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Misinterpretation and obfuscation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2014

William Barr
William Barr*
Affiliation:
Arctic Institute of North America, University of Calgary, Calgary AB T2N 1N4, Canada ([email protected])
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Extract

The thrust of my note (Barr 2014), to which Ken McGoogan was responding (McGoogan 2014), was that in discovering Rae Strait in the spring of 1854 John Rae did not discover the final link in the northwest passage, since a substantial section of that particular variant of the passage some 240 km in length (namely Franklin Strait and Larsen Sound) lying further north, had not yet been discovered. McGoogan has wrongly concluded that I must therefore support the notion that Sir John Franklin discovered the passage. This is an unwarranted assumption. I do not subscribe to this belief; in this, at least McGoogan and I are in agreement. As David Buisseret, the editor of the The Oxford companion to world exploration has elegantly defined it, geographical discovery is ‘the process by which one or more people leave their society and venture to another part of the world [. . .] then return in order to explain what they have seen’ (Buisseret 2007, I: xxiii). Neither Franklin nor any of his officers and men returned.

Type
Notes
Information
Polar Record , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 221 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

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