A few days ago, in the comments section below the Globe and Mail review of Dead Reckoning, I placed a link to my rejoinder. The review's author, Janice Cavell, has responded in that same forum. She says nothing about my two main criticisms, and so apparently concedes -- first, that her review short-shrifted the Inuit, failing to name even a single Inuk, and second, that it suggested white males are interchangeable. Instead, Cavell again takes up the cudgels in defence of the Royal Navy narrative of the Northwest Passage -- a story that does change to suit new information, but that ALWAYS manages to keep those old familiar naval officers front and centre.Ever since Lady Franklin in the 1850s, the defenders of Official History have relied on geographical confusion and misunderstanding to make their case. But check the map attached, taken from the endpapers of Dead Reckoning. As you can see, despite Cavell's contention, Bellot Strait is more than 100 km northeast of King William Island. It played no role whatsoever in the first navigable Northwest Passage, as established by Roald Amundsen in 1903-06. Click on the map and check out the route he took.
Far from denying that John Franklin “discovered” Franklin Strait -- which is simply the southern extension of Peel Sound, south of Bellot Strait -- I argue and show clearly that Franklin sailed directly through that waterway. By so doing, he established a navigable passage through those waters, all the way south to near the top of King William Island (KWI). Whether the coastline was charted is irrelevant. In January 1830, travelling with several Inuit, James Clark Ross had crossed the ice from Boothia to the northern tip of KWI -- but surmised, in snowy conditions, that the waters to the east of that island ended in a bay. The map Franklin carried showed precisely that, which is why he turned west and got trapped in the ice.
In 1854, after travelling overland across Boothia with an Inuk, William Ouligbuck, and an Ojibway, Thomas Mistegan, John Rae determined that what James Clark Ross, and so Franklin, had believed to be a bay was in fact a strait: Rae Strait. Aware of Rae’s discovery, which had been verified by Leopold McClintock, Amundsen followed in the wake of Franklin to KWI, then veered east through Rae Strait to Gjoa Haven, before proceeding onward. So, once more with feeling: Dr. John Rae -- that Orcadian Scot, that Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader, that first great champion of Inuit oral history -- John Rae discovered the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage.

This glorious map turns up as endpapers in Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage. It was drawn by Dawn Huck, one of the principals at Heartland Associates in Winnipeg. I love the way it captures the discovery of the original Northwest Passage in three essential expeditions. The first, led by John Franklin, got halted by ice off King William Island. In the British (Royal Navy) version of exploration history, it stands alone, the culmination of a centuries-long search. The second highlights a profoundly Canadian moment that arose out of the fur trade. Here we find an Orcadian Scot, an Inuk, and an Ojibway -- John Rae, William Ouligbuck, and Thomas Mistegan -- locating the final missing link in the Passage: Rae Strait. The third expedition is that of Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who succeeds in completing the Passage by diverging from Franklin's route and sailing through Rae Strait.
This map is one of half a dozen in Dead Reckoning, which launches on September 27, when I return from voyaging Out of the Northwest Passage
with Adventure Canada. But books may start trickling into bookstores mid-month, and I want to give faithful readers a heads-up: early copies from the first print run include a map-related glitch that will turn those books into collectors' items. Most readers won't notice, and the glitch disappears from later printings and won't be found in the ebook. But for Arctic history buffs, it will identify that book as coming from the earliest printing. So, if you collect Arctic history or you are buying for a collector, you might want to pick up a copy sooner rather than later. Just saying!

Hats off to Roald Amundsen, the most accomplished polar explorer of them all. One hundred and three years ago today, on Dec. 14, 1911, he reached the geographical South Pole as leader of the first Antarctic expedition to do so. Fifteen years later, in 1926, he also became the first to reach the North Pole -- at least if you disbelieve the claims of Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. And, yes, in 1903-06, Amundsen became the first to navigate the Northwest Passage. In so doing, he sailed through Rae Strait, which the Scottish-Orcadian John Rae had discovered half a century before. Amundsen reached the South Pole 33 days before a competing expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott, thanks in part to what he had learned from the Inuit (especially about using dogs) while spending two winters at what is now Gjoa Haven. This photo, taken earlier this year by Sheena Fraser McGoogan, finds Our Hero out front of Amundsen's house, which is now a museum. Situated on the water some distance outside Oslo, it remains exactly as Amundsen left it in 1928, when he set out on a rescue mission from which he would never return. Tip of the day: do not try to reach Amundsen's house without a GPS.

me shaking hands with the giant himself, immediately beneath the ship. As for The Last of the Vikings, that's the tite of a book I reviewed here a couple of years back. And below, I play the familiar with Amundsen and his fellows. All photos by Sheena Fraser McGoogan. And this, of course, is not the half of it. An AMAZING plaee!

In the Globe and Mail of Nov. 17, our hero reviews the new biography of Roald Amundsen, called The Last Viking. Author: Stephen Bown. Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre . . .

By Ken McGooogan
In 1905, when he was preparing to sail out of Gjoa Haven in Canada’s High Arctic, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen buried a few artifacts beneath a cairn. Those artifacts, among them a photo of a scientist who had taught him how to locate the moving North Magnetic Pole, are now held at a museum in Yellowknife. And visitors to the Inuit settlement of Gjoa Haven, so named by Amundsen in honour of his ship, the Gjoa, can see the remains of the observatory sites from which Amundsen took magnetic readings.
The explorer spent two winters based in that harbour on King William Island while becoming the first explorer to navigate the Northwest Passage across the top of North America. He belongs crucially to the history of Canada’s Arctic exploration, and yet, as Stephen R. Bown remarks in The Last Viking, most books treat Amundsen almost exclusively in the 1911 context of the “race to the South Pole.”
That so-called race, which found Amundsen becoming the first to reach the Earth’s southernmost point, while British explorer Robert Falcon Scott died trying, makes for an admittedly gripping story. And Bown does it justice here. But he also demonstrates that, as a polar explorer, Amundsen achieved more in the north than he did in the south. He not only led the way through the Northwest Passage, but traversed the Northeast Passage along the Russian coast, and flew an airship over the North Pole.
Bown surmises that Amundsen is not better known in the English-speaking world because much written material was available until recently only in Norwegian. In The Last Viking, he fills in many empty spaces. Who knew, for example, that Amundsen enjoyed lingering love affairs with three married women? He was about to marry one of them, recently divorced, when in 1928, at the age of 55, he flew north to help rescue an Italian explorer, and was never seen again.
Amundsen emerges from these pages as an obsessive, lonely figure: idiosyncratic, principled, misunderstood. Bown admits that he could be arrogant and impatient, but usually turns up mitigating circumstances and makes a good case that the explorer deserved better treatment than he received.
The author shows that Amundsen succeeded in reaching the South Pole because of what he learned in the north. As a boy, he became enthralled with his fellow Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, who made the first crossing of the Greenland icecap and then traversed the Arctic by exploiting the drift of the pack ice. From his native Norway, Amundsen also took up skiing, honing his abilities as a youth by undertaking ambitious (and dangerous) cross-country expeditions.
From the Inuit, with whom he shared many adventures while based at Gjoa Haven, Amundsen learned above all how to travel across ice using dogs and dogsleds. This expertise he brought to his South Pole expedition. Comparisons may be odious, but really: Scott could barely ski, brought ponies to the Antarctic instead of dogs (!), and was driven to man-hauling sledges, known to be killing work.
Bown notes that, thanks to some trick of the British psyche, Scott became a romantic figurehead, the embodiment of heroic but doomed struggle, “the man who snatched victory from the jaws of death.” Half a century before, the same magic convinced the world that John Franklin and his men, tragically lost in an impassible region of the Northwest Passage, had somehow “forged the last link with their lives.” Amundsen proved otherwise.
Bown never does explain how the Norwegian learned what route to follow through the labyrinthian passage, though the explorer himself credited John Rae with pointing the way: “He discovered Rae Strait, which separates King William Land from the mainland. In all probability through this strait is the only navigable route for the voyage. … This is the only passage which is free from destructive pack ice.”
Throughout, Bown writes from the lofty, distancing heights of the fair-minded historian, eschewing creative non-fiction. As a result, The Last Viking does not transcend its genre. Yet the work is sharp-eyed, thorough and convincing, and constitutes a significant addition to the Arctic canon.
Ken McGoogan has written four books on Arctic exploration. Dec. 1, his talk at the Explorers’ Club in NYC will be Return to Rae Strait.