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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.
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