In August 1854, during a single prodigious Arctic expedition, the Scottish Orcadian superman John Rae solved the two great mysteries of 19th-century Arctic exploration. First, beating his way overland with his two hardiest men, an Inuk and an Ojibway, he discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage, the only channel navigable by the sailing ships of the day. Second, Rae correctly determined the fate of the Franklin expedition -- specifically, that the final survivors of that unlucky, two-vessel undertaking had been driven to cannibalism. I told the whole story in my book Fatal Passage. In the epilogue to that work, I described how, in 1999, with Cameron Treleaven and Louie Kamookak, I erected a plaque beside the cairn that Rae built in the High Arctic, overlooking the waterway he discovered. In August 2012, sailing this time with Adventure Canada, I revisited that hard-to-reach spot -- this time, with eighty or ninety voyagers keen to establish the site as a viable historical destination. Just in time to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Rae's birth (September, 1813), this story turns up in the latest issue (April-May) of Canada's History magazine.
Before turning mainly to books about arctic exploration and Canadian history, Ken McGoogan worked for two decades as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal. He teaches creative nonfiction writing through the University of Toronto and in the MFA program at King’s College in Halifax. Ken served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, has written recently for Canada’s History, Canadian Geographic, and Maclean’s, and sails with Adventure Canada as a resource historian. Based in Toronto, he has given talks and presentations across Canada, from Dawson City to Dartmouth, and in places as different as Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Hobart.
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