Oh oh. The situation all authors of historical fiction dread: Someone points out you got it wrong. Dead wrong, in this case, as I will explain.
In my well received and widely read novel of Finnish immigrants to NE Minnesota, Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh, I start the book with a short novella about Finnish immigrants traveling aboard an unnamed vessel which turns out to be…(drum roll, please)… the Titanic. Why is the pre-story part of the story? Simple: I thought I’d learned something about Finns and the Titanic which was so interesting and compelling that I wanted to include it in the book. When it became clear that the story of Finns on the Titanic wouldn’t really fit with the main plot of the novel, the Titanic piece became a separate but related prequel so to speak. The story of Juha Stranden and his survival forms a suitable beginning, in my humble view, for the larger drama. So what’s the problem, you ask?
Well, part of the Titanic story as it relates to the Finns on board that ill fated ship involves the drowning of an entire Finnish family, the Panulas. It also includes the remarkable tale of forensic geneticists at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario who link the remains of an infant boy retrieved from the sea a week after the ocean liner’s sinking to Eino Panula, the youngest of the five boys who died. That revelation, which was announced as fact in the late 1990s, is no longer valid history.
Though the remarkable work of putting Eino Panula’s name to the unknown body entombed at the foot of the Titanic memorial in Nova Scotia is compelling, recent investigation by the same laboratory at Lakehead University confirms that the body entombed in Halifax is not Eino Panula’s but that of an English child, Sidney Goodwin.
It’s very easy to say you got this wrong, but nevertheless, that is how science works, and you do change your ideas and you do change your theories,” said Ryan Parr, the case’s lead researcher at Lakehead University.
(The Telegraph, 02 August 2007)
Did this author “miss the boat”? (Sorry.) Not really. I began the research for Suomalaiset in 2001. The book was published in 2004. At the time of publication, and indeed, for three years thereafter, the consensus was that “Our Babe” (the inscription on the unknown child’s coffin) was Eino Panula. And I, of course, was happy that such was the case since I’d used that bit of trivia to launch my most successful novel. But hey: I don’t want to be linked by factual inaccuracies (even in a fictional novel) to the likes of James Fry or Greg Mortenson. Not gonna happen. So when I came across the article about Sidney Goodwin in Yahoo News, I had to come clean.
So now what should I do? Here’s what I suggest, loyal readers of Munger books: You tell me.
There’s a poll on the right hand side of this blog that asks the question “What Should Mark do about the new information regarding “Our Babe”, Sidney Goodwin?”. You have four choices. Pick one. The poll will be open for a month. No promises as to what I’ll do after you all vote. But it should be interesting to find out how you think I should handle this discovery.
Peace.
Mark
