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300,000 to gather in Ireland . . .

300,000 to gather in Ireland . . .


DUBLIN MIXES GUINNESS, JOYCE, AND THE STONE AGE
Ireland
by Ken McGoogan

300,000 people are set for the Gathering in Ireland. Some will be tracing their ancestors. Others will come to see the monasteries, or to follow in the footsteps of the writer James Joyce. Many will make their way to the Guinness Storehouse, where visitors journey through the 250-year history of Guinness and finish up in the Gravity Bar, free pint in hand, looking out over the City of Dublin.
Ireland is getting set for 2013. Every town, village, and hamlet looks to be preparing for The Gathering, a year-long celebration of all things Irish. Tourism Ireland is anticipating that more than 300,000 visitors will turn up, among them tens of thousands of Canadians. If you intend to become one of them, I�ve got good news for you, and maybe a few ideas.
My wife, Sheena, and I recently spent three weeks rambling around the Emerald Isle, our third visit in past few years. We had been hearing that Ireland was in the doldrums as a result of the recession in Europe. So what surprised us most was the vitality, energy, and good humour.
We started in Dublin, where Grafton Street has become a pedestrian mall. On any afternoon or evening, here we encountered a carnival atmosphere: people going both ways in streams or else standing in circles, entranced by one of the jugglers, musicians, comedians, or acrobats. At the foot of Grafton, we had no trouble finding the risque statue of that fictional fishmonger Molly Malone. The locals call it �the tart with the cart.� Turns out every statue and even the new Spire has a nickname, though most are unprintable.
A couple of blocks east, the pubs in the colourful Temple Bar area were invariably heading for lift-off at what usually we consider bed time. The same was true even of the uptown pubs around St. Stephen�s Green. But, hey, we were on holiday, we love Irish music, and sure, we gravitated to O�Donohue�s on Merrion Row. The liveliness would keep growing, apparently, until 2 or 3 in the morning.
Having decided to splurge on one fine meal, we headed for Hugo�s Restaurant, kitty-corner across the street from O�Donohue�s (yes, that was how the night began). To continue reading on website Travel Thru History, click here
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Ken McGoogan
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Online Course in Creative Nonfiction



That online course I teach through the University of Toronto?
I call it The Art of Fact: An Introduction to Writing Nonfiction.
It runs ten weeks, starting September 17, and sounds like this:

The hallmarks of Creative, Literary or Narrative Nonfiction are truth and personal presence. The genre includes subjective and objective streams, and encompasses memoir, autobiography, biography, history, adventure, travel, and true crime. The writer of nonfiction employs memory, imagination, analysis, and research, and adapts literary techniques from fiction, journalism, and the essay. This craft-oriented course aims to enhance your ability to tell true stories. We will explore point of view, scene-making, flashbacks, fat moments, personal presence, and something I call The Rolling Now. The instructor (c'est moi) will introduce a concept or technique and provide examples and illustrations. Participants will apply that idea in an exercise, and share assignments and exchange feedback through a Discussion Board.
You could learn more here: Creative Nonfiction Online.

Consider yourself invited!


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Ken McGoogan
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Making history in the High Arctic

Making history in the High Arctic


Okay, this was last year. The story turned up on that fabulous website Travel  Thru History. Next week, another voyage begins. Stay tuned. . .


CANADIAN VOYAGE MAKES HISTORY
Greenland
by Ken McGoogan

None of us expected our voyage to make history, not when we boarded the Clipper Adventurer in Kugluktuk (Coppermine), near the west end of the Northwest Passage. True, our cruise was billed as an expeditionary adventure. But we numbered roughly one hundred and twenty, most of us were over sixty, and we were sailing in comfort if not luxury: white linen tablecloths in the dining room, a well-stocked bar in the forward lounge, and a staff of expert presenters that included scientists, Inuit culturalists, and authors Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood.
Hundreds of ships had plied these northern waters since the early 1800s, when the British Admiralty began to chart the Arctic archipelago while seeking a trade route across the top of North America. So nobody even dreamed of achieving a first of any kind. We forgot that climate change has made a difference. We did not anticipate that this year, the Arctic would have the second lowest extent of sea ice in recorded history. We did not expect that, according to the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the pack ice would reach its least extent just as we arrived in northwest Greenland.
But on September 10, one day after it did so, we sailed into Rensselaer Bay, where in the mid-1850s, explorer Elisha Kent Kane spent two terrible winters trapped in the ice. And three days after that, as on Day Thirteen of our voyage we approached the island town of Upernavik, I went to the bridge. As the staff historian, I needed to announce the surprising news.
By now, everybody on board knew that we had reached a latitude above 79 degrees. We had achieved a �farthest north� for Adventure Canada, which regularly runs voyages like this one into the Arctic. Everybody knew that, although a number of explorers had travelled by dogsled in this region, very few ships (if any) had entered Rensselaer Bay since 1853, when Kane got trapped there in the Advance. And everybody knew that in 1855 -- decades before Ernest Shackleton made his name with a spectacular, small-boat voyage in the Antarctic -- Kane led sixteen men in an extraordinary, 980-kilometre escape along the Greenland coast.
What drove me to the bridge was that our voyage had just become the first to trace Kane�s escape route from Rensselaer Bay to Upernavik, where Danish settlers welcomed the explorer, and now their posterity welcomed us.
Nobody would describe this as an epochal achievement. Nobody would call it Big History. Yet those of us on board found it thrilling, even though we had done the deed in a double-hulled, state-of-the-art ship that dwarfed Kane�s vessel: the Clipper Adventure is four times as long as the Advance (101 metres compared with 26) and thirty times as heavy (4,376 to 144 tons).
Our voyage had begun with a reversal. Originally, out of Kugluktuk, we had been slated to sail west and then north through Prince of Wales Strait to Winter Harbour on Melville Island. There, in 1818, explorer Edward Parry spent a signal winter, and in 1909 Joseph Bernier asserted Canadian sovereignty over the entire Arctic archipelago.
But satellite imagery showed Captain Kenth Grankvist that a small patch of heavy ice blocked Winter Harbour, and other stretches looked problematic. So we turned east from Kugluktuk and followed the southern or coastal route through the Passage: Coronation Gulf, Victoria Strait, Bellot Strait, Prince Regent Inlet, Lancaster Sound.
The change gave us extra time. We hoped now to sail north through Smith Sound into Kane Basin. Perhaps we could reach Etah on the west coast of Greenland, situated at a northern latitude of 78 degrees 18 minute 50 seconds. Etah was as far north as Adventure Canada had yet ventured along �the American route to the Pole.�
During our first attempt to enter the Sound, however, on Day Nine, we ran into heavy weather and retreated behind some Greenlandic islands to calmer waters. The storm passed, and on Day Ten, under clear blue skies, we sailed through Smith Sound . . . all the way to 79 degrees 3 minutes 45 seconds. We had set an Adventure Canada record.
More importantly, as I told anyone who would listen, we were now north of Rensselaer Bay (78 degrees 37 minutes), where Elisha Kent Kane survived his two-year ordeal by forging an alliance with the Inuit of Etah, 80 kilometres south. We sailed into that Bay -- Kane named it after his ancestors -- and dropped anchor.
While most voyagers went ashore in zodiacs to explore beaches and ridges, five of us -- an archaeologist, a geologist, an artist-photographer, an outdoorsman, and an author-historian (yours truly) -- spent three hours searching small rocky islands for relics of Kane�s expedition. We found what I believe to be the remains of his magnetic observatory. And from the zodiac, prevented from scrambling onto slippery rocks by a receding tide, we spotted what I believe to be the site on �Butler Island� where Kane buried the bodies of two of his men.
Probably, those bodies are still there in the rocks, preserved by the permafrost. Nobody is known to have disturbed them. Certainly, Inuit hunters have roamed this area, and in the early 1900s several explorers -- among them Robert Peary, Frederick Cook, and Knud Rasmussen -- led dog-sled expeditions in this region. But all these had their own objectives.
Ice conditions here have always been difficult and unpredictable. And in recent decades, recorded visits have been few. A 1984 article in Arctic magazine describes a study undertaken by scientists who helicoptered in from the American airbase at Thule to investigate the long-term decline in the caribou population. And an exhaustive archaeological study of northwest Greenland by John Darwent and others, detailed in Arctic Anthropology in 2007, turned up 1,376 features, including winter houses, tent rinks and burials -- but sought and discovered no bodies in Rensselaer Bay.
But at this location in 1855, Kane abandoned the Advance (we found no trace of the ship). He and his men spent one month (May 17 to June 16) transporting supplies and hauling three small boats 80 kilometres south across ice to Etah. On the Clipper Adventurer, sailing through open water and occasional icebergs, we covered that distance in a single night. Next morning, after an eight-kilometre zodiac ride into the spectacular Foulke Fiord, we went ashore at Etah.
In Kane�s time, Etah was a permanent Inuit settlement, home to several extended families. Today, it serves as a temporary hunting camp. We stayed six hours and hiked to Brother John Glacier, a natural wonder that Kane, oblivious to Inuit nomenclature, named after his dead sibling.
Here at Etah, having reached open water, Kane said a fond farewell to his Inuit allies. With sixteen men (one had perished along the way), he piled into tiny boats and began a 900-kilometre voyage to Upernavik. He and his men spent seven weeks in those open boats (June 19 to August 6), battling blizzards, icebergs, and near starvation.
On the Clipper Adventurer, dining variously on Greenland halibut, veal marsala, and braised leg of New Zealand lamb, we retraced Kane�s perilous voyage in two days. We called in at Cape York, where the explorer overcame a last great barrier of protruding shore ice, and from there gazed out over open water.
On arriving in Upernavik, today a bustling town of 1,100, we explored the buildings, now a museum, where Kane and his men stayed for a month before leaving on a Danish supply ship. We had lost nobody to scurvy or frost bite. We had suffered no amputations. But many of us found ourselves marvelling anew at the great escape of Elisha Kent Kane. And we savored the knowledge that, as the lucky first voyagers to retrace his escape route from start to finish, we had in a modest way become part of exploration history.






Photo Credits:
Contemporary photos are by Sheena Fraser McGoogan. The map is courtesy of Bill Bialkowski. Historical photos come from the personal archive of Ken McGoogan
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Ken McGoogan
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Irish archaeologist shows way to Viking site


"As archaeologist Ned Kelly stood in a field sixty kilometres north of Dublin," the article begins, "describing how the Vikings founded a “longphort” or fortress-settlement at this spot nearly 1,200 years ago, I realized that he was talking about the ancestors of many Canadians, including possibly some of my own. Kelly, keeper of antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, led the expert team that recently discovered this long-lost Viking site."
The writer is yours truly. The magazine is Canada's History, August-September issue. The piece continues:
"When we strode across this greening field near the town of Annagassan, on the Irish coast south of Dundalk Bay, we were walking atop the covered remains, yet to be excavated, of a citadel, a stone rampart, and many ancient workshops and houses. Because the site was established early in the Viking Age (841 A.D.), and has remained buried beneath farmland for more than 1,000 years, 'Linn Duachaill' -- the name means 'pool of the beast' -- is probably the most important longphort ever discovered. From here, according to the Annals of Ulster, Scandinavian sea-farers conducted inland raids within a radius of 125 kilometres."
For the rest, which is really, really, really interesting, pick up a copy of the magazine, which is now turning up on magazine racks. Oh, and there's a short video you might want to catch.

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Ken McGoogan
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Where Elisha Kent Kane spent two Arctic winters


The June issue of Up Here magazine contains a piece about visiting the spot on the coast of Greenland where explorer Elisha Kent Kane spent two years trapped in ice. Written by yours truly, it begins . . . .

At last I could see how it unfolded. From where I stood, on a small rocky island off the northwest coast of Greenland, I could see where, one May afternoon in 1855, an expedition leader fixed a final message to a post near the gangway of his ship. Elisha Kent Kane, age thirty-five, posted that message to explain to any searchers why he was abandoning the Advance and “in case we should be overtaken by disaster.”

Now, 156 years later, in my mind’s eye I watched as Kane joined his men, all of them starving and suffering from scurvy, some of them unable to walk because of frostbite, and set out to haul three small boats eighty kilometres over ice to open water. I could not help but see this because for three years, while researching and writing a book called Race to the Polar Sea, I had immersed myself in the life of this resourceful doctor. And as I stood there, watching his departure unfold in the distant past, I felt engulfed by a great wave of sadness.

This surprised me. I had expected euphoria. This was the place, after all. And I was the first here. No other author-historian had reached this spot. Four years before, when on the outskirts of Philadelphia I became the first biographer to wander through the house of Kane’s grandfather, I had felt a rush of satisfaction. And when, at the home of a Calgary antiquarian, I became the first to peruse a long-lost journal Kane had written while trapped aboard the Advance in this very location, I could hardly contain my excitement: this was it, the real thing!

Why, then, this wave of sadness? My unpreparedness had to be a factor. I hadn’t expected this voyage to take me anywhere near Rensselaer Bay, as Kane named this desolate location. I was sailing as a lecturer with Adventure Canada. Ice conditions had forced a change of itinerary. Instead of sailing west and north out of Kugluktuk, our ship, the Clipper Adventurer, had followed the coastal route eastwards into Baffin Bay. . . .

(for the rest, track down the June issue of Up Here)
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Ken McGoogan
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The Arctic Journals of John Rae

The Arctic Journals of John Rae






So here's an enticing book that has just gone to the printer: The Arctic Journals of John Rae. The finished work will surface in September. Before that happens, I will sail Into the Northwest Passage with Adventure Canada, bent on leading a zodiac-sortie to the spot where John Rae discovered the final link in the Passage.  He built a cairn there in 1854, and in 1999, with a couple of friends -- one of them Louie Kamookak of Gjoa Haven -- I erected a plaque at that location. If you're keen, the expedition may yet have a few vacancies. Tell them I sent you!


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Ken McGoogan
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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.