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Race to the Polar Sea: the Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane.

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RACE TO THE POLAR SEA: THE HEROIC ADVENTURES OF ELISHA KENT KANE. By KEN McGOOGAN. Berkeley, California: Counterpoint Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-58243-440-7. xii + 381 p., maps, b&w illus., selected bib., index. Hardbound. US$26.00.

Born in Philadelphia on 3 February 1820, Elisha Kent Kane died in Havana, Cuba, on 16 February 1857, at the young age of 37. From about 1835 onwards, he suffered repeatedly from rheumatic fever and heart disease, but he refused to allow his health problems to constrain his activities. After initially studying geology at the University of Virginia, he switched in 1840 to medical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1843, and soon thereafter passed the exam necessary to become a naval surgeon.

Over the next seven years, Kane traveled to many parts of the world on board U.S. naval vessels--and was invariably partially incapacitated by seasickness. His adventures ranged from descending into the crater of a volcano on Luzon in the Philippines, during which he was almost overcome by the fumes, to contracting malaria while in Dahomey during a voyage to suppress the slave trade, to being wounded in the stomach by a lance-thrust in a skirmish between guerillas supporting the U.S. Army and Mexican troops in 1847.

But then, on 21 May 1850, he joined the USS Advance (Captain Edwin J. De Haven) at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, bound for the Arctic in search of the missing Franklin expedition. Funded by the New York shipping magnate, Henry Grinnell, Advance headed north, accompanied by the USS Rescue (Captain Samuel Griffin). After negotiating the ice of Baffin Bay, the two American ships made rendezvous with a small fleet of British vessels at Beechey Island: Captain Horatio Austin's squadron (HMS Assistance, Resolute, Pioneer, Intrepid, and North Star, Captain William Penny's two ships, Lady Franklin and Sophia, and Captain Sir John Ross's Felix and yacht Mary). While the British ships soon went into secure winter quarters, the two American vessels became beset in the ice of Wellington Channel on 13 September 1850. They first...