The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Searching for Franklin with Ken McGoogan

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Some of my favourite stories are about the history of Canada's Arctic and almost all of them have been written by Ken McGoogan. He's our guest today with his exciting new book Searching for Franklin. If you think you know the Franklin story you'll want to hear this, if you don't know it. this just might get you hooked.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Ready for a little adventure? Hey, let's go north! Coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here once again. I'm in Toronto today. Wasn't supposed to be in Toronto. And this is the book tour week. I was in Halifax yesterday. All over southwestern Ontario on Saturday and Sunday.

And last Friday. Today, I'm heading to Winnipeg. In between, I was supposed to be in Ottawa, but I got trapped. I got trapped yesterday in Halifax. I sat in the Halifax airport, the Robert Stanfield airport, for seven hours, waiting for a flight to Ottawa. Never happened. The plane, you know, it was snowy conditions yesterday,

both early in the day in Ottawa and certainly throughout the day in Halifax, but it wasn't the weather. There was a mechanical situation with the plane, and then there was a crew change and this and that, one thing led to another, they finally cancelled the flight, which meant I never got to Ottawa, and to those good people who were waiting for me to arrive for an event along the book tour. And I'm really sorry I didn't, I'm going to try to figure out a way to make that up,

whether I can do that before the holidays or not, I don't know, but we'll see. Meanwhile, things march on. Flew into Toronto late last night. Will fly to Winnipeg around lunchtime today. Event in Winnipeg, then tomorrow it's Calgary, and on it goes. Just love selling a book. Sometimes I think, and some authors agree with me, that writing the book is easier than selling a book. Sometimes I think, and some authors agree with me, that writing the book is

easier than selling the book. It can be a grind. But hey, it's always great to get a goat across the country. So I've been lucky to be able to talk about my new book, How Canada Works, written with Mark Bulguch. And not every author has a podcast and the ability to talk about their book and promote their book. So today, I'm going to reverse the tables. I'm going to talk to an author, an author I have enormous respect for. Are there times when you like to just sit down and read something that is of particular interest to you, that you feel comfort in, and it's like curling up, reading something that you have some general knowledge on, but you're always looking for more? Well, for me, it's the Arctic.

I love the Arctic story, especially its history. The various explorers who've been coming into the Canadian Arctic for hundreds of years. Not looking for Canada, as it turned out. They were actually looking for a shorter route to Asia. But they found Canada. And they helped develop Canada in ways that some of us don't think about very often, that a lot of that development was as a result of Arctic exploration. So my favorite author, Canadian author, about our Arctic and our history, is Ken McGugan.

He's written a half a dozen different books on the Canadian Arctic. He's an award-winning, best-selling Canadian author. He researches all over the world for the books he writes. His latest book is called Searching for Franklin. So we know who we're talking about here, Sir John Franklin, and the disastrous expedition he led in the 1840s with 130 or so people on it. All of them died.

Their ships, the Erebus and the Terror. Just found. Just found in the Erebus and the Terror. Just found. Just found in the last decade or so. In the Canadian Arctic. And hoping to unleash some of the mysteries surrounding what happened to the Franklin Expedition. So we're going to talk to Ken McGugan because he's got some new theories, one in particular that you perhaps have never heard of before as to what happened to those guys and what happened to Franklin. Now, if you know nothing about Arctic history,

some of this may sound a little inside baseball, but it's really easy to follow, especially if you've got a map in front of you to talk about, you know, Google in the Northwest Passage. There's bound to be a map pops up that kind of shows the route. Anyway, that'll help guide you through the conversation. And some names that are of particular interest, be listening for Sir John Franklin, obviously, who led the expedition.

John Ray, who in my view is the best Canadian explorer ever. We'll hear his stories. He helped determine what exactly happened to the Franklin expedition. Now, those are a couple of key names. There'll be a lot of other names that are in this conversation. Don't worry about them. You won't get lost. Listen to the main discussion about the importance of the Arctic, the importance of

the history of the Arctic, the importance of some key individuals, and I hope you find it interesting. Ken's book is out there. It's a great Christmas gift. You've got relatives or kids who may be interested in history, but you find that they're spending too much time in other people's history. This is ours. This is our history. So you might want to take a run at this. Now, that, of course, is when you're in the store picking up your copy of How Canada Works,

you could also pick up a copy of Searching for Franklin by Ken McGugan. And I'm so glad to have him with us. So let's get right to that. Ken McGugan on the bridge. So Ken, what's the fascination for you with Canada's Arctic and the stories of the last few hundred years? Yeah, that's a good question because it's, you know, the answer has to be so multiple or should be in a way. I had no intention of getting involved in the Arctic.

I thought I was a, you know, a hip urban kind of guy, and that's what I was into. I actually published four books before I even went to the Arctic, but what happened was I discovered the explorer John Ray, and well, I hate to say I became obsessed, but I guess I have to admit that I did. And so I wanted first to go to Orkney in Scotland. And then I felt absolutely driven. That's where John Ray was from, right? Yes. Was from the Orkneys.

I mean, like so many of the people that explored Canada's Arctic, and not just the Arctic, but explored this country. Many of them had come from Scotland. Absolutely. And some, like John Ray from the Orkneys. We'll talk specifically about him in a minute, but go on with the broader sort of general attachment to the Arctic for you. Well, what happened was I went up there to place a plaque where Ray had looked out and realized this is the final link in the Northwest Passage. So going up there, meeting

Louis Kamukak and going out in Louis' boat. And the striking thing, you know, well, first of all, in Joe Haven there are no trees. There's no trees, you know, above the Arctic Circle. So that is, you know, even if you know it, and I knew it before I went, it's still very striking. So it's a very elemental landscape. You've got rock, water, and sky. And that's basically all you've got. And there's something, you know, you're dealing with that. So just being out on the water, you know, in the high Arctic, roaring across Ray Strait in Louie's little boat. I know we were doing that at one point. And I looked around,

I said, Louie, shouldn't we be wearing life jackets and he said oh yeah well there's a life jacket right there if you if you want it but if you go in the water here you're not coming out yeah you're just going to prolong the misery so it's that kind of otherness i think is uh is is what that's what settled in for me anyway. You know, when you describe what so much of the Arctic looks like, you know, sort of rock, water, and sky, that's so true, but there's an incredible beauty in that at the same time. I mean, that's what hooked me. I thought when I went to the Arctic the first time,

I thought, well, this is going to be a task. I'm not going to enjoy this. But it was quite the opposite. There's something unbelievably appealing about it. Yes, there is. There is. It is hard to capture, hard to evoke. I guess I've tried.

I guess I've written six books about Arctic exploration. So in the past 25 years, that's what I realized. I've had this obsession. It's not my only one, but, you know, for 25 years, and I haven't been able to let it go. It's like the North came down and grabbed me and hauled me up above the Arctic Circle. So what can I tell you? Well, you know, let's talk for a second before we get into some of the individuals in particular.

Let's talk for a second about what the attraction was to go to Canada's Arctic, because it wasn't about trying to find Canada. No, they were looking for the Northwest Passage, you know, going all the way back to the late 1500s, while the Portuguese and the Spaniards had control of the trade routes to, you know, the riches of Cathay, India and China. So when the British looked down and saw that, they said, well, maybe we can just go over this way instead of dealing with those pirates and all those ships that are going to attack us. We'll just cut over the top. I mean, it makes perfect sense.

How hard can it be? That's how it began. You know, they wanted a trade route. By Franklin's time, by the early 19th century, they more or less realized, well, this trade route business is going to be a little tougher than we thought. But by then, like after the Napoleonic Wars, a couple of things. First of all, they had all these naval officers on half pay.

And, you know, guys including John Franklin sitting around at home. Franklin was working in his father's shop. I mean, he started to go crazy, right? A lot of these guys, they had all those. And meanwhile, the Russians began opening up, you know, the North Channel along their waters. And the British realized, well, wait a minute. We've done all this preliminary work.

Are we going to let them go ahead and finish, you know, and take the glory of finding the way across North America? So, yeah, that's how John Barrows, who was running the Admiralty, basically, he convinced others to start financing these explorations. So we're talking kind of the, as we got to Franklin, we're talking about sort of the early 1840s. When he was picked to lead this expedition in 1845 uh two ships the arabus and the terror part of canadian lore folklore now really in so many different ways um the question the first question i mean it was a disastrous voyage as we all know everybody died um and there were you know

an awful way uh that many of them, freezing to death, starving to death. And then there was the whole issue of cannibalism. Now, aside from that, one of the initial questions about Franklin, who'd been what, you know, he'd been in the Napoleonic Wars. He'd been, you know, he had been around. He had been a naval officer of some repute in the early 1800s. But as he got older, he ended up being basically the governor general of Tasmania, south of Australia, where he first saw the Erebus and the Terror

because they came down on an expedition. Anyway, short story is he gets appointed and the question was he wasn't any spring chicken at that point was you know and was he the right guy for this kind of expedition that the british were going to spend a considerable amount of money and risk a considerable number of men on was john franklin the right guy for that job? I don't think he was. The reason he got that job, well, first of all, when he and Jane Franklin returned from Tasmania, then called Van Diemen's Land, they did so in some disgrace. His reputation was in tatters. Jane Franklin was the smarter individual of to that, and eventually a malevolent figure named John Montague managed to undo the Franklins, so they arrived home in 1843. His reputation in tatters. Her reputation was linked to his, but she was extremely well connected. Now, 1843,

they hear there's going to be this fantastic expedition. You know, this is going to be the one. Two state-of-the-art ships, the flower of the Royal Navy, who's going to lead it? Franklin was not even on the list. He was 59 years old, which I do have to insist is a lot

older then than it is now. But, you know, she went to work and started pulling strings. Tharo and many others wanted James Clark Ross, who was a formidable figure. But Jane Franklin had a good relationship with Ross. He didn't want anything to do with going back to the Arctic. He was fairly recently married. He just wanted to stay home. Then there were several other candidates, George Back, who had worked with Franklin before. He was saying, you know, Franklin is not in condition to do this. He's not good in the outdoors. He's way

overweight. You know, he's not the man for the job. But Jane Franklin had connections all the way to Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. And lo and behold, when the dust cleared, Franklin was appointed to lead the expedition. The man who ate his boots, as he was known, because on one of his expeditions into the Arctic, which had been like 20 years before that or more um it was a disastrous expedition he lost a you know eight or ten men uh who died same kind of thing as that later would happen uh you know starvation cold all that um and he was in such a state he had to eat his boots he had to eat the leather from his boots. So he became known as the man who ate his boots. But here's the question about Franklin and the expedition that he's so known for.

You know, the one that he's still talked about today. And the one that, you know, is a lot of the basis of your book in terms of searching for Franklin, trying to understand this guy and understand what happened to him in the end. Here's the question. When you get right down to it, was it Franklin's age? Was it Franklin's questionable experience in past expeditions? Or was it just bad luck? I mean, he ran into the worst ice conditions um that had existed well for

some time one assumes although nobody really knew because nobody'd been there before except the inuit but it was really bad ice his ships got both of them got trapped in the arabus and the terror in the ice for a couple of years so of all those things and Ken, don't give me it was a little of each of those things, was there a more specific reason or one that is generally assumed was the biggest problem for Franklin on this voyage? Well, I think bad luck played possibly the largest role. This was still the Little Ice Age. So I don't think anybody could have gotten through in those ships at that particular time that year. So anybody would have gotten trapped in the ice in all likelihood.

But, you know, secondary rolls, people have been trying to figure out what happened because it was so strange. Like in 1829 to 1833, James Clark Ross and John Ross spent four winters in the Arctic. They managed to survive. It wasn't that far away, and they lost only three out of 23 men. So that's why Franklin losing all 129 lives, including his own and the two ships. I mean, it's the largest disaster that they'd known. So, and after two years, okay, I mean, the trouble began. They got trapped in the ice in 47. Franklin died that year, we know from the Victory Point record. And then

things fell apart from there. They built a hospital tent on the shore. Men were dying. A higher percentage of officers by far than the crewmen. So there were these strange anomalies that caused people to wonder. And so we had books like in the 1980s, a wonderful book, Frozen in Time, by John Geiger and Owen Beattie. And they went up, and Beattie was a forensic anthropologist, and he figured, well, look, it was lead poisoning.

And that prevailed as a theory for what happened, why things fell apart. And lead poisoning because of the canned food, tinned food, which was a relatively new thing at that point. It had just been developed earlier that century. But that's what they were convinced, was that it was lead poisoning from the canned food. That was the first theory.

And when other scientists began to look at the numbers and say, well, here are these other sailors that were on a different voyage and they had similar lead levels in their blood. And so people were saying, well, maybe it was botulism rather than lead poisoning, or maybe it was lead poisoning from the pipes. So, but by 2014 or so, scientists and statisticians did an analysis, and basically they repudiated, you know, lead poisoning and botulism as explanatory theories. And that left things, just before the discovery of the Erebus in 2014, well, that left things up in the air.

There's been no one put forward an alternative explanation of why things fell apart so strangely. Until, until, until, until this new book of mine, Searching for Franklin. Well, because I spent so long poking around in history, I came across, you know, the monk expedition from 1619 and a 1973 article by a guy named Delbert Young, hypothesizing that it was Trichinosis that wiped out 61 of 64 men on that expedition. He pulled into Churchill, polar bear capital of the world, as you well know. Yeah, my old hometown. You don't go to Churchill and see one polar bear. You see plenty of polar bears if you're there all winter, right?

Absolutely. And so, you know, Trichinosis is an endemic among polar bears. And if humans eat infected polar bear meat and don't cook it properly, you know, you're going to go down. It's basically the drift. So that's what happened to Monk. Then there was another. There was the 1897 Andre expedition. Three men died and subsequently a doctor went, analyzed, you know, the scene and turned up evidence of

trichinosis there. So I looked at the Franklin expedition through that lens and realized, wow, that explains everything. They ate this infected polar bear meat. And that's why some of the men started to die in misery. They put the tent on the shore because, you know, they thought, what's going on? We'll quarantine these guys. Then they would think, well, maybe it's the ship. Maybe there's something wrong with the ship.

You know, they couldn't understand what was going on you know let's get off the ship we'll make a run for it so that's how i think it unfolded and i make that argument uh in searching for franklin well i like the argument i mean we've heard a number of arguments over the years and they've all fallen down uh so far nobody has put a spike in this one uh other than to say this could very well be possible um let me uh let me take a quick break here ken uh but i want to come back and focus on on on two on two things that have always fascinated me uh i mean you've been up there much more than I have, but I've been up there enough to be fascinated by this story,

the Franklin story especially, having been to Beachy Island, one of those stops Franklin made early on where he lost three crew members, and they're buried there, and you can see the little mini cemetery that they put up for that. Anyway, let me take this quick break, and then we'll get right back with Ken McGugan right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge right here on SiriusXM, Channel 167,

Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Guest today, Ken McGugan, the author of Searching for Franklin and many other books on the Arctic story, especially focusing on the exploration in the Canadian Arctic, which in many ways, Ken, I like to argue that it wasn't just, you know, looking for that route to Asia, which was the primary reason for looking for the Northwest Passage. But there was more than that. What it became, because of so many searches, was in many ways kind of an opening up of our country, of Canada, by the various explorers who were a part of it. I mean, Franklin took three expeditions to the Canadian North, one of them by land, which turned into a bit of a disaster. But on the other hand, it was part of the story of opening up Canada's North

and Canada's west, not just the Arctic. So there's a lot of credit for these expeditions that took place up there. Here's my last question about Franklin. It was definitely an interesting figure, but here's my last question. I have this image in my mind that in that winter of 46 and of 47, when they were trapped in the ice off King William Island, kind of halfway through the Northwest Passage,

I have this image that he sat in his cabin there, frustrated by the fact they were trapped, but knowing that he, in fact, had found the fact they were, you know, trapped, but knowing that he in fact had found the Northwest Passage, that he knew where he was going based on his earlier travels, which had come from the other way by land. And here he was almost at the point where he would have reached where he'd been basically by foot all those years before now you tell me i'm wrong what's frank do you think franklin was sitting there do you think franklin was sitting there thinking i found it well he might well have been doing he knew obviously by that point they had elaborated a fair bit.

And as you say, he had come eastward along the coast. And, you know, they had instruments that told him, okay, I'm only this distance. But they knew that already before he left England. They knew that was the whole idea. You know, he was going to go in through the Lancaster Sound and then sail south. How hard could it be? So he hadn't really advanced anything. He'd gone south from Beachy Island, having left three dead men there, but got stuck in

the ice. But, you know, there was no additional knowledge. He knew, yeah, if I could just get over there, I will have found it. But, you know, actually where he was, and I've made this case before, if he'd gone to the east around the top of King William Island down through Ray's Strait, he might have had a fighting chance because that strait tended to open up in the spring,

whereas Victoria Straight, which is where he was into there, it was decades before anyone got through that way because the ice was still there all the time. Ray Straight opened up sometime. So the only chance he would have had is if he'd gone around the east side of King William Island and, you know, traveled down there. But, you know, that wasn't in the cards.

Right. Okay, well, you're destroying my belief that he's sitting in those final days in the cabin saying, okay, I found it. Did he not first, after he left Beachy Island, and correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm sure you will, did he not, when he first left Beachy Island, did he not swing north, first of all, before he swung south? He swung north before he wintered at Beachy Island. He came in, he had a pretty good run, and he went north. I mean, there was still this theory that there was an open polar sea up there.

And, you know, in fact, some of his initial searchers adhered to that, and they were wondering, well, maybe Franklin got trapped up there before they found, you know, further evidence, you know, the victory point record, et cetera. But, yeah, so he went up there first, then came back, landed on Beachy as the winter came on to stay on Beachy. And it was only when the ice broke up. One of the funny things I really should mention about Beachy Island,

which, yeah, it's a fantastic place. Well, first of all, I remember my arrival there the first time in about 2005 or something, sailing in with Adventure Canada. I was amazed that there was no ice, because in my mind I was with the explorers

in 1850. The ships were trapped there. Elijah Cain was there. Ice everywhere. Then I saw, okay, this is climate change. But, yeah, apart from that, the polar bears on Beachy Island, you know, that's also crucial. There's a campsite, you know, the way you can go down towards Northumberland House. Or you can go down towards Northumberland House, or you can go the other way.

If you go the other way towards the isthmus that joins Beachy to Devon Island, I remember more than once being driven off by polar bears coming thundering over that isthmus, coming thundering over. That's why Franklin had a lookout post established, you know, some distance from the main camp. Like if you get attacked once at night by a polar bear, you're probably not going to – you're probably going to be on the lookout for the next time they're coming. So that's – yeah, so all kinds of polar bears on Beachy. Yeah, and I'm sure some of them were shot and some of them were eaten

and there's your trichinosis issue. Okay, I have promised right from the beginning that we want to talk about John Ray because John Ray is, for me, aside from your books, is one of the least known

Canadian heroes. This guy is a legitimate, he's not just an Arctic hero, he's a Canadian hero. He's quite the story. But before I get to him, the other thing that you do, and you do it in more than a few of your books, is you give credit where credit is due and is often forgotten, which is to Canada's Inuit, in the opening up of the Arctic, obviously,

but also in the attempts to find Franklin. This was the greatest search kind of in the history of the world, certainly at that point, and you could argue even still today, in terms of the number of countries, the number of ships, the number of people who went trying to find what had happened to Franklin. And in many ways, you know, they could have got some of the answers if they just bothered to listen to the Inuit, and especially as they continued telling their stories down through the generations. Finally, some of that knowledge was used in the eventual finding of the Erebus and the Terror. But all that time, they were basically ignored, including by Franklin himself,

in terms of his people who could have used the advice that the Inuit were prepared to give. But you not only give credit to, you talk to the Inuit friends, like your friend Louis on King William Island, the late Louis. Yeah, that was very important to me. I feel that in Dead Reckoning, my book Dead Reckoning, I was able to set that record straight to some extent. I mean, every single one of them, of the explorers who made contributions to sorting out the ultimate Franklin mystery,

they were assisted by particular Inuit. For example, you know, starting with John Ray, he had William Oligbach Jr., the best translator of the time. Ray was getting stories from Inuit who'd, you know, had artifacts from the Franklin expedition after it had gone down. And it was those stories that enabled him to put things together. He didn't get those stories himself. Well, he got them himself through William Malik Buck Jr. He needed that translator to get the stories and relay them.

Okay, then you move forward a little bit. Charles Francis Hall, American explorer, he thought he was destined to solve it all. But Hall collected some incredible material through the Inuit interpreters Tukulito and Ebirbing, her husband. Tukulito in particular was articulate in various Inuit languages and also English. She had spent some time in England. So she was able to relay to him. And he took extensive notes. The thing about Hall is he didn't have the imaginative ability to link it all together in a coherent manner. That had to wait until later. But another major figure in this sorting out of who went where and what happened,

Frederick Schwatka, another American, he was up there. But the guy who kept that expedition going was a guy named Tulagak, who managed to – he's an extraordinary figure according to the accounts of the so-called Schwatka expedition. Actually, I've come to think of so-called Schwatka expedition. Actually, I've come to think of it as the Tulegak expedition. So these individuals were tracking information, gathering it, but

sometimes it wasn't clear what they were talking about. If you're saying, well, it's a long ways over that island, over that way, and, you know, even the translators weren't clear on what island they were talking about. So it was difficult to sort it all out. It eventually came to pass. You know, it's one of the things, you know, I'd encourage before we started this interview, I'd encourage the listeners to, you know, if you've got a map of the Canadian Arctic,

you should have it out because we're going to talk about names and places that you may have not heard of before, and it helps us kind of place where we're going in this. But the other thing about the names is so many of the English names, the explorers and the British naval officers and their mothers and their wives and their aunts and uncles are dotted in the geography of our country. You know, the names are placed there. You know, different points named after them, different bays,

different communities in some case, although many of those have changed over time, like Frobisher Bay is now Ecalibit. Eskimo Point is now, my mind's gone blank, but it's just north of Churchill. Yes. But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is there are a lot of these communities that carry the English name of an explorer or an explorer's relative of some kind, where in fact all the names you just mentioned

in that last answer could easily be on Canadian maps. Yes, they could, as a matter of fact. Yeah, it is quite interesting. Even Ray was out there given to naming, but one of the most interesting instances of that kind of thing, I think it was McClintock, an 1857-59 voyage. of bays and so forth along the west coast of King William Island with the names of ships and men who'd been on Franklin's voyage kind of as a homage to them. Ironically, he named Terror Bay, you know, after the ship Terror. And then in 2016, lo and behold, where do they find the ship Terror? They find it right there in Terror Bay.

You know, that was serendipitous at the very least. And, you know, they found it thanks to an Inuit hunter and worker. Yeah, that's right. Who remembered years before he'd seen a mass standing up and they in the water in the shallows of uh of terror bay um and uh so searchers or some of the searchers went back there and bingo there it was um okay time um arviat by the way was the name of the town i was searching for community which used to be called eskimo Point. And I remember these because I used, you know, when I lived up there in Churchill in the 60s,

none of this had happened. It's a movement of the names to the proper Inuit names. Anyway, now, John Ray. We need the short lecture on John Ray because I think if Canadians knew this guy's story, it is like fascinating. It's a fascinating story of, you know, of courage, of determination, of exploration. This guy would walk hundreds of miles in the most difficult conditions, you know, on snowshoes. A walk for him, you know, in southern Canada.

I'm trying to remember where I read it. But, you know, he used to walk from Toronto to Hamilton. Yes. You know, that was just like a night out. Yeah. So he was an extraordinary, I mean, overland traveler. One of his peers or contemporaries said he's not just the outstanding snowshoe walker of the Hudson's Bay Company, but of the age. Right. Yeah, Ray was a doctor.

He trained as a doctor in Edinburgh. He grew up there in Orkney. The Hall of Clustron is still under a rebuilding project. But, yeah, trained as a doctor. And then he sailed. He thought it was going to be a summer job. He sailed with the Hudson's Bay Company, you know, to go and then come back. But that ship got trapped in the ice.

And he spent a winter there, and he realized, whoa, this is the kind of wild sort of life that suits me. And he didn't return to Britain for, you know, another 15 years or so. But he'd already learned how to hunt. He was a hunter at home in Orkney, and going out over the field shooting birds. But he didn't arrive and say to the Inuit or the indigenous First Nations hunters, well, here, look, I'm a big-time hunter, and I'm going to show you how it's done. No. He said, well, how do you cache bear meat, or rather deer meat, so that the bears or other animals don't get at it?

You know, show me how you do it. He learned, he was avid to learn from the indigenous peoples. That marked him out from the get-go. So in addition to, yeah, his physical stamina, which was extraordinary, he'd go and treat some guy with a broken arm and then return the next day. So he was peerless, as a matter of fact, John Ray. And then he got embroiled. Well, because he brought the news, he chanced upon the news, really,

when he wasn't even looking for Franklin at this point, 1854. He met up with these Inuit out there, wandering around, saw a cap band that looked British, and said, well, if you've got more of these, bring them to my camp and I'll pay you well. And that's when he gleaned the story. Whoa, wait a minute, the Franklin Expedition ended in disaster and devolved into cannibalism. As the men staggered along the coast, he wasn't clear exactly where it was. He brought that news back to England, and things blew up.

This is Victorian England. They could not accept, they could not believe that the flower of the Royal Navy had been reduced to eating each other. It was just unacceptable. that the flower of the Royal Navy had been reduced to eating each other. It was just unacceptable. So Jane Franklin, you know, after it took her a while to recover, she led the charge, which included enlisting the foremost writer of the age, Charles Dickens, to write two great screeds. Well, attempting to debunk a true story that Ray had brought, and attacking Ray, and attacking the Inuit,

you know, alleging, well, they probably found, you know, some white men trekking along the coast and attacked them and killed them and all that. So he made some terrible racist allegations. It kind of did color my vision of Dickens. I've always admired him, but I admire him a little less now that I've seen this. He took down Ray and Inuit, you know, in a way.

I mean, Ray survived, but his reputation took a hit from which really it never quite recovered. But yeah, so the story of Ray and his ultimate vindication, of course, because subsequently people said, well, yeah, turns out that was true. And even the Royal Navy historian, Andrew Lambert, he opens his last biography of Franklin with admitting, okay, here's a vivid depiction of the cannibalism that took place. So in the 21st century, even the Royal Navy has admitted it, but it's taken that long. all. The thing about Ray, Ray would have been Sir John Ray if it hadn't been for Dickens and Lady Franklin and the hatchet job they did on him. Excuse the pun

of the term hatchet, but the fact is he would have been knighted, as so many others were, including John Franklin. Yeah, oh yeah. Ray was the only leading explorer that did not receive a knighthood. Although I've seen some people call him Sir John Ray, but it's not so. He was Dr. John Ray, and that's who he remained. Is he a hero of yours?

You know he is. I wrote Fatal Passage, the whole book about him. And that is what got me thundering around the Arctic through six more books, five more books. So, yeah, for me, it all began with Ray. I mean, he's exemplary in so many ways. Yeah, I wrote that book. Well, it's been 25 years since I started. I was at Cambridge when I discovered Ray.

I'd gone there. See, I published three novels, and I was going to write another novel featuring John Ray in it as a minor character, kind of like the model was A.S. Byatt, Possession, historical story, contemporary story, framing it. And then I began to discover who he was and what had happened to him. And I said, no, if I write this as fiction, they're going to dismiss it and say, ah, it never really happened. So I set that plan aside and I wrote the truth as I understand it in Fatal Passage. And that was a transformative book for me. So I'll be forever thankful to Ray for that. Here's the last question, Ken. This has been a treat, by the way, having the opportunity to talk to you. But here's the last question. It's kind of

the question that authors hate, which is, what's next? What's your next book? Oh, actually, I don't hate it. Sometimes I hate it Oh, actually, I don't hate it. Sometimes I hate it, but right now I don't hate it because I recently signed a contract for a book to be published next year, and I'm calling it, well, it's got a title and a subtitle. It's Awake to Invasion. And then the subtitle is Resisting Hitler, Stalin, and Donald J. Trump. That's what's on the boards now.

Sign me up. I'll buy that one. Well, that's going to be a departure for you, right? Unless you're able to set some of this in the Arctic. Although, you know, it's true. I'm best known for the Arctic. But I've always been politically engaged and my first book published in 1991 was called canada's undeclared war fighting words from the

literary trenches so right from the get-go until you know i worked for you know over two decades as a journalist so it's true i'm best known for poking around in the Arctic, but yeah, so I allege that I have a couple of other strings to my bow. Good for you. Well, I look forward to that one too, just as much as I've enjoyed the current one, and I encourage those of you out there who are either already interested or have been hooked by this conversation to go out and find Ken McGugan's latest book, Searching for Franklin. Well, Peter, let me say thank you very much for having me on the podcast. You don't have to do

that. I really appreciate it. So thanks. No problem. Take care, Ken. We'll talk again. Okay, Peter. So there you go. Ken McGugan. And what a treat for me. I mean, I think you can probably tell by the sound of my voice how into the books that Ken writes I am. And so it was a very easy interview to do. Let's just sit back and let Ken talk. The name of the book, once again, Searching for Franklin.

You can pick it up at any bookstore right now or any of the other books. If you got interested in John Ray as a result of this conversation, go for Fatal Passage, another great McGugan book. But they're all good. You can't miss. And collect the whole set if you wish. All right. That's going to wrap it up for this day.

I've got to get organized and head to Winnipeg where tonight I'm looking forward to meeting some of the good people of Winnipeg who want to hear more about how Canada works. The new book by Mark Boguch and myself. I'll be answering their questions and talking with my old friend, Cease Rosner, in conversation with those who've come out to have a listen to what I have to say and maybe get a copy of their book signed. Looking forward to doing all of that in Winnipeg tonight.

Tomorrow it's Calgary, and then onwards from there. We'll keep you up to date. All right, thanks very much. Glad you could listen. Tomorrow it is Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce. He'll be by. And Thursday, your turn. So if you have thoughts on anything we've heard in the last couple of days

please get them in um by uh you know late tomorrow afternoon at the early at the latest um and then the ranter as well on Thursday also uh on Friday good talk with Chantel and Bruce that's it for now I'm Peter Mansbridge thanks much for listening. Talk to you again in 24 hours.