Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Hart House Library, 7 Hart House Circle
7:30pm
Free. Limited seating. Call 416-640-5836 for details.

An evening of lecture and Q & A.

Presented in partnership with

Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane tells the story of a daring nineteenth-century explorer who went in search of an Open Polar Sea at the top of the world, hoping to rescue survivors from a lost expedition led by Sir John Franklin.

Race to the Polar Sea is the fourth and final volume in Ken’s Fatal Passage Quartet. You can read all about it in the April-May issue of The Beaver magazine. At this point, you should know three things.

1. The book is timely. Everybody has seen the headlines. The retreat of the polar ice cap has put the Arctic on front pages around the world. Certainly, Race to the Polar Sea arises out of the nineteenth century. But Elisha Kane was the most literate of all explorers. And he left such a vivid word-picture of the Arctic that it constitutes a singular touchstone. In September 2007, while sailing in the Northwest Passage, where once Kane struggled through upraised tables of ice fourteen feet thick, Ken encountered nothing but open water. That contrast makes this book relevant: it speaks to global warming.

2. Race to the Polar Sea draws on a long-lost journal. Almost by chance, after doing research in Kane’s hometown Philadelphia, Ken learned that a Calgary antiquarian had acquired material from the Kane family. While investigating that material, he made an stunning discovery: a handwritten, 376-page logbook from Kane’s second expedition. This private journal, missing for 150 years, sheds new light on Kane’s entire life.

3. Elisha Kane has been mistreated by history. After surviving two horrific winters in the Arctic, making notable discoveries, and forging a unique alliance with the Inuit, Kane led his men in the most dramatic escape in Arctic history, man-hauling sledges and sailing hundreds of kilometres in small open boats. Question: Why has this man been so completely forgotten? Answer: Kane secretly married a young woman named Maggie Fox – a spiritualist born and raised in what is now Prince Edward County, Ontario. Maggie died tragically – and for this, Elisha Kane has been wrongly blamed. Race to the Polar Sea sets the record straight.

When Nazi Germany’s Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated in 1945, its records revealed that two young Canadians, Ken Macalister and Frank Pickersgill, were among its countless victims. At 30 and 31 years of age, they had been agents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE ), an undercover unit established by Winston Churchill that used sabotage and subversion to bring down the Nazi regime from within.

Jonathan F. Vance brings us the dramatic, untold story of two men who were the most unlikely of soldiers. Pickersgill, an up-and coming journalist, and Macalister, one of the finest law students ever to attend the University of Toronto, were both living in France when the Nazis seized power. Pickersgill, arrested as an enemy alien, spent two years in prison before escaping to England.

The men’s intelligence, resourcefulness and familiarity with French customs and language caught the attention of the SOE. Trained in special-operations techniques, from radio control to killing, they were paired together and parachuted into France—just as the underground network they were to join was cracked open by the Germans.

Unlikely Soldiers is an extraordinary tale of unsung heroes, intrigue and tragic error. With access to the recently opened SOE archives, Vance draws new material into a fascinating narrative that will appeal to anyone interested in military history, the evolution of espionage, or simply the remarkable story of two heroic Canadians.

Above the village of Châtillon-sur-Cher on the night of June 15/16, 1943, Frank and Ken sat in the fuselage of the Halifax and watched as the dispatcher hooked their parachutes to the static line. Seconds later, the red light blinked on, the dispatcher pulled the cover off the chute in the floor, and the two Canadians sat down. . . . Then the green light flashed . . . and Ken and Frank were gone.
—From Unlikely Soldiers

Ken McGoogan is the author of the national bestsellers Fatal Passage, Ancient Mariner and Lady Franklin’s Revenge. One of Canada’s leading historical biographers, he has won the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the CAA History Award, the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award and a Christopher Award. In 2006, he won the prestigious Pierre Berton Award for his body of work. A film adaptation of Fatal Passage will be released in 2008. Visit his website at www.kenmcgoogan.ca.

Jonathan F. Vance is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Culture. His books include High Flight, Building Canada and Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, which won the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the C. P. Stacey Award and the Dafoe Book Prize. A frequent contributor to The Globe and Mail and a reviewer for The Beaver, Vance is on the advisory committee of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.