Peter Halkett was the son of one of the directors of the Hudson Bay Company, so had grown up in what was then the wild and largely unexplored (at least by westerners) fastnesses of Canada. It must have been a childhood full of stories – the voyageurs returning from trapping expeditions, British adventurers probing the edges of this new dominion and native peoples who had lived for millennia in areas so inhospitable to Europeans that few could survive a month there.
So, it’s perhaps not surprising that Halkett had something of a wanderlust himself, returning to his native England in the 1840s to become a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Halkett believed he had more to offer the Navy than just his youth and enthusiasm. He had become fascinated with one of those British naval expeditions that we’d rather not talk about –Franklin’s disastrous Coppermine Expedition of 1819-22.
Led by John Franklin, who would go on to other bigger, disastrous expeditions, this...