Fatal Passage

In 1854, during a single Arctic expedition, John Rae established two answers that had puzzled explorers for decades. He learned what had happened to Sir John Franklin's lost party, and he identified the one route through the Northwest Passage that ships of his era could actually sail, the passage that navigators had sought for centuries.

Ken McGoogan first encountered Rae's handwritten diary, which runs to 820 pages and had gone largely unread for nearly 150 years, while he was researching a novel. He soon saw that Rae had been treated unjustly and resolved to restore the explorer's place in history. McGoogan worked through thousands of pages of documents, maps and charts, then travelled to England, Scotland and the Arctic to see the places Rae had known firsthand. The result blends adventure narrative, travel writing and biography.

Rae was an Orkney-born doctor who joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1833. He spent more than twenty years in the Canadian northern wilds, earning a reputation as a skilled hunter and snowshoe traveller. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he valued learning from Indigenous peoples and adopting their knowledge and skills. This approach allowed him to become the first European known to survive an Arctic winter by relying entirely on what the land provided.

The Admiralty sent many search parties to find Franklin and his two ships, and Rae was among them. When he returned with news that the expedition had ended without survivors and had descended into cannibalism, Victorian society refused to accept his account. Rae was shunned, his achievements were overlooked, and credit for finding the Passage went to Franklin. The book also portrays an era of imperial ambition. It will appeal to readers of Arctic exploration, students of Canadian history, and anyone drawn to stories of courage and integrity.