An autobiographical/historical account of his and various explorer’s travels in Ellesmere.
p. 197, in chapter on Nares expedition: In March, after a long winter in which condensation had also been the main problem on the ship—one officer rigged an umbrella over his chair so he could read without water raining onto his book—the sledging trauma began again.
p. 213, says that the current military base at Alert has a library.
p. 253, at abandoned RCMP post at Bache Peninsula: The buildings were gone but plenty of eloquent garbage from that golden age of the RCMP remained [1953-63]…, even a box of paperbacks that had helped the Mounties endure the long winter. Moisture had glued some of the pages together, giving new meaning to the term pulp fiction, but considering that the books had sat outside for seventy years, they were in good shape. Most were Edwardian society novels, with characters such as Lord Fisher and Mr. Asquith and chapter openings, such as ‘The loveliest mouth in France turned into a distracting smile….’ [Something seems wrong here: he seems to refer these books to Greely at Camp Clay in 1884, which would have been 70 years before RCMP came, but theirs would probably not be paperbacks and couldn’t have been Edwardian.]