In April 1848, Commander Graham Gore has been missing and presumed dead for eight months. He is absent from the unfolding catastrophe of Franklin’s expedition; instead, he imagines what happens by reading later histories and letting their “awful images” form a narrative in his mind.

Through the winter of 1847, the crews of the Erebus and Terror deteriorate: hunting fails, storms claim men, and others die of scurvy, cold, and mental collapse. Coal and candles run short, the ships stink of decay, and the men lie motionless in darkness. By spring, the death toll is extreme, and Francis Crozier orders the ships abandoned.

The expedition attempts an eight-hundred-mile march south with provisions for only half that distance, betting on game and open water that may never appear. They lash whaleboats to runners and overload them with essentials and useless comforts alike—soap, books, candlesticks, journals, crockery—because fear convinces them to carry everything. Officers haul alongside men; frostbite, dysentery, and weakness spread, and marines are ordered to guard medicine chests and shoot desperate sailors if necessary. Surgeon Harry Goodsir dies from a tooth infection and is, comparatively, “lucky” to be buried.

As they continue, the dead are first buried, then covered with rock cairns, and finally left where they fall when deaths become too frequent. The march sheds the markers of “England” in abandoned cans, clothing, and trinkets scattered across the ice. Gore reads that only about thirty survivors reach a last camp later called Starvation Cove, still far from help.

Gore’s imagining turns into dreams: he sees Henry Le Vesconte dead and mutilated, and Lieutenant Edward Little creeping toward the body with the blind hunger of someone who can no longer distinguish people from meat. Gore hears in remembered testimony that Inuit tried to help but could not save so many dying strangers in a year when summer never came. Awake, Gore’s guilt resurfaces—especially the memory of an Inuit widow whose husband Gore killed—and he resolves with grim determination not to be responsible for another death, forcing himself onward “to reach camp before dark.”