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The Man Who Mapped the Arctic: The Intrepid Life of George Back, Franklin's Lieutenant
In the mid-1800s, George Back went on three Arctic expeditions with Sir John Franklin across the barren lands of the Canadian north. But unlike Franklin, Back lived to tell his tales in journals, drawings, watercolors, and maps. Noted writer Peter Steele drew on these sources, along with contemporary accounts, to craft this gripping tale of resilience in the face of incredible odds.
The book thrillingly recounts the near-impossible circumstances of these expeditions — the fights with the Hudson Bay Company, rations that failed to get through, even cannibalism. Back survived these horrors to lead an exploration of the Great Fish River, now named Back River in his honor. His return upstream, hauling his handmade boat up 83 sets of rapids, is one of the greatest-ever feats of heroism and endurance.
A gifted artist and mapmaker, Back was a brave explorer forgotten by history. Steele does him belated justice with this fascinating account.
The book thrillingly recounts the near-impossible circumstances of these expeditions — the fights with the Hudson Bay Company, rations that failed to get through, even cannibalism. Back survived these horrors to lead an exploration of the Great Fish River, now named Back River in his honor. His return upstream, hauling his handmade boat up 83 sets of rapids, is one of the greatest-ever feats of heroism and endurance.
A gifted artist and mapmaker, Back was a brave explorer forgotten by history. Steele does him belated justice with this fascinating account.
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
62 people want to read
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Peter Steele
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 25, 2025
An exciting biography of an explorer too little known!
It takes considerable flair and panache to write history in a way that makes it read like a novel and not very many authors have that ability. Canada's Pierre Berton has it! Dava Sobel and Simon Winchester are certainly up to the task! In THE MAN WHO MAPPED THE ARCTIC, Peter Steele demonstrated his rightful claim to membership on that short list. Steele, a physician who has spent most of his life in the North and an arctic adventurer and mountaineer in his own right, has eloquently told us the astonishing tale of George Back, Franklin's undeservedly obscure and unsung Lieutenant and his astonishing exploits in exploration that rival Samuel Hearne's or Lewis and Clark's in their extraordinary scope and difficulty.
Steele's prose has painted a vivid picture of Back's working life as a Navy Lieutenant and explorer and the compelling setting in which the story takes place - endless waterfalls and rapids; excruciating clouds of mosquitoes or black flies; extreme temperature swings; backbreaking 90 to 100 pound loads hauled over strenuous ankle-breaking portages; the open water of Lake Winnipeg, Lake Superior and Great Bear and Great Slave Lake that might better be described as inland oceans when observed from the perspective of a canoe; changeable unpredictable weather; the dumb-founding athleticism of ten to twelve men paddling in perfect synchrony at 50 strokes per minute for hours on end singing, if you please, to provide a rhythm and take their minds off the numbing pain in their backs and shoulders; lost rations, near starvation and cannibalism; the stinging cold and near endless dark of sub-arctic winter camps; the political struggles, bickering, corporate fighting and espionage that occurred as a matter of course in the conflict between the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company; and much, much more.
Of Back's cultural indoctrination by fire upon his arrival in Canada, for example, Steele wrote:
"He knew nothing of the rival fur companies' years of bitter forest skirmishes, sniping from riverbanks at each others' canoes, occasionally taking prisoners, and resorting in extremis to arson and theft, kidnapping and murder - tantamount to open warfare." "Neither did he understand the cultural differences that might arise between himself and a disparate group of French Canadian voyageur canoemen, Indian hunters and Eskimo guides, who he expected would guide them through the most barren and inhospitable land anyone could imagine, among people utterly ignorant of intrusive Westerners and their strange ways."
In other words, Steele has provided us with an exciting biography of a talented naval officer, explorer, mapmaker, outdoorsman and survivor who has languished for too long under the shadow of Franklin, his considerably less talented superior. The Yukon News praises THE MAN WHO MAPPED THE ARCTIC by suggesting that it is destined to become a classic story of Canadian Arctic exploration. I concur.
Paul Weiss
It takes considerable flair and panache to write history in a way that makes it read like a novel and not very many authors have that ability. Canada's Pierre Berton has it! Dava Sobel and Simon Winchester are certainly up to the task! In THE MAN WHO MAPPED THE ARCTIC, Peter Steele demonstrated his rightful claim to membership on that short list. Steele, a physician who has spent most of his life in the North and an arctic adventurer and mountaineer in his own right, has eloquently told us the astonishing tale of George Back, Franklin's undeservedly obscure and unsung Lieutenant and his astonishing exploits in exploration that rival Samuel Hearne's or Lewis and Clark's in their extraordinary scope and difficulty.
Steele's prose has painted a vivid picture of Back's working life as a Navy Lieutenant and explorer and the compelling setting in which the story takes place - endless waterfalls and rapids; excruciating clouds of mosquitoes or black flies; extreme temperature swings; backbreaking 90 to 100 pound loads hauled over strenuous ankle-breaking portages; the open water of Lake Winnipeg, Lake Superior and Great Bear and Great Slave Lake that might better be described as inland oceans when observed from the perspective of a canoe; changeable unpredictable weather; the dumb-founding athleticism of ten to twelve men paddling in perfect synchrony at 50 strokes per minute for hours on end singing, if you please, to provide a rhythm and take their minds off the numbing pain in their backs and shoulders; lost rations, near starvation and cannibalism; the stinging cold and near endless dark of sub-arctic winter camps; the political struggles, bickering, corporate fighting and espionage that occurred as a matter of course in the conflict between the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company; and much, much more.
Of Back's cultural indoctrination by fire upon his arrival in Canada, for example, Steele wrote:
"He knew nothing of the rival fur companies' years of bitter forest skirmishes, sniping from riverbanks at each others' canoes, occasionally taking prisoners, and resorting in extremis to arson and theft, kidnapping and murder - tantamount to open warfare." "Neither did he understand the cultural differences that might arise between himself and a disparate group of French Canadian voyageur canoemen, Indian hunters and Eskimo guides, who he expected would guide them through the most barren and inhospitable land anyone could imagine, among people utterly ignorant of intrusive Westerners and their strange ways."
In other words, Steele has provided us with an exciting biography of a talented naval officer, explorer, mapmaker, outdoorsman and survivor who has languished for too long under the shadow of Franklin, his considerably less talented superior. The Yukon News praises THE MAN WHO MAPPED THE ARCTIC by suggesting that it is destined to become a classic story of Canadian Arctic exploration. I concur.
Paul Weiss
June 30, 2018
Not bad, but a fairly pedestrian bio of George Back. It’s not completely the fault of the author though, because as a Royal Navy man, Back was constrained by the Navy’s hidebound rules, obsession with form and disdain for outside experience; and although Back was rather innovative in some ways, he was still of that same mould that had Franklin’s men dragging a boatload of silverware across the high Arctic. In this he was quite unlike the more successful explorers like John Rae, who valued and made use of Inuit expertise.
Back accompanied John Franklin on three polar expeditions, to Spitzbergen, Bathurst Inlet in the Central Arctic and towards what is now Alaska in the west Arctic. All three suffered from varying degrees of poor preparation and didn’t entirely achieve their goals, but the second one stands out in that the party came close to starvation for two successive winters; the description of this exploration occupies nearly half the book.
Back’s main achievement, though, was to lead one of his own expeditions, down the unexplored Thlew-ee-choh / Great Fish (aka Back's) River to the Arctic Ocean. Curiously, this is one of the shortest sections in the book. Steele mentions that Back’s journal is unaccountably brief for the return part of the journey, but still, this IS called “The man who mapped the Arctic” and I thought this part would have been more expansive, as there are other books about the Franklin expeditions.
Back led a final voyage two years later in an attempt to map the eastern Arctic but, failing to learn from earlier explorers, ended up trapped in the ice of Hudson Bay. In all, his five expeditions covered nearly 20 years. He was a tough bugger though; he went to sea at 11, was captured by Napoleon’s Navy soon after, and was a prisoner of war for 5 years, still in his teens - that episode did make for very interesting reading.
A couple of gripes about the book itself. One, Steele says that he uses the term “Eskimo” because that was how they were referred to in Back’s journals. But this does give his bio a bit of a dated feel these days.
The other is the quality of the illustrations: the maps are lacking in detail and how they relate to each other, and don’t give a good indication of the complex paths of the voyages. And Back himself was an accomplished artist who spent much of his time recording what he saw along the way. Although there are some images of his paintings, none are in colour, and I think a lot more could have been made of his drawings, maps and paintings.
Back accompanied John Franklin on three polar expeditions, to Spitzbergen, Bathurst Inlet in the Central Arctic and towards what is now Alaska in the west Arctic. All three suffered from varying degrees of poor preparation and didn’t entirely achieve their goals, but the second one stands out in that the party came close to starvation for two successive winters; the description of this exploration occupies nearly half the book.
Back’s main achievement, though, was to lead one of his own expeditions, down the unexplored Thlew-ee-choh / Great Fish (aka Back's) River to the Arctic Ocean. Curiously, this is one of the shortest sections in the book. Steele mentions that Back’s journal is unaccountably brief for the return part of the journey, but still, this IS called “The man who mapped the Arctic” and I thought this part would have been more expansive, as there are other books about the Franklin expeditions.
Back led a final voyage two years later in an attempt to map the eastern Arctic but, failing to learn from earlier explorers, ended up trapped in the ice of Hudson Bay. In all, his five expeditions covered nearly 20 years. He was a tough bugger though; he went to sea at 11, was captured by Napoleon’s Navy soon after, and was a prisoner of war for 5 years, still in his teens - that episode did make for very interesting reading.
A couple of gripes about the book itself. One, Steele says that he uses the term “Eskimo” because that was how they were referred to in Back’s journals. But this does give his bio a bit of a dated feel these days.
The other is the quality of the illustrations: the maps are lacking in detail and how they relate to each other, and don’t give a good indication of the complex paths of the voyages. And Back himself was an accomplished artist who spent much of his time recording what he saw along the way. Although there are some images of his paintings, none are in colour, and I think a lot more could have been made of his drawings, maps and paintings.
November 17, 2014
This is a well-researched, well-written book about an arctic explorer who stands in the shadow of Franklin himself. This book brings Lieutenant George Back out of the shadows and into his own well-deserved spotlight.
I rated this book 3/5 because it will primarily appeal only to those deeply interested in (i.e. already have a background knowledge of) Arctic/Northwest Passage history.
I also took away a star for lack of colour images of places Back so well describes in his journals. It would have been nice to see what these places actually look like today. Otherwise, the book is liberally enhanced with Back's own detailed sketches.
For a good introduction to Northwest Passage history, check out Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage
I rated this book 3/5 because it will primarily appeal only to those deeply interested in (i.e. already have a background knowledge of) Arctic/Northwest Passage history.
I also took away a star for lack of colour images of places Back so well describes in his journals. It would have been nice to see what these places actually look like today. Otherwise, the book is liberally enhanced with Back's own detailed sketches.
For a good introduction to Northwest Passage history, check out Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage
June 7, 2024
Peter Steele really does a fantastic job with this book. The amount of research that had to have gone into this, especially considering there is almost no information online about George Back, is unbelievable. He really made the story of Backs life seem like a novel but it's all true. All the toughness and perseverance Back endured and that was described in this book was real. The only complaint I have is that towards the end it started to feel like a chore. His final days were not exciting, and unfortunately, that makes the book less exciting. Overall, though, it's a pretty good book that sheds light on a forgotten figure in history.
July 30, 2017
Exhilarating, a real triumph of human spirit.
June 14, 2025
Excellent storytelling of the various adventures and explorations of George Back. Thoroughly enjoyed.
Read
February 22, 2009the challenges of travel north of the US border
December 6, 2010
Looks like a good read.
March 15, 2011
Facinating.
January 2, 2016
Awesome!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews