Race To The Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane

By Ken McGoogan

Elisha Kent Kane, scion of a wealthy and influential Philadelphia family, became a legend of 19th-century America. Before he was 30, he had descended into a volcano in the Philippines, infiltrated a company of slave traders in West Africa and narrowly survived hand-to-hand combat in the Sierra Madre while carrying a secret message from the president of the United States.

Yet Kane would achieve his greatest fame by exploring the High Arctic, an adventure that began when he sailed in search of the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin and the open water of an alleged “polar sea” around the North Pole. In the mid-1850s, Kane pushed farther north than any other voyager, then spent two years trapped in the ice before leading a desperate but heroic retreat that only added to his legend. Kane also enjoyed a secret love affair with a young Canadian-born spiritualist named Maggie Fox, a celebrated “spirit rapper” deemed unsuitable by his family. How this relationship combined with Kane’s tragic early death to deny him his rightful place in history is one of the most dramatic aspects of the book.

Race to the Polar Sea tells the story of a romantic adventurer driven by dreams of glory. It is a tale of heroism, courage and conspiracy that evokes an age when the Arctic seemed a white, booming emptiness, beautiful and unknowable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781443401654

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.

Reviews for Race To The Polar Sea

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[janegca · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[iudita_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.