Fatal Passage: The True Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot.

p. 27, shows small library at HBC’s Moose Factory.

p. 65: As winter deepened, daylight dwindled and temperatures plunged. Rae visited a nearby Inuit camp and discovered the efficiency of the igloo. Back in the stone house, his pocket edition of Shakespeare’s plays had recently frozen solid after getting wet; to thaw it, he had had to take it to bed.

p. 67: Time dragged endlessly and, as he perused Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear in the faintest light, Rae thanked his lucky stars that he had remembered to bring his Shakespeare.

p. 81: Franklin’s two state-of-the-art ships…. Carried daguerreotype cameras, libraries of 1,200 books, hand organs that played fifty tunes, and enough provisions for three years.

p. 88: Rae and Richardson would sit around the fire chatting with the voyageurs before retiring to write in their journals and read by lantern

light, Richardson turning to the Bible, Rae (most often) to Shakespeare.

p. 108: Rae responded to a letter from England in which Sir John Richardson offered to send him anything he might want. Besides several ‘volumes of useful and entertaining works,’ including a new collected Shakespeare, the explorer asked for a telescope, an aneroid barometer, an astronomical chart of the stars, and a good general atlas with all the latest discoveries.

p. 112: …beside the corpse of William Foubister lay an open Bible and a kettle, empty and overturned.

p. 125: During the winter, Rae received a printed copy of his book about his first expedition, which had finally appeared in London the previous year:Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic Sea in 1846 and 1847 (usually shortened to Arctic Narrative). An editor had had his way with the work—no doubt by necessity and Rae pronounced it ‘so remodeled that I did not know my own bantling when it reached me.’

p. 177—Rae took books on sledding expedition.

p. 188: … dragging a third sledge piled with instruments, books, and bedding, Rae set out to trace the last uncharted coastline of North America.