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A new watercolour by Robert Hood of the first Franklin expedition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2009

Hector Williams*
Affiliation:
Department of Classical Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada ([email protected])

Extract

Perhaps the most tragic story from the Franklin expedition of 1819–1822 was the murder of Robert Hood, a talented midshipman who left a number of watercolours of the trip and of the peoples and fauna encountered (Houston 1974; Franklin 2000). The story even became the basis for a novel that won the annual Governor General of Canada's prize for fiction in 1994 for the Alberta writer, Rudy Wiebe (Wiebe 1994). The expedition undertook a desperately difficult trek that saw only nine survivors of the original twenty members, but it resulted in the first map of 800 km (500 miles) of the northern central Arctic coast of Canada.

Type
Notes
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

Franklin, J. 2000. Journey to the shores of the polar sea, in the years 1819, 20, 21 and 22 (introduction J.P. Delgado). Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre.Google Scholar
Houston, C.S. (editor). 1974. To the Arctic by canoe 1819–1821. The journal and paintings of Robert Hood, midshipman with Franklin. Montreal and London: Arctic Institute of North America and Queen's University Press.Google Scholar
Wiebe, R. 1994. A discovery of strangers. Toronto: Random House.Google Scholar