As affecting the fate of my absent husband

As affecting the fate of my absent husband: Selected Letters of Lady Franklin concerning the search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848-1860.

Edited, and with an introduction and Notes, by Erika Behrisch Elce

Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.

$39.95

Lady Jane Franklin was, in many ways, a more public figure -- and a more successful one -- than her famously missing husband Sir John. She deployed so many rhetorical fusillades from her residence in Pall Mall that it became commonly known as "The Battery," and although her quest was, in the end, only partly successful, it was with some justice that The Times could refer to her as "our English Penelope."

The past two decades have seen dozens of books on the final Franklin expedition, but only a very few have focused directly on the woman at whose call more than 36 ships were launched into uncharted Arctic waters. Penny Russell's 2003 book This Errant Lady uses Jane's journals and letters to illuminate a cross-country trip through Australia that she undertook while Sir John was governor of neighboring Van Diemen's Land, and it remains, I feel, the most immediate portrait; from its pages one can imagine, at least for a moment, what an encounter with her Ladyship might have felt like. Kenn McGoogan's 2005 biography, Lady Franklin's Revenge, gives a much fuller portrait, and although its title hints at some criticism of her methods, the book as a whole offers an admiring view. And so it was with great eagerness that I looked forward to Erika Behrisch Elce's As affecting the fate of my absent husband.

Elce's book is a significant landmark; it offers, for the first time, a complete collection of Lady Franklin's public correspondence, the very letters in and through which she masterfully summoned up public and private support for further searches. It's beautifully designed, aptly edited, and accompanied by just the right amount and kind of contextual materials that will aid the ordinary reader's enjoyment of the volume, and yet satisfy the more scrutinizing expert. My only disappointment is that her private correspondence, save for a couple of brief notes to Benjamin Disraeli, is not represented here; while it's true that to include it would have meant a very different, and larger undertaking, I certainly hope that at some point this can be done. I can testify from experience to the difficulty, expressed by many previous scholars, in reading Lady Jane's small and closely-written handwriting, and not all of her letters and diaries are readily available, although the Scott Polar Research library has a substantial collection. If, as I hope, a complete and substantial publication of these materials is undertaken, I certainly can't imagine a more capable editor than Dr. Elce, whose engagement with her subject, and grasp of the rhetorical landscape on which this lone figure stood so tall, are extraordinary.

There are, I am certain, many treasures yet to be found. In one of her most poignant missives, addressed to James Anderson in December of 1854 and reprinted in William Barr's admirable volume for the Hakluyt Society, one can hear the poignant voice of a woman whose range extended from a roar down to a pointed whisper:

You will receive, I am sure, with kindness the earnest wishes of one who is most deeply interested in the important mission with which you are charged. May God strengthen and guide you in the execution of it ... I do not expect my dear husband to be among the survivors --if you should meet with his corpse which I think will be found wherever the ships are found, I beg you to bring me his locks of hair and I also entreat of you to bring me sealed up and directed to myself all of the letters you can find addressed to him or me ... The ordinary journals of the officers must of course be unearthed as they may be able to guide your researches -- but it is the private letters and papers I desire to be kept sacred from every eye but my own.

Ler us hope that we will hear more of this voice again, and soon.

Antarctic Fiction

Although some of us here at the Arctic Book Review take a dim view of the place we like to call "the other pole," there's no denying that this region of the earth, nearly as much as the North, has had a deep and abiding attraction to writers of fiction. The granddaddy of them all, of course, is Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which combines elements of exploration narrative, memoir, and fantasy so effectively that Poe's British publisher initially believed it to be a factual account. Pym ends on a strange, ambiguous note, in a region where the water runs white and a mysterious pale figure appears but does not speak. The apparent lack of resolution is "explained" in an editorial note by Poe, who says that "Pym" unhappily died before being able to complete his narrative, which of course has not prevented others from taking up where Poe left off. H.P. Lovecraft, in his At the Mountains of Madness (1936) imagines an archaeological expedition launched in part to investigate strange inscriptions modelled on (and at one point quoting) those in Pym; after ascending an Antarctic mountain range taller than the Himalayas, the scientists discover a weird, lush tropical world in which "elder things" -- a variety of species with impossible evolutionary features -- lie in wait. Making a film of Lovecraft's novel has been a longtime dream of director Guillermo del Toro, but at present the project appears to be dead in the (icy) water.

The idea that the poles hide secret tropics is far older than Lovecraft; the idea goes back at least to 1888, when an Antarctic jungle featured in American writer James De Mille's Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder; Jules Verne's Adventures of Captain Hatteras gave the North a tropic as well, complete with an active volcano in its center. But in recent years, these sorts of geographical fancies have given way to more political ones, to tales which project the issues and anxieties of the present onto the one last continent which is not the territory of any nation (albeit it has its zones of influence).

The earliest of these, and one of the best, is John Calvin Batcheolor's 1983 opus, The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica. Batchelor, who has since quit writing novels and become a radio talk show host, opens his tale with a sentence worthy of Melville: "I am Grim Fiddle." In other hands, such a phrase might be the start of a luridly overwritten melodrama, but Batchelor weaves a weird yet entirely compelling narrative involving a hippie commune in Stockholm, a Swedish civil war (!), and a vast wave of refugees on boats who create their own uneasy nations on an Antarctic coast newly rendered habitable by global warming. Grim Fiddle becomes, in course, the last great hope against an opposing tide of "New Benthamites" (named after Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism), as well as a sort of accidental Moses to the fractious tribes who find themselves fighting over limited resources at the bottom of this brave new world.

From the viewpoint of today's even more contentious world, Batchelor's neo-Nordic political meditation may seem almost nostalgic; nowadays, the people who claim everything is political are less often progressives who believe in a voyage toward a better tomorrow, but fear-mongers who are looking for things, and people, to throw overboard. Which brings us to our second two novels, both published this year. Mat Johnson, in his Pym, has made the most direct evocation of Poe since Lovecraft, but it's as sociopolitical fodder for wry fancies, not a realistic voyager's tale, while J. Zornado, taking the pulse of today and projecting it 39 years into the future, discovers in the Antarctic wastes an almost-alien planet -- "Little Earth" -- on which will be fought battles between the "gods" of old (avatars, apparently, of old science gone mad) and the scattered tribes of wanderers who populate their domain.

Pym announces itself from the very start as a sharp satire: Chris Jaynes, an African-American professor obsessed with Poe's Pym is denied tenure at an elite private college, his collection of books removed from his office and dumped out in the rain on his front porch. Along with his Little-Debbie-munching Sancho Panza, Garth Frierson, he and a rag-tag band of characters displaced from the blogosphere embark on a collective Quixotic quest, searching the deepest South for the 'heart of whiteness' predicted to be found there by Toni Morrison. They discover a mysterious race all right -- what the narrator dubs "snow honkies" -- but there's very little mystery in the elaborate business that brings them there. There are a few hilarious moments, but for this reader, it's such a self-conscious exercise in over-the-top intellectual parody that all the fizz goes out of the narrative long before journey's end. If what fiction is for is to admire the author's cleverness, let this novel win a prize -- if not, then perhaps there's some other better reason to undertake a journey.

Which brings us to 2050. There is a danger in constant sly irony, and yet another danger in too much seriousness; either can be fatal. J. Zornado begins in the middle register, part Frank Herbert and part Sam Beckett, as, Vladimir-like in his dim futility, Vilb Solenthay lurches back and forth across a desert landscape, carrying water in what we belatedly, horribly, realize are human "skins." In some ways, 2050 harks back to Batchelor's book, painting a dire and dessicated landscape as vast as that of Earthsea or Middle Earth – to the latter of which, indeed, its “Little Earth” is indebted. Its reluctant hero may remind some of Bilbo, though instead of a wise wizard he has only the counsel of a young girl whose sanity and motives are questionable; his journey, like Bilbo’s, involves the crossing of a mountain pass and a trail through a vast and unusually dense forest. Yet the “gods” we meet here are of quite a different sort; unlike Tolkien’s warring forces of good and evil, these gods are asymmetrical and ambiguous, with uncertain and variable powers, motives, and histories. This first volume has the task of introducing us to them.

Zornado does a remarkable job of plunging us headfirst into a richly-imagined world. Of course, we recognize it as Antarctica – but clearly something has happened; there is neither water nor ice, and snow exists only in Vilb’s half-remembered dream- visions; illumination comes from the "arclight" -- an Aurora Australis of sorts, not natural but generated by some strange power source deep beneath the ground, and it's fading. At the same time, in this newly-reissued volume, the first of a trilogy to be brought forth by Iron Diesel Press, we sense a far longer journey, not merely to the present abode of these "gods," but an uncanny recursus which promises to take us at once back to our own past, and forward to a perilous future. The latter part of the first volume brings the reader around via a tightening spiral of past and present that draws ever nearer the centers of power; here we get our first indications that the "gods" of the novel are the embodied forms of an elite group of scientists in whose hands the continent of Antarctica was first transformed. We also see the long shadow of events from before the end of the world, getting glimpses of the ambitions and conflicts between these scientists, as well as of a figure known as Leventhal who, it appears, was the Oppenheimer of them all.

I reviewed the original edition of 2050 at length when it came out a few years ago -- but this is in essence a new book entirely, framed by a new preface, and shaped and shaded throughout by the gravity of the two volumes to come. It's as strong a start to a significant act of world-building as any I know in the realms of fantasy or science fiction; its readers' only frustration will be the wait, but it will not be long: the second volume is to be published just a year from now.

Polar Imperative

Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America

By Shelagh D. Grant

Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre

$39.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Canada's sovereignty over its Arctic territory has been a hot-button issue of late, the more so under the government of Steven Harper. The sight of live-fire interdiction drills, flag-plantings on Hans Island, and the flying of a government minister for a live video at the site of the rediscovery of HMS Investigator in Mercy Bay are all signs of how central the issue has become. And yet, while willing to put out a good deal of money and resources for such shows of force, the federal government of Canada has shown much less interest in supporting the social and infrastructure needs of its Arctic inhabitants, particularly the Inuit. How did this state of affairs come about?

With her new book, Polar Imperative, Shelagh D. Grant provides an eloquent and well-documented answer. And, as it turns out, the Harper government is far from the first in Canadian history to discover in the issue of sovereignty a convenient, seemingly innocent vehicle for political advantage. First, however, Grant lays out the kinds of legal and political arguments which have evolved in the field of international law, and without which "sovereignty" as such cannot be understood. There are many ways a claim of sovereignty can be made; prominent among them are discovery (I was here first), cession (you can have it, I don't want it), subjugation (I conquered it), and contiguity (it's in the midst of lands I already claim). One might think, given all the flag-plantings, that discovery was the strongest claim, but it practice is can be the weakest; land discovered but not occupied, or without the effective exercise of control, may be deemed "inchoate" -- undeveloped or temporary -- and thus liable to the claims of others who may, in fact, come much later.

Then comes the history; Grant offers both a panoramic view and a number of illustrative episodes of the most significant turning points in Canada's, and other nations, Arctic claims. It turns out that Canada has acquired its northern lands by nearly all of the above means: British explorers discovered it; having done so they then ceded it to Canada; Ellesmere Island, though in parts first discovered by Americans, lost its claims there because Canada both occupied them and exercised control. Indeed, Canada's two most northerly outposts, Resolute and Grise Fiord, were both established in order to cement claims of sovereignty. They were also settled, forcibly, when the Canadian government took a number of Inuit families, urged them on with false promises, and then abandoned them. Grant briefly mentions these "High Arctic Exiles," as well as native groups used in a similar manner, but I was disappointed that the larger dimensions of the injustice -- what a nation will do to people in order to wave its flag -- seemed so briefly passed over.

There is, of course, a lot of ground to cover; Grant's narrative stretches from Frobisher's voyage to the D.E.W. line to the era of Russia's underwater flag-scatterings a few years ago. Along the way, there are some fascinating diplomatic dramas, such as the British government's lengthy attempt to "give" the Arctic sea islands north of Barrow Strait to Canada, a move that bounced back and forth through several governments on both sides of the Atlantic before it finally came to pass. Grant touches on the search for Franklin, as well as the later dash for "farthest north," and how these narratives became part of a perceived claim -- by loss of life, as well as discovery -- of the Arctic as a region with a particular role in Canada's history and identity. Here, alas, there are a few errors of fact: Sir Francis Leopold McClintock was never a "whaling captain," and his 1858-59 expedition, although "private" at its outset, was retroactively deemed to have been a period of active service in Her Majesty's Navy. It's a slight, mistake, though in a narrative where "private" and "public" can make such a difference, it's significant.

Nevertheless, the book as a whole is expertly documented and eminently readable. My personal favourites tend toward the grand delusions, none of them more extravagant than the United States' attempt to create a permanent subterranean settlement, "Camp Tuto," deep inside year-round glacial ice; the station was to be powered by a nuclear power plant, and featured tunnels large enough to drive enormous trucks through them. The plan had to be abandoned when shifts in the glacial ice made it clear it could never be stable. Canada, for its part, attempted to establish its own Arctic fortress at Resolute, connecting the oversize airport to the town and Inuit settlement area with a graded highway, under which ran an enormous "Utilidor" pipe, capable of carrying enough raw materials, electricity, water, and fuel for a settlement twenty times its size. Neither side, ultimately, entirely realized their cold-war era dreams, although Thule AFB was built, and the Inughuit inhabitants displaced -- another injustice which has been found illegal by the world court, but the United States refuses to recognize. And this, in the end, is the problem with sovereignty: it turns out that the body of international law on which it is supposedly founded is often in conflict with the views of various nations, and yet these nations cannot be compelled to accept international judgments.

At the present moment, for instance, Canada's sovereignty is under no real threat; though the U.S. and others may believe the Northwest Passage to be an international waterway, they still go through the motions of asking to use it; though the Russians may scatter little titanium flags on the floor of the Arctic Ocean near the Pole, they as yet have shown no sign of searching for resources there (although contracts are being signed for their Arctic oil reserves closer to the mainland). Canadians, at least, should be able to sleep a bit better at night, the more so if this book is on their nightstand. By showing the long history of the vagaries of Arctic sovereignty, Grant's book makes it clear that these fears and posturings are nothing new, and in this case at least, the more we know about this history, the less likely we are to hit the panic button when next it rears its head.

Just Received: Polar Books of the Season

The end of the year often brings a series of oversize packages to the offices of the Arctic Book Review - 'tis the season for large-format, illustrated, and definitive tomes, and this year is no exception. And so, although we've not had time to thoroughly read and review all these titles yet, we'd like to draw our readers' attention to some of the most remarkable among these new offerings.

Not all of these books are for everyone -- W.F. Weeks's On Sea Ice is an exhaustive and technical tome, a reference for oceanographers and other scientists whose work involves sea ice (as opposed to land-bound ice and glaciers). Nevertheless, it merits mention for Dr. Weeks's eminently readable and delightful introductory chapter, "Historical Background," which offers a lively survey of the literature of Ice from ancient times, through to legends such as Scorseby and Nansen, through to the present moment.

Our other three volumes are based around photography; even for those to whom lengthy narratives of Arctic expeditions may have limited appeal, the sheer beauty of the region has the capacity to arrest any eye, as our remaining books amply demonstrate. First, we have Jerry Kobalenko's Arctic Eden; readers of the ABR may recall our review of his earlier book, The Horizontal Everest, by David Owen. As with his first volume, the text is a geographical and cultural ramble, recounting journeys from Beechey, Axel Heiberg, and Ellesmere Islands, the last of which Kobalenko has traversed from top to bottom in a series of interlinked journeys. Yet unlike his previous book, here the large format allows the photographs to star, and they do -- from the site of Sverdrup's Fram Haven to the Franklin graves at Beechey; from the remains of a cairn built by Peary and the Inuit at Cape Colgate to a striking view of polar mirages hanging over Jones Sound, there is an abundance of impressive imagery. Croker mountains, anyone?

Yet it's Ragnar Axelsson's Last Days of the Arctic which, to my mind, better captures the rich contradictions of this fascinating region, and the peril in which it presently lies. In some measure, this is simply because of Axelsson's imagery of the Inuit and Inughuit, who are visible only in the margins of Kobalenko's book; here we get a sense both of the profound isolation of many northern hamlets, and yet also their tremendous vitality, their youth, their disarming honesty. Axelsson captures a diverse array of images: a young girl in Kuumiut in East Greenland, in her best summer dress and on her way to church, making what looks like some kind of Hip-hop hand gesture to the photographer; a Inuk toddler fast asleep on a couch, while his father washes up in the adjacent bathroom (northern houses being an endless play on what can be done with less than 750 square feet of space); an old hunter, cigarette in mouth, clutching a husky pup, wearing a knit cap as he gazes out across a settlement. Amidst these, there are extended sequences of hunting trips, where traditional spears mingle with high-powered rifles, and a narwhal head makes for an excellent trophy moment. The greater part of Axelsson's images are in stark, stunning black-and-white; one can only imagine the envy that Ansel Adams and others of the ƒ64 group might feel for a land where the bright snow every day permits a depth of field rarely possible in the temperate zone. The people, and the land, come through with such stark clarity that, as with the Arctic sun itself, it is necessary sometimes to squint.

Our final book is not really an Arctic volume per se, though it includes a fair number of polar figures. Readers of the ABR will recall our notice of Dr Huw Lewis Jones's first volume in this series, Polar Portraits, two years ago; now comes its successor, Face to Face: Ocean Portraits, published (as is Axelsson's) by Polarworld. The format is parallel, as is the richness and newness of every portrait, even those that some of us may have seen before. The quality of the reproductions is magnificent, and the new photos -- many of them by the gifted photographer Nigel Millard -- are every bit their equal. Among the Arctic subjects are Lewis Gordon Pugh, "the human polar bear," seen emerging from the water at the North Pole; Henry Le Vesconte, a lieutenant on the Franklin expedition who was memorialized last year in Greenwich at an event hosted by Polarworld, attended by Robert Grenier, shown here at the rail of a Thames clipper on the evening of his talk; Sir George Nares, last of the great nineteenth-century British polar explorers; Otto Schmidt, explorer of the Soviet Arctic; John Parker, captain of the Truelove; and Sir Edward Inglefield, whose own Arctic pictures were exhibited in London in 1853. Among the other striking portraits are those of Lady Phyllis Sopwith (whose white-gloved hands upon the wheel and aristocratic angled chin practically scream "yachtswoman"); open-water swimmer Lynne Cox, quite literally in her element; rower Alex Bellini channeling the look and beard of a latter-day Rasputin; artist Dorothy Cross holding a dessicated shark's skin; and yacht restorer Elizabth Meyer, her face salted with sawdust from a current project.

As with the earlier Portraits volume, added attractions in this book include a fine essay on ocean photography past by Dr Lewis-Jones, illustrated by a wide array of striking and seldom-seen early photographs, followed by a lively discussion of present-day photography in which he's joined by Millard, Rick Tomlinson, Joni Sternbach, and David Doubilet, and a brief, beautifully-written afterward, "The Heart of the Ocean," by Deborah Cramer.

It won't be easy to choose from among these books at year's end -- and with some of them, you may need to get a bigger stocking! -- but all of us here at the Arctic Book Review wish you the pleasantest of holiday seasons, and the time and space for lots of reading!

Interview with the author, Dominique Fortier

Russell Potter: I've read that your initial interest in the Franklin story came from the NOVA broadcast, in which I was a presenter. So, as you can imagine, I'm curious as to which scenes or sequences from this program lingered most in your mind?

Dominique Fortier: At first, I was just blown away to see the Terror and the Erebus prisoners of a sea of white and to learn that more than a hundred men had stayed there and managed to survive for almost three years. I remember pausing the TV and calling to my fiancé, asking him if he’d ever heard about that expedition. (He hadn’t either; I gather we are not the only ones in Québec not to have known of it). But there is one image in particular that stuck with me the whole time I was writing the book: that of the men, hungry, thinned and exhausted by the three winters spent in the ice, leaving the ships and starting to walk – towards what they must have known was their death. Nevertheless, they were hauling behind them, in boats weighing more than a ton, all kinds of trinkets: soaps, silver polish, curtain rods, the most ridiculous things … That image told, in a very powerful way, that after all they went through they still were not ready to leave England behind them… It also told both of their arrogance and of their complete ignorance of what the Arctic was like and demanded. It is because of that single image that I started to write their stories.

Russell Potter: Yes, it’s a very compelling image! I was really impressed by the breadth and detail of the historical materials you draw from in your novel. What kind of research did you do, and were there any documents or resources that turned out to be especially valuable?

Dominique Fortier: I started with Pierre Berton’s Artic Grail, about the history of the North-West Passage “conquest”, which offered a good overview, and then went on to read a number of works specifically on the Franklin expedition. I focused on those that presented factual information (log books, list of canned food on board, etc.). Among them: Frozen in Time, by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, and Iceblink, by Scott Cookman. I also read a biography of Crozier and one of lady Jane Franklin, so as to have an idea of the important events in their lives, but I didn’t want to know too much about them, because I still wanted to be able to create my own “fictional” characters. More importantly, I read journals and accounts of explorers from the time, among those the one Franklin had written about an earlier expedition (Narrative of a second expedition to the shores of the polar sea in the years 1825, 1826, and 1827), and also lots of science books written in the 1850s (on magnetism, geography, etc.), in order to try to capture the “soul” of that epoch, and hopefully to see the Arctic through nineteenth century eyes. That also helped me to find Francis Crozier’s voice, which I didn’t want to sound modern.

Russell Potter: It certainly doesn’t – in fact it seems to me pitch-perfect for both the man and the times. In fact, I’m struck by the ways in which your novel paints a rather less than complimentary portrait of such typically admired figures as Franklin and Fitzjames, while making Crozier -- who is usually portrayed as dour and disappointed -- into a more complex and compelling figure. Was this a conscious design, or did the characters just come out that way?

Dominique Fortier: It was a very deliberate choice. I didn’t want to make a hero out of Franklin (nor out of Crozier, for that matter). John Franklin is so well known and glorified that today he almost feels like a statue. So I figured it would be more interesting to have someone looking at that “statue” from the outside, in a critical but always very respectful way, since Crozier is a man of honor and he would never dare undermining the authority of his superior. Still, I felt it would make an interesting contrast to oppose Franklin’s unbridled optimism with Crozier’s doubts and uncertainties. And I wanted the reader to learn to know both of them mostly through what they say and do, not so much through analysis of their characters. In the end, Crozier is flawed, but he comes out human. At least, I hope.

Russell Potter: Your portrait of Lady Franklin also seems to me particularly vivid; how did you set about imagining her?

Dominique Fortier: She sort of imposed herself. I didn’t have a specific idea about how I wanted her to be, but as soon as I started writing about her, she was there, and it was very clear what she wanted. I would say Sophia’s character gave me more trouble, because her “motivations” are changing and in the end remain quite a mystery. But Lady Jane was a very strong woman, in a no-nonsense kind of way, she was resourceful, independent, quick to act, so I basically only had to follow her lead.

Russell Potter: I loved the use of the de Bergerac play -- were there other sources in French that you drew from or consulted? I'm curious as to whether you looked at Emile Frédéric de Bray's journals, or Jules Verne's Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras?

Dominique Fortier: I actually don’t know of de Bray’s journals (but now I have to go take a look!) and I must admit I am not a big Jules Verne fan. That may sound strange, but I would say Flaubert was an inspiration, for his irony, as well as Jane Austen (even if she is definitely not French). I chose to adapt Le Voyage dans la Lune de Cyrano de Bergerac because of a sentence found in Berton’s Grail, that I quote in the novel. Eskimos, seeing white people and their ship for the first time, ask them if they have come from the Sun of from the Moon. And I figured that, in a way, the Franklin expedition was in fact, at the time, the equivalent of going to the Moon. (By the way, I love the fact there is a crater named from Crozier on the Moon. I tried to find a way to hint to it in the novel and couldn’t… but I managed to put it in my second book.) These men lose all their bearings and find themselves in a place entirely unknown, that didn’t clearly appear on maps, as foreign as another planet would be. But Cyrano aside, I tried mostly to keep the explicit reference English (Shakespeare, Goldsmith, Austen) so as not to draw attention to the fact that it was a Francophone writing about this very British adventure.

Russell Potter: In her lecture, "Concerning Franklin and his Gallant Crew," Margaret Atwood identifies the Franklin story as a foundational myth of Canadian literature, and points to writers such as Rudy Wiebe, Mordecai Richler, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Now that, thanks to your novel, this story has found a place both in Francophone Canadian letters and in English translation, do you think this will affect the way the Franklin myth functions for Canadians as whole?

Dominique Fortier: I’m afraid I’m not equipped to answer that question. Once I decided I would write about the Franklin expedition, I chose early on to not look at other novels on the same subject, for fear that I would just get discouraged and drop it. For the same reason, I haven’t studied the “resonance” the fiction has had or to the myth it has helped build. The only thing I can say is this: once they learn of it, Quebecers share the fascination Anglo-Canadians already have for that story and the mystery that still surrounds it.

Russell Potter: I was delighted to learn that Jean-Marc Vallée is planning a film of your novel. Will you be involved with the screenplay, and can you tell us anything else about this project?

Dominique Fortier: We are actually working on the script together, and we’re supposed to have a first draft at the end of November. It is pure joy working with him: he is an incredibly gifted screenwriter, and a very good teacher. We immediately agreed on what the movie should be about: it is a tragedy, but it also has to be a bit of a comedy; the “adventure” and discovery part is important, but, in the end, it is love story. As for production, I have no idea! Jean-Marc talked early on of trying to get financing in the UK, but we are still far from there …

Russell Potter: Many of my readers are asking when they can expect a U.S. edition, and since the Arctic Book Review reaches an international audience, I'd be interested to know about this or any foreign editions that may be in the works.

Dominique Fortier: For the moment, the book can be ordered in the U.S. via Amazon.com. I don’t know if there are going to be other editions or translations.

Russell Potter: What's your next project?

Dominique Fortier: My “day job” is to be a translator. I’m just finishing up the French translation of Linden McIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man for a Quebec publishing house. My second novel came out in French this summer; it is called Les larmes de saint Laurent (St. Lawrence Tears). It is about earthquakes, volcanoes... and is also a love story. I am now working on a third novel.

On the Proper Use of Stars

To the long annals of flights of fancy inspired in whole or part by the last, fatal expedition of Sir John Franklin -- a list whose authors include Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Joseph Conrad, Rudy Wiebe, Mordecai Richler, and Sten Nadolny -- must now be added another name, that of Dominique Fortier. It might be questioned whether, given the continued recourse to the pen over a century and a half by these and numerous other writers, another tale is called for, or even possible -- but after reading On The Proper Use of Stars, I can only say this: no matter how crowded the firmament, there shines here a new and startlingly brilliant light, yet one which takes its place in a familar constellation as though it had always been there.

Ms. Fortier's novel -- originally published as De Bon Usage des Etoiles in 2008 -- succeeds by refracting the light of its sources into a series of stellar vignettes, each of which captures a glimpse of one of the many figures who were caught up in the launch of, and search for, the Franklin expedition of 1845. Some glimmer darkly -- Crozier is almost a black hole of stellar suspiration -- while others, such as Lady Jane Franklin, take on the full refulgence of an Arctic sky. Sir John himself is cast deep in the shadows of his own expedition, reduced to a few doubtful-seeming journal entries, but we hardly miss him. His crew, on the other hand, is crammed with a variety of colorful characters, some based on its actual officers, some entirely fictional, such as the delightful "Adam Tuesday," who claims to have read every book in the ships' well-stocked libraries. In-between these leaves are folded, specimen-like, the fragments and documents of daily life: a dinner menu, a page from a manual of magnetism, a snippet of Eleanor Porden's poetry, a scribbled note attached to a button, a recipe.

The central portion of the narrative alternates between Crozier, whose dark matter grows in gravity and depth as the expedition progresses, and the lives of Lady Jane and her niece, Sophia Cracroft. Crozier's ineffectual courtship of Miss Cracroft is the connecting thread; in Fortier's version, their relationship seems far less futile than either of them feared, although (alas) neither will ever be the wiser. Crozier eventually must leave his reveries, and his ships behind, while Sophia comes to the realization -- with the help of Lady Franklin -- that perhaps, after all, the companionship of a conventional-minded man is far inferior to the company of a smart and free-spirited woman.

The social history of tea forms another delicate and finely nuanced strand, figuring both in Crozier's rivalry with Fitzjames and Lady Franklin's carefully choreographed social ensembles. And in the end, it's Lady Franklin who shines the brightest; never, in any of the other novels drawn from these histories, has she been so particularly, vividly alive as she is in Fortier's capable hands. She is here, she is there, she is everywhere -- equipped with little dogs named Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley, her color-coded maps, her calling cards, and her formidable recipe for Christmas pudding (given at novel's end should anyone wish to embark upon a two-month's journey from first stir to fiery arrival) -- she proves herself again and again a far more intrepid and tireless explorer than her seeming-heroic husband. One must see her, in this light, as the very first to make a fiction out of Franklin, and although here we witness only the first few opening brush-strokes, the reader can little doubt that, in the end, it is her portrait at which after-comers must ever ponder and pry, however various and disparate their ultimate visions.

Of these there have been many. In years past, we have had to content ourselves with a Franklin expedition fractured along stylistic lines -- one had to choose the postmodern crazy-house of Vollmann's The Rifles, the lyrical languidness of Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, or the faithful historical facsimiles of John Wilson's North with Franklin. Now at last, in Fortier's novel, we can partake of the playful, the lyrical, and the faithful all at once, and are led to realize, deep down in our collective Arctic souls, that what has always drawn us to this story is that single, steadfast star at which all those qualities converge.

NOW ONLINE: An interview with the author, Dominique Fortier!

New Franklin Fiction

We don't usually notice a new book before we've even had a chance to read it -- but Dominique Fortier's On the Proper Use of Stars, which is to to be released this week by McClelland & Stewart, is a very unusual book. For while it will be (by my count) at least the twentieth novel inspired by the career of Sir John Franklin, it is the very first originally written in French by a Canadian Francophone writer. Originally published in Québec as De Bon Usage des Etoiles in 2008, it's been translated into English by Sheila Fischman. The publisher's website describes it thusly: "A sparkling, inventive debut novel inspired by Sir John Franklin's grand — but ultimately failed — quest to discover the Northwest Passage and by his extraordinary wife, Lady Jane." So of course we're keenly looking forward to receiving our copy -- the more so as it turns out that, according to this article in TheSuburban.com, she was first inspired to write it after learning of the Franklin expedition in the 2005 NOVA broadcast, in which your (usually somewhat more humble) editor appeared as a presenter. So watch this space: we'll review it as soon as possible after it's received!

James Fitzjames: Mystery Man

James Fitzjames: The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition

by William Battersby

Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, £20

ISBN 978-0752455129

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

With the publication of this book, we now have full biographies of all of the chief officers of Sir John Franklin's final Arctic expedition of 1845. Franklin himself, of course, is a man of evidently endless fascination; Francis Crozier, his second-in-command, makes up in fortitude what he apparently lacked in charm, and has been seen by some as the "Last Man Standing." And yet it's Fitzjames, the third in line, who has had, in death as he had in life, the most charmed of reputations, despite the fact that so little was known about him. His lively letters sent home via the last port-of-call in Greenland, his gallant good looks (available in two different daguerreotype images), and his boundless enthusiasm ("I hope that we are forced to stay at least one winter in the ice," as memorably voiced by Thom Fell in 2005's Search for the Northwest Passage), are all part of his attraction. Indeed, he is the only figure from the expedition other than Franklin himself to have inspired a novel (John Wilson's North With Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames, 1999).

But who was this man? By all accounts, a spirited young fellow, with a heroic rescue and a dogged expedition in the Middle East to his credit, but no Arctic experience at all. His service and promotion? Well, there are a few blanks here and there. His parents? Ahem, may we have another question, please? And yet, as William Battersby shows us in this engaging and well-researched volume, his life up until the moment of his departure for the North is recoverable in a remarkable degree of detail.

Except, as it happens, with the matter of his parentage. Not wanting to disclose any trade secrets here, I will simply say that Battersby's solution to this longstanding mystery is, I believe, the correct one, although it is (in part) a very close conjecture. "Fitzjames," after all, means merely "son of James," and had known use before as a patronymic vague enough to both hint at and gently pass over any questions of legitimacy. And yet, though deprived of the privileges he might have had as a legitimate heir, Fitzjames in fact enjoyed in his relations precisely the kind of deep and satisfying intimacies which were so often lacking from natural parents in this era. His foster parents, Robert and Louisa Coningham, raised him with the same kindness and affection with which they did their own son, William, whom Fitzjames referred to as "Willie." The two of them had a brotherly bond which endured throughout Fitzjames's life, and it was to Elizabeth "the wife of him I love best," that he addressed the charming letters sent from Greenland.

And yet, despite their closeness, the destinies of William Coningham and James Fitzjames could hardy have been more different. Coningham, through inheritance, became by degrees a wealthier and wealthier man, while Fitzjames, who first volunteered for the Royal Navy at the age of twelve, had always to seek new assignments, and promotion, by the skin of his teeth. For although his upbringing was a very good one, he lacked the sort of "friends" that were usually required for Naval advancement, particularly in times of peace. The most difficult step of his rise through the ranks was his ascent to Midshipman, and here Fitzjames's determination motivated him to permit an untruth to go unremarked -- that he had not, in fact, served the requisite full year as a first-class volunteer. This was later discovered, but glossed over, as much to avoid embarrassment to the more senior officers involved as to spare Fitzjames, and he soon distinguished himself sufficiently that there was no reason to revisit the lapse.

And his career was in every respect a brilliant one. He cut his explorer's teeth on an expedition down the Eurphrates in 1835-36, a struggle of man, machine, and water of almost mythological proportions. He participated in the naval blockade in Syria in 1839, and then went on to serve in Britain's Chinese conflict, which involved both naval bombardment and hand-to-hand street fighting. It was here that Fitzjames met many of the men whom he would later select for "Erebus" and "Terror," among them Edward Couch and George Hodgson. But perhaps his most important new friend was John Barrow, the son of Sir John Barrow, whose advocacy for Arctic exploration was so powerful and influential that it had already shaped an era.

Still, as Battersby notes, this connection alone would scarcely be sufficient to cause Fitzjames to rise above hundreds of men with similar records to attain a coveted senior post on a vaunted Arctic expedition. In this case, his detective work cannot, ultimately, solve the problem, but it appears to have been some service that Fitzjames performed for John Barrow's brother George, something which caused his friend to feel he was very much in his debt, and to intercede with his father. The results were impressive, and fateful: a promotion to Commander, and a ship which, as Battersby notes, brought him to London "at exactly the right (or wrong) time to be appointed to the Franklin Expedition."

It also goes some way to explain why it was Fitzjames, and not Crozier, who selected the junior officers for that expedition. In his biography of Crozier, Michael Smith makes much of this, seeing it as almost a direct insult to an officer of Crozier's seniority to deny him the privilege traditionally accorded to seconds. Authorities seem divided as to whether this was really so severe a breach of protocol as Smith claims, but there has also, as Battersby notes, been criticism of Fitzjames's choices. And yet, as he demonstrates, his selection was not so anomalous as is often claimed; the small number of men with specific Arctic experience (Ross's Antarctic expedition had been sent with many fewer), the supposed regional prejudices (they were in fact quite a diverse and representative batch), or the preference for former messmates (which would have been expected no matter who was doing the choosing).

And, in any case, they sailed into an oblivion that would have been difficult to avoid, even had every man aboard been a hardened Polar veteran. As Glyn Williams has noted, it was precisely the Franklin expedition's success in reaching an area assumed by those who searched for it to be impassible that delayed -- fatally -- any chance of rescue. Battersby, unlike Smith and other biographers, avoids any speculation about the fate of Fitzjames or any other individual men after the abandonment of "Erebus" and "Terror" in 1848. It's a judicious and understandable caution, although given the remarkable detail he has given us of Fitzjames's earlier life and career, it feels somewhat like jumping off a cliff into the void (and perhaps that is his intent). He instead traces the sense of loss via Fitzjames's foster-brother William Coningham, and thus gives a fresh sense of the admixture of grief and admiration felt by those who knew Franklin and his officers personally. It's a fitting conclusion.

There are some additional thoughts and appendices, including a poignant poem, "A Sailor's Life," penned by Fitzjames, and several excellent maps. The illustrative material is rich and well-reproduced, though I hope I will be forgiven for saying that my favorite plate is that giving both of Fitzjames's photographic poses side by side. For some years, it frustrated me to see one or the other of these images reproduced, without any indication that two existed: here we finally have Fitzjames, with and without telescope, and without and with wry smile. Like this plate, Battersby's book is the first really full depiction that we have had, and it ably fills our previously incomplete portrait of Franklin and his senior officers. It's a book that no one with an interest in this expedition, or this period, will want to miss.

Arctic Labyrinth

Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage

Glyn Williams

Allen Lane

ISBN 978-1-846-14138-6

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore

Anyone wanting an introductory overview of one of the Western world’s most enduring exploratory obsessions would previously have had to consult three or four books at a minimum. Now we can recommend an authoritative and engaging account of the whole sweep of the subject, from soup to nuts, in one volume.

Over the last fifty years Glyn Williams’s writings have ranged widely over maritime and exploration history in the broad context of the development of European empires, with a particular focus on the eighteenth century. The Northwest Passage has been a constant theme in his work, from his first monograph, The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century, in 1962, through his editions of journals and correspondence from the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives. The long and complicated search for the passage from the bay, and then from the Pacific coast, resulted in his 2002 overview of the 18th-century phase of that work, Voyages of Delusion, an updating and major expansion of his 1962 book. Now, in Arctic Labyrinth, he has pulled back the focus still further to give us a bird’s-eye view of the whole exploratory effort towards a north-west passage from Frobisher’s first voyage in 1576 to Amundsen’s final accomplishment of it in 1906, with further chapters bringing us through Larsen’s first single-season navigation in the St Roch in 1944 to the present, when the new situations opened up by global warming—both navigational and political—are still very much in flux. As a masterly synthesis of so much of his previous work, Arctic Labyrinth is a fitting capstone to Williams’s authorial career.

As its title makes clear, the focus throughout is on the Northwest Passage, not Arctic exploration in general, and Williams, Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, is disciplined in not getting sidetracked into the sixteenth century probing of the Northeast Passage, or the late-19th century moves towards the North Pole. The title also makes clear the central problem of the Northwest Passage: unlike the long and dangerous but ultimately straightforward slog of the Northeast Passage, or the short and dangerous canal of Magellan’s Strait, the Northwest Passage is not one route but a mix-and-match collection of possible routes through a maze of islands that can theoretically be put together in dozens of possible permutations, and the book’s title emphasizes the labyrinthine nature of a passage whose very entrance took more than two centuries to find.

While other writers, especially Pierre Berton and Fergus Fleming, have made enormous contributions to our understanding of the 19th-century phase of exploration, their passion and humour have occasionally been at the expense of a disinterested coolness of judgement in assessing the motives of the explorers and outcomes of their actions. But the depth of knowledge that a professional historian brings to all the related topics in the background of Northwest Passage exploration, from early globes and maps to the fur trade and naval history, all within the overarching context of an unfolding European imperialism, make this a work apart in its breadth of reference and sophistication of outlook, and bring exploration history out of its specialist niche and into the unaccustomed light of the serious historiographic mainstream. All this means it is hard to imagine an author better qualified to write such a book. In terms of the source material with which he is familiar, probably no one has been in a better position to do so since John Barrow himself produced his Chronological History of Voyages into Arctic Regions in 1818—a time when the last and most productive segment of the search was still in the future.

The book is essentially in three parts, underlining the three-act structure of the search: an opening phase from the 1570s to the 1630s, when mythical waterways such as the Strait of Anian led many explorers astray; a renewed though sporadic effort focused on Hudson’s Bay and then the Pacific between 1719 and 1794; and the third and best-known phase beginning with John Ross’s cruise around Baffin Bay in 1818 and concluding with the final Franklin search expeditions in the late 1850s. The last phase is further subdivided, as is appropriate for the period of greatest activity, into Barrow’s systematic attempt to map the coasts and sea lanes both overland and by ship, and the large number of naval and private voyages that, in attempting to save Franklin’s last expedition, virtually finished the job. The intense activity of this later period inevitably makes Amundsen’s final voyage through the passage—the main subject of the book’s fifth section—almost bathetic. Unlike Magellan or even Nordenskjöld, every mile of Amundsen’s route had been mapped by one or another of dozens of previous explorers before he sailed it; only the stringing together by a single crew in a single vessel was missing, and it is to Williams’s credit that he recognizes how much that “only” hides, giving proper weight to Amundsen’s grit and accomplishment.

The author’s breadth of outlook brings some refreshing new angles to familiar stories. For instance, it’s become an almost universal motif to note how the cultural prejudices of the 19th-century Royal Navy prevented them from learning effective means of travel, clothing, or shelter despite the abundant examples of all three the Inuit provided them with. Williams does not demur from the general point at all, but nevertheless makes clear that the Navy’s practice in fact showed significant evolution and signs of learning from experience as one expedition followed another: clothing and rations were improved, daily routines refined, and there was even, before the deadening orthodoxy of man-hauled sledging became established later in the century, enthusiastic and extensive adoption of dog-sledging.

The source materials available for each period vary tremendously: for the earliest voyages very few original materials survive and for blow-by-blow accounts of the voyages the historian is almost completely reliant on the sometimes heavily redacted navigators’ journals published by Richard Hakluyt and his successor, Samuel Purchas. For the 18th-century material, the author’s countless hours in the Hudson’s Bay Company archives over the decades show in his profound knowledge not only of the journals but of the company’s minute books, correspondence, and other administrative papers. And for the 19th century phase a still larger selection of manuscript material is available alongside the often minutely detailed published journals, sometimes from more than one participant of each voyage. Williams shows his experience not just as a historian but as a writer in smoothing out the discontinuities of the sources to present a seamless narrative with a roughly even granularity of detail throughout—a task made easier by the fact that the four-century scope of the book mostly precludes the description of events at a day-to-day level.

Painting with even brushstrokes also brings to the fore the usually more overlooked characters of the story, and particularly those of Williams’s original area of specialism, the 18th century, when the search was at its most unglamorous, circling obsessively around the giant cul-de-sac of Hudson Bay. Christopher Middleton takes his rightful place as a worthy merchant-turned-naval seaman in the mould of Cook, while the loss of James Knight and his entire crew in 1719 continues, in the puzzling absence of human remains, to present even more unanswered questions than that of Franklin. The real advance of the 18th century was on land, when Samuel Hearne trekked from the Bay across the Barrens to the Arctic coast in 1770–72, thus ruling out a temperate-latitude passage across North America and paving the way for the High-Arctic focus of the following century’s exploration. Williams does not give the background of Hearne’s journey in the HBC’s earlier overland expeditions of Henry Kelsey and Anthony Henday, but again this is due to his tight focus on the North West Passage, and land expeditions that went west without travelling significantly north are outside his remit (readers can turn to Company of Adventurers, the first part of Peter Newman’s monumental trilogy on the HBC, to get the full flavour of that other exploratory trajectory).

Williams ends by giving an overview of the Passage in the era of global warming. As it becomes more accessible, offering ice-free navigation for at least brief summer periods, issues of sovereignty and supervision raise their heads, but mineral exploitation seems likely to cause the most intense activity, with Russian assertions of control over undersea resources likely to provoke Canadian and US assertions in response. An oil spill or the rescue of stranded cruise ship passengers are perhaps more likely scenarios of a future crisis in the North West Passage than an armed confrontation over recognition of Canadian sovereignty. Williams marshals the evidence as impressively as ever, but would be the first to admit that in the face of such an unclear and fast-changing future, crystal-ball gazing is likely to be as speculative as mapping the Strait of Anian.

The Man Who Ate His Boots

The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage

By Anthony Brandt

Alfred A. Knopf, 28.95

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Do we really need another recounting of the quest for the Northwest Passage? After all, the task has been assayed a number of times in recent years, by the likes of James Delgado, Ann Savours, and Martin Sandler; just last year, it was given a magisterial overview by Glyn Williams. It was with this doubt in my mind that, somewhat wearily, I opened Anthony Brandt's The Man Who Ate His Boots, and found that the answer, after all, was a resounding "Yes." Brandt has certainly done his homework, and yet his writing is anything but a term paper; by turns lively, mischievous, and dryly ironic, his prose is an adventure in itself, and deeply satisfying fare for either the neophyte or the traveler who thinks he has been there before. Even Sir John Franklin -- who, as the title implies, provides the dramatic continuity of this book -- seems to step freshly forth from the two-dimensional portraits which were so often made of him.

Part of this is due to Brandt's deft touch with the mood of our times, one in which we both crave heroes and (not to put too fine a point on it) devour them. Remarkably, he manages to satisfy both urges, giving us at once the mythic, Arthurian Franklin with his powers of persistence and kindness to mosquitoes, as well as the overweight bumbler afflicted with an especially bad case of the cultural myopia endemic to his times. He sees these aspects not as contradictory, but complementary; with a Keatsian sense of negative capability, he keeps them both in his eye. Brandt also has a keen nose for just the sort of refulgent details -- those diamonds in the coal-heap of history -- which illuminate the narrative from within. Thus we hear of Franklin's avoidance of Leicester Square, lest someone recognize him from his portrait in the Panorama there; of Sir John Ross's insistence that sunlight altered the motion of the magnetic needle; and of the pseudonymous "Voyageur" who (quite alone among the debates of the day) suggested that the "Esquimaux" rather than the Admiralty offered the truest account of Franklin's fate.

There are no new revelations here. Mr. Brandt freely states that he has drawn entirely from printed sources, and not delved into any handwritten journals or correspondence. He comes, not as would a historian, to sift every particular, but rather to scry out the larger lay of the land, and bring it, along with all its intangibles, back to the armchair explorer. It's a task he undertakes with particular verve and style, and it has rarely been so well done.