SOURCE: “The Search for Sir John,” in Spectator, March 6, 1999, pp. 39–40.

In the following review, Taylor offers a positive assessment of The Voyage of the Narwhal, calling the novel “half a boy's adventure story of the highest class, half a kind of meditation on the nature of human curiosity.”

The hunt for John Franklin was one of the great early Victorian obsessions, inflaming public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, giving rise to a mound of books and articles and bringing a raft of supplementary tragedies in its wake. Sir John, who had fought at Trafalgar as a 17-year-old, set out with his ships Erebus and Terror in search of the North-West passage in 1845. He never came back, and though the first rescue missions were sent out two years later, it was not until 1850 that news of the expedition's fate trickled back to civilisation. Later, as further attempts...