Aside from the paranormal aspects of the show, was AMC's "The Terror" historically accurate with regards to crew names, family and naval drama back in Britain?

by InfamousHat
cdesmoulins

Oh hey! This is a great question -- "is it accurate?" is usually a tougher question for me to answer (if a film does a great job of conveying the mood of a particular historical era but the costumes and set designs are dead wrong, for instance, or if a book has great material descriptions but hugely inaccurate historical events) but luckily in this case the question seems more concrete. The names of characters in AMC's The Terror are drawn from the muster rolls of the HMS Erebus and Terror, and are reflective of reality -- from the ships' captains, officers, and surgeons to its carpenters and sailmakers. However, broadly speaking The Terror's treatment of these characters gets less biographically exact as they go down the ladder in terms of rank. Sir John Franklin's family relationships, humiliating experiences as lieutenant-governor of Tasmania, and fervent relationship with Jane Franklin (née Griffin) all reflect reality, in many cases as documented by Jane Franklin and her niece and companion Sophia Cracroft. For a less prominent, less public figure, like the surgeon Stephen Stanley or the officer's steward William Gibson, some of the interesting biographical details offered up by contemporary documentation never made it to the show and others were invented for storytelling purposes. For even less prominent figures like the historical Cornelius Hickey, who left a tangible mark on the material record of the expedition and may have living descendants still but left no collection of letters and memoirs behind him, the show takes far greater liberties and is much more frank about the liberties taken.

This vague trend generally reflects the state of scholarship and extant documentation of these individuals -- higher-status individuals being generally better documented than lower-status individuals, with more surviving biographical materials in the form of journals, memoirs, personal scholarship, correspondence, anecdotes and contemporary references, records of past service, even extant photographs. (Some of the scholarship and documentation around these individuals was still evolving in the time between the novel's publication and the television show's premiere -- this is reflected in the show's changes in its characterization of Commander James Fitzjames to incorporate recent scholarship by Franklin scholar William Battersby regarding Fitzjames' parentage, early life, and naval career.) That's not to say that there's no biographical info out there for individuals of lower status, however -- I'll get to that in a moment. A number of personal traits like Lieutenant John Irving's evangelical religiosity and Harry D.S. Goodsir's interest in biology (Goodsir was from a fairly prominent medical and scientific family) were drawn from the historical record, but in the show characters' personalities are otherwise fabricated for storytelling purposes, and certain elements that remain open questions have been invented and filled in by the show's writers and the original novel's author. Some kind of romantic entanglement between Sophia Cracroft and Francis Crozier seems to be a known fact, but not the precise reason for Crozier's failed proposals, and other fictionalized takes on the expedition fill in that blank differently -- including the novel on which The Terror is based, which paints Cracroft in a more mercenary light.

For some of the lowest-ranking individuals on Erebus and Terror, we may only have birthplaces, ages, and distinguishing marks -- the kind of biographical data provided by muster rolls, pay books, and other ships' records from their previous employment. The show incorporates these ages (in broad-strokes terms) and names but I haven't noticed a slavish adherence to physical descriptions -- the show's Edmund Hoar is dark-haired but his historical counterpart is described with light hair, and so on. This kind of superficial difference isn't likely to single-handedly puncture anyone's enjoyment of the show, but it's another instance of thoughtful departure from the available historical documentation -- not an element that's necessarily integral to conveying a sense of historical place. However, the majority of men serving on both Erebus and Terror had some kind of maritime career (if not firsthand Arctic experience) before this final voyage, and the show does a fairly decent job sketching the kind of ragtag experience these men brought to their work. Some relationships between less-prominent characters are extrapolated from material articles recovered from the ships' debris by later Franklin-seekers -- the relationship between Harry Peglar and John Bridgens, for instance, is constructed around the "Peglar papers", a collection of writings and letters by Peglar found with the remains of an individual judged not to be their author on the basis of a distinctively tied neckcloth. Linking Peglar and Bridgens as friends and lovers and establishing Bridgens to be the steward found with Peglar's book neatly ties up the historical question of who the man found with the Peglar papers is if not Peglar and why he had them, while making a neat literary device to bring together crew members from opposite ships. There are other more likely candidates for the identity of the man found with Peglar's book, just from out of the men on Terror, but that plotline and Bridgens' love of books basically serve as little love letters to the archaeological discoveries that litter the history of the expedition.

After the point where the show's timeline in the Arctic departs from known events, all of its plot developments and crew movements become speculative -- the show's last acts especially have certain designated beats to hit backed up by archaeological evidence (the cairns, the burial sites at Beechey, the locations of the wrecks identified in 2014 and 2016) and Inuit oral histories (men with watch-chains strung through their faces, smaller groups of stragglers, evidence of cannibalism) and the show incorporates most of these elements pretty diligently; even elements that have to be massaged to fit the show's narrative usually carry with them some tip of the hat to their historical counterparts.

Naval history isn't my usual wheelhouse so I'm afraid that I can't unpack the deeper naval drama back in England within the admiralty or give a real inside-baseball perspective there, but there were certainly obstacles -- the earlier crop of Arctic explorers like Sir John Barrow were ageing out by the 1840s, and the younger men who might have replaced them like James Clark Ross and James Fitzjames were poorly situated to take their place. There were lingering controversies around previous misadventures in the Arctic, including the earlier expedition that the fictional Jane Franklin is speaking of when she's throwing shade about Ross' "poor captaining" in Episode 3 -- there was lingering ill feeling about the loss of ships in John Ross' previous expedition in 1829-1833, and vague hopes that the badly-damaged and abandoned HMS Fury might be repaired and recovered. (When the fictional John Ross remarks that Franklin will eat his shoes again and worse should he embark on this voyage, the image is drawn from Franklin's own account of the earlier Coppermine expedition, which recounted such desperate measures from the more comfortable position of hindsight.) John Ross had initially been deemed too old to take part in what would become the final Franklin expedition himself, before participating in a recovery mission financed by Jane Franklin some five years later. Jane Franklin's determination to find proof of her husband's survival, and her involvement in raising funds and support to send vessels in search of her husband and his men, is also robustly documented. In AMC's The Terror it's more of a subplot than anything, a meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch interlude to support the narrative bookends of European explorers venturing north in search of the lost ships, but the later lives of Jane Franklin and Sophia Cracroft could make for a prestige drama in its own right.

Some reading: