Arctic Reading: United States

Unfortunately, most of the readings recorded in Stuck’s first book have only to do with temperature readings, with a few minor exceptions, compared to the prodigious reading recorded in his other books.

p. 77: The division of the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some leisure at night, and I found time to read through again The Cloister and the Hearth and Westward Ho! with much pleasure, quite agreeing with Sir Walter Besant’s judgment that the former is one of the best historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers in literature to me than Denys of Bergundy, with his “Courage, camarades, le diable est mort!” This matter of winter reading is a difficult one, because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan is to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics that have been read before, and renew my acquaintance with them. But reading by the light of one candle, though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our degenerate eyes.

Stuck’s second book on Alaska, this mainly on the interior of the state based on summer travels, on the Inside Passage, the Yukon, and its tributaries.

One of four travel accounts by the “Archdeacon of the Yukon and the Arctic,” with Walter Harper as companion. “My purpose was an enquiry into their present state, physical, mental, moral and religious, industrial and domestic, into their prospects, into what the government and the religious organizations have done and are doing for them, and what should yet be done” (p. viii). Among other things the archdeacon did a good deal of reading during his journey, not all of which will be captured here.