A double review with The Old way North: Following the Oberholtzer-Magee Expedition
by David F. Pelly.
“A scientist studying the effects of extreme stress could hardly do better than to confine nineteen men in a cabin and subject them to intense cold and never-ending darkness while attacking them with scurvy and starvation.” This passage from Race to the Polar Sea, Ken McGoogan’s fourth book of Arctic exploration, actually falls short of summing up the privations endured by explorer Elisha Kent Kane and his crew. It neglects to mention the rats: the four-footed ones that gnawed away at the ship, and the two-footed ones — treacherous crew members — who gnawed away at morale.
In this bone-chilling book — pun intended — McGoogan writes in detail of the unimaginable hardships of the 1853 to 1855 polar journey led by Kane, a largely neglected American explorer. Race to the Polar Sea is based in part on Kane’s long-lost journal, which McGoogan happened to discover in the collection of a Calgary bookseller.
A Philadelphia doctor who led a private expedition in search of the lost Franklin expedition, Kane also sought to discover what many believed was an open polar sea teeming with fish and mammals. He went further north than any explorer of his time, made groundbreaking observations about glaciers, and forged alliances with the Inuit that were remembered for many generations. While writers such as Pierre Berton have not been kind to Kane, McGoogan describes him as a humane, archetypal hero, driven to accomplish some great thing.
It’s hard not to like the man McGoogan portrays — Kane battles recurring bouts of life-threatening illness, risks his life many times in high-minded adventures all over the world, charms American society with his eloquent public lectures, and obsesses over an ill-fated love affair with a celebrity psychic. But mostly, it is his heroic effort to lead his crew to safety after they become trapped in the ice — “the most extraordinary escape in Arctic history” — that suggests he should be in the same league as famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton.
Race to the Polar Sea covers the span of Kane’s action-packed thirty-seven-year life. Except for the early chapters detailing his family genealogy, each section is engrossing and the momentum builds right up to the book’s conclusion.
The Old Way North by David F. Pelly moves at a slower pace, but will be of interest to those who love tales of northern travel. It focuses on a little- known and uncelebrated northern wilderness route that stretches from Manitoba to Nunavut on the west side of Hudson Bay.
Pelly, a canoeist, retraces the inland journey made by Ernest C. Oberholtzer in 1912. He draws from Oberholtzer’s journal and compares those observations with what a modern wilderness traveller would see today. York boats — sturdy freight boats equipped with sails — were still plying the northern rivers in Oberholtzer’s day, although their time would soon end.
Besides Oberholtzer’s journal and Pelly’s own observations, the book draws from a variety of sources: the journals of nineteenth-century missionaries who established posts along the route, Pelly’s interviews with First Nations people, and the perspectives of modern-day canoeists.
Illustrated with black-and-white photos, The Old Way North provides a detailed account of a 3,000-kilometre-journey by canoe while reminding us how much of the history of Canada is about the journeys taken on its rivers. As Pelly says, they are “the threads that tie our geography together.”
— Nelle Oosterom (Read bio)
Nelle Oosterom is the Senior Editor of Canada's History magazine.