Greystone Books, Vancouver, 2012
362 pp., illus., $22.95 paperback
“Daring explorers” have no lack of admirers, it seems, but would you really want to marry one? The premise of Kari Herbert’s Polar Wives is that signing on as the helpmate of a dashing Arctic adventurer made for a life of tough sledding. And not because wives accompanied their polar paramours into the ice fields — they usually didn’t — but because it took a special kind of woman to endure the multi-year absences of ambitiousmates driven by dreams of conquest.
Indeed, polar heroes tended to fall for women who were as strong-willed as themselves, women who were accomplished in their own right, influential women who sometimes made their husbands’ obsessions their own.
Of the seven members of the “polar wives club” described in this book, none had more impact on the course of history than Jane Franklin. A forceful, well-connected woman, she persuaded numerous power brokers to fund multiple searches over a number of years in hopes of finding what remained of Sir John Franklin’s lost 1845 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. (Indeed, the effort continues to the present day as the Canadian government funds its well-publicized quests for the remains of the ships the Erebus and the Terror.)
Yet, when her husband was still alive Lady Jane was far from the picture of a long-suffering, loyal mate. After marrying Franklin, she quickly tired of the task of looking after her stepchild, Ella (the daughter of John Franklin’s first wife, Eleanor, a famous poet who died in 1825). With her husband in the Mediterranean serving with the Royal Navy, Jane left Ella with an aunt and went on a three-year adventure tour of North Africa and the Middle East. At one point she kept company with a gallant younger man, with whom she was loath to part.
These are the kind of stories that make this book fun to read. Yet while the author describes her subjects’ human frailties, there’s no overtone of judgment. Yes, Jo Peary is horrified when she has to share ship’s quarters with her husband Robert’s Inuit mistress and child. Awkward. But those polar nights are long. The author was in a unique position to write this book, since she is the daughter of the late British polar explorer Wally Herbert. Her mother, author Marie Herbert, is the most contemporary of the polar wives — Marie accompanied her husband on some of his journeys in the 1970s and today teaches wilderness rites of passage.
The only challenge in reading this book is its unusual structure: Rather than moving from one complete bio to the next, the subjects get picked up, dropped, and then revisited again under four subject headings — and not necessarily in chronological order. This gets confusing. Polar Wives is otherwise well written.
— Nelle Oosterom (Read bio)
Nelle Oosterom is the Senior Editor of Canada's History magazine.