Exploring Other Worlds tells the intertwined stories of the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the spiritualist medium Margaret Fox and examines their unlikely relationship. Kane, from a prominent Philadelphia family, became one of the most renowned and honored explorers of the antebellum era. Fox grew up in rural upstate New York and, as one of the Fox Sisters, became a famed and somewhat notorious "spirit raper" whose strange "knocks" were said to be communications from the dead. The two were rumored to have had a love affair, and they may even have been secretly married.In their...

Peter Pond, a fur trader, explorer, and amateur mapmaker, spent his life ranging much farther afield than Milford, Connecticut, where he was born and died (1740 1807). He traded around the Great Lakes, on the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers, and in the Canadian Northwest and is also well known as a partner in Montreal s North West Company and as mentor to Alexander Mackenzie, who journeyed down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Sea. Knowing eighteenth-century North America on a scale that few others did, Pond drew some of the earliest maps of western Canada.

In this...