In the spring of 1933, Canadian poet E.J. Pratt conceived the idea of writing a verse epic on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage, a story that had "long haunted his imagination." Pratt's sources of information about Franklin, and about the Arctic in general, were almost purely literary, and rather strangely assorted. One that had a particularly strong impact was James Macdonald Oxley's Hentyesque novel North Overland with Franklin (1901), ...