Author: David B. Williams

One of the World’s Most Famous Cairns

One of the world’s most famous cairns was located almost exactly 143 years ago on May 5, 1859. On that day, William Hobson and a team of men located a mound of sandstone blocks frozen on the northwest coast of King William Island in Canada. When the men dismantled the ice-crusted cairn, they found a sealed copper cylinder holding a single piece of paper. The document had been written by James Fitzjames, the captain of the Erebus, one of two ships along with the Terror from the fabled John Franklin Expedition, which had left England in 1845.

The sheet, a standard printed form used by British expeditionary crews, was the first written record found from Franklin, after more than 20 expeditions had been sent out in search of them men. Written on May 28, 1847, the note told of how Franklin’s men had overwintered about 400 miles north on Beechey Island. All were well, FitzJames wrote, but 11 months later on April 25, 1848, FitzJames had updated the form.

For 19 months, since September 12, 1846, the Terror and Erebus had been trapped in ice, the addendum added. The crews had abandoned the boats just three days prior to writing the note. One hundred and five men were alive, under the command of Terror captain Francis R.M Crozier, who had signed the note along with James Fitzjames. They planned to venture south on the twenty-sixth in search of Back’s Fish River, a river that flowed from the south into the Arctic. By this time, nine officers and 15 men had died. This included Sir John Franklin, who had perished just 13 days after the original document had been signed.

The Victory Point cairn on King William Island, as it became known, was not the first cairn found by searchers. Throughout the Arctic, teams had found and dismantled many cairns, most of which had been built by previous explorers, including the one with the note, which had been erected in 1830 by James Ross.

My favorite cairn is one found on Beechey Island, that was made of 600 to 700 bright red, meat tins, made by Goldner’s in London. The company had supplied Franklin with more than 20,000 tins totaling 16 tons. (One of the long debated aspects of the Franklin Expedition is whether the lead used to solder the tins had addled the men’s’ brains and lead to poor decision making.) The cairn measured eight feet high by six feet wide. Curiously, limestone pebbles filled each soup can-sized tin.

Despite more than 160 years of searching, no other written evidence has ever been found from Franklin’s Expedition. People still continue to travel to the Arctic in search though. They are still building and still dismantling cairns.

 

 

Cairns: I turn my book galleys in

Golly ned, I turned in the galleys of my new book yesterday. For those of you not familiar with galleys, this is the first round of seeing a book look like a book with titles page, table of contents, illustrations, etc. It is also the last chance I have to make major changes.

I am quite happy with the look of the new book. The title font, which is used throughout for chapter titles and the first few words of each chapter is rather handsome and somewhat old fashioned and dignified. My wife thinks it looks a bit like an old typewriter face. Another friend thought it looked like a font used on tombstones, elegant and permanent. I agree!

Fortunately, I didn’t have any major changes to make in the text. I did pick up a few extraneous words, a June/July dating issue, a misplaced epigraph, some places where there should have been italics and some places where there shouldn’t, and an extra footnote, which could have been ugly. The major changes had to do with a complicated section on carbon dating, where I had omitted a crucial fact, and a sentence on lichen thalli, which you can imagine can be a troubling enterprise to address. I like to think that I worked out a solution that will please even the most opinionated lichenologist.

[nggallery id=24]Right now I feel pretty good about the writing. I don’t mean this to sound like bragging but it is easy to get tired one’s own work in these final stages. I cannot count the number of times I have read the entire book. I usually do this two times: silently with an eye and pencil for editing and out loud, usually without a pencil for editing. I have found that I need to do it this way to pick up words I use too many times and sentence structures that sound odd together.

It is also strange how much the book changes from screen to hard copy to galleys. Each edition reveals something new. I am very happy, too, that I had a diligent copyeditor and am also having a proofreader for I know that I see what isn’t there and don’t see what I should. Plus, I know that I am not very good at punctuation.

So now the publisher will work their magic and incorporate my changes and the ones from the proofreader. They will then send back my final page proofs, with I hope no mistakes. Publication date is mid September.