To hear Stan Rogers’s “Northwest Passage” (from his 1981 album of the same name), to which Humphreys alludes, visit Fogarty’s Cove Music’s website, where the song provides the background music for the introductory page.

The online resource for all things Victorian, victorianweb.org, has a section on Franklin’s expedition with links and background information. The site also contains Charles Dickens’s outrage at the suggestion that Franklin resorted to cannibalism.


Polar regions inspired much nineteenth-century literature, and one of the best examples (albeit pre-Victorian) is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 2003). The novel is infused with the obsession the Brits of that era had with travel and adventure. Plus, nothing is creepier than the monster saying, “I just want to be loved” and leaping from ice floe to ice floe with an animal between his teeth. Not quite as chilly, H. Rider Haggard’s novels are filled with the swashbuckling gentleman in Africa that preoccupied the Victorian imagination. See King Solomon’s Mines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and She: A History of Adventure (New York: Modern Library, 2002) for solid examples.

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Imaginings
“It’s a Smallwood, After All”
by Wayne Johnston
(pp. 30-31)

This is certainly not the first time Wayne Johnston has written about Joey Smallwood. Johnston’s bestselling novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1998) is narrated by the former premier of Newfoundland. Johnston is also the author of The Navigator of New York (Toronto: Doubleday, 2002), the story of a young man’s search for his origins in Newfoundland and New York told against the background of American explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook’s early-twentieth-century rivalry over their race to the North Pole.