Cirque Spectacle
The traveling Cirque Dreams company is bringing its “Holidaze” spectacle to the Oakdale in Wallingford.
Mystic Seaport, a museum about seafaring, is usually filled with triumphant and adventurous stories of sailors, ships and wanderlust. But the Stonington museum has taken a dark turn, focusing in-depth on a tragic mystery involving the 1845 Franklin Expedition, whose two ships got stuck in the Canadian ice and whose sailors were never seen again.
“Death in the Ice” tells the tale of the ill-fated HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
The exhibit points out a treacherous reality that was faced by all seagoing missions seeking a shipping route through the Arctic Ocean: Water will freeze in winter, but there’s no guarantee it will unfreeze in summer. And if it doesn’t, and food runs out, and subzero temperatures plummet even further, the crew is doomed.
The show includes artifacts from the Erebus, which was finally found in 2014. (The Terror was found in 2016.) The exhibit incorporates Inuit lore about what happened. This information at first was dismissed by Europeans as unreliable, but later Inuits reports were determined to be accurate.
The exhibit “ties together the European perspective, the Inuit perspective and modern forensics and diving technologies to put together a full picture,” says Elysa Engelman, the museum’s director of exhibits.
“The Inuits had an oral tradition, no writing, but they had place names that reflected where incidents happened. When