In a moment of candor, Kane admitted that he and Maggie were a pair of operators. “When I think of you, dear darling,” he wrote to her, “wasting your time and youth and conscience for a few paltry dollars, and think of the crowds who come nightly to hear of the wild stories of the frozen north, I sometimes feel that we are not so far removed after all. My brain and your body are each the sources of attraction, and I confess that there is not so much difference.” Mrs. Fox tried to keep the lovers apart, but they considered themselves engaged. Before returning to the Arctic, Kane took a drastic step: to remove Maggie from her family’s influence, he sequestered her with friends of his outside Philadelphia, where she began to receive the education she’d missed out on.

Back in his element with the clock ticking, Kane had little use for caution. Where a more deliberate explorer might hug the shores of a bay, Kane would steer between lunging icebergs in the main channel. But he learned from his mistakes and took advice from local Eskimos, which is more than can be said for many later explorers.

Though Kane and company were gone more than two years, this second attempt to track down Franklin was a true voyage for only a few months. The rest of the time, the ship was stuck fast in ice. The men stripped its interior of wood to burn in the stoves and fought against scurvy by consuming the few birds and marine mammals they managed to kill. Kane, who might have been thought especially vulnerable because of his weakness, was the only traveler to escape the disease—fresh meat can be preventive, there was a ready source on board, but he couldn’t get anyone else to join him for a bowl of rat soup. When the men felt up to it, they explored. One party got stranded and sent a man back for help. The fellow arrived so weak and addled that he couldn’t remember where he’d left his comrades, but Kane and other volunteers went out and found them anyway.

What Kane could not do was keep his men in line. Unrelenting winter darkness, temperatures that bottomed out at 69 degrees below zero, illness, boredom, being cooped up with the same people for months on end—so much cumulative misery tested the crew’s resolve. Some of them cracked, announcing their intention to abandon the marooned ship and strike out for civilization. For all of Kane’s shaky leadership, he handled the mutiny well. He gave everyone a choice, contained his fury when some of those he relied on most raised their hands to leave, talked a few into reconsidering, and grubstaked those who insisted on going. Four months later, when the deserters came straggling back, he honored his pledge to accept them.

The Second Grinnell Expedition, as it was called, found no trace of Franklin (he and his party had long since perished on a Canadian island), but it did lay down a route toward the North Pole. In the spring of 1855, Kane and his men abandoned ship and crept south in sledges and boats. Eighty-four harrowing days later, they reached an Eskimo settlement, where a Danish supply vessel took them on board. The expedition was a mélange of stumbles and regained balance, of mutiny and forgiveness, of gruesome weather and excruciating hardship, of exhilarating beauty and courageous enterprise—and Kane had it all down in journal entries and sketches, which he couldn’t wait to turn into a book.

On October 11, 1855, the forts of New York City fired cannons to welcome back Kane and his crew. The longsuffering Maggie Fox, in town on a visit, expected her man to pay a call that evening. She waited up for him till midnight, but in vain. He stopped by the next day, only to drop a bombshell. His family was adamant: He couldn’t marry her. He asked her to sign a statement denying that they were engaged, which she did. A few days later, he found the courage to return, hand the paper over, and watch as Fox tore it up.