McGoogan, Ken. Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero That Time Forgot. Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2001.
Reason read: the hero of the story, John Rae, was born in September.
McGoogle writes with a vivid imagination about what John Rae’s world must have been like. To orientate the reader to the times, McGoogan rattles off the Who’s Who of the day: Gottschalk, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Charles Dickens (more on him later). John Rae’s story reads like an action thriller as if he is side by side with Rae the entire time. Chosen to look for the lost Franklin on March 25th, 1848, Rae sounds a bit like Superman: impervious to the cold (temperatures sometimes falling to below negative sixty degrees Fahrenheit), legendary snowshoer and hiker, skilled doctor (qualified to be a surgeon at aged sixteen), successful hunter, fastest of the long-distance canoe-and-boat pilots, able to display impeccable timing when it came to deciding when to turn back or push onward. The list goes on. The one attribute Rae did not possess was the ability to communicate with tact. How he chose to describe Franklin’s demise was his downfall. Researchers questioned Rae’s reports; accusing him of leaving out key details or saying too much (like announcing the probability of cannibalism among Franklin’s men). Lady Jane Franklin never forgave Rae for the latter and successfully sought to ruin him and his reputation.
Despite Rae’s downfall it cannot be disputed that he was the first explorer to rightly surmise that Victoria Land was actually an island. Rae was the first to discover relics from the Franklin expedition. Rae also discovered the hidden gateway to the Northwest Passage. Unfortunately, it was Amundsen some fifty years later who would positively confirm it.
Later in life, John Rae was hired to survey the proposed route for telegraph lines over 2,000 miles from the East Coast and over the Rockies. Sadly, the Hudson Bay Company never did build the telegraph route that Rae proposed.
As an aside, clearly, McGoogle wants justice for John Rae. By default he was not kind to Lady Jane Franklin in his descriptions of her or Charles Dickens. I had an on odd sense of vindication for Rae when McGoogan was able to travel to the very spot of Rae’s cairn and place a plaque in his honor.
Quote that had me giggling, “In 1843, Sir John Franklin, derided as a victim of petticoat domination…” (p 222).
Author fact: McGoogan has a website here (the coolest thing I learned is that McGoogan is also a musician).
Book trivia: Fatal Passage was a best seller in Canada.
Music: “Jenny Lind,” and Gottschalk.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “To the Ends of the Earth: North and South” (p 230). This is obviously to the North.
~*LunaSea*~ 