Author: John Geiger
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 1771640790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"The amazing true story of a doomed Arctic voyage-- and the secrets preserved in ice"--Cover.

Author: John Roobol
Publisher: eBook Partnership
ISBN: 1913227049
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
The 1845 North-West Passage expedition of Sir John Franklin in the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, with a full company of 129 officers and men, none of whom ever saw England again, was one of the most heroic and courageous, maritime expeditions in history. This enthralling book is the result of seven years of arduous research by retired geologist Dr. John Roobol, who weighs evidence gathered over more than 170 years, and offers a highly convincing interpretation of what really happened to the lost, heroic, expedition.

Author: Tom Tucker
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786739428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Every schoolchild in America knows that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1752. Electricity from the clouds above traveled down the kite's twine and threw a spark from a key that Franklin had attached to the string. He thereby proved that lightning and electricity were one. What many of us do not realize is that Franklin used this breakthrough in his day's intensely competitive field of electrical science to embarrass his French and English rivals. His kite experiment was an international event and the Franklin that it presented to the world -- a homespun, rural philosopher-scientist performing an immensely important and dangerous experiment with a child's toy -- became the Franklin of myth. In fact, this sly presentation on Franklin's part so charmed the French that he became an irresistible celebrity when he traveled there during the American Revolution. The crowds and the journalists, and the ladies, cajoled the French powers into joining us in our fight against the British. What no one has successfully proven until now -- and what few have suggested -- is that Franklin never flew the kite at all. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiastic hoaxer. And with the electric kite, he performed his greatest hoax. As Tucker shows, it was this trick that may have won the American Revolution.

Author: Ken McGoogan
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
ISBN: 1554689198
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Not long after he began reading the handwritten, 820-page diary of Scottish explorer John Rae, Ken McGoogan realized that here was an astonishing story, hidden from the world for almost 150 years. McGoogan, who was originally conducting research for a novel, recognized the injustice committed against Rae. He was determined to restore the adventurer’s rightful place in history as the man who discovered not only the grisly truth about the lost Franklin expedition, but also the final link in the elusive Northwest Passage. Fatal Passage is McGoogan’s completely absorbing account of John Rae’s incredible accomplishments and his undeserved and wholesale discreditation at the hands of polite Victorian society. After sifting through thousands of pages of research, maps and charts, and traveling to England, Scotland and the Arctic to visit the places Rae knew, McGoogan has produced a book that reads like a fast-paced novel—a smooth synthesis of adventure story, travelogue and historical biography. Fatal Passage is a richly detailed portrait of a time when the ambitions of the Empire knew no bounds. John Rae was an adventurous young medical doctor from Orkney who signed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1833. He lived in the Canadian wilds for more than two decades, becoming legendary as a hunter and snowshoer, before he turned to exploration. Famous for what was then a unique attitude—a willingness to learn from and use the knowledge and skills of aboriginal peoples—Rae became the first European to survive an Arctic winter while living solely off the land. One of dozens of explorers and naval men commissioned by the British Admiralty to find out what became of Sir John Franklin and his two ships, Rae returned from the Arctic to report that the most glorious expedition ever launched had ended with no survivors—and worse, that it had degenerated into cannibalism. Unwilling to accept that verdict, Victorian England not only ostracized Rae, but ignored his achievements, and credited Franklin with the discovery of the Passage. Fatal Passage is Ken McGoogan’s brilliant vindication of John Rae’s life and rightful place in history, a book for armchair adventurers, Arctic enthusiasts, lovers of Canadian history, and all those who revel in a story of physical courage and moral integrity.

Author: Scott Cookman
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9780471042150
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

Author: Russell A. Potter
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773599622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In 2014 media around the world buzzed with news that an archaeological team from Parks Canada had located and identified the wreck of HMS Erebus, the flagship of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Finding Franklin outlines the larger story and the cast of detectives from every walk of life that led to the discovery, solving one of the Arctic’s greatest mysteries. In compelling and accessible prose, Russell Potter details his decades of work alongside key figures in the era of modern searches for the expedition and elucidates how shared research and ideas have led to a fuller understanding of the Franklin crew’s final months. Illustrated with numerous images and maps from the last two centuries, Finding Franklin recounts the more than fifty searches for traces of his ships and crew, and the dedicated, often obsessive, men and women who embarked on them. Potter discusses the crucial role that Inuit oral accounts, often cited but rarely understood, played in all of these searches, and continue to play to this day, and offers historical and cultural context to the contemporary debates over the significance of Franklin’s achievement. While examination of HMS Erebus will undoubtedly reveal further details of this mystery, Finding Franklin assembles the stories behind the myth and illuminates what is ultimately a remarkable decades-long discovery.

Author: Barry Deane Stewart
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1490796754
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Sir John Franklin was a famous British explorer of the 19th Century. His expedition to the Canadian High Arctic, involving two ships and 128 navy men, went missing in 1848. It took ten more years to discover their tragic fate, with many details still not known. The two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, disappeared under the Arctic ice. They were not discovered until 2014 and 2016 respectively. Against a background of political and public celebration of the ship’s discovery, an antiquarian book fair and auction takes place, focusing on the many interesting and valuable journals that were published about the search for the lost Franklin expedition. Authorities have determined that hundreds of valuable rare books worth millions of dollars have been stolen from many famous libraries and institutions. They suspect that some of those stolen books might appear at the Franklin book fair. A game of cat and mouse unfolds as they try to determine who stole the books and how to recover them. The trail leads them to the world of organized criminals and large-scale money laundering.

Author: Jeffrey Blair Latta
Publisher: Dundurn
ISBN: 1770700307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The Franklin Conspiracy is an absorbing account of the single most enigmatic event in Canadian history. In 1845, two British Royal Navy ships, the Erebus and the Terror, commanded by Sir John Franklin, entered the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. Neither ship returned. A fifteen-year search uncovered evidence of unparalleled disaster, but to this day no one knows exactly how the 129 men of the Franklin Expedition met their deaths. Although the expedition did not run out of food, there is clear evidence of cannibalism. The ships carried two hundred message cylinders with them, yet failed to leave records. Stranger still, an earlier explorer, Thomas Simpson, was reputedly murdered for the "secret of the Northwest Passage." What was this "secret"? The Franklin Conspiracy is an exhaustively researched, compellingly reasoned answer to that question. The result is a shocking saga of conspiracy, cover-up, and unbelievable secrets.

Author: Gillian Hutchinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472948718
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
In 1845, British explorer Sir John Franklin set out on a voyage to find the North-West Passage – the sea route linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The expedition was expected to complete its mission within three years and return home in triumph but the two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and the 129 men aboard them disappeared in the Arctic. The last Europeans to see them alive were the crews of two whaling ships in Baffin Bay in July 1845, just before they entered the labyrinth of the Arctic Archipelago. The loss of this British hero and his crew, and the many rescue expeditions and searches that followed, captured the public imagination, but the mystery surrounding the expedition's fate only deepened as more clues were found. How did Franklin's final expedition end in tragedy? What happened to the crew? The thrilling discoveries in the Arctic of the wrecks of Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016 have brought the events of 170 years ago into sharp focus and excited new interest in the Franklin expedition. This richly illustrated book is an essential guide to this story of heroism, endurance, tragedy and dark desperation.

Author: Royal united services institute mus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 50

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Book Description