last reads

Graves of Ice: The Lost Franklin Expedition By John Wilson Scholastic Canada, CDN$ 14.99 Ages 9-12 Reviewed by Kristina Gehrmann In Graves of Ice , author John Wilson tells the story of Franklin’s Lost Expedition as part of the I am Canada series, a collection of stories about adventure and exploration geared toward a pre-teen audience. He has explored the same theme previously in the novel North with Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames ; and in the young-adult book Across Frozen Seas . A biography of Sir John Franklin - Traveller on Undiscovered Seas is also part of his repertoire of many historical books and novels.  The story is told from the viewpoint of one of the expedition's boys. Eighteen-year-old George Chambers can read and write, works as a clerk, and thanks to his father’s connections manages to get a spot aboard HMS Erebus, one of the ships to sail for the Arctic on Sir John Franklin’s much-awaited expedition. They are to leave England in May of 1845 to f...

Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England’s forgotten Arctic Explorer by P.J. Capelotti Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013. Reviewed by Jonathan Dore Peter Capelotti, anthropologist at Penn State University, archaeologist of human space travel, sometime poet, and writer on many lesser-travelled byways in the exploration and exploitation of the seas, has now written the first biography of Benjamin Leigh Smith (1828–1913), who appears as a shadowy presence in the annals of late-19th-century Arctic exploration—mentioned in passing in the narratives of more famous names—but who is now given centre stage in an account that focuses on his three yachting expeditions to Svalbard and two to Franz Josef Land in the 1870s and 80s. It doesn’t take long to understand the reason for Leigh Smith’s ghostly absence from the feast of Arctic exploration history, and consequently the challenge that Capelotti set himself. The explorer was such a shunner of public att...