Buried in Ice: The Mystery of a Lost Arctic Expedition (Time Quest Book) - Hardcover

Grade 4 Up-- In 1845, Sir John Franklin and his two ships, Erebus and Terror , sailed from England to begin a search in icy Arctic waters for the fabled Northwest Passage. It was one of the most well-planned, well-supplied, and well-commanded expeditions of all times; yet it ended in disaster. Not one man returned alive. For almost a century and a half, no one could explain their mysterious deaths. In this compelling, contemporary account, anthropologist Beattie and journalist Geiger describe how they solved the 147-year-old mystery. The narrative is interspersed with an imaginative section that relates the story of the expedition from the point of view of 19-year-old Luke, a member of the crew. While the text is exciting, the book's greatest strength is its superb illustrations: drawings, paintings, and historic and present day photographs are used to enrich each page. Probably the most intriguing photographs are those of the actual exhumation of three sailors whose graves had been discovered in 1857. Because of the cold, the bodies remained frozen and appeared almost exactly as they did at the time of interment. Another fine entry in an excellent series. --Don Reaber, Meadowdale High School, Lynnwood,
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1845, famed explorer Sir John Franklin set out with two ships in search of the elusive Northwest Passage; the expedition vanished, leaving only a few artifacts and several lonely graves for subsequent searchers to find. When, 140 years later, Beattie (a forensic anthropologist) began to look into the expedition's fate and the causes of its failure, he not only uncovered evidence of cannibalism but--by temporarily opening the graves to take tissue samples--proved that some or all of the crew had ingested debilitating levels of lead from poorly tinned food. This book is a digest of Beattie and Geiger's book for adults, Frozen in Time (1987), combined with a dramatized historical reconstruction plus plenty of paintings and color photos-- including macabre photo portraits of three exhumed, startlingly well-preserved corpses. Like others in the ``Time Quest'' series: a fresh, vividly illustrated look at modern methods of archeological research. (Fiction/Nonfiction. 11-14) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.