Author takes on historical inaccuracies

Page 23

Fatal Passage

The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin

By Ken McGoogan

Harper Flamingo Canada

312 pages

$34 (hc)

In Fatal Passage, author Ken McGoogan takes on Canada's image of itself as he seeks to correct historical inaccuracies and expose the attitudes that created them.

The story centres on the life of John Rae, a Hudson's Bay Co. doctor turned Arctic explorer. McGoogan clearly see his protagonist as a figure of heroic proportions who has been denied his rightful place in history, in part, because he found that Indigenous methods of coping in the bush were superior to methods used by Europeans.

The saga of the fate of the Franklin expedition was undoubtedly the most compelling story of the Victorian era. In May of 1845, Sir John Franklin was sent by the Royal Navy in search of the Northwest Passage across Canada's Arctic. He took two well-equipped ships and 128 men. By July, the expedition was lost. Years went by, while the whole of Britain wondered what had happened.

It should not have been that hard to figure out. Franklin, as McGoogan reported, "was 59, overweight and famously ruled by his formidable wife, Lady Jane Franklin" when he set sail. He had just been recalled after six years as governor of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) and censured for incompetence. But his powerful, well-connected wife badgered the admiralty until they gave him this assignment. McGoogan found evidence she did so to help rehabilitate her husband's reputation and to protect her own place in high society.

Expedition after expedition failed to locate the Franklin expedition, at great expense to the admiralty. Finally, in 1854, Rae was assigned to map unknown territory on the coast of the Arctic mainland and was told to do what he could to find the lost explorers while en route.

During that journey he not only mapped the final link of the Northwest Passage but also encountered Inuit people who possessed relics from the lost expedition. The Inuit people reported all had died and the last survivors had resorted to cannibalism as a final desperate means of survival.

When Rae returned to England, his report threatened to destroy everything Lady Franklin had worked so hard to construct. She set out to destroy Rae's reputation, employing noted author Charles Dickens as an accomplice.

Dickens, and others, wrote columns attacking the very idea that Englishmen would engage in cannibalism. Dickens wrote that it must have been the Inuit who engaged in such barbaric practices.

McGoogan sees the racism of the era clearly expressed by its greatest writer.

"To me, he was the voice of the people raised to an unprecedented eloquence. He was the spokesman of the age. And all that stuff about 'savages' and so forth, he was voicing the prejudices of Victorian England. That is why Victorian England reacted so strongly against John Rae. Rae's evidence undercut the moral underpinnings of the whole colonial enterprise," he said, during a phone interview with Windspeaker on May 23.

Rae was vulnerable to criticism in England because he was, as McGoogan described him, "a man outside of his times. A post-colonial man living in colonial times."

He defended the Inuit against the criticisms and accusation levelled at them in the press and that did not help his standing in society.

"A large part of the secret of Rae's success was his attitude towards the Native peoples. He arrived here in North America and he was already an extremely good hunter and sailor and outdoorsman.

But he didn't come out and say, 'OK, look, I'm an expert in these things and here's how it should be done.' No. He said, 'I've never hunted caribou. How do you catch caribou?' He was asking that of the Cree around Moose Factory. Then he went up north and he was involved with the Inuit," McGoogan said. "He was living in a stone house and he realized, 'Hey, these guys are living in their snow huts and they're far more comfortable and war than I am.' So he asked them how they do that. He learned from them. How do you grease your sled runners? How do you harness your dogs? How do you guard against snow blindness? All these things he learned from the Native people and, when he went back to England, he didn't say, 'Well, I invented these things.' (He said) 'I learned these things from the Native peoples. These are technological, scientific achievements that deserve to be celebrated as such.' He learned from the Native peoples. As a result of that he became, among Europeans, the greatest Arctic explorer of them all. You don't arrive at a place and start telling people how to survive there when those people have survived there for centuries. You go there and these people have something to teach. Those who arrived with that attitude were able to survive and thrive. If they brought the opposite attitude, as so many did, well, that's why so many died."

Many Native leaders say they still encounter Victorian attitudes in the corridors of power in Canada, attitudes that are still more in tune with Franklin and what he represents than with Rae.

"Yes," McGoogan said, "and that's one of the things I'm trying to change with this book. It's a slow process but that's one of the things that I'm consciously taking aim at."

Lady Franklin succeeded in destroying Rae's reputation. He is the only Arctic explorer that did not receive a knighthood and Franklin is still officially seen by historians as the discoverer of the Northwest Passage. McGoogan said it shows just how unreliable history can be.

"What's also interesting, and I try to get at this in the book, is the way we create history. When I was a kid learning history, I was taught that Sir John Franklin was the one who discovered the Northwest Passage," he said. "Now, I'm exploding that mythology with this book or certainly attempting to do so and in so doing, I'm looking at the way history is created. That has contemporary meaning because if we understand howhistory has been created we understand . . . we can say, 'wait a minute now, let's look at this again, but it looks to me like we got this wrong. Let's re-create it.'"

A lot of the book was written while its author was walking a picket line courtesy of a labor dispute at the Calgary Herald that was spawned by the editorial staff's displeasure at the way media magnate Conrad Black was influencing the editorial slant of the paper. Black, McGoogan noted, would have been quite at home in Victorian England.

Windspeaker asked the author if it was possible Black had unwittingly helped him to discredit a world view Black probably holds dear by giving him more time to work on the book.

"Yes, it's another nice irony," he replied. "I began [the book] before the strike at the Herald. I began it in Cambridge. I was in Cambridge on a fellowship and I was away for four months before the strike ever happened. I came back, I was working again at the Herald and then the strike came and I went on strike. The connection is tenuous but I'll tell you something, this book is much better than it would have been because of the strike. I had a lot more time. I was only on picket duty four hours a day."

Fatal Passage is a very readable and entertaining book by a very thoughtful, intellectually honest non-Native author.