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Ukkusiksalik: The People's Story By David F. Pelly Toronto: Dundurn, $21.50 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter When I was in Gjoa Haven for ten days in 2004, I remember a local Inuk who, though he was happy to answer my newcomer's questions, regarded my interest in his community as a short-term one, despite my protestations to the contrary. When I asked him why, he put it plainly: many  Qallunaaat say the same thing -- but then that's the last you see of them -- they never come back. David F. Pelly is one who came back -- again and again -- and so earned the trust and the friendship of the people he sojourned among. And these qualities are vital to the  project of  Ukkusiksalik , which is no less than to provide a comprehensive oral history of this area from the earliest appearance of humans to the establishment of the national park that bears its name in 2003, and beyond. Indeed, Pelly opens with an account of the geological history of the area beginning with the last Ice Ag...

Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of H.M.S. Investigator and the McClure Expedition By Glenn M. Stein. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. ISBN 978-07864-77081 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore In October 1853 the sensational news was announced in London that the captain and crew of HMS Investigator had discovered the last link with previously known routes in the Arctic to complete a maritime North-West Passage, finally proving its existence after some three centuries of uncertainty. Those who had brought the news, Lieutenant Samuel Cresswell and the Mate Robert Wyniatt, were almost certainly the first individuals ever to make a complete transit through the passage, but at the time of the announcement the captain and most of his crew were still in the Arctic, far from completing the passage and still far from safety—and it would be another year before they returned home. The discovery had actually taken place in the autumn of the voyage’s first year, 1850, when a sl...

Franklin’s Lost Ship: The Historic Discovery of HMS Erebus By John Geiger and Alanna Mitchell 201 p., illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2015 Reviewed by David C. Woodman The September 2014 discovery of HMS Erebus, one of two long-lost discovery vessels from the third Arctic voyage of Sir John Franklin, garnered international interest and will undoubtedly count as one of the greatest marine archaeological finds of the century. As the fitting culmination of a six-year effort in difficult conditions by Parks Canada and its partners, this discovery will undoubtedly result in a bookshelf full of new publications concerning its archaeological, historical, and even political implications (full disclosure: I have one in manuscript form). Franklin’s Lost Ship , as the first of these, has the advantage of primacy and immediacy, and serves as a good introduction to the story of the discovery of the wreck and the historical background. Mr. Geiger,...

The Polar North: Ways of Speaking, Ways of Belonging Stephan Pax Leonard Francis Boutle Publishers, London. 2014.  £20. Reviewed by Genevieve LeMoine Stephen Pax Leonard's book The Polar North joins a long line of popular accounts by travellers to the far north who seek to experience and learn from traditional "primitive" culture before it disappears. Leonard spent a year among the Inughuit (in his spelling, Inugguit) conducting linguistic research, concerned about the impending loss of oral traditions, and indeed Inughuit culture as whole, in the face of rapid cultural and climatic change. His background is as a linguist of Scandinavian languages and this was his first experience in the far north. His approach is phenomenological, concerned with the spoken word, as well as gestures; language not as “a disembodied, purely formal set of grammatical and syntactic relations” but as a part of “the totality of human experience” (p. 28). Leonard discusses this aspect of his r...

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 n...