Overview

In the nineteenth century the High Arctic was the equivalent of the moon, and the explorers who searched for the Northwest Passage were the Apollo astronauts of their day. The most famous of these men, John Franklin, was a British naval officer who explored and charted Canada's arctic seacoast in 1819-1822, 1825-27, and 1845. On his first expedition he nearly starved and on the third he died. None of his men survived the third expedition, but the search for clues to their fate helped to open up the North and is celebrated in Canadian songs and stories. John Franklin was a restless man, a traveller, never content to stay in one place in comfort and security. Of the forty-seven years from the time he joined the Royal Navy at age fourteen until he died at age sixty-one, he spent barely a dozen years at home in England. He served under Admiral Nelson in the great naval battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. He learned navigation while mapping the coast of Australia; his sea duties took him to China, Brazil, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and New Orleans. More than 150 years after his men buried him in an unknown grave in the frozen land that kept calling him back, we are still fascinated by John Franklin. Was he a hero, an honourable officer striving nobly against impossible odds? Or was he a fool who doomed himself and his expedition through an inflexible, archaic attitude? Perhaps the mystery will never be solved and the restless traveller never laid to rest, but John Franklin and the search for the Northwest Passage have become a Canadian myth.

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John Wilson was born in 1951 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He did his early growing up on the Island of Skye and in Paisley, near Glasgow. From 1969 to 1974, he attended the University of St. Andrews where he took an Honours B.Sc.. in Geology and never played golf once. He took a position with the Geological Survey of Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). In his two years there, he mapped rocks, dodged land mines and watched the country sink ever deeper into civil war. Shortly before he was due to be called into the army, John retreated back to Britain on his way to the safety of Canada. He settled on Calgary where geology was booming and the only danger was freezing to death in January. In 1979, he moved to Edmonton to take up a post with the Alberta Geological Survey. In 1988 he sold a feature article to the Globe and Mail. This fueled a smouldering mid-life crisis and he took up freelance writing full-time. With some success, John mined the experiences of his travels for articles, journalism and photo essays. He even began to express himself poetically and, with a young family, began writing children's stories. He moved to Nanaimo and then Lantzville on Vancouver Island. John has been widely published by a number of Canadian presses, with his accolades including a shortlisting for the Governor General's Award.

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