Postcards from Mars

The First Photographer on the Red Planet

This is as close to Mars as most of us will get, a coffee table book with photos taken by the two Mars Rovers that arrived there in January of 2004. You may remember the event, especially the landing procedure, which involved bouncing the airbag-encased landers across the Martian surface.

Jim Bell, the book's author, is the lead scientist for the Pancam colour imaging system on the Rovers. He gives an interesting behind-the-scenes account of the mission -- launch preparations, technical problems, communication challenges -- but book's main attraction is the 150 or so photos. Postcards he calls them, but not because of their size. You'll actually need a coffee table to spread out the double-page fold-outs. There are four of them, each almost four feet long.

The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, arrived on opposite sides of the planet, Gusev Crater and Meridiani Planum -- not the most exciting places visually or scientifically, but for landing purposes they were a necessary trade-off. Nearly half of spacecraft send to Mars in the last 40 years have failed.

Spirit

Gusev Crater was thought to have once have been a lake, but Spirit found no sedimentary rocks, only a rugged lava plain with "dry, primitive volcanic basalts." It therefore set out for the Columbia Hills, 3-4 km distant, where it discovered evidence of layering in outcrops.

Along the way it overcame a wonky wheel and power problems caused by dust on the solar panels. By utilizing slopes oriented toward the sun, and with the fortuitous intervention of the wind, NASA scientists were able to keep the rover alive.

The panoramas are mostly flat desert-like expanses littered with rocky rubble. The light is dim, and the sky is a paler shade of the rust-coloured terrain.

Opportunity

Meridiani turned out to be very different from Gusev -- darker soils, prominent sand dunes, and weathered outcrops that reminded me of the Canadian Shield. More importantly there were BB-sized hematite "blueberries," and a mineral called jarosite in layered sedimentary deposits -- "key evidence that there was once liquid water on Mars...either on the surface in a lake or shallow sea, or just below the surface in extensive underground aquifers or groundwater systems."

The presence of water, however, does not guarantee an environment hospitable to life. On Mars the abundance of sulfur might have resulted in water too acidic for organic molecules to form.

More Mars

A cool companion to this book is the documentary film, Roving Mars. It recreates the Rovers' journey with a combination of actual images and computer-animated graphics. A delightful bonus is the hour-long episode, "Mars and Beyond," that aired in 1957 on the TV program "Disneyland," and is introduced by Walt himself.

When the book and the film came out in 2006, the two rovers were still functioning, having far exceeded their expected travelling distance of 600 meters and life expectancy of 90 Martian days (aka "sols," 39 minutes longer than Earth days). In 2009 Spirit got mired in soft sand, but Opportunity is still carrying out its mission. Current info on the rovers, including updates from Opportunity, is available at the following sites:

Mars Exploration Rover Mission
NASA - Mars Exploration Rovers

Finally, more info about the book can be found on the author's website, including a few images from the book.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

An African Childhood

Much of this book is a child's-eye-view of Africa during the civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

There's the constant threat of bloodshed plus the usual exotic risks -- snakes, scorpions, leopards, etc.

The family drives a bomb-proofed Land Rover, and the children learn how to clean and load their father's assault rifle, their mother's Uzi.

When the war ends they remain in Zimbabwe, though many other white settlers leave and their farm is sold out from under them. Eventually they relocate to Malawi and then to Zambia.

The author's portrayal of her family and herself is vivid, unflinching, and firmly cemented into place by the b&w photos that head each chapter. She writes:

I felt as if I needed to find a way to explain the racism I had grown up around, to justify the hard living of whites in Africa, to expunge my guilt over the injustice I had witnessed in my youth.

Not an easy task, delivering a sympathetic portrayal of her flawed but hard-working parents, along with her own dawning awareness of native Africans as fully rounded human beings, and tempered with a few glimpses of the excesses of post-Independence Africa.

Her descriptions of the sights, sounds and particularly the smells of Africa are rich and evocative.

When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy. "Smell that," she whispered. "That's home."

Many sad, humorous, poignant, tense and uncomfortable moments fill the book. Clueless missionaries and hitchhikers pop up, border officials are either welcoming, venal or dangerous. There is a pot-smoking cook and a man with an almost preternatural skill as a tracker. The mother -- beautiful, feisty, eccentric -- suffers a nervous breakdown after the loss of her third child (two of whom rest in unmarked graves).

I wonder what sort of book Jane Austen would have produced if she had grown up in Africa.

The Author

Though Alexandra Fuller attended university in Canada (Acadia here in Nova Scotia), and now lives in the US, she still thinks of herself as an African. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight was a New York Times notable book, and finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize.

You can find out more about her at her website.

A Sound Like Water Dripping

In Search of the Boreal Owl

Youthful idealism motivated the author to tackle the boreal owl as a research project while attending the University of Guelph. At the time little was known about the species, including whether or not it even nested in Ontario.

Undeterred, he set out for Kapuskasing in late winter equipped with camping gear, climbing irons, and a recording of a Tengmalm's owl (a European version of the boreal). Thanks to his determination and resourcefulness he not only confirmed that the owl was indeed nesting in the province, but also gathered much useful information about the species.

The following year he continued his research in northern Alberta, and travelled to Sweden in the book's final chapter to compare notes with a fellow biologist studying the Tengmalm's owl. A few of his experiences:

One moonless night while returning to camp he walked smack into a moose.

Boreal owls are quite small, and so unwary he was able to catch one with his bare hands.

He got a personal demonstration of an owl's striking power (their prey is usually killed outright) when an attack left him with a splitting headache and bloody talon marks across his face.

One of the best anecdotes in the book explains how a snake was cowed by its intended meal, a fearless white lab mouse.

While you'll learn a lot about owls and nature and wildlife biologists, what really makes this book so readable is its human side. You'll meet the guys at a logging camp, and a married couple running an owl rehabilitation centre, and a fellow student the author fell in love with. You'll admire his resourcefulness when he makes an owl-trap out of an aluminum lawn chair, and uses a mechanical clock to record the comings and goings at a nest, and fixes up an old cabin by installing windows, door, and a pole floor.

This is a quintessentially Canadian book, infused with honesty, enthusiasm, and a genuine love of nature. It contains 23 b&w photos and a beautiful line drawing by one of the author's friends (whom you'll also meet in the book). The title comes from the Montagnais name for the boreal owl: the water-dripping bird.

The 64-Square Looking Glass

The Great Game of Chess in World Literature

Chess in fiction is most often employed as a superficial metaphor or shallow plot device. There are a number of reasons for this, which probably explains why chess stories are scarce and chess novels even scarcer.

Nevertheless I keep hoping to find a few fictional offerings that genuinely communicate the excitement and dazzle of the game, or at least offer a fresh take on it. Thus I was very pleased to come across this anthology, the most comprehensive I've found so far. It includes a wide selection of verse, non-fiction, short stories, and novel excerpts.

Non-Fiction - 7 selections

The two pieces I enjoyed most are:

"Playing Chess with Arthur Koestler" by Julian Barnes
"Chess Reclaims a Devotee" by Alfred Kreymborg

I've never read anything by Julian Barnes before, but this piece convinced me I must read more. The others are:

Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak, Memory
E.M. Forster, from "Our Diversions" in Abinger Harvest
Charles Krauthammer, "The Romance of Chess"
A.L. Taylor, from The White Knight: A Study of C. L. Dodgson
Andrew Waterman, from his introduction to The Poetry of Chess, an anthology of chess poetry

Verse - 6 selections

Jorge Luis Borges, "Chess"
Lord Dunsany, "The Sea and Chess"
Robert Lowell, "The Winner"
Ezra Pound, "The Game of Chess"
Lord Tennyson, excerpt from Beckett (a verse play)
Bulwer-Lytton, "The Chess-Board" (not that Bulwer-Lytton)

Short Stories - 13 selections

The two I enjoyed most are both humorous:

"Check!" by Slawomir Mrozek
"The Gossage-Varebedian Papers" by Woody Allen

The first (from The Ugupu Bird) is an amusing account of players in a living chess match taking matters into their own hands. The Woody Allen piece is about a postal match gone horribly wrong, and has been called the funniest story ever written about chess. I won't disagree. It can be found online in a number of places.

There is also an excerpt from the novella "The Royal Game" by Stefan Zweig, thought by some to be the best story ever written about chess.

Of the remainder, two are by famous authors -- "All the King's Men" by Kurt Vonnegut (from Welcome to the Monkey House), and "Pawn to King's Four" by Stephen Leacock (from Happy Stories Just to Laugh At).

Three are crime stories:
Harry Kemelman, "End Play"
Theodore Mathieson, "The Chess Partner"
Henry Slesar, "The Poisoned Pawn"

And the rest are:
Poul Anderson, "The Immortal Game"
Spencer Holst, "Chess" from The Language of Cats and Other Stories
Vasily Aksyonov, "The Victory -- A Story with Exaggerations"
Miguel de Unamuno, "The Novel of Dan Sandalio, Chessplayer" from Ficciones
Sholem Aleichem, "From Passover to Succos, or The Chess Player's Story" from Tevye's Daughters

Novel Excerpts - 17 selections

Several come from the hand of famous authors:
Martin Amis, Money
Samuel Beckett, Murphy
Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes
Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane
Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense

Four are from detective or espionage novels:
Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love
David Delman, The Last Gambit
John Griffiths, The Memory Man
Alan Sharp, Night Moves

The rest are:
Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit
Brad Leithauser, Hence
Claud Cockburn, Beat the Devil
Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs
Fernando Arrabal, The Tower Struck by Lighting
Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fe (Canetti was the Nobel winner for literature in 1981)

The Magic Journey

Second of a trilogy (the first being The Milagro Beanfield War), this book starts off with a bang -- the explosion of a busload of dynamite in Chamisaville, a town in the southwestern US. In the middle of the resulting crater stands a man wearing nothing but his boots.

It's a miracle!

The Holy Chapel of the Dynamite Virgin is quickly erected, followed by a Dynamite Shrine Motor Court and the sale of "sacred wooden dynamite fetishes."

In the midst of this money-making grab is the owner of the bus, Rodey McQueen, a conman from Muleshoe, Texas. He has his eye on bigger things, possible only if the backward and impoverished community of Chicanos and Native Americans can be transformed into a cash-based economy.

One of the earliest signs of progress is the arrival of the first automobile owned by a local farmer. The vehicle is dubbed the Horse without Shit and its purchase destitutes the farmer.

Another early attraction is an embalmed whale, which results in the following incident:

A pale, taciturn youth named Ralphito Garcia walked eighteen miles into town one day, gingerly placed his palm against the whale, then left without a word, a beatific smile lighting up his bewitched features: he promptly hitchhiked to the West Coast and drowned himself in the Pacific Ocean.

This symbolic event is referenced again and again throughout the book, as a dripping Ralphito reappears numerous times with seaweed in his hair. He presages the outcome of the "Betterment of Chamisaville" scheme, which McQueen and his band of developers (the "Anglo Axis") are implementing by robbing people of their land.

Local opposition includes an exhausted lawyer, a hundred-year-old outlaw, and McQueen's own daughter, April Delaney. Vivacious and impossibly beautiful, her hunger for life leads her through many travels and numerous marriages, before she returns to Chamisaville to oppose her father's ruthless ambitions.

A Real Kitchen Sink

That's how the author describes the book in his Introduction, and he's right. It's a big rambling work, bursting with characters, full of humour and compassion and raunchy sex, but also simmering with rage, which does not become truly apparent until the gut-wrenching ending. The Magic Journey has some of the same range, expansiveness, and multitude of characters as Pynchon's V and Gravity's Rainbow, though I much preferred The Magic Journey to those.

In the Introduction the author also says that he was "politicized in the mid-1960s by feminism, the antiwar movement, environmental activism, the fight for civil rights." All of these elements are present in the book. He adds, "Call this a 'regional' novel and I'll kill you."

Here's a typical passage, McQueen reflecting on his early years:

[He was] a skinny hobo tacker wild as a corncrib rat riding boxcars, hunting cigarette butts in gutters, pitching hay on west Texas prairieland until his back was almost broken, curled up under tattered blankets in snow-sprinkled winter arroyos half starving to death, grappling big-breasted farm girls ugly as homemade soap in horse-shit-smelling three-room shotgun shacks, and getting drunk in disaster alleys with other tow-headed buck-toothed big-eared scrawny redneck good 'ol boys on Saturday nights in small cowboy towns with names like Lampasas, Tulip, Ropesville, Tokio, Turkey, Matador, Rankin, and Iraan. McQueen had strung barbed wire, milked cows, played $6.98 Sears Roebuck guitars, shot horses for meat (and rustled them, too), hunted rattlesnakes in annual roundups, stolen cars, spent a year in jail and another six months in the workhouse and on a road gang, managed a travelling carnival, and ridden broncos and bulls bareback in a hundred rodeos. He had failed in a dozen occupations before arriving in Chamisaville: logger, cowboy, trainman, wetback runner and farm contractor, oil rigger, all-around conman, poacher, Bible salesman, semipro football player, whatever had come his way.

Murther & Walking Spirits

Connor Gilmartin is killed by his wife's lover in the opening sentence, but it is not his own life that flashes before his eyes. Instead he sees the lives of his forebears -- the Welsh Gilmartins and the Vermeulen-Gages, Loyalists of Dutch stock who fled New York during the Revolution.

These two families experience lots of ups and downs, illustrating a saying in the book attributed to Heraclitus -- "anything, if pursued beyond a reasonable point, turns into its opposite." During the course of the story more than one rags-to-riches-to-rags story is told, in terms of wealth, religion, and love.

As usual, the prose of Davies is a pleasure to read, polished but not flashy, filled with great lines and imaginative diction, and managing somehow to be both earthy and erudite. A few favourite quotes:

a killing moustache orray-eyed drunkards the winey air of Canada the gumbo of their emotions the lion-like face of Gladstone an ill-used toy of circumstances she dashed off arpeggios like confetti donkey liver fricassee, and orange Jell-O to top it off the spirit of a very rich fruitcake, made habitable clothes that looked as if they had been made not by tailors but by upholsterers who had heard tell of the human figure but had never seen one What is a pistol to a bear?

The novel is populated by a huge cast of characters, many of them minor yet wonderfully named: Hugh McWearie, Tabitha Drinker, Liz Duckett, Elsie Hare, Guinevere Gwilt, Reverend Cattermole, Louida Beemer, Forty-Pie Doane, and Bug Devereux ("so called because, when he was seventeen, his face welled hugely and at last burst, and a great black bug crawled out of it, spread its wings, and flew away").

Yet despite the fine writing, the book doesn't quite reach the level set by the Cornish trilogy. It gets off to an excellent start, but begins to wallow a bit midway through. Part of the problem may be a lack of overall cohesiveness. The narrator, Connor Gilmartin, is present throughout but remains a minor character, his role mainly that of an observer. In the end he achieves self-knowledge, but it seems a rather thin discovery.

And while there are deft touches of humour throughout the book, there is no memorable comic scene or character. Of the latter, two of the most interesting are Thomas Gilmartin and William McOmish, but they occupy the stage for too short a time.

The Gilmartins

Thomas Gilmartin is a Welsh weaver-preacher who adopts a pot-boy named Gwylim Griffiths and renames him Wesley Gilmartin. Wesley has two sons, Samuel and Thomas.

Thomas finds work as a servant, while Samuel becomes a tailor and his children include Walter and Polly. Polly marries the untrustworthy John Jethro Jenkins, and they move to Canada.

Walter marries Jenkins's sister Janet, and they have several children, including Rhodri. Their family too relocates to Canada.

The Gages

After her husband is killed, Anna Vermeulen Gage and her children flee overland to Canada. Her daughter Elizabeth marries Justin Vanderlip. Cynthia and Virginia are their grandchildren. Cynthia is lame and mean-spirited; she marries Dan Boutell, who eventually skips out on her. The frigid Virginia marries a master builder named William McOmish, who goes broke building a church. Their children include Malvina and Minerva.

The Two Lines Merge

Rhodri Gilmartin marries Malvina, who in lying about her age causes a rift between them. She is firmly rooted in Canada, while his dreams lie in Wales, where he eventually buys and furnishes Belem Manor. Their son Brochwel (Brocky) Gilmartin is the father of the dead narrator, Connor Gilmartin.

Not a word is said about the narrator's mother, Nuala Connor. Her story is most likely taken up in the next book (The Cunning Man) of this unfinished trilogy.

Nicholas Nickleby

What better time of year to read Dickens than Xmas, with his cosy celebrations of family, friends, food and drink, while Scroogelike villains pinch their pennies?

My choice for this season was Nicholas Nickleby, which Dickens produced next but one after my current favourite, Pickwick Papers. I was hoping for something simpler and more comic than the last three I read, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and Little Dorrit -- and until midway through the book I was not disappointed.

The plot moves along in a straightforward and unencumbered fashion. Ralph Nickleby finds employment for his nephew Nicholas with a brutal one-eyed schoolmaster named Wackford Squeers. Nicholas thrashes Squeers and runs away with a simple-minded young man named Smike, an abandoned student kept on at Dotheboys Hall as a servant. Nicholas finds employment tutoring French for the Kenwigs family, then he and Smike end up with a theatrical company run by Vincent Crummles. They return abruptly to London on receiving an urgent message from Newman Noggs, Ralph’s clerk. It regards Nicholas’s sister, Kate.

Ralph is a familiar figure in the pantheon of Dickensian villains, an implacable “usurer” whose chief goal in life is the acquisition of money. After finding employment for Kate with a milliner named Madame Mantalini, he dangles her before two debauched noblemen, Sir Mulberry Hawk and Lord Verisopht, as an inducement to maintain their financial dependence on him. They pursue Kate when she takes up new employment as a lady's companion with Mrs. Wititterly.

By this time Nicholas is back in the city and happens to overhear Kate’s name being bandied about by Hawk and his confederates. He accosts Hawk, rescues Kate from the Wititterlys, and denounces Ralph.

This is a very condensed version of the novel's first half, which I enjoyed enormously. But then a change takes place as Dickens starts herding his characters toward a conclusion. Comedy gives way to cloying sentiment, unlikely coincidences, contrived backstory, ridiculous melodrama, and stuffy Victorian morals. All of these elements are present to some extent in any Dickens novel, but they overwhelm the last half of this one. The turning point comes with the introduction of the insufferable Cheeryble brothers, through whose charitable hands money pours "as freely as water" (chapter 35), and the astonishing change of Lord Verisopht from a weak-willed dupe to a defender of Nicholas and Kate (chapter 38).

Dickens is forced to introduce several shady new characters to service the plot - Bray, Brooker and Arthur Gride. Squeers is dragged back into the story more times than is necessary. There is a soppy death scene for Smike, and an outrageous passage where Frank Cheeryble and Newman Noggs sneak into a room and get close enough to Squeers to peer over his shoulder at an important document – a will, of course. The marriage of Madeleine Bray to a disgusting old miser (Gride) is prevented by the timely passing of her father, which not only contributes to Ralph’s ruin but also saves her for Nicholas (who loves her even though he has scarcely spoken to her).

The worst is saved for the end – the revelation that Smike is Ralph’s son (with an implausible explanation of how he ended up with Squeers), followed by a saccharine triple wedding. One illustration in particular sums up all the corny melodrama.

This is not to say the last half of the book is without merit. Chapter 50, for example, is a fine set piece, culminating in the duel between Hawk and Verisopht. Overall, though, the final half fails to live up to the superb promise of the first half.

Characters

For me the most memorable characters are Wackford Squeers and Mr. Mantalini. Is it not odd that two such scoundrels are also the most amusing? The combination of humour and villainy makes for doubly potent comedy, and is one aspect of Dickens’s genius that I greatly admire.

I also enjoyed seeing Nicholas portrayed as a headstrong and fiery young man. His physical courage in confronting Squeers, Hawk, the actor Mr. Lenville, and his uncle Ralph is refreshing; while Kate as a spirited young woman is more satisfying than the meek and long-suffering Madeleine Bray, who serves as a template for subsequent boring heroines like Esther Summerson.

One of the best scenes in the book occurs when Nicholas seeks employment with an MP named Gregsbury, at the same time that he is being confronted by dissatisfied constituents. The Crummles theatrical troupe also affords a number of excellent moments.

Of no interest whatsoever are the saintly Cheeryble twins, who are as credible as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Also, the machinations of Ralph Nickleby are a little too convoluted to be completely believable, though a trace of remorse early in the novel for manipulating Kate is a nice touch, as is his rationalization for doing so.

Marriage

Marriage, family, and parental responsibility figure large in the work of Dickens, but here they are of central importance. Of the five weddings in the book, three of them take place at the very end -- Nicholas and Madeleine, Kate and Frank, Tim Linkinwater and Miss La Creevy. The other two occur earlier and offstage -- John and Tilda Browdie, and Mr. Lilyvick and Henrietta Petowker. The latter relationship ends when Henrietta runs off with a half-pay captain. A sixth wedding (Madeleine and Gride) is aborted at the last moment, and a wedding anniversary is celebrated by the Kenwigs.

In Chapter 4 we are introduced to Mr. Snawley, who, having just married, is sending his two stepsons off to Dotheboys Hall to prevent his new wife from squandering money on them. Dotheboys Hall, it turns out, is a dumping ground for unwanted children. Ironically Squeers is devoted to his wife and offspring. The Squeers and Mantalini families form a suitable contrast to the happy Kenwigs and Crummles (the latter containing the celebrated "Infant Phenomenon").

Family contrasts are also central to the Nickleby saga. The secretive marriage of Ralph ended badly, his wife running away with another man, his child (unbeknownst to him) ending up at Dotheboys Hall. Nicholas senior, on the other hand, married for love and headed up a happy family. Unfortunately, while Mrs. Nickleby's heart is in the right place, her brain isn't. She urged her husband to speculate, which led directly to his death and the family's financial ruin. She completely misjudges Hawk and Squeers, and in this respect resembles another incompetent parent, Madeleine's father. Apparently she is modelled on Dickens's own mother.

As important as love is, it takes second place to other things, and not just money. Nicholas and Kate are both ready to forgo it for the sake of appearances; they don't want the Cheerybles to think they are being taken advantage of. In a similar confusion of values, Madeleine Bray is willing to suffer a loveless marriage out of blind devotion to a worthless father.

Consider Her Ways

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard, and consider her ways," says the Bible, and Frederick Philip Grove takes the advice to heart, travelling to Venezuela to study leaf-cutter ants and making telepathic contact with Wawa-quee, leader of a great journey of exploration undertaken at the behest of Queen Orrha-wee. The book is the record of that journey.

The expedition heads north, crossing the Panama canal and the Mississippi River before arriving in New York City. The journey takes years to complete, and enables the author to introduce a wide variety of ants and their amazing adaptations. In addition to the agricultural leaf-cutters, we meet army ants, honey-pot ants, harvester ants, slave-making ants, and ants that herd aphids.

The author's second purpose is Swiftian satire. He gives us an ant's-eye view of human affairs that is delightfully skewed, while at the same time poking fun at the ants themselves, who are as guilty of misplaced pride as the humans they look down upon. During the journey they meet a dentist, a farmer, and a myrmecologist, but the most amusing bits occur in New York City. There they take up residence in the Public Library, and one of them becomes addicted to crime fiction. Wawa-quee's confused observations about clothing are priceless.

Unfortunately, while ants are fascinating creatures, Grove fails to find a consistently entertaining way of melding fact with fiction. The subplot he comes up with (seditious egg-laying) is not very compelling, and in fact is just another way of including an interesting bit of ant lore. As a result the book is rather dry and tedious until the last of the five chapters, when the ants finally reach New York. For me, the book remains an interesting but flawed attempt (like Anthill by E.O. Wilson) to novelize the lives of ants.

Frederick Philip Grove

Grove was born in Europe, where he translated into German the work of many important writers (Swift, Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, etc.). He was a friend of H.G. Wells, and led an adventurous and somewhat unsavory life, which included a stint in jail and a faked suicide, before he finally ended up in Canada. Grove is not the name he was born with, and he wrote under a number of pseudonyms.

In Canada he achieved a lasting respectability, publishing the following novels: Settlers of the Marsh (1925), Our Daily Bread (1928), The Yoke of Life (1930), Fruits of the Earth (1933), Two Generations (1939), Master of the Mill (1944), and Consider Her Ways (1947). He won the GG for non-fiction in 1946 for the autobiography In Search of Myself (parts of which are fictionalized). He died in 1948.

The Cave

James Fitzjames

The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition

The early naval record of James Fitzjames, third in command of the lost Franklin expedition, is confusing and incomplete. He gave conflicting accounts of his age and place of birth, and his baptismal certificate was fraudulent.

The story that author William Battersby has pieced together is this: Fitzjames was the illegitimate son of an important British diplomat serving in Brazil, while his mother was "almost certainly" Portuguese. In England, he was raised "from an early age" by a foster family, the Coninghams, and maintained a deep attachment to them for the rest of his life.

At the age of 12 he went to sea on a ship captained by a blood relative, and a few years later parlayed an ambiguously worded letter into a rating as midshipman.

After serving in the Mediterranean, he signed on with the Chesney expedition, which was endeavouring to set up a mail route to India via the Persian Gulf. As part of this expedition he undertook a 1000-mile overland journey from the Euphrates to Beirut.

He received advanced training in gunnery, which he put to use in China during the Opium Wars. His fighting there came to an end when he was struck by a musket ball that pierced his arm, entered his body via the armpit, and lodged next to his spine. It was successfully removed without the benenfit of anaesthesia.

A second unknown in Fitzjames's life is the act of assistance he rendered to Sir John Barrow's son, George, in Singapore. Whatever it was, it was enough to earn Sir John's lasting gratitude, and resulted in Fitzjames obtaining his first command, the HMS Clio, and later his place on the Franklin expedition.

The Franklin Expedition

Fitzjames harboured a secret ambition. Once the Northwest Passage was conquered, he wanted to deliver the news to England via an overland journey across Siberia. It was a characteristic attitude of the time that all one needed in a risky undertaking was sufficient pluck.

Ironically he thought Franklin reckless for piling on too much sail as they made for Greenland, and ordered the canvas reduced after Franklin had gone to bed. But he was not alone in this view, and Franklin after all had not commanded a ship in 10 years, and never in arctic waters.

Several of his crewmates were close friends or former shipmates, including LeVesconte, DesVoeux, Fairholme, and Couch.

Refutations

Battersby is at pains to correct the previous image of Fitzjames as "well-educated, aristocratic, wealthy, of good family, Church of England, fast rising in the service -- and thumpingly, lispingly, English to the core," which is Scott Cookman's description of him in Ice Blink, and one that has been generally accepted for over a century, and so entrenched that it has found its way into popular works of fiction (e.g. Clive Cussler's Arctic Drift and Dan Simmons's The Terror.)

Fitzjames, who was responsible for selecting most of the crew of the Erebus and Terror, has been criticized for choosing men without polar experience. Battersby refutes this charge, and here again Cookman is specifically mentioned.

Battersby also challenges the contention of Michael Smith (Captain Francis Crozier: Last Man Standing?) that Crozier's Irishness was prejudicial to his advancement within the Royal Navy.

Summation

This book contains an astonishing amount of original research, though some of the conclusions that Battersby reaches are speculative. He provides an interesting snapshot of what it was like to serve as an officer in the Royal Navy in the first half of the 19th century -- the hardship, danger, camaraderie, and travel to far-flung places.

Fitzjames, in the course of his career, visited Lisbon, Malta, Troy, Constantinople, Babylon, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, and Hong Kong -- to name some of the better-known spots. Two of his more colourful experiences: being mooned by a group of women while steaming up the Euphrates, and being clawed by a pet cheetah while aboard the Clio. (It used to climb up the rigging with the sailors.)

Fitzgerald himself was handsome, charismatic, and ambitious. He was fluent in Portuguese and French, with some knowledge of Spanish and Arabic. He was a competent artist (the book reproduces a few of his sketches) and the author of a 10,000-word naval poem. He was a lover of elaborate practical jokes, and almost recklessly brave.

In the end he left this life as mysteriously as he entered it.

Links

Updates and Corrections
Hidden Tracks (Battersby's blog)
Review by Russell Potter