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    Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane
    Unavailable
    Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane
    Unavailable
    Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane
    Ebook491 pages6 hours

    Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane

    By Ken McGoogan

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In the mid-1800s, geographers revived the ancient idea that at the top of the world, encircling the North Pole, lay a temperate Open Polar Sea.” Without doubt, the voyager who discovered this balmy basin would etch his name forever in the annals of exploration. Among those drawn to the challenge was Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, a handsome, charismatic figure from a leading Philadelphia family who was already a well-known adventurer and explorer. In 1853, Kane sailed to the Arctic to seek both the Open Polar Sea and the lost British explorer John Franklin. After sailing farther north than anyone yet, Kane and his men became trapped in the ice. Besides treacherous icebergs and violent currents, Kane battled starvation, disease, and a near mutiny before abandoning ship to lead a desperate escape in sleds and small boats. Race to the Polar Sea tells this story in heart-pounding detail. Drawing on documents never before seen, author Ken McGoogan brings to life a heroic figure famous in his day as America’s greatest explorer and celebrates a shining example of American courage and survival.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateSep 16, 2008
    ISBN9781582439105
    Unavailable
    Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane
    Author

    Ken McGoogan

    KEN MCGOOGAN has published more than a dozen books, among them Fatal Passage, How the Scots Invented Canada, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, Celtic Lightning and Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage. He has won the Pierre Berton Award for History, the UBC Medal for Canadian Biography, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize and the Christopher Award for “a work of artistic excellence that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” McGoogan has worked as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Montreal and Calgary. He sails with Adventure Canada, teaches creative non-fiction in the MFA program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and lives in Toronto with his artist-photographer wife, Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

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    Reviews for Race to the Polar Sea

    3.5/5

    10 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5
      The story is about Elisha Kane, an American from Philadelphia, who embarked on an Arctic expedition purportedly to search for the lost British Franklin expedition and find the 'Open Polar Sea'. McGoogan sees Kane as an unsung hero; a point which he pushed to the point of annoyance, interjecting frequent references to Joseph Campbell's 'Hero of a Thousand Faces' and counter arguments to Kane's detractors.
    • 4/5
      About 75% of this book is about early Arctic exploration done by Elisha Kane and his crew and I found it extremely interesting. The story covers the two years that Kane and his crew are trapped by ice in the deep North and their daily struggle for survival. However, the other 25% of the book is about Elisha Kane's family and love affairs and I had to force my way through these chapters. Even though I loved sections of this book, I was still glad to get to the last chapter, especially since the last 60 pages of the book were about his domestic affairs and his death and they were very anti-climatic compared to his arctic voyage.
    • 4/5
      Elisha Kent Kane was a daring explorer. He was the first non-Native to see the massive Humboldt glacier in Greenland. He survived 2 winters in the far north and when he realized that his boat would not be able to make the return trip he organized an escape by sledge and boat to a Danish settlement, travelling 1300 miles to do so. He and all his men were physically devastated by scurvy and many of them were unable to walk. Kane himself suffered from the complications of childhood rheumatic fever all his life but he managed to survive these trying conditions and keep up the spirits of his men. When he died at the young age of 37 in Havana, the train bearing his coffin was greeted by throngs of people all the way home to Philadelphia. There his body lay in state for 3 days while hundreds visited. Yet, his name is hardly known and there is no public monument to him in his birthplace of Philadelphia. Ken McGoogan obtained access to previously unpublished journals and has written a compelling story. Maybe after 150 years Kane is about to get some of the recognition he has missed out on.