 13-inch mortar mounted amidships on HMS "Terror" on the people of Stonington, Connecticut, scarcely ten miles distant, in the War of 1812. Similar shells were "bursting in air" during that same vessel's bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and are the very same that are sung of in our national anthem. That a ship of war could later become a vessel of discovery is but one of the many revelations that await those who come to visit this magnificent show. Here, nearly all the extraordinary relics of the previous exhibits are joined by this ball, an inkstand, chairs, and china ware from HMS Resolute -- along with a fiddle perhaps played there in the presence of Captain Kellett -- and the Grinnell Desk (on loan from the New Bedford Whaling Museum), one of four "Resolute" desks made by command of Queen Victoria from the timbers of that storied vessel. It is a show not to be missed! -- and opens, appropriately enough, on the first day of the wintry month of December. More information, and tickets, can be found on the Mystic Seaport website here.