The Northwest Passage is a famously treacherous and mysterious area of the Arctic. In the 1800s, a British crew of over 120 men disappeared while trying to find the passage. Jackson, New Hampshire author and adventurer Mark Synnott was already eager to sail the Arctic waters when he first learned about the unsolved shipwreck. In his new book, “Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery,” he traces the clues as to what happened to the crew as he also sails the Arctic passage where they disappeared.
NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Synnott about his experience in the Arctic.
Transcript
This is one of those enduring mysteries that I remember hearing about as a kid and seeing documentaries on. I happen to be chatting with you now over Zoom because you're on a sailing trip right now. Where about are you?
We're on a little island in French Polynesia, which is called Ua Pou. The cool thing about what's happening now is [it's] just the continuation of the voyage that I wrote about in the book, which started from Saco, Maine, near Biddeford, right there at the head of the Saco River in June 2022. Fourteen-thousand miles later and we're in French Polynesia aboard Polar Sun.
So in 2022 you planned this mission to sail through the Northwest Passage where there was this famous shipwreck. Tell us more about that story and what we know [about] what happened to that crew?
Well, when I got this boat, Polar Sun, in 2019, I had this question: If I could go anywhere in the world in this boat right now, where would it be? And the answer surprised me a little bit, but it hit me pretty hard – which was that the place I wanted to go was to the Arctic.
So then I started looking into the feasibility of sailing Polar Sun into the Arctic. Like, could I do it? Could the boat do it? How much ice was up there? And then because I like to do this storytelling, I just started digging around to see what's the best story to tell there. And it's really obvious that that's the Franklin expedition because it's this incredible mystery.
We still don't know, 175 years later, what happened to those guys. They sailed into the Northwest Passage in 1845 aboard two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, and they disappeared. And no one made it out to tell the story of what happened. So it's one of the great mysteries of exploration.
Everybody loves a great mystery, myself included. So I try to do these adventures that are epic enough where just the story itself of following in the footsteps of these people is enough to hold it up. And I feel like that's what we've got here.
I know that over the years people've tried to solve those mysteries. Britain back in the 19th century tried to send other expeditions out. You want to go there, you want to try it yourself. You actually end up going and getting trapped in the ice for a time, don't you?
Yeah, the whole thing when you go up there, it's about avoiding getting caught in the ice. My first question was, "Well, how much ice is still in the Arctic?" And it's melting and there's not as much as there was when Franklin was there or even 30, 40 years ago, but there's still a lot of ice. And in some ways, it's just as treacherous because some of these channels that have always been frozen, that have blocked the ice, they have opened up.
Part of my story is that even using modern technology, communicating with the Canadian Ice Service, looking at satellite photos for how the ice was moving, endeavoring to the absolute best of our abilities to avoid getting caught in the ice, we still got trapped. And at the time it was the worst, most stressful thing that I've ever experienced in my life, and it gave us a taste of what it was like for Franklin. A small taste, because we were only trapped for 10 days versus for them, potentially 10 years. But it did give us a very up close and personal look at the ice and what that's all about.
And that's the thing that I like to do with my writing. I love the immersive journalism where I'm in the story. I did that on Everest with my book "The Third Pole." I did that with my book about Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan, "The Impossible Climb." Plus, I get to go on an epic adventure, which is what I love more than anything.
