Our hero frets about the Arctic in today's Globe. . .


By Ken McGoogan


The late Pierre Berton liked to describe how in 1853, when Arctic explorer Leopold McClintock was searching for the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin and travelling across spongy, summer-time tundra, he chanced upon cart tracks so fresh that he thought they had been made the previous day. As he studied them, slowly he realized the truth: those tracks had been made by Sir Edward Parry, another Arctic explorer – not yesterday, but thirty-three years before.

The preservative power of the Arctic has loomed large in the Canadian imagination since 1987, when Owen Beattie and John Geiger published Frozen in Time. That book contained photos of the well-preserved bodies of the first three sailors to have died during that last Franklin expedition. Dead since 1846, the three looked as if they might have died last week.

Yet a recent visit to their gravesites on Beechey Island suggests that the preservative power of the Arctic may have met its match – and that match is us. It also reminded me that while Canadians have grown fond of talking about Arctic sovereignty and developing the North, we are failing to take concrete, relatively inexpensive actions that could make a difference both today and tomorrow.

Where to begin? This was my third visit to Beechey Island with Adventure Canada, a conservation-minded travel company based in Mississauga. And the history-rich island, the most famous site in the Arctic, is so confusingly degraded that only on this occasion did I finally sort out what happened where, exactly, in the 1840s and ’50s.

Arriving in two ships late in 1846, the Franklin expedition spent one winter on Beechey before sailing south to its terrible fate. Four years later, in August 1850, American explorer Elisha Kent Kane was among the first men to discover this site. The artistic, articulate Kane sketched the three gravestones, copied their inscriptions, and scoured the area, turning up countless artefacts.

A quarter mile from the graves, he found a neat pile of more than 600 preserved-meat cans. Emptied of food, these cans had been filled with limestone pebbles, “perhaps to serve as convenient ballast on boating expeditions.”

Today, of all that Kane described, only the three headstones (and the bodies before and beneath them) remain – and those headstones are not the originals, which are preserved in Yellowknife, but facsimiles, two of which have been accidentally switched.

The site is further confused by a fourth headstone, which marks the grave of a sailor named Thomas Morgan who died here in 1854; and also by what looks like an unmarked grave, but is in fact the original location of a memorial to Joseph-Rene Bellot, a searcher who died nearby in 1853.

Franklin’s original campsite is today nothing but a shallow pit, unmarked. The 600 pebble-filled tin cans are long gone. About eighty-five of them have been moved a couple of kilometres west to the ruins of Northumberland House, a storehouse erected in 1852-53 in case Franklin should return.

There, half-buried in the sand, those 85 cans form a rusty cross, itself badly damaged. Nearby stand a number of memorials – some of them significant, like Lady Franklin’s monument to Bellot, others irrelevant.

Standing amidst this archaeological chaos, where well-meaning but unaware visitors have bent cans and broken beams, I found myself thinking that they must have arrived unprepared and unguided. A priceless historical record is being destroyed – part of our cultural heritage. And I wondered: Should visitors be banned?

I thought then of a young Inuk woman, a guide I had met a few days before at Kugluktuk, an Inuit settlement at the mouth of the Coppermine River. In 1771, Samuel Hearne had reached that location after an arduous, months-long journey from Churchill on Hudson Bay. To this guide, I had described what Hearne had seen -- seals, tide water markings, an array of islands – and she had been able to lead me to where Hearne must have stood: a bluff overlooking the mouth of the Coppermine River.

That location, the first point charted on the northern coast of North America, and also along the Northwest Passage, remains devoid of signage. After I had spoken of the site to those who accompanied us, and as we walked back into town, the young woman told me, “We need more of these ships stopping here.” She was alluding to the fact that ships bring much-needed spending to any northern community they visit.

Now, on Beechey Island, as I stood amidst the archaeological confusion, I rejected the idea of banning visitors. And surveillance, given the isolation of many sites, is obviously impossible. What we need, I realized anew, is interpretative and cautionary signage at every significant historical site in the north. We should start with Beechey Island, which is both busy and jeopardized, and move on to sites like the mouth of the Coppermine River and Victory Point on King William Island, near where Franklin’s ships got trapped in the ice.

At each site, well-designed interpretive signage should explain and map what exists and caution visitors to ensure that it remains intact. These same interpretative materials should be distributed to travel companies that regularly venture into the Arctic. And those companies should be encouraged or even compelled to follow the example of Adventure Canada, which brings archaeologists, historians and conservationists on every voyage.

As the Northwest Passage becomes increasingly viable, the Arctic will attract more visitors. Relevant sites need protection. And the territory of Nunavut, with a population of 30,000, can hardly be expected to shoulder responsibility. The federal government should act immediately to protect and develop Canada’s exploration history as a natural resource.


Ken McGoogan, a resource historian who sails with Adventure Canada, is the author of four related books about the search for Franklin and the Northwest Passage, the latest of which is Race to the Polar Sea.

My book Race to the Polar Sea, which is now surfacing in paperback from HarperCollins Canada, has won Honourable Mention in the Keith Matthews Award competition sponsored by the Canadian Nautical Research Society. The annual award recognizes the best book on a maritime topic.
The judges described the work, which tells the story of Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, as "engagingly written, impressively researched, and engrossing." The author's discovery of a long-lost journal, they wrote, as well as his "effective interweaving of documentary and published evidence, and his infectious enthusiasm for the subject, combine to resurrect Kane as an important figure in the history of Canada's north."
Sure, they went on a bit, but why not? "Parts biography, adventure tale, and romance, this work makes an important contribution to Arctic and environmental history."
The winning book was At the Far Reaches of Empire by Freeman Tovell, which celebrates a Spanish sea captain, Bodega y Quadra, who explored the Pacific Northwest prior to 1800. The Nautical Research Society doubles as the Canadian national sub-commission of the International Commission for Maritime History.

In the Globe and Mail Book Section, I rebut a rebuttal: can we stop obsessing, please, about what makes a Canadian author Canadian and focus our attention on individual books?

By Ken McGoogan

Last updated on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009 04:09AM EDT

If we look at literature from a national perspective, as distinct from taking a generic, thematic or period approach, we have to clarify what belongs and why. Here in Canada, we have drifted into defining Canadian Literature according to authorial nationality. We say it is literature written by Canadians.

But then we face a question: How do we define Canadian? Looking at Ed O'Loughlin, long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, we discover that he was born in Toronto and lived in Canada for his first six years. And some of us end up claiming that a novel written by an Irishman, and set in Ireland and Africa, is Canadian.

Instead of falling repeatedly into this trap, I say we forget the author and his or her nationality. Instead, let's look at the naked book and ask: Does this work belong to Canadian literature? No biography, no authorial opinions. Is this book of special interest to Canadians? Is it set in Canada? Does it feature Canadian characters? Does it explore Canadian themes? Does it manifest a sensibility that is distinctly Canadian? Is it relevant in some unexpected way?

I am suggesting that we follow those countless scholars who have long since identified The History of Emily Montague as the first Canadian novel. Author Frances Brooke (1724-1789) was English. Yet she wrote a novel that belongs to this place – and so to Canadian literature. Why can't other foreign nationals do the same?

Certainly, I can make a case for Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or Mavis Gallant's Stories From the Fifteenth District, which could only have been written by Canadians; and also for a memoir set partly in this country. Conversely, I see no way to claim Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano – not without going outside the book. Nor do I see anything Canadian about Brian Moore's Judith Hearne.

On the other hand, I can make a case for his The Luck of Ginger Coffey, set in Montreal – and likewise for Rawi Hage's Cockroach, Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin of a Lion and Dionne Brand's What We All Long For. In these last, all written by authors born outside Canada, we see on-page proof of “civic identification.”

Will posterity accept less? I doubt it. One hundred years from now, if people are still studying Canadian literature, those who prepare reading lists won't be contemplating an author's persona or promotional strategies. They will make choices based on the books in front of them.

Ken McGoogan is the author most recently of Race to the Polar Sea.

This autumn, according to Savvy Reader, Our Hero will spend sixteen days sailing in the Northwest Passage with Adventure Canada. Afterwards, he'll wax eloquent about that voyage in two different cities while showcasing his book Race to the Polar Sea.
On October 21, as part of The Eh List Author Series, Ken will speak at the Toronto Public Library, Northern District, starting at 6:30 p.m.
Then on November 17, he will be a featured author at Explore The North, an evening of conversation, food, art, music and artifacts slated for the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. That event kicks off with a cocktail reception at 6 p.m., and Ken will talk about Polar Sea and Fatal Passage, which was turned into a BBC docudrama. Joining him on stage will be Elizabeth Hay, who won the 2007 Giller Prize with Late Nights on Air, and Charlotte Gray, whose books include Sisters of the Wilderness and Reluctant Genius.
Between those events, on Saturday October 24 at 1 p.m., Ken will moderate a round table discussion at the International Festival of Authors. He is writing a book about the Scottish influence on Canada, and the subject of the panel is Writing Scotland’s Past.

Our Hero turns up in Globe and Mail Books (Aug. 8/09) arguing that when we think about Canadian literature, we should analyze books, not authors. The electronic version at the other end of the link comes complete with a little known photo of Malcolm Lowry . . .

By Ken McGoogan

The literary mavens are at it again: demanding to know how we define “a Canadian author.” This time, the inspiration is the just-released long list for the Man Booker Prize – a list apparently devoid of Canadians.

Or no, wait: turns out Ed O’Loughlin, the Dublin-based, 42-year-old author of Not Untrue and Not Unkind, was born in Toronto. O’Loughlin spent his first six years in Edmonton, and his next thirty-six in other countries, mostly Ireland. No matter: one writer calls him Canada’s “torchbearer,” while a headline declares him “the only Canadian long-listed” for the prestigious Man Booker.

At that point, the literati begin to agonize – and not for the first time. What makes an author Canadian? Place of birth? Current residence? When does an immigrant author become a Canadian? What happens when a Canadian-born writer turns American? Confusion, angst, disgruntlement: this is what comes of investigating authors instead of books.

A couple of years ago, here in the Globe and Mail, I reviewed an historical novel that recreated the harrowing true story of the final expedition of Sir John Franklin. As most readers know, Franklin disappeared into the Arctic in 1845 with two ships and 128 men, leaving behind a welter of questions.

Because the Franklin tragedy stands at the heart of Canadian history, it has attracted the attention of authors as diverse as Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood, John Geiger, Rudy Wiebe, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Mordecai Richler.

The novel I reviewed, The Terror, transformed the Franklin saga into a supernatural, hell-bent narrative. I declared the book a tour de force and added: “The author's nationality notwithstanding, this novel is far more deserving of specifically Canadian attention than the majority of the books that, come autumn, we will see short-listed for this country's most prestigious literary prizes.”

This prediction was a no-brainer. Despite its manifest relevance to Canadian readers, The Terror was not even eligible for most of this country’s literary awards. Why not? Well, because it was written by Dan Simmons -- an American.

At that point, I began to wonder. When we talk about a work of Canadian literature, wouldn’t we be wiser to look at the book and not at the nationality of its author? Wouldn’t it be wiser to ask: Does a given work speak specifically to Canadians as distinct from Albanians, Bolivians, Belgians or Americans? If it does, then isn’t that enough to make it a Canadian work?

Take a novel written by a native Canadian and set in Canada. Obviously, it’s Canadian. But of course a work can be Canadian without being set here. If a novel is written by someone who came of age in this country, and so was psychologically shaped by this place, his or her creations can only be Canadian. Attitude and sensibility inform a literary work no matter what the setting, which is why Mavis Gallant will forever speak to Canadians.

English literature offers an illustration: Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein. That trilogy is set not in England but in Middle Earth – yet it remains as jolly-old-English as a pint of bitter. If anyone disputed this, I believe I could demonstrate the Englishness of that epic.

Giving priority to the work over the author is no revolutionary idea. When scholars hunt the first Canadian novel, they invariably turn up The History of Emily Montague. Set in eighteenth-century Quebec, it was written by Frances Brooke, an Englishwoman who spent a year in the colonial wilds. She wrote numerous other books that have nothing to do with Canada, and scholars rightly claim none of them for this country.

Consider Malcolm Lowry, also born and raised in England. He is best-known for Under the Volcano, a modernist masterpiece set in Mexico. He wrote much of it in British Columbia, but the book shows no evidence of that. And I don’t see that we can claim it for Canadian literature. Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola, however, is set in the Gulf Islands. Clearly it belongs to Canadian literature, as well as to British. It illustrates the point that a work can belong to two or more national literatures.

The same is true of certain works of Brian Moore. His novel Judith Hearne, set in his native Ireland, can not be considered Canadian. But his Luck of Ginger Coffey is set in Montreal, speaks directly to Canadians, and so belongs to the literature of this country, as well as to that of Ireland.

In 2010, Richard Ford, the celebrated American author, will publish “a novel of revenge and violent retribution set on the Saskatchewan prairie.” This work, entitled Canada, will rightly be recognized as an American novel. Because of its subject matter, however, it will speak specifically to Canadians. So, yes, it will also belong to Canadian literature. It will have dual nationality.

What about The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penny? That mystery is set in Canada in the 1860s. The author is a Scot who never visited this country – but clearly, that is irrelevant. Thanks to geography and history, the novel speaks specifically to Canadians. It belongs to Canadian literature. And the same is true of certain works by American Howard Norman and Scotland’s Margaret Elphinstone.

So much for books produced by foreign writers. Situating works by Canadian immigrant authors is equally entertaining. But here I would observe that if we accept to look at literature through the prism of nationality, rather than through genre, for example, then the words “Canadian literature” have to mean something.

To my mind, Canadian literature is variously bilingual, multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, post-colonial, post-modern, and even multi-national. By it is not post-national. At this final fork in our argument, then, we take the nationalist path identified by Rudyard Griffiths (Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto) rather than the internationalist one highlighted by Pico Iyer, who has suggested that Canada has a post-national literature.

I would say no, it does not. Canadians contribute to international literature, certainly. But this country, Canada, has a Canadian literature. And immigrant authors -- among them Austin Clark, Michael Ondaatje, Dionne Brand, Neil Bissoondath, Nalo Hopkinson, and Rawi Hage – are producing some of its most exciting works.

Immigrant Canadian authors face extra choices. They can speak to Canadians, to readers of a native land, to a particular diaspora, or they can go international and address Americans and Belgians as directly as Canadians. This last is the Pico Iyer option, and both M.G. Vassanji and Rohinton Mistry have chosen it.

A Fine Balance, set in India, shows what can result. Critics have argued that Mistry could not have written this shining novel while living in India, and probably they are correct. But the novel reflects nothing of Canada, speaks equally to Canadians and Norwegians, and could have been written in England, Ireland, France, the United States, or you name it.

Whenever he chooses, Mistry can write a Canadian novel -- and probably a towering one. To call A Fine Balance a Canadian work, however, is like laying claim to Under The Volcano. It’s wishful thinking.

And that leaves only Ed O’Loughlin and his Man Booker contender, Not Untrue and Not Unkind. The product of a sensibility shaped elsewhere, the novel focuses on an Irish foreign correspondent who shuttles between Dublin and Africa. To see it claimed as Canadian is embarrassing.



Toronto author Ken McGoogan spent two decades as a book reviewer and literary columnist. He sails as a historian with Adventure Canada and writes Canadian narratives, the latest of which is Race to the Polar Sea.

Back by popular demand: my Creative Non-fiction workshop at University of Toronto. What the heck is CNF, anyway? We hear the term applied to all kinds of writing. How does Creative Non-fiction differ from journalism? From academic writing? From short stories and novels? Is it okay to mix and match? Why does Our Hero prefer the term "Narrative Non-fiction?" I discovered CNF in the late 1990s when, while writing a book called Fatal Passage, I began bringing together everything I had learned from publishing three novels and thousands of journalistic articles. In answer to early questions: Yes, autobiography and memoir certainly belong to the genre, as does the research-based narrative.

My workshops are you-focused, you-driven. I lead discussions and some in-class "workouts." In responding to works-in-progress, I am craft-oriented (I have spent crazy amounts of time thinking about craft). This introductory session runs eight weeks, Tuesday nights from 6:30 to 9, starting October 6, 2009. Registration is open (http://learn.utoronto.ca/site3.aspx). Administrative questions, contact bill.zaget@utoronto.ca. Content queries, drop me an email.

So here's a review that turned up in the Globe on July 11.

FATAL JOURNEY:The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson

By Peter C. Mancall (Basic Books, 288 pages, $31)


By Ken McGoogan


Four centuries ago next year, on April 17, 1610, Henry Hudson sailed out of London on a small wooden ship called Discovery. A veteran explorer with three northern voyages behind him, Hudson brought with him twenty-one men and two boys, one of whom was his son.

Backed by two dozen wealthy Londoners – merchants, politicians and gentlemen – Hudson was sailing to find a Northwest Passage, a direct water route through North America that would allow European ships to reach the East Indies.

Seventeen months later, in September 1611, the Discovery would arrive back carrying seven men and one boy. Hudson and his son would not be among those who returned. And the deck of the ship would be stained with blood.

The story of what happened on that voyage is a famous tragedy of northern exploration history. As I have noted before, the image of Henry Hudson set adrift in a small boat with seven men and a boy, victims of mutiny in a forbidding landscape, haunts anyone who contemplates it.

In Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson, historian Peter C. Mancall offers no startling revelations. But his sense of seventeenth-century England is so strong that this book is worth reading for context alone.

In 1610, at the end of the Elizabethan Age, he tells us, London was “a city awash with mercantile enthusiasm and maritime pride.” At any given time, 2,000 English ships might be at sea, many of them coming and going from the Spice Islands of the East Indies: “cinnamon, cloves, peppers, and other exotic flora had captured the imagination of the English,” Mancall observes, and “much money was to be made in satisfying the newly sophisticated national palate.”

The lust for spices had fuelled the search for the elusive Northwest Passage, inspiring voyages by Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert and John Davis, among others. Mancall sets the stage before he details Hudson’s career, although he also summarizes the whole story in his opening chapter.

This mistake drains his narrative of energy. But Mancall is a scholar, a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California, and not a professional writer. He follows academic conventions to the letter, confining himself strictly to exposition, and never, never, never breaking into a scene. As a result, he lets opportunities slip away.

At one tense moment during Hudson’s final voyage, for example, with the ship trapped amongst ice floes, Mancall quotes a witness as observing that “there were some who then spake words, which were remembered a great while after.” He quotes details from that account, with one sailor declaring that “if he had a hundred pounds he would give ninety for the chance to return to London.” The ship’s carpenter retorts “that if he had that much money, he wouldn’t even give up ten pounds – because he believed that the expedition would be a success.”

In the hands of a craftsman with a more literary imagination, this altercation could have become a vivid scene. Instead, we get long-distance observation and quotation from the documentary record.

And yet the saga emerges. The mutineers claimed that, as supplies ran out and men neared starvation, Hudson hoarded food and fed his favourites. Also, by demoting those with navigational skills and appointing an illiterate first mate, Hudson had taken sole control of the ship’s route. Having narrowly survived one horrendous winter locked in the ice of James Bay, he appeared bent on risking a second – and this some of the men could or would not tolerate.

Mancall stops far short of justifying the mutineers. He remains irreproachably even-handed, and offers comparisons to show that some of those who made it home were lucky to escape the death penalty.

One bit of confusion arises towards the end of the narrative. Mancall tells us that the mutinous Juet survived most of the voyage: “He died, apparently from starvation, before the ship managed to dock on Ireland’s west coast.” But later, without clarification, he quotes a ship’s captain identifying a location as the spot “where the villains Greene and Juet were slain, after they had exposed Master Hudson.” Fine, the captain had his facts wrong.

More questionable is Mancall’s dismissal of the oral history relating to a spot near the bottom of James Bay known locally as “Young Englishman.” He notes that, picking up the story after the abandoned sailors reach shore, “one legend purports that John Hudson trudged southward, where he found Samuel Champlain . . . but there is no evidence to support it.” Also, “a recent expedition to find a purported grave proved fruitless.”

But in his recent book God’s Mercies: Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery, author Douglas Hunter describes how Champlain learned that some Algonquins had enslaved an English youth, clearly Hudson’s son, and travelled overland to free him.

Apparently, the sailors had tried to steal food and got massacred – all but one, this enslaved youth. But Champlain met so much resistance as he neared the implicated tribe that he abandoned the search.

Oral tradition says the boy was murdered at the place called Young Englishman. If John Hudson was dead by the time Champlain came looking for him, the killers would have had good reason to resist his approach.

Mancall does a splendid job of situating Hudson’s last voyage in the context of British exploration. But those marking the 400th anniversary of the expedition might want to supplement their reading with God’s Mercies.



Ken McGoogan is the author of Fatal Passage, which inspired a BBC docudrama, and Race to the Polar Sea.