FATAL PASSAGE

Calgary-based editor and novelist McGoogan pens a vivid biography of the first European to have seen great stretches of the Canadian Arctic and live to tell the tale.

Among the reasons that John Rae (1813–93) does not figure prominently in standard histories of Arctic exploration, argues McGoogan, is the “Canadian tendency to self-effacement,” which keeps them from duly celebrating their heroes. (Had Rae been a US citizen, the author suggests, his compatriots would now be “singing songs about how, in the Great White North, he faced down a pack of wolves with a hunting knife, became legendary as a snowshoe-walker, and traveled 23,000 miles by canoe, small boat, and dogsled.”) A more important factor in his obscurity, perhaps, was the unintended fallout from the news that Rae brought back from a far northern trek of the mid-1850s, during which he discovered the cannibalized remains of the lost Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin. Rae’s suggestion that British heroes had resorted to cannibalism drew heated attacks from a number of figures in English high society, one of the most influential being Charles Dickens, who loudly voiced his view that Franklin’s “gallant band” had been attacked and butchered by Eskimos, adding, “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel.” Rae knew better, McGoogan says; he recognized the genius of indigenous peoples in adapting to the northern environment, and his study of their ways kept him alive in many dodgy situations. That knowledge, however, did little to help him negotiate the class-bound politics of his day, about which McGoogan writes with suitable indignation, and Rae died in obscurity while others took credit for his very real accomplishments.

An effective brief for adding Rae to the explorers’ hall of fame, and an able work of popular history in the bargain.