Love and Ice: The Tragic Obsessions of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane Arctic Explorer

The story of the famed explorer who perhaps was the greatest American hero of the 1850's. After graduation from the University of Pennsylvania in 1842, Elijah Kent Kane became a surgeon in the U.S. Navy and was appointed physician to the China Mission under Caleb Cushing. In 1850 Kane sailed on the first Grinnell Expedition in search of Sir John Franklin, missing since 1845. The first expedition stirred such interest that Kane was able to organize and lead the second Grinnell Expedition, financed by private subscription. While he combed the Arctic for Franklin, Kane not only discovered the sixty-mile-wide Humboldt Glacier, the North Atlantic Ocean's greatest source of icebergs, but he also mapped little-known Smith Sound, which Robert E. Peary followed fifty years later on his quest for the North Pole. The poignant love affair between Kane and Margaret Fox, the Spiritualist medium, adds heart-warming contrast to the explorer's frigid adventures in the Arctic. Upon Kane's untimely death in 1857, his universal fame culminated in a funeral procession rivaled only by that of Abraham Lincoln.