This utterly cheerless true story is about three English drop-outs who went too far. They paid the ultimate price for the belief that if an expedition is sufficiently difficult and dangerous it may achieve an apotheosis of heroic martyrdom.
Jack Hornby (Harrow and Military Cross), the 43-year-old son of a famous, wealthy cricketer, was a small man of immense ego, stamina and charm who persuaded two other eccentrically ambitious misfits to accompany him on an ill-conceived, fatally bungled journey in the sub-Arctic Barren Lands of the Canadian tundra.
Clive Powell-Williams, a teacher who spent five years preparing this book, his first, describes the Barrens in an access of poetic anthropomorphism as "a frozen hell so harsh and ruthless as to cut down any white man or Indian unable to match it in the game of jeopardy and survival." That is cold.
Hornby was already intimately acquainted with that frozen hell. On his own, he had canoed to the uninhabited wilderness on the shore of Great Slave Lake and had spent two winters there. The temperature fell to minus 62 degrees Fahrenheit. On one occasion, when weakened by lack of food, he crawled half a mile across the frozen lake to lift his fishing hooks.
Motivated, it seems, by some masochistic or exhibitionistic compulsion, he talked a fellow army veteran into accompanying him in 1924 on a two-man expedition to the same deadly region. Captain James Critchell-Bullock, 26, late of the Indian Army's 18th Lancers, who had served on the Western Front and in the Desert Mounted Corps in Palestine, was convinced that he should finance the expedition, to gain a fortune by trapping and making cinematographs for commercial exhibition. In the event, the faultily preserved furs proved to be worthless, and nobody wanted his amateurish films.
The indomitable leader was undeterred. On a brief visit to England, Hornby recruited a 17-year-old cousin, Edgar Christian, for the next madcap adventure. Like many another red-blooded English schoolboy of that time, young Edgar venerated Scott of the Antarctic and George Leigh Mallory, who famously declared that he would attempt to climb Everest "because it is there," and died on the mountain. Heroworship is enhanced by death; Hornby's blandishments easily seduced Edgar, partly as he had not done well at Dover College, a minor public school, and was obviously incapable of going on to university.
"An immature young man of no great intellect or savvy," according to Powell-Williams, "was generally thought most suitable for the colonial life. Kenya, New Zealand or Canada beckoned."
In a lugubrious farewell letter, Edgar's father warned that "life is full of disappointments and disillusionment & things very seldom turn out as we hope."
"Try," he added, "to keep a sort of diary of your life till you come back." Edgar's sort of diary demonstrates his scholastic ineptitude (he scrawls "tommorrow" and "dissappointment"), but he wrote stoically with a frozen upper lip, and the poignant resulting document was a useful source for Cold Burial.
The third predestined loser on the 1926 expedition was a 27-year-old Englishman whom Hornby had first encountered in Edmonton in 1923, and now by chance found working behind the counter of a general store in Onoway, Alberta.
Harold Adlard had a farcical career in the Royal Naval Air Service, having crashed in training and recovered only just in time to be passed for active service on the day of the Armistice. After his discharge, he was employed by his father, the proprietor of a prosperous old publishing firm.
"R.E. Adlard," the author relates, "was a dour teetotaller - he had recently become publisher of the National Temperance Quarterly - and it is easy to see how the mess drinking habits Harold had acquired in the service could have become a trigger for family rows. Adlard family lore has it that R.E. Adlard eventually ordered his son out of the house for drunkenness."
It is also easy to see how eager Harold must have been to join any expedition that would release him from a boring job in a small Canadian town.
Hornby thus assembled a cast for the blackest of black comedies; however, Powell-Williams evidently was not tempted.
His prose is plain, muscular, serious. It could hardly be otherwise, as Hornby leads his team to their wretched fate.
He takes them beyond Enterprise and Fort Resolution to a part of the Northwest Territories where he expects to subsist for a long period mainly on caribou, which regularly migrate across the tundra in their tens of thousands. But he chooses the wrong place for a log cabin and has no dogs for farther exploration. The caribou, musk-ox, etc. etc. are always somewhere else.
Powell-Williams is a scrupulous researcher, perhaps more thorough than necessary in his account of starvation, in grim detail to the terminal stages, as the dying men, feebly scavenging for putrid organic scraps, suffer from chronic constipation, which they attempt to relieve with improvised enemas.
In a final letter to his mother, Edgar surprisingly writes: "Please don't blame Dear Jack."
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic