The Terror

“There is, on this October winter’s dark-day evening in 1847, no arctic or antarctic continent, island, bay, inlet, range of mountains, ice shelf, volcano, or fucking floeberg which bears the name of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. Crozier doesn’t give the slightest God-damn.”

This quote foreshadows Crozier’s arc. He’s a capable man who could lead, but has never before been truly acknowledged by his peers or superiors. His Irishness and his class separate him from the polished, favored officers like Franklin and Fitzjames, and this passage plants that seed early. Thematically, it also ties into one of The Terror’s central themes: The Clash Between Human Ambition and Nature. Crozier is a man who has devoted his life to exploration, hardship, and service, but the ice and the indifference of his society have left him nameless. That absence mirrors the larger futility of the expedition itself, of men trying to leave their mark on an environment that swallows them whole.

“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.