Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin/John Franklin: Traveller on Undiscovered Seas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Martyn Beardsley, Deadly Winter: The Life of Sir John Franklin (London: Chatham Publishing, 2002), xiv + 272. Cloth. £20. ISBN 1-8617-6187-2. John Wilson, John Franklin: Traveller on Undiscovered Seas (Montreal, XYZ Publishing, 2001), xii + 176. Paper. $15.95. ISBN 0-9688-1661-4. There can be few Arctic explorers who have been commemorated in song, and it says much for John Franklin that he should be accorded this honour on more than one occasion. From the mid nineteenth-century broadside ballads that lament the loss of his ships and 129 men, to Stan Rogers' wonderful anthem Northwest Passage, Franklin's memory is kept alive. He is also the subject of two new books, each retelling the Franklin story, from his birth in Lincolnshire in 1786 to his death in 1846 during his third voyage in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Quite why Sir John Franklin continues to interest and even fascinate the Canadian (and British?) public is difficult to understand. He is best remembered for failure on an epic scale, was blamed for the deaths of all his men and was probably the least successful of the Arctic explorers. However, there is, in Britain at least, a long tradition of affection towards gallant losers and interestingly, both authors of these Franklin biographies are British by birth and education. Wilson now lives and works in British Columbia but Beardsley is still based in the United Kingdom. Curiously, both authors usually write for children, and Wilson's book is clearly aimed at the 'young adult' audience. Beardsley's is, apparently, his first for an adult readership. Both authors tell the same story and it is certainly one worth telling. Franklin's early career is the stuff of modern historical fiction. He fought at Copenhagen and Trafalgar, sailed with Flinders to Australia, was 'shipwrecked' on an archetypal desert island and, between his three Arctic expeditions, was posted to places as diverse as Russia, Greece and Tasmania. He was Lieutenant-Governor of that colony for six years. Wilson's version is a clear, straightforward narrative apart from his device of opening the story with a graphically described account of the moment when, nearing death and too weak to have removed from the hut the bodies of those who have already died, Franklin and his companions are miraculously saved. This is a neat way to capture the young reader's attention. The book is well written and enjoyable, and Wilson tells a very good story and tells it well. Importantly, he is very good at putting Franklin and his peers in their social and cultural context, warning his young readers that behaviour that would be unacceptable today was normal in the nineteenth century. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".