Theme Layout

Boxed or Wide or Framed

[style4]

Theme Translation

Display Featured Slider

No

Featured Slider Styles

Display Grid Slider

Grid Slider Styles

Display Author Bio

Display Instagram Footer

Dark or Light Style

Search This Blog

Blog Archive

Followers

Popular Posts

Pages

Dead Reckoning tracks Northwest Passage through Oakville



Faithful readers (hi, Mom!) will find the above photo vaguely familiar.
That's because a flipped version turns up on the cover of Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage. It says here that the book's author is heading for Oakville, and is not to be missed. More precisely, Our Ken will be presenting to the Canadian Club of Halton at the Oakville Conference Centre on February 22.  He tells jokes, shows slides, waves his arms -- what's not to love?
Ken's latest book challenges the conventional narrative of the Northwest Passage which emerged out of Victorian England and focuses almost exclusively on Royal Navy officers. By integrating non-British and fur-trade explorers and, above all, Canada’s indigenous peoples, Dead Reckoning drags the story of Arctic discovery into the twenty-first century.
Because Ken voyages regularly in the Passage with Adventure Canada, you never know what might pop up on the screen. Here's a cairn we chanced upon one August in Pasley Bay. 

At first I dreamed that this might be it: the cairn James Clark Ross built on Boothia Peninsula in 1831 to mark his discovery of the North Magnetic Pole. Turned out the ruins of THAT cairn lie a few hours march away. Henry Larsen built THIS cairn during his eastward voyage in the St. Roch. He did so to mark the gravesite of the ship's cook, who died aboard ship in this bay.  So that's the kind of thing might surface.

Ken McGoogan
0 Comments
Share This Post :

You Might Also Like

No comments:

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.