Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery

Witness to Yesterday (The Champlain Society Podcast on Canadian History)

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon talks to Ken McGoogan about his book, Searching for Franklin: New Answers to the Great Arctic Mystery, published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2023. Arctic historian Ken McGoogan approaches the legacy of nineteenth-century Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin from a contemporary perspective. Franklin’s expeditions were monumental failures, yet, many still see the Royal Navy man as a heroic figure who sacrificed himself to discover the Northwest Passage. This book challenges that vision as it interweaves two main narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy’s Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected lost eleven of his twenty-one men to exhaustion, starvation, and murder. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin’s last expedition in 1845? Drawing on his own research and Inuit oral accounts, McGoogan teases out intriguing aspects of Franklin’s expeditions, including the explorer’s lethal hubris in ignoring the expert advice of the Dene leader Akaitcho. McGoogan will captivate readers with his first-hand account of travelling to relevant locations, visiting the graves of dead sailors and experiencing the Arctic—one of the most dramatic and challenging landscapes on the planet. Ken McGoogan is a globe-trotting, history-hunting storyteller who has published fifteen books – mostly nonfiction narratives, but also novels and memoirs. His best-selling titles include Dead Reckoning, Celtic Lightning, Fatal Passage, 50 Canadians Who Changed the World, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and Flight of the Highlanders. Image Credit: Douglas & McIntyre If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.