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• Format CD-Audio
• Dimensions 133 x 171 x 13mm | 68.04g
• Publication date 13 Sep 2016
• Publisher Audible Studios on Brilliance
• Language English
• Edition Unabridged
• Edition Statement Unabridged
• ISBN10 1531870880
• ISBN13 9781531870881
• Bestsellers rank 852,940

Rough Weather All Day: An Account of the “Jeannette” Search Expedition

by Patrick Cahill, edited by David Hirzel

Pacifica, CA: Terra Nova Press.  173 pp., $20.00 USD.

Reviewed by: P.J. Capelotti, Division of Social Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Abington College, Abington, PA 19001, USA. E-mail: pjc12@psu.edu


James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald and the man who had dispatched Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone, was equally fascinated with the Arctic. In 1873, Bennett dispatched two reporters to search for the survivors of Charles Francis Hall’s doomed North Pole expedition.  Five years later, he assigned a reporter to an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin sponsored by the American Geographic Society and led by a U.S. Army lieutenant named Frederick Schwatka.

Bennett sponsored his greatest Arctic venture in 1879.   A U.S. Navy captain, George Washington DeLong, was ordered to locate the ‘lost’ expedition of the Swede Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld—and then attempt to reach the North Pole itself.  DeLong sailed from San Francisco in the Pandora, a former Royal Navy vessel which Bennett had purchased and renamed Jeannette after his sister.  The navy agreed to man the ship if Bennett paid all the expenses of the expedition.

Even before the Jeannette reached the Arctic, Nordenskiöld and his ship Vega broke through the ice north of Russia and emerged into the Bering Sea.  With no dramatic rescue to report, DeLong continued with his secondary mission and turned north towards Elisha Kent Kane’s chimerical open sea and the North Pole beyond.  The Jeannette was soon beset in the ice north of the New Siberian Islands and, after two grueling years drifting about in the ice, crushed.  DeLong and his men made a desperate retreat in the ship’s small boats to the Lena River delta on the Siberian coast.  Only one of the three boats reached safety, another vanished with all hands, and DeLong’s own small boat made it to shore where he and all but two of his men starved to death as they waited in vain for relief.  To intensify the disaster, a newly-commissioned U.S. Navy vessel sent to find DeLong, the U.S.S. Rodgers, was itself burned to the waterline and blown to pieces.

This interesting volume presents an edited version of the diary of a sailor on board the Rodgers, a thirty-two-year-old Irish-American mechanic named Patrick Cahill.  Cahill was brought to the U.S. as a boy and by his mid-twenties had found work as on a railway in Panama.  In 1880, Cahill joined the U.S. Navy as a Machinist’s Mate and the following year volunteered for service on the Rodgers as the navy sought to learn the fate of DeLong and his ship and crew.

Cahill must have possessed some literary ability in addition to his skills with machinery, as he was contracted by the San Francisco Chronicle to act as a correspondent during the Rodgers search for DeLong.  Cahill’s notes from the cruise never seem to have made it to the Chronicle, but a typescript was later made of them and, combined with interviews he gave in his seventies to the Oakland Tribune, form the source material for this edited volume.

Cahill’s observations make for terrific reading.  He describes his mates as “some pretty rough sailors” (p. 26), many of whom had been north previously and knew to carry a stash of trade goods with which to barter for furs and ivory in the far north.  As Cahill wrote: “We expect to have all kinds of curios when we return” (p. 30).  While the carpenter and cook suffered grievously from sea-sickness, Cahill loves being under sail: “it is grand to look at a big sea just as it comes aboard and dashes all over everything” (p. 31).  When the Rodgers arrived in ‘Port Petropaulovski’ (now Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky) in late July, the officers on board the Russian cruiser Strelok (Cahill called it the 'Straylok') toasted the men of the Rodgers and the Russian Emperor, at which point the Americans who exactly was the emperor since the assassination of the last one.  This quickly ended the celebrations, as the Russians, on the far side of the empire, had not yet learned of the assassination of Alexander II in St. Petersburg more than four months earlier.

By late August, the Rodgers had cleared the Bering Strait and searched at Wrangel Island and along the north coast of Siberian for any trace of the Jeannette.  Finding none, the ship returned southwards and November anchored for the winter in St. Lawrence Bay on the eastern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula on the far eastern tip of Siberia.  There, on November 30th, after the fire pumps had been disconnected to keep them from freezing, a fire in the fore hold broke out.  The crew battled the fire as long as possible while the ship was run aground in about three fathoms.  The ship burned to the waterline, and these are some of Cahill’s most vivid descriptions, as the crew scurried supplies ashore in the small boats before the ship was a total loss.

The entire crew escaped, to face a forced winter amidst four small villages of Inuit who nevertheless shared out what limited stocks of walrus and seal they possessed.  Despite the near-starvation diet that nearly killed him, Cahill maintained his daily observations throughout the winter until a whaler arrived in the spring and took the men off to San Francisco.  There Cahill recovered from his fascinating ordeal, left the navy, and made a career for himself in the city’s cable cars.

The volume is the product of Terra Nova Press, described as a ‘small POD publishing enterprise [that] seeks to bring into print the smaller, less-well-known true stories of polar exploration in the days of the sailing ship.’  The press is the result of editor David Hirzel’s longtime interest in Arctic and Antarctic exploration and, in  particular, the Irish contribution to same, as previous works have covered the life and travels of the ‘Irish Giant’ of the Royal Navy, Tom Crean.

The lack of proper editing does show at times, with errors in punctuation and especially with inconsistencies in the use of italics and/or underlining for the names of ships and the titles of newspapers.  In spite of these, the volume contains fascinating insights into a little-known sideshow of the vast saga of the Jeannette expedition and its aftermath.

Lost! The Franklin Expedition and the Fate of the Crews of H.M.S. Erebus and Terror

By Richard Galaburri

NY: Black Raven

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter



Into the icy mists surrounding the final fate of Sir John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition there comes a new figure: Richard Galaburri. An Arctic book dealer, collector, and traveller, his short essays on various aspects of northern history have appeared the The Musk-Ox, Arctic, and other specialist journals, but those seeking a copy of Lost! at their local library or bookstore may be forgiven if they begin to wonder whether the book and its author are themselves phantasms of the frozen zone; even the vast WorldCat archives contain no record of the volume.  Happily, I can report that both the book and Mr. Galaburri do in fact exist; both may be found on eBay, where he's been quietly selling this modest volume for the past year, and I hope that this review will bring them to the attention of a wider audience.

And it will be attention well-deserved, as this slender but meticulous volume is in fact the best available introduction to the essential issues that make the Franklin mystery an 'unsolved' one. Written in a lucid and accessible style, it lays out the basic facts of the case with admirable clarity, and then traces the evidence uncovered by Charles Francis Hall, the Inuit testimony with which any meaningful account of Franklin's fate must grapple. One may disagree with some of the details Galaburri's proposed solution, as I do, and nevertheless find it stimulating and provocative; the author has done his research carefully, and his evidence is sound (and amply footnoted). It is the rare book that will appeal both to newcomers to the story, and those who have grappled with it for decades.

What follows is chiefly for the latter, and I'll apologize in advance for the density of detail; for those not already steeped in these questions, I can simply recommend Mr. Galaburi's book, followed by Woodman's two volumes; those who have read any or all of these will be familiar with the issues I raise.


The summary of the Franklin evidence offered in the first few sections of the present book is admirable; up to the point of the 1848 abandonment, there is fairly broad consensus as to the disposition of the ships and their crews. Two elements of Inuit testimony, however, offer conflicting alternatives as to teh destiny of the last groups of survivors, and it is these that Galaburri wisely focusses upon. The first is the testimony of one Kok-lee-arng-nun, and old man who gave Hall two spoons with the Crozier crest and told a remarkable tale of visits to the commanders of two ships, who seemed to be Franklin and Crozier, under the names 'Too-loo-ah' and 'A-gloo-ka.' He described 'Too-loo-ah' as "an old man with broad shoulders, thick and heavier set than Hall, with gray hair, full face, and bald head. He was always wearing something over his eyes (spectacles, as Too-koo-li-too interpreted it), was quite lame, and appeared sick when they last saw him. He was very kind to Innuits -- always wanting them to eat something. With this man was his second officer, 'Aglooka' ... after the first summer and first winter, they saw no more of Too-loo-ark, and then A-gloo-ka was the Eshemutta (captain)."

This story, as Galaburri observes, cannot be explained away (as Hall himself and others have tried) as a reminiscence of Sir John and James Ross; the elder Ross had a luxutriant head of hair until the day he died, which was a quarter-century after his expedition, not during it. I believe there's really no other way to explain this testimony other than to posit that some Inuit bands did indeed visit the ships prior to the abandonment, prior indeed to Franklin's death. The dating is even accurate: after the first summer (that of 1846) and winter (1846-47) was precisely when he died.  Still, this evidence has been handled gingerly by some experts, most notably David Woodman, who points out that there is no other evidence that Inuit knew about or visited the ships in the pack ice off King William Island, and that this story must therefore refer to a later event when the ships were further south; in his version Too-loo-ark is Crozier, and thus it is Crozier who dies and is replaced by a subordinate. Galaburri takes the Kok-lee-ang-nun story at face value, and vividly recounts it, along with Hall's (eventually skeptical) response.

But this for Galaburri is just the turning point for his second hypothesis, which is that the "Aglooka" described here and in other Inuit testimony is indeed Crozier.  His argument is based on Crozier's character and Arctic experience, and is of course an appealing one; I myself always find that when I imagine the elusive Aglooka I tend to picture Crozier.  There is no concrete evidence, however, and given that the name was also applied to Ross and Rae and other strangers, the identification of Crozier here must fairly be called conjectural. Given that, however, the rest of his theory is reasonable and well-argued; he believes that Crozier and his men headed east rather than west, apparently making for Igloolik.  He thus credits (as does Woodman in one of his theses in Strangers Among Us) the sighting of strange white men on the Melville Peninsula to this group. There is a conflict here, though, since in the tales of Tooshooarthariu and others, Aglooka told them he was going to "Iwillik" (Repulse Bay) and not to Igloolik.  Clearly, these must be different groups, unless Aglooka changed his mind at some point, and/or there may have been two Aglookas.  Nevertheless, it's a strong argument that one of them was Crozier, since many of the Inuit told Hall that a man who had been with Parry at Igloolik in 1822 was among this group of last survivors -- and that could only be Crozier.

It still seems a bit of a stretch to imagine that a Crozier-led group would march all the way to Igloolik rather than to nearer resources, such as the supplies remaining at Fury Beach, or Repulse Bay, where contact via whalers was possible. Still, since he had been there before, the familiarity of the place and the possibility of finding some familiar Inuit faces must have been strong attractions. Some of the "strangers" were indeed seen by Inuit in the area of Igloolik, but mistaking them for "Etkerlin" (sub-Arctic Indians), they avoided them. It would be ironic indeed if Crozier guided his men this far, but was unable to communicate with any Inuit. If this was his route, he and his companions must have perished just short of their goal; nevertheless their struggle, as Galaburri recounts it, is one that elicits considerable admiration.

There are a few minor shortcomings to the volume: Galaburri did not consult the original Hall papers, relying only on those Nourse transcribed, and he did not make use of Woodman's Strangers Among Us, wanting to avoid any undue influence on his own theories. Nevertheless, his book offers a brisk and lucid possible solution, one which judiciously notes where and how it departs from others; by choosing a single strand of possibility, Galaburri is able to make his account a far more readily readable one. I'd recommend it to anyone commencing their own Franklin search, and hope that it will be more widely available in the near future.

Cairns: Messengers in Stone

by David B. Williams

Seattle: The Mountaineers Books. $15.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


On first seeing this book, some may ask, how much can you really say about cairns?  After all, for most who know the term, it calls to mind the trail-marking heaps of rocks that guide hikers above the treeline, or where landmarks are scarce; such modest, utilitarian markers hardly seem to call for an entire volume, even this modest one of 192 pages.  And yet on actually opening the book, one finds that -- in a manner rather like cairns themselves -- it contains a remarkable variety and amount of information within its various nooks and crannies, so much so that one marvels not at its extent, but its compactness.

The feeling grows as one reads through the chapters, each a neat conglomeration of historical, cultural, and scientific facts. The most expected topic -- "Cairns on the Trail" is followed quickly by chapters on the geology and ecology of cairns, both of which offer an enormously engrossing and succinct account of the deeper significance of all the things one sees in cairns. Did you know that the thin accretions on the outside of rocks have a name, and that these -- along with the size of the lichens on a rock's upper surfaces -- can be used to accurately date a cairn's age?  Did you know there was an ancient species of tree in Lebanon which survives only because its seedlings found shelter in cairns? Did you realize the enormous influence of stones upon an ecosystem, so great that lifting a few rocks and stacking them in a pile both destroys and creates unique micro-climates and colonies of life?

Each of Williams's historical and scientific disquisitions is interwoven with witty footnotes, evocative excerpts from the reflections of others upon cairns,  and John Barnett's tasteful illustrations, so that one never feels that the knowledge imparted becomes too weighty.  For my part, the most delightful sections are those on expedition cairns, particularly in the Arctic.  Williams gives a brief but resonant account of the Franklin expedition of 1845, and how cairns served both as its markers, its mailboxes, and -- ultimately -- its tombstones. A meditation on the origins of a Greenland cairn discovered by George Strong Nares reads like a miniature mystery novel, and if every loose end is not tied up at its conclusion, we nevertheless learn a great deal, including something about the limits of our knowledge.

Some of the book's most poignant passages describe the destruction of cairns or their wholesale carting-off, a stone at a time, leaving a terrible sense of a void where once there was an abundance.  And yet, for every stone that is taken, more than one is often left behind somewhere else.  The leaving of stones, from megalithic times to the present, begins to appear as an essential, almost primordial aspect of what it means to be human.

Charles Dickens once wrote that "“No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot," and having read Williams's book, I would say the same thing about cairns: once we learn, in this deceptively modest volume, how to read cairns, we will never look upon them the same way again.

Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

By Ken McGoogan

Toronto: HarperCollins, 2017

Reviewed by Kenn Harper



Ken McGoogan has produced yet another worthy northern book. Dead Reckoning sets out to tell, as its sub-title proclaims, “The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage.” The book is peopled with the usual suspects in the history of Arctic exploration and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. I needn’t name them here; if you are reading this, you already know who they are.  But this book introduces other names that will be unfamiliar to many readers, even some well-versed in northern history. Their stories are the “untold stories” of the sub-title.

McGoogan points out in his Prologue that orthodox history only grudgingly acknowledges non-British explorers - he specifically mentions Amundsen, Kane and Hall - as well as “short-changing” fur-trade explorers - and here he mentions Hearne, Mackenzie and Rae. He has mentioned these explorers before, of course, and his focus on John Rae is well-known. But in the present volume he takes his championship of the neglected considerably further. “The twenty-first century,” he says, “demands a more inclusive narrative of Arctic exploration–one that accommodates both neglected explorers and forgotten First Peoples.”

 His goal, then, is “to restore the unsung heroes to their rightful eminence.” He recognizes not just the physical work, but the contributions, of the fur-trade explorers, and of Dene, Ojibway, Cree, and especially Inuit. He points out that Franklin’s ships would still be undiscovered at the bottom of the ocean were it not for Inuit and their oral histories.

And so the reader encounters unfamiliar names in this sweeping tale. McGoogan’s point is that they have largely been nameless to date, so I feel compelled to name them here, in solidarity with McGoogan’s championing of them, and to help in rectifying the injury that past histories have done them.

Thanadelthur, an unsung Dene woman who assisted James Knight, has her story told in these pages, as do other Dene leaders, Matonabbee, who accompanied Hearne, and Akaitcho, who assisted Franklin on his overland expeditions. The Ojibway hunter, Thomas Mistegan, played an important role in support of John Rae. Even the Iroquois voyageur (and murderer), Michel, makes an appearance.

Two Greenlandic Inuit are recognized in these pages: John Sakeouse is present for his role in helping John Ross make the first contact by Europeans with the Inughuit of north-western Greenland; Hans Hendrik is featured for the reliance Elisha Kent Kane placed on him.

Early Inuit interpreters in what is now Canada ranged far and wide. They include Tattannoeuck and Hoeootoerock, both from the western shores of Hudson Bay, but who travelled extensively with explorers as far west as the Mackenzie Delta. Albert One-Eye lost his life in the service of John Rae. Ouligbuck (William Ouligbuck Senior), an Inuk from the Keewatin region, worked with explorers and traders as far east as Fort Chimo (Kuujjuaq) and as far west as Fort McPherson, certainly an accomplishment worth noting, yet the historical record has been generally silent on his contributions, less so for those of his son, William Ouligbuck Junior, on whom much of Rae’s success depended.

Other Inuit contributed directly to the work of those Qallunaat explorers who searched for Franklin and his missing men. The oral histories provided by men like In-nook-poo-zhe-jook and Puhtoorak, and the indispensable couple, Tookoolito and Ebierbing, not to mention their physical labours – and those of men like Tulugaq - in support of the expeditions of Hall and Schwatka, leave one wondering why their stories have not been known earlier. Tookoolito’s brother, Eenoolooapik, played an important role in the rediscovery of Cumberland Sound by whalers, but no role at all in the search for Franklin or the Northwest Passage. But his biographer later sailed as assistant surgeon with Franklin, and this prompts McGoogan to tell his story in a “what if” chapter. Might things have turned out differently for Franklin if Eenoolooapik had travelled with his friend, the surgeon, on Franklin’s doomed expedition? Eenoolooapik can be seen here as a surrogate for Inuit in general, and the question becomes – What if Franklin had made use of Inuit travel methods and Inuit knowledge? It’s a question worth pondering.

McGoogan devotes a chapter also to Knud Rasmussen, an explorer-ethnographer of Danish and Greenlandic heritage, who spoke Greenlandic (closely related to Inuktitut) as his native language. He collected Franklin reminiscences on his epic dog-sled journey across Arctic America from Hudson Bay to Bering Strait. He travelled with two indispensable Inughuit companions. Ironically McGoogan doesn’t give us their names, but they were the hunter, Qaavigarsuaq, and his female cousin, Arnarulunnguaq.

Of course, the story must end (and does) with acknowledgement of the contributions of Louie Kamookak and Sammy Kogvik, both instrumental in the finding of the Erebus and Terror.
McGoogan highlights also the work of non-British explorers whom he feels history has short-changed, among them Jens Munk, a Dane who led an early and tragic expedition to Hudson Bay, and Roald Amundsen, the first to sail the Northwest Passage. David Woodman, a modern-day researcher, is given the credit he richly deserves for his work in pointing out that Inuit oral histories held the key to “unravelling the Franklin mystery.”

McGoogan achieves admirably his goal of bringing the unsung, whether Indigenous or Qallunaat, to the fore. In some areas, I would suggest he overachieves it.

In his desire to give Indigenous people their due, he sometimes over-reaches. While there is ample reason to include Hans Hendrik for his work with Kane, and Tookoolito and Ebierbing for their assistance to Hall, there seems little reason to discuss Hall’s expedition in search of the North Pole, in which all three participated, in a book on the Northwest Passage; perhaps it was a way of making the Inuit biographies more complete. The inclusion of a chapter on Minik (the New York Eskimo) in a book on the passage is more perplexing, although I am personally grateful for the exposure this inclusion gives to Minik’s sad story.

And yet a few Inuit who were involved in the search for Franklin are omitted, perhaps because the author felt their roles were quite minor. Kallihirua (properly Qalaherhuaq, and usually abbreviated to Kalli), from northern Greenland, was with Ommanney in 1850 and ended up in England where he assisted Captain John Washington in preparing an English-Eskimo dictionary for the use of Franklin search parties. The West Greenlander, Adam Beck, also played a minor (and confusing) role in the Franklin search.

In his blog on August 30, McGoogan pointed out that “copies from the first print run include a map-related glitch that will turn these books into collectors’ items.” The challenge implicit in his statement was to find the glitch. OK, I found it. It is the misplacement of the maps (but not the map titles) on pages 206 and 254. All the maps, by the way, and especially the end-paper maps are superb.

A book of this scope necessarily gives rise to questions and quibbles. They are remarkably few.

In discussing James Knight’s ill-fated expedition, which perished, it is claimed, in its entirety, he makes no mention of “the English Man.” Between 1738 and 1744 Francis Smith, the captain of a Hudson’s Bay Company trading sloop which ventured annually north from Churchill, reported that at Whale Cove the Inuit called one of their number “the English Man.” The captain noted that he was of an age that meant that he could possibly be the son of a survivor of the Knight expedition and an Inuit woman. This is supposition, of course, but would have made a nice aside.

The controversial Moses Norton of Churchill is referred to as “HBC governor” (43), when what is meant is “chief factor,” the position that Norton held there from 1762 until his death in 1773. The same error is repeated in reference to Samuel Hearne (52).

In “Matonabbee Leads Hearne to the Coast,” the slaughter of Inuit by Dene at Bloody Falls is recounted. But I was disappointed that there was no reference to recent scholarship casting doubt on the veracity of Hearne’s account of the massacre – whether one believes the recent scholarship or not - although an earlier chapter casts doubt on Hearne’s account of the James Knight story.

Eenoolooapik’s birthplace, Qimisuk, is not Blacklead Island (155), which is farther down the coast of Cumberland Sound and has the Inuktitut name Uummannarjuaq. Qegertarsuag should be Qeqertarsuaq (364). “Qallunaat,” the word given for “white man” is the plural form; the singular is “qallunaaq” (399).

On page 335, it is claimed that in 1870 when Lady Franklin visited him, Charles Francis Hall was working on his “soon-to-be-published book Life with the Esquimaux: A Narrative of Arctic Experience in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition.” But that book was published in 1866, the American edition of a two-volume work first published in England under a different title two years earlier. In 1870 Hall was, in fact, working on plans for his North Pole expedition. He never published an account of his second expedition, the one in which Lady Franklin was interested; his notes were edited and published posthumously as a third-person narrative in 1879.

But these are minor quibbles in a sweeping work that sets out to bring the Indigenous contributors to northern exploration into the story as participants with names – not just tribal affiliations or occupations stated as “hunter” or “my faithful interpreter” – and lives, families, and accomplishments.  McGoogan achieves his goal. Let’s hope that future writers follow his lead and give Indigenous people their rightful place in the development of inclusive, cross-cultural histories of northern exploration.

The Arctic Journals of John Rae

Selected and Edited by Ken McGoogan

Victoria, BC: TouchWood Editions, 2012

312 pp. , $19.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


The welcome publication of the journals of Dr. John Rae, the man who filled in the last crucial blanks in the northern coastline of North America, now fills a notable blank on the shelves of history; his is the last personal narrative of a major explorer during the search for Sir John Franklin to be published, one hundred and fifty-eight years after the latest events it recounts. There is considerable irony in the chief reason for this delay, which is doubtless that Rae searched too well, uncovering things that the British Admiralty, and large segments of the British public, would have preferred remained covered up. His accounts of Inuit testimony as to Franklin's men resorting to cannibalism shocked the sensibilities of the day, and were vociferously denied not only by Charles Dickens, but by many others in more recent times, despite the clear forensic evidence since gathered which has proved this testimony true.  Rae's own words still speak most capably in his defense, and we must be grateful to Ken McGoogan and TouchWood editions for bringing them back to us in a beautiful and compact new edition.

The format of the book, though, may be a bit confusing at first to some readers; it opens with several passages from the "lost" section of Rae's autobiography, missing from the manuscript at the Scott Polar Research Institute, then partially recovered by McGoogan in a series of extended quotations in David Murray Smith's compendium of Arctic voyages. Smith's commentary and sections of Rae's text are given together, which makes for somewhat jarring transitions between the rather pompous language of Smith, and the plain speaking of the intrepid Orcadian. There can be gleaned, however, from these pages, some items of considerable interest to the armchair Franklin searcher of today, particularly in Rae's extended comments on the paucity of wood amid the Inuit he encountered. Rae believed that this was clear evidence that they had not found either of Franklin' ships as of 1854, which would effectively date the finding of the ship at Oootjoolik to after that point; certainly by the time McClintock encountered the Inuit near Booth Point in 1859, wood was remarkably abundant.

The second, and largest section of the book contains Rae's full account, published in his lifetime, of his first Arctic expedition in 1846-47; while it of necessity contains nothing about Franklin, it is remarkable to consider how well and (for the most part) how comfortably Rae lived off the land, at the very moment when Franklin's men, holed up in their frozen ships, were contemplating that same land with fear, so dependent were they on stored provisions.

The remainder of the book contains a series of texts, including Rae's initial report, followed by Dickens's two-part attack on the credibility of Rae's witnesses, Rae's rejoinder (with Dickensian interruptions), and finally the full text of Rae's official report as reprinted in Household Words.  The astute reader may notice, the third time around, that there are a few pesky inconsistencies in these reprinted sources. As an example, Rae's original report opined that some of Franklin's men must have lived into the spring following, as "fresh bones and feathers of geese" were found (this is given accurately by Smith, and in the present volume on p. 33), whereas the typesetters at Bradbury & Evans, publishers of Household Words, mis-read this as "fish-bones and feathers," leading whole generations of Franklin researchers off on a wild fish chase (this error is faithfully reproduced in the text taken from HW on p. 301).

The general reader, happily, need not trouble over such minutae, but will benefit from this volume in two significant ways.  First, Rae's own account gives us the most vivid description of the rigors of extended journeys by boat and sledge, the longest ever undertaken with success by a single individual in this period, in the face of squalls, storms, frostbite, and terrain so rough that it wore out a brand new pair of moccasins in two hours. Second, until now there has been no readily-available and complete account in Rae's own words of the entirety of his discoveries relating to the fate of Franklin.  This new edition remedies this lack, and should have a place on the shelves of anyone interested in Arctic exploration, during the Franklin era or any other.

Product details

• Format Paperback | 128 pages
• Dimensions 210 x 276 x 12mm | 585g
• Publication date 27 Aug 2010
• Publisher DAVID & CHARLES
• Publication City/Country Newton Abbot, United Kingdom
• Language English
• Illustrations note Illustrations, unspecified
• ISBN10 0715337777
• ISBN13 9780715337776
• Bestsellers rank 84,306