David Young is a character is AMC's The Terror. He is a ship's boy on HMS Erebus and one of the expedition's younger members.
In The Show[]
David first appears in Episode 1 having dinner with other sailors below decks of Terror. He and the other crew members at the table have a discussion about what rank Neptune would be. Soon afterwards He starts coughing up blood a having spasms. He loaded on to a lifeboat and is brought back to Erebus where he is chastised by surgeon Stephen Samuel Stanley for not speaking up when he began filling ill. Doctor Henry Goodsir tries to comfort David and they have a conversation about his ring and that his sister should be given it when he dies. Later David starts having a hallucination about an Inuit man and screams "Run! Run! He wants us to run!". David then dies from severe shock.
The next day Dr. Goodsir and Dr. Stanley perform an autopsy on him and Goodsir says that he didn't die from scurvy as was originally thought. David is later buried on the shore of King William Island, but while burying him the party doing the job accidentally drop his coffin and it causes the lid to come loose. Sgt. Solomon Tozer tells caulker's mate Cornelius Hickey to just leave him but Hickey instead jumps in David's grave and closes the coffin lid saying that it would be important to the boy's father, but before he closes the lid of the coffin, Hickey steals David's ring.
In Episode 6, after discovering that the crew is suffering from lead poisoning, Dr. Goodsir suspects that it was what killed David.
In the beginning of Episode 7 featuring a flashback sequence, he is seen with Tom Hartnell talking about the locomotive engines aboard the ships.
In The Novel[]
Unlike in the series, David Young has no lines in the novel and is mentioned to be still alive with the last surviving crew members as they try to make it towards main land Canada.
Trivia[]
- David's burial and the clothes he is wearing when he's buried is very similar to that of petty officer John Torrington.
- For some reason, David is described as being a ship's boy on HMS Terror and not HMS Erebus.