Extravagant depictions of the starved, the frozen, the dead and the almost dead have animated tales of polar exploration throughout its relatively short history. From Robert Scott's doomed South Pole expedition to Ernest Shackleton's desperate escape from Antarctica, the hardships endured at the ends of the earth are legend. But there is one name and one survival saga you've probably never heard of, even though they predate most others by more than 50 years.
Elisha Kent Kane was a naval surgeon turned adventurer whose voyages into the upper reaches of the Arctic Circle between 1851 and 1855 added important knowledge about the region's landscape, navigational routes and native people. Kane developed close ties with the Inuit that aided later discoverers, and he identified and named Humboldt Glacier, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere.
Marooned on their vessel, the Advance, for 21 months while trapped by sea ice, Kane and his crew of 19 endured relentless hunger, 80-below-zero temperatures, frostbitten limbs (there were multiple amputations), debilitating scurvy and the psychological trauma of two long and lightless Arctic winters. Convinced their ship would soon become their tomb, in May 1855 Kane led his men on one of the most extraordinary survival quests ever recorded. The team dragged three whaleboats across pack ice for weeks before reaching open water, then crossed 800 miles of treacherous seas, finally reaching Upernavik, Greenland, after 83 days. Only one crew member died.
Kane's original handwritten journal from the perilous second expedition resides in Stanford's Special Collections. Penned in elegant cursive and accompanied by sketches, it reveals Kane's gifts as a writer and artist, and provides a valuable resource for scholars. His detailed descriptions of Arctic geology are credited with helping scientists establish theories about the Ice Age. Later explorers used his navigational notes to make their way deeper into the Arctic Circle and eventually to the North Pole.
A national hero in his time—after he died at age 37 from a heart condition, tens of thousands of people lined the tracks as a train carrying his body traveled from Cincinnati to Philadelphia—Kane has virtually disappeared from history. He goes unmentioned in most textbooks. Kane, Pa., is named not for him but for his brother Thomas, a Civil War general. The USS Kane, a Navy destroyer named in his honor, was decommissioned in 1946 and sold for scrap. There is no monument, no statue, not even a bust of him on a museum mantle. But he is beginning to get his due, most recently in the 2008 book Race to the Polar Sea, by Ken McGoogan, who used Stanford's Kane materials as a primary source.
