Year of Reading: Mr Cater

This year, our school turned a page in the best way possible by making 2026 the Year of Reading. By encouraging pupils to make more time for reading, books have begun to have a more positive impact on our daily lives. To celebrate this, we have asked teachers to share their favourite books and to kick things off, Mr Cater has recommended ‘The Terror’ by Dan Simmons; inspired by Franklin’s ill-fated Artic expedition.

‘The Terror’ is based on the true story of the Frankin’s lost expedition. The expedition was a failed British voyage of Artic exploration led by Captain Sir John Franklin that departed England in 1845 aboard two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror and was assigned to traverse the last unnavigable sections of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Artic. The expedition met with disaster after both ships and their crews, a total of 129 officers and men, became icebound in Victoria Strait near King William Island in what is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut. After being icebound for more than a year, Erebus and Terror were abandoned in April 1848, by which point two dozen men, including Franklin, had died. The survivors, now led by Franklin’s second-in-command, Francis Crozier, and Erebus‘s captain, James Fitzjames, set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared, presumably having perished.

Drawing on actual evidence of cannibalism discovered on recently unearthed bones, the novel imagines a harrowing narrative of survival: men trapped on ice‑locked ships, tormented by lead poisoning from poorly sourced rations, starvation, scurvy, and a monstrous “Thing on the Ice” that stalks and kills them in all sorts of gruesome ways. Does the Terror refer to the ship, the Thing on the Ice or the Monsters some of the men become when pushed to extremes?

For me the book has reignited an interest in survival stories and I will be finding out more about other Polar Expeditions such as those led by Shackleton and Amundsen.

I began reading The Terror while wrapped in a blanket in my poorly insulated house on the RHS site, in the depths of winter. It gave me a faint sense of the Arctic cold these sailors endured. When they crawled under their frozen wool blankets at night, they had to wait for their own body heat to thaw the fabric enough to wrap it around themselves. Brrrrrr!