Writes of passage
Russell A. Potter’s Finding Franklin explores our most enduring mystery
Finding Franklin By Russell A. Potter McGill- Queen’s University Press 280 pp; $39.95
In an early passage of his new book, Finding Franklin, Russell A. Potter describes the amateur’s infatuation with Franklin’s lost expedition clinically: an infection passed across centuries and near impossible to treat, driving hoards of its cursed and curious to fame, bankruptcy and exile. He goes on to catalogue the infected, assembling a cast without discrimination, artfully spotlighting theories from notable cultural heavyweights alongside the boneyard of long-discredited historical ideologues.
Potter is himself a shameless Frankliphile, hopelessly diseased. You might call this his microbial handshake.
Dwindling through the last few decades, this contaminant crowd has come with the latest Franklin Expedition discovery back into vogue, ruling what could be Canada’s coolest intellectual cadre. Finding Franklin is their story, told across two centuries, spanning the mystery of Sir John Franklin’s expedition from its 1845 departure to, probably, last night’s dinner table for many of the modern devotees featured within. The result is an easily digested primer, scholarly in research but accessible in approach, slipping into 2016’s fall book circuit auspiciously.
It is, after all, a good time to be dead. Riding high on a post-Serial tide, the zeitgeist is hungry for whodunit and, with some genre- bending creative flair, Finding Franklin might well catch that wave. Though Potter’s academic gaze is fixed mostly northward — his first book documented visual representations of the Arctic — fiction is this author’s playpen. Pyg, his 2012 debut, is the comedic memoir of an Oxford-educated hog.
In Finding Franklin, Potter’s style borrows more from the latter, describing obligatory expedition factoids in a surprisingly entertaining way. The mystery of Franklin’s lost expedition begs for some fiction to fill its extensive gaps, and without fully breaking genre, Potter is able to offer liberal explanations for the prevailing theories while still maintaining an academic’s reasonable plausibility based on good research. Admirable but risky, the approach does prove tenuous at times. Swinging from deeply dug historical fact to lighter cultural inference could gamble both the attention of a wellintentioned dilettante reader and the regard of the conventional academic crowd.
But Potter is a skilled writer, and more importantly a generous and patient historian, willing to retell key points for layman’s reading. He is the kindest breed of academic: the sort who let you believe you’ve done their heavy- lifting. To this end, he cleverly introduces small historical details early to later help readers corroborate facts for themselves.
Potter’s treatment of conflicting narratives, especially well done in a chapter on Doctor John Rae, cedes enough room for readers to form theories and interpret the mystery independently. Few histories allow for this kind of approach, and in Potter’s hands Finding Franklin takes on an engaging choose-your-own-adventure quality.
Potter’s work benefits greatly from Inuit testimony on Franklin’s Expedition, a source largely caught up in the scholarly squabble over oral tradition’s place in historical record. Where comparative titles opt conservatively to flit, Potter is incisive, deftly introducing and expertly contextualizing Inuit accounts. Keeping with the book’s candour, he draws hefty excerpts from both better-known 19th century logs and more recent hand- me- downs courtesy of the current Franklin campaigns. Potter couches them in equally judicious perspective, weighing validity with a scholar’s lens, but writing in a way that allows readers to interpret at will.
This book wouldn’t make it to print without due nod to the game-changing 2014 discovery of HMS Erebus in Victoria Strait, and Potter is not remiss. He offers tempered optimism in the exploration to come west of King William Island, but points out the neglect of some researchers to adequately probe the evidence at hand before Parks Canada’s latest breakthrough. He defers rightful belonging of Franklin’s expedition and its future exploration to the Inuit, among whom Potter has established himself as a friendly scholar in the discovery site’s nearby Gjoa Haven.
Potter is humble in his hope for what’s to become of Franklin’s lost ships. While he acknowledges ongoing exploratory efforts and speculates levelly on our best chances at learning more, there’s a sense that the author knows legend itself is how Sir John Franklin will continue to captivate popular imagination, and Finding Franklin revels in its subject’s great and unknown mystery. With a broad thematic structure and welldrawn historical narrative, it seems crafted deliberately to feed the beast.
Finding Franklin is a cheater’s handbook for Saturday night in academe. A generous digest of the Franklin Expedition narrative, it’s balanced with both soft counter- narratives and an entertaining dose of the history’s more extreme theories, marked with rounded biographies of its major players.
In his thoughtful catalogue of the Franklin mystery and affectionate reverence for the people who have defi ned a nd recorded its history, Potter has earned himself sure footing among them.