SEARCHING FOR FRANKLIN

McGoogan offers a reassessment of the doomed Franklin expedition and the man behind it in this nonfiction work.

The disastrous 1845 Franklin expedition sought to map the Northwest Passage; it ended in icebound ships, extreme deprivation, and the death of many crew members, including Captain Franklin himself. The author takes a predominantly biographical approach to contextualizing this infamous event, telling the life stories of everybody involved. This is especially true for Captain Franklin, who’s examined in great detail both in his personal life (alarming friends and prospective brides, for instance, with his zealous Christian beliefs shaped by the “spiritual leader of a fringe group of evangelical Calvinists,” Lady Lucy Barry) and in his role as the leader of the star-crossed expedition that will forever bear his name. McGoogan balances his well-illustrated text with personal anecdotes, as when he reminisces about his time years ago at the University of Cambridge, where, “one rainy night, with a floor lamp at my elbow and a mug of coffee in my hand, I sat reading a particularly cogent description of how Sir John Franklin had earned the right to be recognized as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage.” The author squarely takes aim at that accolade; as a prolific writer of popular history titles, his storytelling experience is abundantly obvious on every page of this book. McGoogan’s approach to sifting through the people and events of both the Franklin expedition and its pertinent forerunners is challenging without being irreverent. He takes nothing for granted, and his research is thorough, though the book’s most touching narrative thread involves the author directly addressing his friend and fellow Franklin expert Louie Kamookak (“And so, Louie, I find myself speaking to you once more, telling you the stories that you originally told me,” he writes. “That is how I relive them, how I keep them alive”). Exploration fans will find the work fascinating.

A revisionary and deeply personal look at the infamous Franklin expedition.