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Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony Second Edition by David C. Woodman Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter It's the single most significant book in the history of the search for Sir John Franklin's long-lost ships and men, one without which, arguably, Parks Canada's 2014 discovery of HMS "Erebus" would never have been possible. And yet it's a book that relatively few, aside from the true Franklinomanes, have read, read recently, or read with care. And so it's extraordinarily welcome news that McGil-Queen's University Press has seen fit to bring out this new paperback edition, just in time for those who have only recently contracted Franklin fever to apply its sobering salve to their heated brows. The text of the book is essentially unmodified from its first edition -- but, as Woodman explains in his thoughtful and informative preface, that's because -- aside from one or two relati

Second In Command by May Fluhmann NWT Department of Information (1976) Reviewed by Regina Koellner It is a phenomenon that so many books have been written about Sir John Franklin and his ill-fated expedition, but so few about the officers and men who accompanied him. There is currently only one biography of Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier available, namely Michael Smith's Captain Francis Crozier: Last man Standing ?  James Fitzjames, Commander of H.M.S. Erebus, had to wait until 2010 for his story to be told by William Battersby in James Fitzjames – The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition . Graham Gore, Harry Goodsir and all the others still remain unsung heroes. In Crozier’s case, though, there is in fact a second biography apart from Smith's, but other than in selected libraries and archives, it's hard to find a copy. The book, published in a small edition by the Government of the Northwest Territories (Department of Information), is appropriately called “Second in Comman

In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Voyage of the USS Jeanette By Hampton Sides 454 p., b&w illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography NY; Random House, 2014 Reviewed by William Barr Influenced by the deluded idea of German geographer and armchair explorer, August Petermann (and of many of his contemporaries) that the North Pole lay in the middle of an ice-free Open Polar Sea, surrounded by a relatively narrow annular belt of sea-ice, in the 1870’s, following the disastrous outcome of Charles Francis Hall’s expedition on board Polaris in 1871-73, Lt. George W. De Long of the US Navy conceived of mounting another attempt at the North Pole, but by a different route. With the financial backing of James Gordon Bennett, flamboyant   owner of the New York Herald, on   8 July 1879 he sailed from San Francisco on board the bark-rigged, three-masted steamer, Jeannette which, through Bennett’s influence, had been flagged as a unit of the US Navy.   She was northward-bound

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’ e

Cambridge Library Collection Various titles, $37.99 - $75 Cambridge University Press Reviewed by Russell A. Potter It's not often that we review multiple titles in a single notice -- but this case is exceptional. There's no other single publisher who offers such a range of classic expedition narratives, and it would seem unfair to single out any one of these many volumes. Chosen in consultation with the Scott Polar Research Institute, they represent the widest array of classic Arctic book currently in print and available from any publisher I know. And, though it's quite true that the majority of them can be read for free online via Google Books or archive.org, there's something about these particular books -- and these particular reprints -- that makes obtaining them as actual, physical books a particular value. Over past decades, a number of publishers have reprinted books such as these -- classics in their field which have long gone out of print -- and sold them, prim

The Dream of the North: A Cultural History to 1920 by Peter Fjågesund Rodopi, 2014, $175 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Every few years, a book comes out which offers -- or purports to offer -- a sweeping overview of the history of Arctic exploration and its historical significance. Most, however, take the explorers' accounts at face value, and are essentially elegant coffee-table books for armchair enthusiasts. When I first saw the title of this book, though encouraged by the subtitle "a cultural history," I was a bit skeptical -- how could any book, especially one just over five hundred and fifty pages in length, cover such a period, and cover it well? Peter Fjågesund manages this feat, and several others along the way: unlike other recent cultural histories, which -- rejecting the old grand narratives -- have cobbled together in their place a rather lumpy "new North" out of Scandinavian mythology, wandering antiquarians, and stuffed polar bears, Fjågesund is n

In 1852, the indefatigable Sherard Osborn -- a prolific if not always pleasant collaborator and author -- published his Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal . The stray leaves of this review, however, are of a quite different and more visually engaging variety: a chapbook and a small volume of illustrated cards inspired by words in in the Greenlandic Inuit dialect. Both share slight dimensions and lightness of weight; they seem as though they might almost have arrived at our doorstep via message balloons like t hose dispatched in 1851 in the search for Sir John Franklin, or perhaps fallen out onto our desk as we opened some more ponderous tome of Arctic journeys. We can only express our delight that they have. The first is Nancy Campbell's How to Say 'I Love You' in Greenlandic , a miniaturized version of her fine press art book of the same name. Campbell, who was a writer in residence at the Upernavik Museum in 2010, is presently the holder of the Lady Margaret Hall Visua