John Franklin will always be better known, deservedly, for the events of his life than for his narratives of them; yet his two books of early-nineteenth-century arctic travels present some of the best examples in the literature of Canadian exploration of the duty-bound officer's highly disciplined, factual, and unadorned style, as called for in the genre by the Royal Society's Thomas Sprat in 1664. Literary flourish, even metaphor, was nearly a stranger to Franklin's reportorial pen; still, the events at least of the first arctic expedition rendered his first narrative one of the most captivating ever written about early Canada.

John Franklin was born on 16 April 1786 at Spilsby, Lincolnshire, England, the twelfth child of Willingham Franklin, a banker (his mother's name is unknown). By the age of thirteen he was at sea aboard a ship of Britain's prodigious merchant fleet. He joined the navy a year later and saw...