Clement Markham: Longest Service Officer, Most Prolific Editor,

Savours, Ann. in Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth: Studies in the History of The Hakluyt Society, 1846-1996. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996) p. 165-88.
  • Arctic Reading: Great Britain

p. 168, on Markham’s 1850-51 Greenland expedition: Confined to a tent by a storm, he ‘Read Pickwick aloud, ate, drank, slept and read Johnson’s life of Pope, alternately. Had a duck and sandpipers stewed in green pea soup, for dinner.’ See Markham’s MS. Journal in the Royal Geographical Society, Archives, CRM 3. This entry is from 7 July 1851.

p. 187: On 29 January [1916] Markham was in bed suffering from one of his recurrent attacks of gout and reading an early Portuguese printed book. Under an electric light bulb not switched on, he read by candle-light—as he had done as a midshipman in his hammock. Perhaps he nodded off for a moment and the flame caught his bedclothes. Although his calls for assistance were instantly met and the fire extinguished, the shock caused him to lose consciousness and he died peacefully after some twenty hours.