The Arctic Hero America Forgot

Dr. Elisha Kent Kane's 1853 brig Advance was locked in Greenland's Smith Sound for two years searching for Sir John Franklin's lost expedition. The Second Grinnell Expedition reached 78°37' north before the pack ice closed at Rensselaer Harbor in September 1853. Three men died — Jefferson Baker, Pierre Schubert, Christian Ohlsen — but sixteen survived two Arctic winters fed by the Inughuit of Etah and Greenlandic hunter Hans Hendrik (Suersaq). Kane reached Upernavik in August 1855 and died in Havana in February 1857. His secret marriage to spiritualist Margaret Fox surfaced after his death. 🎵 Music: Original soundtrack created for this documentary 🖼️ Thumbnail: John Sartain mezzotint of Elisha Kent Kane, U.S. National Library of Medicine (public domain) Sources ————— Archives & Official Records The National Archives (Kew): FO 5/624, FO 96/140 — Foreign Office files on the expedition and silver presentations American Philosophical Society: Elisha Kent Kane Papers, 1840-1857 Mystic Seaport G.W. Blunt White Library: Henry Grinnell Letters, Collection 8 Stanford University Libraries: Elisha Kent Kane Private Journal Published Testimony & Primary Documents Elisha Kent Kane — Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, '54, '55, 2 vols. (Childs & Peterson, 1856) Isaac Israel Hayes — An Arctic Boat Journey, in the Autumn of 1854 (Brown, Taggard & Chase, 1860) Isaac Israel Hayes — The Open Polar Sea (Hurd and Houghton, 1867) Hans Hendrik (Suersaq) — Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller, ed. Henry Rink (Trübner, 1878) [Margaret Fox] — The Love-Life of Doctor Kane (Carleton, 1866) Books William Elder — Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (Childs & Peterson, 1858) George W. Corner — Doctor Kane of the Arctic Seas (Temple University Press, 1972) David Chapin — Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004) Todd Balf — Farthest North: An Arctic Expedition Salvaged from Obscurity (Crown, 2014) Academic Glenn M. Stein — "British and American Awards to the American Second Grinnell Arctic Expedition of 1853-55," OMRS Journal 49.2 (2010) Mark Sawin — "Science Weeps, Humanity Weeps, the World Weeps: America Mourns Elisha Kent Kane," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Clive Holland — "Kane, Elisha Kent" and "Hans Hendrik," Dictionary of Canadian Biography Press Philadelphia Public Ledger, March 12, 1857 Philadelphia Inquirer, February-March 1857 New York Times, October 1855 and February-March 1857 New York Tribune, October 1855 and February-March 1857 Accuracy Notes First contact between Kane's crew and the Etah Inughuit occurred on April 7, 1854 — the same morning Jefferson Baker died of tetanus — not in autumn 1853 as some popular accounts state Hans Hendrik was eighteen at hiring, per Kane's Volume I; "nineteen" in derivative accounts is a transmission error Christian Ohlsen died in mid-June 1855 from an internal injury sustained on June 2 saving the boat Hope. The specific cause (ruptured bladder) rests on a single academic source (Stein 2010); the script uses paraphrase Margaret Fox was nineteen at her first meeting with Kane in November 1852, not fourteen or fifteen Kane was the third American to lie in state at Independence Hall, after John Quincy Adams in 1848 and Henry Clay in 1852 The "open polar sea" Kane believed he had observed at Cape Constitution was a seasonal lead in Kennedy Channel. The theory was disproved by the Nares Expedition of 1875-76 and Nansen's Fram drift of 1893-95 The 1845-48 Franklin Expedition and the 1853-55 Kane Expedition are sometimes conflated in popular accounts. They are separate. Franklin's 129 men died. Kane brought sixteen of nineteen home