Clarification about Battersby’s updated research and the 2023 paperback

William Battersby published his Fitzjames biography, The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition, in 2010. Sadly, Battersby died in a tragic accident in 2016.
In July 2023, I was baffled to suddenly encounter a newly released version of Battersby’s Fitzjames biography, now titled James Fitzjames: Commander of HMS Erebus. When I contacted the publisher, The History Press, about this, they said the hardback was out of print and had been replaced by this new paperback edition, but that the content remained unchanged. This sounded reasonable enough, but I was immediately annoyed by the title change because the new title is incorrect. Fitzjames was a commander in rank until he was promoted to captain on 31 December 1845, but from the start of the Franklin Expedition, he had been the captain of Erebus. I am also annoyed by the colourised picture of Fitzjames on the cover: his hair was not brown but red/strawberry blonde!

Believing the publisher that the paperback contained the exact same text as the hardback, I was in no hurry to look at the former, until I was contacted on social media by a reader who was very confused by something in the paperback. While the first few paperback chapters remain unchanged from the hardback, which presents Battersby’s mistaken theory that Fitzjames was born in Brazil to an unknown Portuguese mother, Chapter 10 of the paperback suddenly names Robert Coningham’s sister, Hester Sterling, as Fitzjames’ mother without any prior explanation:

This corresponds with the research Battersby had been doing after his book was published, in hopes of finding new information about Fitzjames’ parentage for a prospective revised second edition. Battersby ultimately never published this. In late 2021, I obtained a PDF of the first two chapters of this prospective second edition from a fellow Franklin Expedition researcher, and I published them on my website with Battersby’s family’s consent in January 2022. At that point, I lacked the knowledge to fact-check Battersby’s work because I had only just begun my own Fitzjames research. I later learnt that Battersby ultimately didn’t believe in his ‘Hester Sterling is Fitzjames’ mother’ theory anymore for lack of proof, and that he had moved on from Fitzjames research entirely by early 2016, for lack of new findings. Spoiler alert for my Fitzjames biography: I have found extremely compelling evidence of who Fitzjames’ mother was, and I can say this much: it was not Hester Sterling.

The more Fitzjames research I did, the more inaccuracies I noticed in the revised Battersby chapters on my website. Since Battersby never published these himself, I cannot, in fairness, critique them as I do the work he did publicly publish. I felt increasingly uncomfortable about spreading misinformation on my website (because people took the chapters for fact) and decided the best course was to remove these chapters from the internet and pretend they had never existed. However, now that the paperback seems to include part of a revised manuscript in which Hester Sterling is referred to as Fitzjames’ mother, I must provide context for this revelation. While there is plenty to critique about Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition (I am, in fact, writing an entirely new Fitzjames biography), at least that book is what Battersby chose to put out into the world himself. It is very unfortunate that this confusing posthumous paperback version of Battersby’s Fitzjames biography is now in print. Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition can still be bought second-hand, and I recommend getting that one instead of Commander of Erebus if you want to read a book about Fitzjames before mine is published.