The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions

The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions

Edited by Adrian Howkins and Peder Roberts

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

ISBN 978-1-108-42993-1, $155 USD

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore

A large compendium of some thirty chapters covering the history of the polar regions, produced by the oldest and one of the most illustrious academic presses in the world and written by experts in their fields, is a mouthwatering prospect for anyone with an interest in the human history of either or both poles. Here, one would hope, is a chance to see a snapshot of the latest scholarship, perhaps the fruits of archival research or archaeological investigation, a chance to gain the most authoritative available overview of Arctic archaeology and history in the grand twelve-millennia sweep of the Holocene, and of the great two-century quest to understand and explore the formidable ice continent of Antarctica. A chance to reflect on the differences and similarities between the history of the two regions, and to gain a sense of their complex interconnection with the history of the temperate latitudes where most of us live.

Such is the prospect. All the greater, then, is the disappointment on finding the opportunity so comprehensively missed. To give credit first where it is due: the production functions performed for CUP by freelancers – the creation of the many excellent maps, the copy-editing, the typesetting and printing – have all been done to an impressively high standard. But the book their work has adorned has not been worth the care and treasure spent on it, despite the virtues of its many excellent individual chapters. With no sense of a central guiding intelligence, each chapter is simply a silo unconnected to, and seemingly unaware of the contents of, any of its neighbours.

The cause of the failure is most clearly seen in the editors’ introduction, tellingly titled “The problems of polar history.” Their primary desire, it seems, is not to tell the history but to problematize it, to explain why a narrative is problematic rather than actually giving us the narrative in the first place so we can judge for ourselves how problematic it might be. Exploration in particular is the activity that dare not speak its name here, and the underlying reason is not hard to find. Howkins and Roberts write:

“One person’s unknown frontier is another person’s cherished homeland. Even if the category of the explorer were to be broadened to encompass more than just the Europeans who build a historical edifice around that label, it would privilege encounter over habitation.” (p. 22)

Quite apart from the fact that a large portion of the land “encountered” (from Svalbard and Franz Josef Land and the New Siberian Islands and the far-northern parts of the Canadian archipelago at one end of the Earth to the entirety of Antarctica at the other) was never anyone’s “cherished homeland” before its discovery by Europeans, the contrast the editors go on to posit is a false one: it is not encounter and habitation that are at odds in a putative history of the polar regions. The only meaningful divide in writing any history is between things that are potentially available to historical investigation and those that are not. Assuming we can allow a generous definition of history that encompasses oral tradition and archaeological data as well as written records – despite the varying granularity of their information – there is no reason at all why the histories of encounter and habitation should not both be told. The archaeologist Robert McGhee masterfully achieved precisely this synthesis in The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World (OUP, 2005), an important work the current editors show no sign of being aware of.

But there seems to be a further objection to the inclusion of exploration:

“Our claim is that polar history aggregates and indeed magnifies inherent problems with Arctic history or Antarctic history by per definition privileging explorers and scientists – the categories of practitioner for whom the polar regions have meaningful commonalities. The need to identify that which both polar regions have in common necessarily marginalizes that which is particular or unique. Such an approach can erase Indigenous cultures and undermine local ways of knowing.” (p. 10, my emphasis)

If the adequate treatment of a subject required the editors unavoidably – “per definition”, by their own admission – to cover a central aspect of it, yet they were unwilling to do so, it would perhaps have been more honest of them to have declined the task so that it could be passed on to someone capable of it. Note also the passage’s zero-sum thinking (so characteristic of the identitarianism of which the sacralization of Indigenous peoples is a part): the idea that any space given to an unfavoured perspective is space actively taken away from a perspective you prefer (the weasel word here is “necessarily”, a word that no logic or evidence supports). The fact that space in the realm of ideas is not fixed, and can expand with every new perspective that emerges, seems beyond their grasp. Instead, simply invoking the threat of this supposed marginalization is, ironically, sufficient reason to justify their own actual marginalization of exploration in the history of the Arctic and Antarctic, or at least in this one.

Given this opening credo, one might assume that Indigenous history would feature heavily in the book. In fact, as we shall see, the glaring lacunae in coverage extend to this area as much as to exploration. Perhaps apart from subject emphasis and selection, what has gone awry is the simple ability to manage a large project:

“Our aim has been to assemble a set of chapters that make arguments about an aspect of polar history rather than attempting the futile task of comprehensive coverage.” (p. 24)

It’s not often that the editors of a collection throw up their hands and frankly proclaim at the outset the futility of the task that their book’s title seems to promise. It is easy to miss how insulting this is to the Indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic (the half of their purview that actually has Indigenous inhabitants): the notion that there is no point in even attempting to write about their history in any systematic, thorough, joined-up way – in other words, with the application of an intellectual cohesion that the editors dismiss, ludicrously, as a “Eurocentric ‘God’ perspective” (p. 22), as if non-Europeans were incapable of, or had some natural hostility towards, a synthetic and synoptic approach to history. Can anyone imagine the editors of a multi-contributor History of Africa, or South America, or any part of Asia, getting away with such a shameless Gallic shrug of lackadaisical indifference?

The publisher is equally to blame for this state of affairs: if the editors abdicated their responsibility to brief their authors adequately, CUP’s commissioning editor seems also to have failed to brief Howkins and Roberts – or if she did, to have monitored what was happening and pulled them into line when it became clear they had so thoroughly lost their way. What results, sadly, has not earned the right to be called a “Cambridge History of” anything at all. A “Companion,” perhaps, or a “Handbook” – a disjointed set of individual chapters all conceived without reference to each other – but not a history. To be worthwhile, a regional history must be more than just three or four journal issues’-worth of random articles. It must have meaningfully sustained connecting threads – chronological, thematic, methodological – as well as cross-references that show each author has had a chance to read related contributions, that together provide an overall telos to the sequence of individual chapters.

*************

Of course none of this is the fault of the actual authors of those individual chapters, all of whom have seriously addressed their given (or perhaps chosen) subjects, and most of whom have achieved a creditable survey of their field, even if they seem to have been left to rely on guesswork to define the chronological and thematic boundaries of their contribution.

Emblematically placed first is a chapter by Inuit hunter George Angohiatok, describing the social and particularly environmental changes he has seen during his lifetime based around Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, but given a longer perspective by also drawing on the cultural memory of his parents and their ancestors preserved in oral tradition. The equivalent starting point (by Martin Siegert and Andrew Fountain) for Antarctica, a continent lacking Indigenous inhabitants, accesses deep time instead through the disciplines of geology and glaciology to describe the slow evolution of the continent’s ice sheet. Bjarne Grønnow then takes us into the archaeological evidence that describes “The initial peopling of the circumpolar north” – a fine summary but one that, as we shall see, has been left to do too much heavy lifting on its own – followed by “The Norse settlement of Greenland” (Jette Arneborg). Archaeology then merges with documentation in “Russia, the first Arctic empire, 1000–1917” (Ryan Tucker Jones, Alexei Kraikovski and Julia Lajus). The latter two chapters of course contain aspects that are usually described as “exploration”, but since in these territories the end-point is settlement, this seems to pass the Howkins and Roberts sniff test. After a chapter on the slow emergence of Antarctica in the mapping efforts of the nineteenth century (Erki Tammiksaar and Cornelia Lüdeke), Russell Potter, writing about “Sir John Franklin and the Northwest Passage in myth and memory,” not only describes something of the cultural history of Euro-American thinking on the passage and Franklin’s last expedition but manages to sneak in a potted history of some of its earlier exploration by sea and land. Stephanie Barczewski’s following chapter on “The Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, 1890 to the present” seems to present the most obvious challenge to the editors’ distaste for the subject, though her focus is more on how views of the age’s image of patriotic masculinity have evolved, been critiqued and reinterpreted by subsequent generations.

After this sequence of broad-sweep chapters, roughly chronological though with large lacunae within and between them, any semblance of systematic linkage between the chapters breaks down. In the remaining two-thirds of the book some historical surveys are still to be found, such as Janice Cavell’s “Canada and the high Arctic islands, 1880–1950” and Andy Bruno and Ekaterina Kalameneva’s “Creating the Soviet Arctic, 1917–1991.” A welcome southern-hemisphere perspective comes from Pablo Fontana’s chapter on “The Antarctic extension of Latin America,” about the competing sectoral claims of Chile, Argentina and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, though it is telling how minor is the adjustment of language needed for the traditional anti-British resentment lurking close to its surface to be re-cast into the politically more stylish jargon of anti-colonialism. (For an example of proud Argentine nationalism, written at the very time about which Fontana is so exercised yet unclouded by such xenophobia, one need only look to José Manuel Moneta’s memoir Four Antarctic Years in the South Orkney Islands.)

Alongside these chapters the remainder of the book intersperses thematically defined essays such as “Industrial whaling in the Arctic and Antarctic” (Bjørn Basberg and Louwrens Hacquebord) and “The first century of US militarization in Alaska, 1867–1967” (Matthew Farish). Mark Nuttall’s chapter on “The rise of circumpolar political movements” successfully combines both approaches and brings us up to date with the most important new force – Indigenous self-determination – to emerge in the Arctic regions in the last half-century. The thematic chapters are fascinating in their own right, and one of them, Dolly Jørgenson’s “Moving muskoxen as an Arctic resource in the twentieth century,” I found the most purely enjoyable in the whole book, describing the varied success with which attempts have been made to establish commercially viable colonies of muskoxen around the circumpolar world as a new string to the Arctic economy’s bow.

But such chapters also most forcefully show the baleful results of the editors’ laissez-faire approach. Given what has been left out of the book, whether deliberately or inadvertently, it is hard to imagine how a chapter on such an arcane and small-scale topic as a few mostly failed attempts at muskoxen farming could justify its place in any responsibly and knowledgeably conceived one-volume history of the polar regions, though it would make a fine standalone journal article. So too with Elizabeth Leane’s “Representing the polar regions through historical fiction” or Carl-Jösta Ojala’s “Archaeology, politics, and Sámi heritage”, which is solely concerned with the present-day political struggle between governments, NGOs and institutions to control the interpretation of Sámi culture. One is literary criticism, the other is contemporary sociological reportage, and despite their real merits, neither are history, and they have no place in the present volume.

So what has been left out? Among other things, and in no particular order:

·       The entire history of Iceland, which is a member of the Arctic Council and, despite lying just south of the Arctic circle, is nevertheless further north than most of the population of Greenland. More importantly, its climate is subpolar, shaping its history and culture, shared with Scandinavia and the former Norse settlements of Greenland, making them indelibly Arctic in character.

·       The long migration and settlement of the Thule Inuit from the western to the eastern North American Arctic and the Greenlandic seaboard, supplanting the Tuniit as they spread. The Tuniit (Dorset culture) are admirably treated in Grønnow’s chapter but he stops before the Thule migration, perhaps assuming it would be covered in another author’s chapter that then never materialized (or perhaps was never commissioned). 

·    Any serious treatment of the Sámi as historical actors (rather than as cultural pawns in a current-day power game).

·    Any detailed discussion of the migrations and settlements of most Indigenous Siberian peoples: again it is Grønnow who provides the pre- and early-Holocene foundation, but how the Chukchi, Evenki, Nenets, Dolgan and their many subdivisions emerged and established themselves before their fleeting appearance in Jones et al.’s chapter on Russian expansion is a tale left unattempted.

·    The entire effort of European maritime exploration of the far north in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries – many dozens of expeditions from several nations – with its accompanying cartography, geographical theorizing, and commodification of Arctic resources. Anyone who has looked at a map and wondered how such names as Baffin, Davis and Hudson became attached to such large geographical features in the Arctic will search in vain for any enlightenment here.

With proper planning by the publisher, and an appropriate degree of real work by the editors, all of these areas could have been covered, and through careful briefing of authors could have been properly integrated with their chronologically, geographically, and thematically abutting chapters to make a collection that was also a coherent whole. But the Cambridge History of the Polar Regions we actually got is sadly not made of such whole cloth; instead we have a threadbare garment patched together from different materials – yet still full of gaping holes.

The Land Was Always Used: An Inuit Oral History of the Franklin Expedition

The Land Was Always Used: An Inuit Oral History of the Franklin Expedition

Edited by Connie Gunn

Gjoa Haven: Nattilik Heritage Centre, 2024

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

When I heard back in 2018 that there was to be a new project to collect testimony about the Franklin expedition from Inuit elders in Gjoa Haven, I was tremendously excited. First, because a project of this kind had long been a dream of my late friend Louie Kamookak, and secondly because I held out hope that local traditional knowledge might yet add key elements to the Inuit testimony about the Franklin expedition. In many ways, the finished book of this project exceeded my expectations; it's beautifully produced and richly illustrated, in a large format that lends itself to sidebars and connections amidst the imagery. At the same time, though, the actual amount of new information about the Franklin story is fairly modest, and in most cases adds only a slight degree of clarity or context to what we've long known from the oral stories collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Traditional Inuit territories (19th century), from the book

The book opens with, and draws heavily upon, the oral testimony collected in the 1850's, 60's, and 70's by Franklin searchers such as McClintock, Hall, and Schwatka. Its first figure is Pooyetta, who along with his wife Tooktoocheer was among the first Inuit to come upon the remains of the Franklin expedition and its men. There are conflicting surmises about his discoveries -- and whether the boat he found and the bodies he discovered were actually at the same place -- but here, they're treated as the same, in a narrative that draws on accounts given to Hall and Schwatka.

From there, the book steps back to give a general introduction to the Inuit presence in Qikiqtak (King William Island), the Franklin expedition, and the stories gathered over the years. In a sidebar, the editor makes an important point about difference between the older accounts transcribed by nineteenth-century searchers and those collected as part of this new oral history project:

"Inuit are particular about getting their facts straight, and very careful to tell a story in the way that story was told to them ... Inuit recognize that stories about Franklin and other Qablunaat are shadows of the originals told by their ancestors, and are reticent to speak of something they may not know enough about ... During interviews for the book, Saul Aqsaluk Qirngnirq abruptly ended more than one anecdote with 'That's all my father knew or 'That's the end of that story.'"

All this is prelude to the main body of the book, which is organized into six chapters, ranging from "We are the Descendants" to "A Nice Place to Be" to "They Perished Here Too." As the titles imply, the focus here is on contemporary Inuit from Gjoa Haven, their perspective on these now-distant events, and their relationship with the land and its creatures. It's fair enough to observe, as the editors do here, that the lost Franklin expedition was really just a small blip in the long and continuous memory of the people, which was -- sensibly enough -- more concerned with hunting, fishing, and the ways of the land and climate. The book is certainly a rich source of Qauijimajatuqangit -- Inuit traditional knowledge -- from this region, but while the sites associated with Franklin are given prominence, it's the necessities of daily life that stand at the center. As Gjoa Haven elder Martha Pooyatak says in the quote that gives the book its title, "The land was used before I was born. It was always used."

Patsy Klengenberg's trading post

The second chapter, "They Kept On Coming," mixed brief quotes from the historical testimony (Kok-lee-arng-nun and Seepunger among them) with a series of brief accounts from the elders, keyed to a map of the island. This continues into the second chapter, which focuses on Terror Bay; the link there is Patsy Klengenberg's fur trading post there and the recollections of some of his descendants; again, historical voices mingle with those of present-day elders. What's added is certainly a strong sense of place, though little of this new testimony adds any detail to the Franklin story. 

Along the way, numerous sidebars introduce elements of Inuit culture and knowledge, from "preserving fish" to "Inuit navigation" to "Inuit and Qablunaat Burial Practices." Gorgeous photographs, many by my friend and fellow traveller Michelle Valberg, appear alongside well-reproduced historical maps and sketches; as a visual document, the book certainly gives readers a strong sense of the place in which these stories transpired. Here and there, the words of the elders add an interesting element to the tradition, as when Saul Aqslaluk Qirngnirq recalls a person seeing two boats "still covered with their loads":

"The men gathered at the camp and they all went to the boats. The loads were covered -- hadn't been unloaded and there was nobody else around. When the covers were removed, they revealed guns on top of the load. They later learned that they were guns as they didn't know what guns were ... they smashed the wood off against a rock to salvage the metal."

This testimony certainly rings true, and adds some possible insight into there having been not one but two boats at the infamous "boat place."

Saul  Aqslaluk Qirngnirq and Dave Woodman, 2002

The final chapter, "Working Together," details some of the work accomplished in modern times by searchers working in collaboration with Inuit and using the historical testimony as a guide; it culminates in the discovery of the ships, and goes on to offer a brief account of the continuing move toward collaboration and co-curation of found artifacts that has made the past few years much more of a shared endeavor, with benefits to Inuit as well as to the larger communities of Canada and the world.

It's a worthy book, perhaps best read in the spirit with which it was assembled -- that of learning, listening, and imagining these histories in the fullest possible context of the land and the people, guided by the voices of the elders. It's tempting to pick through it looking for just those bits that add something to our imagining of the Franklin story, but that would miss the larger point of the book.

Finally, a word on availability; for now, the book can't be obrained through any of the usual online channels or book chains. Co-published by the Nattilik Heritage Centre and Parks Canada, it was printed by Friesens in Altona, Manitoba, and the ISBN prefix is one that's been used in previous publications by Parks Canada. The NHC is currently working to find ways to make it more readily available; I'll certainly update readers here if and when I hear further details.

Mark Kalluak’s Traditional Stories from Arviat

Mark Kalluak’s Traditional Stories from Arviat

by Mark Kalluak

Iqaluit and Toronto: Inhabit Media, 2024.

Reviewed by Kenn Harper

 

It's hard to believe that Mark Kalluak passed away 13 years ago. He was a dominant presence in the Inuit cultural world for decades.  

Mark Kalluak (1942-2011) was a community leader and, in his quiet way, a cultural activist in his home community of Arviat (formerly Eskimo Point) on western Hudson Bay. Throughout his 68 years he was active especially in issues related to language and culture. He worked variously as an interpreter, translator, and teacher, as well as editor of a bilingual regional newspaper, The Keewatin Echo. Somehow he managed to find time to also serve his community as mayor for some years.

When I wrote a special issue of Inuktitut magazine , “Writing Systems and Translations” (Inuktitut, no. 53, September 1983), I was honoured that Mark agreed to write the introduction. Modestly, he wrote about the eventual realization by Inuit that a revision to the syllabic writing system was needed “to make improvements to include certain Inuktitut sounds not covered by the old system”, noting that Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (as Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami was then known) set up a Language Commission “to bring about the solution–the dual orthography–that is in use today.” Mark was far too modest to mention that the Language Commission drew heavily on work that he and Armand Tagoona (an Anglican minister with a passion for language) had already done, in devising the revised orthography.

Inhabit Media has put together an attractive hardbound collection of some of Mark’s stories from Inuit culture. Most of the selections have been published before, one by Nunavut’s Department of Education in 2004, and a number in two volumes published by Inhabit Media as Unipkaaqtuat Arvianit (Volumes 1 and 2) in 2009 and 2010.

But the last quarter of the book, entitled Inuit Beliefs, comprises stories not previously published. In introducing that section, Mark wrote that the “traditional belief system was linked to every area of life, affecting how they [Inuit] worked, how food was harvested and used, how water was used, how relationships were formed and maintained––it affected all areas of life.” In this book, he wrote about how some of those beliefs were “taught, learned, and practised.”

In “Showing Kindness to Orphans,” Mark told in abbreviated form part of the well-known story of Kaugjagjuk, an orphan who was cruelly mistreated by his community members, including his own family. He points out the lesson to be learned from the tale, that “we must always show kindness to people who (sic) we consider to be less fortunate than us, because they can rise up to become more powerful than us, and we ourselves may require their help someday… We are to offer them kindness and help. This is a precious thing to build our memories on.”

Most of the other stories in that section also convey lessons for living. Some are “Avoid Being Stingy About Food,” and “Treating Elders Kindly.” In “Avoid Whistling at the Northern Lights,” he reminds people – all Inuit know this – “We were told to avoid whistling at the northern lights, because if you whistle they will get closer, and the northern lights could cut your head off and play with it like a soccer ball.” Less well-known are two other beliefs about the northern lights: “People believe that if they rubbed their fingernails together, the sound would make northern lights go away,” and “When people wished the northern lights to go farther away, they would call out, ‘I piss on you,’ to try to drive away the northern lights.”

The introduction, by respected Inuit linguist, Jaypeetee Arnakak, points out that Mark had polio as a child and spent many years away from his family in a southern hospital where he had to learn a new language. He drew on his reserves of humility and patience and “decided that he would learn from this experience. This response would serve him well when he got out of the hospital. Because he had learned English while away, he felt he was now able to help both Inuit and qallunaat (white people) to communicate with each other.” How refreshing, in a time when so many Indigenous Canadians want to adopt the role of victim, to read about a man who refused to let life’s adversities conquer him and who instead chose to play the hand he was dealt and become a leader of his people and an inspiration to all.

In introducing some of his stories, Mark is careful to point out that some have many versions told in different places in the Arctic. He often makes a disclaimer, like, “This version of the story is taken from the Hauniqtuurmiut.” The Hauniqtuurmiut, an inland group of Inuit in the Kivalliq region (the area west of Hudson Bay) are his mother’s people, and many of his stories come from them.

Modern Inuit make much of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, sometimes translated as “traditional knowledge.” As Jaypeetee Arnakak points out, “Mark Kalluak lived and personifies the Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit principles authentically and genuinely; he was humble, thoughtful, and very caring towards his family, his community, his language, and his culture.”

Mark collected, wrote, translated, and illustrated this book. He began collecting stories, first from his mother, Helen Paurngat Kuugaq, and then from a wider sampling of community and regional elders. A few of the stories he heard from elders from other regions.

The book is lavishly illustrated with Mark’s own drawings. The type is large, and the paragraphs alternate between Inuktitut in syllabic orthography and English translations. The volume is an easy-to-read yet detailed introduction to Inuit traditional beliefs for the general reader, tales told well by a masterful story-teller.

The Ministry of Time

The Ministry of Time

by Kaliane Bradley

Simon & Schuster, $28.99 / £16.99

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

A richly-detailed historical past and a wholly hypothetical future don't often meet in the same story. Of course, there are those episodes of various Star Trek franchises where the pricipals go back into the "past," being careful to avoid trampling the butterflies of time-travel infamy, but eventually of course the holodeck is invented and saves them the trouble. Novels, our oldest technology of immersive reality, fulfill, in a sense, the same purpose, making our hearts beat faster at imaginary perils -- and pleasures.

Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time is one such, and simply as an immersive, delightful "escape" from our troubled timeline, it shines. Bradley's adroit and fresh way of putting things seems capable of making almost anything -- even London weather -- newly vivid, as when she describes the Christmas season making the city look as though it were "painted by a lesser impressionist." But beyond the glittering language, beyond the slow-burning romance, beyond the tightly-plotted espionage-filled main plot, Bradley's novel is anything but an escape -- on the contrary, it holds our darkness up to ourselves like a spattered mirror, and insists that we not look away.

How to explain the last two centuries -- how to account for the horrors, and our collective ability to repress and forget them, even to "double-down" (as the phrase goes these days) on our worser selves -- to a person who arrives to them as a tabula rasa? Well, not really entirely rasa, as Graham Gore did lead a life, ensconced by the ideological reassurances of his age, but complete with war, slavery, and mortal peril. It's just that he's skipped ahead a few hundred pages, and yet arrives in a world where his "bridge" -- the novel's unnamed narrator -- has the dreadful responsibility of deciding what to tell him, and when.

In the midst of reading about this conundrum, I found myself the somewhat odd position of knowing almost too much about the "real" Graham Gore and his role in the pereptually "ill-fated" Franklin expedition. Not only that, but having read every known piece of fiction inspired by its demise (thirty-two at last count), I initially readied myself for some new take on the tale. Which there was, of course, but that was not the point, dear reader, not the point at all. If considered as a "Franklin fiction," The Ministry of Time moves further from its source than any of them, further into the essential problems of human existence -- and by doing so, becomes the one book that fully captures the expedition's spirit.

And it does so with a narrative capable of the lightest of touches, the gentlest of humors, happily free from the lugubrious self-seriousness which possesses most other Franklin fictions. For, as Terry Pratchett -- in a quote that Bradley is fond of, observed:

The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as GK Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious … humor has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. 

I can say with assurance that the Graham Gore we meet with in this book's pages is a fully realized individual, so alive, indeed, that it seems his breath might fog the glass. And his perplexity at the twenty-first century and its accoutrements is so genuinely described that it almost makes us a little embarrassed for ourselves. As the story progresses, the reader, too, is liable to a sort of disassociation, sometimes disconcerting but at othe moments quite delightful. I can see why many readers, on completing the book, begin it all over again, much as Commander Gore can't let go of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, the one volume in his new "present" which engages both the man he was -- and the man he will be.

And he's not even necessarily the most remarkable of the "expats" -- the Ministry's double-edged euphemism for those they've plucked from time -- my personal favorite was Margaret Kemble, picked up on the cusp of the Great Plague (and the Great Fire) of London, who dismisses Facebook as "soft oats and whey" but takes to online dating like a stroke of lightning. They, and the narrator, are caught up in two webs -- that of the Ministry and its politics, and that of the vagaries of modern life -- even before a third, the time-traveling espionage one -- gets a hold of them. I loved the novel's "middle parts," the calm before that storm, but its denouement is adroitly plotted, and despite all manner of role-switching revelations, there's a space at the end for hope.

And that's where the underlying seriousness of the story finds its perfect context. In Bradley's words:

 "Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions every day. A twelve-second delay, a slip of the tongue, and suddenly your life is on a new road."

Which is as true for us today as it was for Graham Gore in 1847. We catch only glimpses of the lost Expedition, and that's as it should be -- because, for him, it happened in "real" time, and even traveling across time doesn't really change that.

An Inuk Hero

An Inuk Hero in Rupert’s Land 1800-1834

by Renee Fossett

Regina: University of Regina Press, 2023

$36.95 CA Paperback

$89.00 CA Hardback

 

Reviewed by Lawrence Millman

 

 Augustine Tataneuck is hardly a familiar name even to Arctic experts.  He was an Inuk, specifically a Kivallirmiuq, who began his Hudson Bay Company apprenticeship in August (hence his first name) of 1812 and continued to work for the Company until his death in 1834.  Among other things, he did household chores, planted cabbages, served as an interpreter, and helped Qallunaat live in various austere habitats.  He also served as an interpreter-guide for Sir John Franklin’s two overland expeditions, winning the admiration not only of Franklin, but also of doctor-naturalist Sir John Richardson, a man whose Arctic expertise considerably surpassed Franklin’s.

In an effort to excavate details about Augustine Tataneuck’s little-known life, author Renee Fossett delved into the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and in most cases she came up empty-handed or found only a drive-by mention of his name.  I can imagine Ms. Fossett saying, “This might result in a paper, but not in a book, so I’ll give my research a broader context.”  Thus a goodly part of The Life and Times of Augustine Tataneuck doesn’t mention Augustine at all, but discusses the HBC trading post at Churchill or the Franklin expeditions.  Indeed, almost 1/3 of the book deals with the Franklin expeditions, and Augustine appears only when his skills as a translator or an Arctic survival expert are required.  By the way, the subtitle is a little misleading: along with the overland Franklin expeditions, several of the book’s primary locales are either east or west of Rupert’s Land, which consisted only of the Hudson Bay drainage basin.     

Concerning that subtitle, Augustine seems rather too complicated an individual to be called simply a hero.  Yes, he was an excellent interpreter-guide, but he also delighted in “spiritous [sic] liquors,” wrote HBC trader Walter Harding.  Another trader wrote that he “was very happy to be issued a blue serge jacket and other items resembling what seaman with the Royal Navy wear.”  Yet another said he was too “arrogant” to do certain kinds of work (perhaps emptying slop buckets?).  Might he have been a Qallunaat wannabe?  

With respect or perhaps disrespect to the Qallunaat, Augustine provided his fellow Inuit with all sorts of items such as mirrors, rings, bells, whistles, and medals — I dare say his generosity in this regard might have been a detriment to their traditional culture.  Ms. Fossett writes “Nothing…sets him [Augustine] apart from other indigenous people at the beginning of the 19th century."

Many recent books have been written about the Arctic by individuals who never went there, so it’s a pleasure to come across a book whose author spent a considerable amount of time in the Arctic.  In addition to her field research, Ms. Fossett spent ten years as a community teacher in various Inuit villages.  In fact, she occasionally steps out of her narrative and purveys lore that she probably acquired from the Inuit themselves.  An example: she mentions the designs a seamstress was obliged to put into her clothing.  Any mistake on that seamstress’s part “could be misinterpreted by a person other-than-human [powerful spirit] and bring disaster on a hunter and his community.”  Sometimes I wish she had stepped out of the narrative in a different way and compared the past with the present…indicating, for example, that Churchill has now become the tourist mecca known as the Polar Bear Capital of the World.

For those readers who are looking for a book fraught with high drama, I would not recommend The Life and Times of Augustine Tataneuck.   But for readers who want a highly detailed, more or less scholarly book that focuses on the history of the Canadian North, I would recommend it highly.

Passage: A Novel

Passage: A Novel

by Angus Wardlaw

Daredevil Books, 2013, $31.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Many times in these columns we've reviewed fictional works based in whole or part on Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition of 1845. It's a subject that has fascinated novelists almost ever since Franklin first vanished; among the luminaries drawn to the story one can count Jules Verne, Mordecai Richler, Sten Nadolny, Margaret Atwood, Richard Flanagan, and of course Dan Simmons. Among the works to spring from this story are poems, plays (including one by Wilkie Collins), an Australian musical and a German opera, not to mention numerous novels -- more than two dozen by my count.

Novelistic treatments of Franklin tend to fall into two camps: one within which some deep symbolic stirrings of his story branch and leaf out into strange new worlds of possibility, some of them traveling far in time and space and style from the expedition itself; among these are the intertwined pseudohistories of William T. Vollman and Ed O'Loughlin, or the pensive meditations of Dominique Fortier or Lindsay Simpson. The others tend to some more realistic (though speculative) extension of what we know, an imagining of what came before and after the expedition's fateful final note; among these one can count John Wilson, Robert Edric, or Nancy Cato.

Wardlaw's novel falls mostly into this second category; interweaving known historical documents, characters, and incidents with fictionalized sequences which bridge wider and wider gulfs of unknowing. As a (collateral) descendant of Francis Crozier, Wardlaw brings a certain special gravitas to the undertaking, and it's also clear that he has spent many years carefully researching many aspects of the story (in a number of which, in the spirit of full disclosure, he and I corresponded over a period of years). There is also, however, a kind of dark, fanciful aspect to the story, in which characters we thought we knew twist and morph under pressure, bending and eventually breaking as the narrative progresses to its inexorable end.

There is a challenge in all historical fiction, though, and that is to capture something of the spirit and language of the era, One can't of course imitate nineteenth-century speech directly; such an effort would produce a very wooden and imitative text, but a fully modern tone would jar as well. One needs, in the words of novelist David Mitchell, to come up with something in-between the old and the new that evokes the older tone to readers of today, a tone he calls "bygonese."

Wardlaw's novel, in my personal view, doesn't quite manage this feat. The insertion of historical documents at many junctures, mostly quotes from Franklin's sailing instructions from the Admiralty, certainly helps, and it's clear that Wardlaw has done extensive research into the history of nautical terminology and jargon, but the speech of his characters sounds too modern to my ear. It becomes more so as circumstances become more dire, with the men swearing and cursing at one another in language that (as my grandmother might say) would "make a sailor blush." Wardlaw also adds odd peculiarities to some characters to make them stand out, including giving Ice Master James Reid a stutter, which seems especially wrong.

The narrative parts are much stonger, however, and the author's descriptive passages are quite evocative, with some brilliant turns of phrase scattered throughout. Having been through the Northwest Passage myself several times, I can affirm that the physical descriptions of land and ice are faithful ones, and paint a rich and detailed picture of the frozen regions that echoes what Franklin and his men would have seen from their ships -- and later, from their sledges.

I also have a slight quarrel with Wardlaw's portraits of the senior officers. Franklin -- who is inaccurately referred to as "the Commodore" throughout -- comes off as an ineffectual duffer who doesn't really have the respect of his subordinates. This is clearly contradicted by his and the men's letters home (though to be fair, Warlaw was writing much of his novel before the collection of letters I co-edited was published). More surprising still is the portrait of his ancestor Francis Crozier, who comes off as a drunken ego-driven man, though (as happens in The Terror television series) he eventually sobers up and becomes and effective leader of the expedition's last efforts at survival). It's also a bit jarring to hear him and J.C. Ross refer to each other as "Frankie" and sometimes even "Jimmy" when the record shows they used "Frank" and "James" for one another. But of course this is a work of fiction, and a novelist enjoys an absolute right to imagine the story in his or her own terms.

I won't give away the book's somewhat unusual hypothetical reconstruction of the expedition's last days -- readers ought to find that out for themselves -- but I will say that it's an original one, and that it certainly makes use of a great variety of historical research that lends it a believeable quality. In the end, Wardlaw's novel is a striking new contribution to the long literary tradition of tales that take up and evoke the deep and resonant tragedy of the Franklin story.

Tracking the Franklin Expedition

Tracking the Franklin Expedition of 1845: The Facts and Mysteries of the Failed Northwest Passage Voyage

by Stephen Zorn

McFarland & Co., $39.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

The history of those who've written about about the Franklin expedition includes a long list of people who, while motivated by their fascination with the story, didn't "quit their day jobs." From Richard Cyriax (public health officer), to May Fluhmann (musician and telegraph operator), to Stephen J. Trafton (banker), most of those who have contributed to the larger story have been true amateurs -- that is, lovers of their subject -- rather than academically-trained historians.

To this list we can now add Stephen Zorn, a lawyer and journalist, as well as a former government official in Papua New Guinea. His book is different from most of its precursors, though, in that it does not propose any new single all-explaining theory of what happened -- on the contrary, it seeks rather to suss out the probable from the plausible, the established facts from the speculations, and (among the speculations) which stands on firmest ground.  Zorn bases his approach on what he calls a "quantum theory of history," one which readily allows that there are some uncertainties that simply can't be resolved. And, while I know of no Franklin-related mystery that is quite as uncertain as is Schrödinger's hypothetical cat (which is both alive and dead at the same time), it's a provocative model for an approach which takes uncertainty as a given, and resists (for the most part) the urge to hypothesize it away.

Zorn begins with the "known knowns" (a wry reference to the late Donald Rumsfeld's word salad about certainty), as good a brief summary of the whole Franklin mystery in a nutshell as any I've read. And then, one by one, it's on to a more detailed account of the same, giving important background on each figure in the expedition, and all that we know thanks to more than a century and a half of searching. He organizes the next few chapters around the classic cruxes: did Franklin consider sailing to the east of King William Island (or was he even aware that such a route existed); what routes Crozier considered as he reached his decision to desert the ships; whether or not they returned to them and when; and lastly the possible causes of their eventual demise. In that, I think that he's quite right that starvation and exhaustion, with a little help from their friends scurvy, lead poisoning (a factor certainly in the illness of some if not an all-encompassing explanation), along with exposure to the elements, were more than sufficient causes.

It's an excellent précis and guide to the full spectrum of the known unknowns of Franklin's last expedition, and it has the great advantage that it draws from and cites the large body of new work and understandings that has come from members of online communities such as the Remembering the Franklin Expedition Facebook group (also acknowledged in McGoogan's new book), as well as the latest archaeological and forensic studies. This makes it an excellent starting point for the newfound Franklinophile, to whom I would almost unreservedly recommend it.

My only caveat there is that, at several junctions in the narrative, Zorn goes out of his way to discredit Franklin personally, at one point referring to him as "the most lethal commanding officer in the history of the Royal Navy's Arctic service." He also asserts, quite incorrectly I feel, that Crozier's expressed reluctance to go to Erebus to dine with Sir John was a sign of personal animosity of some kind, and from which he also infers (again, incorrectly) that "Sir John was less than universally respected." The collected letters of the officers -- which Zorn draws from elsewhere -- clearly refute such a view; every single officer, and several other men of lower rank, speak with unstinting praise of his command, Crozier prominent among them. When, earlier in 1845, Crozier learned from James Clark Ross that he would most likely sail as second-in-command to someone else, he replied "I am quite ready to go second to our kind friend Sir John – with none else save and except yourself and Captain Parry would I go." There's nothing in any others of his letters to suggest that his view of Franklin changed.

Still, setting that issue aside, Zorn's book is in every other respect a breath of much-needed fresh air in a room in which sometimes, not out of ire but out of the great passion for the subject we Franklinites share, the discussions become too heated.

Searching for Franklin

Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery

By Ken McGoogan

Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre

$38.95 CAD

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Readers of the Arctic Book Review will be familiar with Ken McGoogan's many books that touch upon aspects of the Franklin expedition, perhaps most notably with Fatal Passage, a book which singlehandedly revived the reputation of Dr. John Rae, the brilliant Scottish surveyor and explorer who discovered the first direct evidence of Franklin's fate. Since then, both with Lady Franklin's Revenge and Dead Reckoning, McGoogan has greatly expanded our understanding not only of some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering behind the heroic veneer of exploration, but also of the significant and lasting role of Indigenous peoples as guides and explorers in their own right.

So it would be an understatement to say that Searching for Franklin has been keenly anticipated by all who have taken an interest in the many and varied aspects of that famously lost explorer, the present reviewer among them. The approach of the book is somewhat different from what I'd initially expected, but by the end it succeeds in offering compelling new insights into the mindset of Franklin and other explorers of his era, along with a suggestive hypothesis as to the demise of his final expedition.

The book opens in conversation between McGoogan and Louie Kamookak, the late Inuit historian and friend to both of us, as well as to many others who went to King William Island in search of insight into the fate of Franklin and his men. It's great to hear Louie's voice again, resonating with that of his people and their ancestors, and lively with an often-humorous irony about the assumptions and obsessions of the various "Franklinites" he'd met through the years.

From there, we proceed to a lively retelling of events from Franklin's departure in 1845 through to Rae's and McClintock's discovery of what were to be, for a time, the final known traces of his lost men; it's a story that will be familiar to readers of McGoogan's earlier books. This sets the scene for the central portion of the book, which focuses not on Franklin's last command but his first, the Coppermine Expedition of 1819-22. The main theme here is of Franklin as 'the man who wouldn't listen' -- at least when it came to advice from his Dene guides -- which is surely a fair criticism. Of course, Franklin's deafness was not his alone; the entire apparatus of the British Admiralty and the Empire in general was quite hard of hearing when it came to Indigenous voices and knowledge.

The following chapters touch on several sundry aspects of the Franklin mystery, from the box dug up from under the Paddy Gibson memorial in Gjoa Haven (which some believed held Franklin records, but turned out to be full of sand), some chapters from the peculiar career of Franklin searcher Charles Francis Hall, and then finally to the discoveries of Franklin's ships in 2014 and 2016. After a brief detour to Jens Munk ('the second-worst disaster' of Arctic expeditions), we return to the Coppermine expedition and its key figures, particularly the Dene leader Akaitcho. Franklin, of course, comes off none to well in these histories -- I'm reminded of why, in his novel A Discovery of Strangers, Rudy Weibe has the Dene give Franklin the nickname "Thick English" -- but it was a bit frustrating as a reader to see so many of the remaining pages turn without a return to the story of the 1845 expedition.

It's just then, though, that McGoogan offers his own theory as to the surprising loss from among their numbers that clearly affected Franklin's men in their icebound ships: that eating improperly-prepared polar bear meat led directly to their death and disappearance. While it's entirely plausible, there's no direct evidence of the expedition having killed or eaten a bear --- indeed, they seemed poorly equipped for hunting of any kind. McGoogan cites an example of a bear killed by Akaitcho and eaten by Franklin's men in 1821; the Dene themselves did not eat bear meat. And yet the Inuit certainly do, and have for millennia; I've enjoyed it myself at a community feast in Clyde River. As long as the meat is well-cooked, the risk of trichinosis is relatively low, though of course one can't eliminate it entirely.

In his concluding chapter, McGoogan offers a sharp rebuttal to those who have, over the intervening years and today, hailed Franklin as a polar hero. He certainly had his flaws and limitations -- but then so do most "heroes" when you look closely at them. His sins seem in large part to be the common ones that nearly all Royal Navy commanders shared, among them insufficient trust in Indigenous knowledge, while his merits -- such as the love and loyalty he inspired in his men -- were his own. That said, I'm sure his reputation can stand a little correction; as Margaret Atwood once wryly observed (in a quote mentioned in the book), "every age has created a Franklin suitable to its needs." Perhaps this is the one for ours; only time will tell.

The Search for Franklin: An Irish Connection

The Search for Franklin: An Irish Connection

By Kevin Cronin

Reviewed by Frank Michael Schuster

Appearing at first glance as a coffee table book due to the unusual landscape format and the quality of the cover and the printing in general, Kevin Cronin’s book turns out to be a self-published book of no more than 75 pages, but with excellently reproduced illustrations, photographs, maps and charts on almost every page. The book is clearly a labour of love.

In it, the author describes concisely but ironically -- and very appealingly -- his experiences in the Arctic in general, and on the trail of Sir John Franklin's last expedition lost in the ice in particular. The Dublin-chartered accountant discovered his love of the sea early, spending his holidays as a child with his grandfather in County Cork, Ireland, at and on the sea. In the mid-1980s, he accompanied Irish adventurer Paddy Barry on his Atlantic crossing in a Galway Hooker, a historic cargo sailing vessel.

 

After this adventure, in 1997 he and Paddy Barry and Jarlath Cunnane attempted to repeat Ernest Shackleton's legendary 1916 crossing (not 1913, as stated in the book) from Antarctica to South Georgia in a converted boat of the Endurance, which had sunk in the Antarctic ice. The undertaking came to an end when the replica of the James Caird capsized in the stormy polar sea. That didn't stop Cronin from continuing to embark on polar adventures with them, circumnavigating the North Pole from 2001-2005. In the process, he passed through both the Northwest and Northeast Passages in the sailing vessel Northabout, which was built by Cunnane. Irish filmmaker John Murray, who was there for the crossing of the Northwest Passage, filmed this as part for a film about John Franklin's expedition. This brought Cronin into contact with that story, which obviously fascinated him. 

They had met Dave Woodman and Tom Gross on King William Island during their transit of the Northwest Passage. Since the Northabout, after reaching Alaska, cruised in the North Pacific in 2002-2004 before taking on the Northeast Passage, Murray and Cronin decided to join the next expedition planned by these two well-known Franklin searchers and researchers in search of Franklin's missing ships. The two set off from Dublin via London, Edmonton and Yellowknife to Goja Haven in 2002 with little besides their camera equipment as hand luggage.  After Tom Gross had received them, the journey was to become even more adventurous, as they continued with two snowmobiles. Driven by two local Inuit, one pulled a sled with the tents and the rest of the equipment, the other the box of the magnetometer with which they wanted to scan the frozen sea in Willmot & Campton Bay west of Skull Island, because Dave Woodman was convinced after his analysis of Inuit tradition that one of Franklin's ships must have sunk in the vicinity. 
There was actually not enough room for Cronin, Gross and Murray. They therefore sat down in the box, which turned out not a great idea.

 

“The journey was bone-crushing”, Cronin writes:

The space in the caboose was not adequate for three people, and on one of our rest stops I examined the other gear-laden sled to see if we had another option. With some adjustment to the cargo I found that I could make a groove along the top of the sled that could accommodate me lying corpse-like on the top of the load. […] Tom helpfully pointed out that if the sled tipped over, I would be squashed. […] I had ample time to contemplate how and why I was finding myself in this mad situation as the sled heaved and roled under me and the wind and snow pummeled me unmercifully. Shur, what else would you be doing? (pp. 21-2)

This passage is just one example of the author's lively and amusing style. One certainly learns more about the results of this expedition from Woodman's field reports (for example), but here the expedition's everyday life comes alive. Caribou hunting or the building of igloos are described briefly but very vividly, as is life in a tent, which is anything but easy. How a night on King William Island in a tent designed for Irish rather than Arctic weather becomes an adventure the moment nature calls and you need to pass water, for example, Cronin also tells us. These are things you don't find in the classic expedition naratives of the 19th century, and hardly ever today. 

The search with the magnetometer in 2002 and the subsequent closer examination of the hotspots found in the recordings in 2004 did not lead to the discovery of HMS Erebus, because she lies on the seabed not to the west but to the east of Skull Island, and therefore remained undiscovered for another decade. They later found that the expedition's camp was scarcely a mile away from where Erebus sank -- within sight, so to speak.

Nevertheless, Kevin Cronin remained passionate about the Franklin Expedition even after the discovery of the two ships in 2014 and 2016, and he joined Tom Gross' search for Sir John Franklin's grave in the summer of 2018. After his previous experiences on the subject of getting around in the Arctic, he decided to prepare himself and practice driving an ATV (all-terrain vehicle) in advance. Therefore, he signed up at a Quad Adventure Centre in March 2018.

“I found the experience hair-raising but valuable. […] I consoled myself by imagining that the actual terrain on KWI could not be as bad as this artificial course that was especially designed to be as demanding as possible. It was worse!” (p. 49)

The way he writes about his expedition is fun to read, even if Franklin's grave has not been found, neither then nor later.

Those who are hoping for new insights into the Franklin expedition may wish to look elsewhere, but those who enjoy beautiful, amusing and entertaining books and are looking for a first-person idea of what it's like to travel through the polar regions will greatly enjoy reading this modest publication.

Coming soon!

A banner season for books on the #FranklinExpedition this fall -- and we'll be reviewing all of them! pic.twitter.com/zwDXW7hvku

— Arctic Book Review (@ArcticBookRev) October 11, 2023