The Terror

“He was—and always would be—the man who ate his shoes.”

On a character level, the line illustrates Franklin’s insecurity and self-delusion. He insists that he survived nobly because he, unlike others, never resorted to cannibalism, but his contemporaries still see him primarily as a figure of ridicule. This disconnect between Franklin’s self-image and public perception feeds into the irony that he commands one of the grandest and most heavily publicized Arctic expeditions of his day, yet his authority is undercut from the start by past failures and by doubts about his competence. Just as he could never outlive the legacy of eating his shoes, he will never escape the fate awaiting him in the ice.

“Dear God, this is truly a Stygian bleakness.”

Goodsir compares the Arctic winter to the River Styx from Greek mythology. It’s not just physical darkness that he records, but a spiritual one, an atmosphere that feels like an entryway to the underworld. Facts and measurements cannot capture the horror of the landscape, so Goodsir falls back on metaphor and myth.

“‘Abandon Erebus?’ repeated Sir John. He did not sound cross or angry, only perplexed by the absurdity of the notion being discussed.”

Franklin’s incredulity at Crozier’s pragmatic suggestion of consolidating on one ship to save both fuel and lives shows his fatal inability to adapt. He’s a man shaped by tradition, reputation, and appearances, so the idea of leaving behind his flagship and personal symbol of command is unthinkable. The absurdity to him isn’t in the logic of the plan but in its challenge to the hierarchy and prestige that he embodies.

“Goodsir could only think of it as an attack, as if from Greek gods furious at their hubris for wintering in Boreas’s realm.”

By invoking the Greek gods and Boreas, the North Wind, Simmons filters the Franklin Expedition through the lens of classical myth. The storm becomes less a random event and more a wrathful rebuke of human arrogance, echoing the Greek idea of hubris punished by divine retribution. Their attempt to conquer the Northwest Passage, to impose imperial order upon an alien landscape, is thus framed as sacrilege against nature itself, invoking The Clash Between Human Nature and Ambition.

“One more summer and then winter here in the belly of this Leviathan, shipmates, and I swear to you that God’s divine mercy shall see us out of this terrible place […] In the meantime, shipmates, we are afflicted by the dark spirit of that Leviathan in the form of some malevolent white bear—but only a bear, only a dumb beast, however the thing seeks to serve the Enemy, but like Jonah we shall pray unto the Lord that this terror too shall pass from us.”

Franklin tends to interpret the horrors around him through the lens of Biblical allegory and personal vanity. By casting the expedition as Jonah trapped in the belly of the Leviathan, Franklin presents their dire situation not as failure or misfortune, but as a divinely ordained trial. Franklin, as both captain and preacher, claims the role of prophet, positioning himself as the man who will guide them back to God’s grace. Simmons undercuts this display with dramatic irony. Franklin insists the Tuunbaq is “only a dumb beast” that can be killed by musket fire, but his sermon betrays the truth that they are indeed inside the belly of a Leviathan, and escape isn’t guaranteed.

“We do not have enough food to survive another Winter and Summer here in the ice […] And should we all perish because of this, the Reason is Murder.”

This blunt declaration from Goodsir’s diary shifts the crew’s plight from purely an act of nature to one of human betrayal. It’s no longer just bad luck that the cans have failed; it’s the result of greed, bureaucracy, and the indifference of a system that valued speed and savings over human life. The Franklin Expedition, hailed as the pinnacle of British naval ambition, was sabotaged not only by hubris and ignorance of the Arctic but by the corruption within the very system that launched it. The men are casualties of human arrogance and the illusion of progress, speaking to Colonialism as Horror.

“‘Today,’ he intoned, ‘I shall read from the Book of Leviathan, Part One, Chapter Twelve.’”

Crozier delivers his sermon not from Scripture but from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. The book is a work about the need for a social contract and absolute authority to restrain chaos and violence. By invoking it here, Crozier is foreshadowing the mutiny and cannibalism to come when that contract breaks down entirely. His words are a warning disguised as a sermon: If the men give in to superstition and terror, their society will disintegrate into a war.

“At that instant Thomas Blanky realized that the seamen whom he’d silently cursed as being superstitious fools had been right; this thing from the ice was as much demon or god as it was animal flesh and white fur. It was a force to be appeased or worshipped or simply fled.”

Up until now, Blanky has been one of the most pragmatic men on the expedition. He dismissed the “hexes” and amulets of Hickey’s cult, ashamed that sailors could turn to superstition in the face of hardship. Here, after his direct confrontation with the Tuunbaq, he’s forced to accept that rational categories fail to capture the creature. Simmons dramatizes the collapse of Enlightenment reason under the weight of the uncanny: Blanky, a man of skill and common sense, is driven to concede that the sailors’ beliefs may have been closer to the truth than his skepticism.

“The swaying, much-cheered headless admiral and swaying bear-monster entered the ebony compartment. Sir John’s black clock within began striking midnight.”

From a character perspective, this summarizes Crozier’s worst fears about the Carnivale. He sensed all along that the masquerade was more than frivolity and instead edged into sacrilege to taunt fate. Once the men turn their deceased commander into a joke and march his effigy into the dark chamber, all sense of order collapses. The real terror arrives in the form of the Tuunbaq, as if summoned by their blasphemy.

“The ship groans as it continues to be squeezed inexorably to fragments by the never-ceasing ice. Crozier groans as his demons continue to squeeze him inexorably to fragments through chills, fever, pain, nausea, and regret.”

Crozier is in the depths of alcohol withdrawal and fever, hovering between delirium and lucidity as he battles with The Psychological Effects of Isolation. His body is breaking under the physical effects of substance dependency and illness, just as the Terror itself creaks and strains under the unrelenting pressure of the Arctic pack ice. Simmons here makes Crozier’s body and the ship almost indistinguishable: Both are cracking under external and internal forces, and trapped in a hostile environment that they cannot escape.

“Crozier wanted to live. It was that simple. He was determined to live. He was going to survive this bad patch in the face of all odds and gods dictating that he would not and could not.”

The passage strips Crozier down to the truth that survival is no longer about naval honor, duty to the Admiralty, or even responsibility for his men, but his personal will. Unlike the others, Crozier is the one officer whose inner fire isn’t yet extinguished. It foreshadows that, in the end, he will be the only one to make it out alive.

“Abandoning ship was the lowest point in any captain’s life. It was an admission of total failure. It was, in most cases, the end of a long Naval career. To most captains, many of Francis Crozier’s personal acquaintance, it was a blow from which they would never recover. Crozier felt none of that despair.”

Within naval tradition, ships were embodiments of duty, honor, and the officer’s very sense of self. Previously, Franklin, like most captains, was aghast at the idea of abandoning his. Crozier isn’t like most captains. The wreckage of naval tradition frees him to focus on what truly matters: The lives of his men and himself. It positions him not only to endure where others fail, but also to eventually find a path forward in a world that no longer fits the mold of empire.

“I can’t let them get away. These Esquimaux could be the answer to our problems. They may be our salvation.”

After months of starvation, isolation, and slow collapse within the doomed Franklin expedition, Irving sees in the Inuit not just strangers, but potential saviors. Unlike some of the other officers, who view Inuit as Other or as nuisances to be avoided, Irving approaches them with a blend of curiosity, humility, and respect. The irony is that this sense of deliverance is almost immediately undercut by the treachery of Hickey, whose murder of Irving ends the fragile chance of alliance before it can begin. The Franklin expedition’s greatest danger isn’t the ice, nor the Tuunbaq, but the corruption festering within the crew itself, reinforcing Colonialism as Horror.

“You were the only officer present, Lieutenant Hodgson. For good or ill, it was and is your responsibility.”

Crozier has carefully listened to both Tozer and Hodgson, extracting from them a grim and confused picture of Irving’s death and the subsequent massacre of the Inuit. What becomes clear to him is that Hickey manipulated events, and that Hodgson, in his grief and anger, allowed his judgment to be overwhelmed. By telling Hodgson that it “was and is [his] responsibility,” Crozier is doing more than reminding him of rank—he is reminding him of his accountability, something that has become dangerously scarce among the men.

“You are my loved one, Harry. The only man or woman or child left in the world who cares whether I am alive or dead, much less what I may have thought before I fell or where my bones will lie.”

Bridgens’s words provide contrast to the mutiny, starvation, and death to focus instead on a moment of connection and love. Peglar, already weakened by scurvy and sickness, is thinking about legacy: His diary, his memory, some small part of himself surviving beyond the ice. For Bridgens, it isn’t the official story that matters, but the quiet fact that someone in the world still loves him. There is no one and nothing else but this, and he’s at peace with that fact.

“Every time I believe I Know one of these men or Officers, I find that I am wrong. A Million years of Man’s Medicinal Progress will never reveal the secret Condition and sealed Compartments of the Human Soul.”

Goodsir has spent the novel observing men through the lens of medicine, cataloguing their illnesses, cutting open their bodies in autopsy, and trying to treat their failing health with limited knowledge and dwindling supplies. Here, after Fitzjames’s death, he admits that the greatest mystery is human nature. After Fitzjames was possibly poisoned, an exhausted and hardened Crozier responds with an almost Machiavellian plan to use Aylmore as a test subject. Goodsir remains the compassionate outsider, horrified by what desperation and The Psychological Effects of Isolation have done to his comrades.

“The long awaited and Universally Cheered Open Water was a vicious Trap. The Ice will not give us up. And the creature from the ice will not allow us to leave.”

When Little’s party finds a lead, the camp erupts with desperate hope, only for it to be an illusion. The “lake” is a cul-de-sac, and worse, it becomes the site of slaughter. Water, once imagined as deliverance, is revealed to be just another prison shaped by the ice and patrolled by the Tuunbaq, reflecting The Clash Between Human Ambition and Nature. At this point, the men finally understand that both the natural world and the supernatural creature have conspired to deny them escape. The expedition is no longer a test of endurance, but a slow entrapment with no exit.

“In these last days, John Bridgens felt that the literary character with whom he had most in common—in outlook, in feeling, in memory, in future, in sadness—was King Lear. And it was time for the final act.”

When Bridgens chooses to walk away from camp in his final hours, the allusion he makes to King Lear is telling. Lear is the Shakespearean figure most associated with age, folly, exile, and the stripping away of illusions until only human frailty remains. For Bridgens, the march has already become a kind of tragedy. The stage metaphor also shows that the Franklin expedition has itself become a kind of grim drama, one destined for legend and retelling. The use of intertextuality also highlights how Bridgens views life: Not just as survival or suffering, but as a narrative, where character and closure matter.

“‘All this natural misery,’ Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. ‘Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?’”

Up until now, the crew’s suffering was framed as a battle against external forces. However, the natural world, for all its hostility, is indifferent. Hickey, on the other hand, chooses to worsen the suffering for power and sadistic satisfaction. Simmons uses Goodsir’s outburst to amplify the moral contrast between those who cling to humanity in extremes and those who abandon it.

“I am only thirty-one years old, he thought fiercely, angrily. Today is my birthday.”

This simple line condenses the entire tragedy of Jopson’s fate. Though scurvy, starvation, and neglect have left him weak, inside he remains young and determined. By reminding himself that it’s his birthday, Jopson clings to his humanity and individuality in a situation that has stripped nearly every man of dignity. He’s young enough that he should still have lived a long life, but instead is left behind and reduced to a crawling body pleading for recognition.

“Caulker’s mate Cornelius Hickey hated kings and queens. He thought they were all bloodsucking parasites on the corpusass of the body politick. But he found that he did not at all mind being king.”

Hickey is an opportunist, resentful of hierarchy and authority. His disdain for monarchy reflects his class resentment as he sees kings and queens as exploiters. However, once he seizes power, he adopts the very role he despised. In rejecting the British monarchy, he simply reconstructs it in miniature, crowning himself as “king” of a starving, desperate band. He does not mind tyranny as long as he’s the tyrant, which reflects his opportunism and lack of morality.

“All humans, and especially the Real People, live by eating souls—they know this well. What is hunting but one soul seeking out another soul and willing it into the ultimate submission of death?”

In this worldview, existence is predicated on consuming other beings, but with the crucial emphasis on spiritual exchange. A seal “allows” itself to be killed, a hunter must demonstrate courage and balance, and the cycle of death and rebirth carries an embedded ethic of reciprocity. For the novel’s narrative, this line resonates with Crozier’s own struggle to make sense of what has happened to his men and to himself. The British expedition sees hunting only in material terms, whereas the Inuit tradition sees it as a negotiation with forces larger than oneself. By embedding Crozier’s story within this mythology, Simmons places the Franklin Expedition in a moral universe where failure to respect balance has catastrophic consequences, reflecting Colonialism as Horror.

“Surrendering only to the human being he wants to be with and to the human being he wants to become—never to the Tuunbaq or to the universe that would extinguish the blue flame in his chest—he closes his eyes again, tilts back his head, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue exactly as Memo Moira taught him to do for Holy Communion.”

Up to this point, Crozier has been wrestling with the paradox of survival: Surrender is death, but survival requires a kind of surrender nonetheless. With Silence, he has learned a new form of surrender through an opening of the self. By the time Crozier kneels before the Tuunbaq, he’s no longer a rigid commander. Now, surrender is an act of love and becoming, not defeat. His actions directly call back to his Catholic upbringing, where communion signified taking in the body of Christ to unite with the divine. Here, however, it isn’t Christ’s body but the Tuunbaq’s presence he opens himself to. By mirroring the ritual, Simmons shows Crozier transforming his old faith into a new, hybrid form.