No one is certain whether the ship found and photographed is the Terror or the Erebus. If it is the Terror, as many suspect, it would give the story a peculiarly American and ironic angle—for, in a turn that would stump even a historical novelist, the Terror was one of the ships that bombarded Baltimore on that famous night when, in the dawn’s early light, despite the rockets and bombs, our flag, if nothing else, was still there. Survival, it is often said, is the key trope of Canadian prose, and so the discovery would once again link Canadian and American history—with the Americans triumphing, sort of, and singing loudly about it, while the Canadian boat (or at least a British ship, adapted by soul rights into Canadian myth) simply survived, deep and frozen, all these years.
On the other hand, by far the most memorable of the many recyclings of the Franklin mythology in Canadian literature occurs in what many regard as the closest thing there is to the Great Canadian Novel, Mordecai Richler’s “Solomon Gursky Was Here.” In it, Ephraim Gursky, a Jewish mischief-maker escaped from London, slips aboard the Franklin expedition—and, while the honest Britishers languish with their lead-poisoned tinned rations, he and his friend Izzy fatten up on a diet of kasha and schmaltz herring, surviving to pass on their faith, and a smattering of Yiddish, to a select community of Inuit. So far, at least, no trace of the Gurskys, their herring, or the Yiddish-speaking Inuit has been found.
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