He was the man who ate his shoes, and had been for twenty-three years, ever since he returned to England in 1822 after his first, failed overland expedition across northern Canada to find the North-West Passage. He remembered the sniggers and jokes upon his return. Franklin had eaten his shoes – and he’d eaten worse on that botched three-year journey, including tripe-de-roche, a disgusting gruel made from lichen scraped from rocks. Two years out and starving, he and his men – Franklin had dazedly divided his troop into three groups and left the other two bands to survive or die on their own – had boiled the uppers on their boots and shoes to survive. Sir John – he was just John then, he was knighted for incompetency after a later overland voyage and botched polar expedition by sea – had spent days in 1821 chewing on nothing more than scraps of untanned leather. His men had eaten their buffalo sleeping robes. Then some of them had moved on to other things.

But he had never eaten another man.

To this day, Franklin doubted whether others on his expedition, including his good friend and chief lieutenant Dr. John Richardson, had succeeded in resisting that temptation. Too much had happened while the parties were separated as they stumbled through the arctic wastes and forests, desperately trying to get back to Franklin’s little improvised Fort Enterprise and the real forts, Providence and Resolution.

Nine white men and one Esquimaux dead. Nine dead out of the twenty-one men young Lieutenant John Franklin, thirty-three years old and pudgy and balding even then, had led out of Fort Resolution in 1819, plus one of the native guides they’d picked up along the way – Franklin had refused to let the man leave the expedition to forage for himself. Two of the men had been murdered in cold blood. At least one of them was, without doubt, devoured by others. But only one Englishman died.