p. 59: Conclusion—Advice to Apprentices. NOW if any youth, who is intending going to sea, should read this rough sketch of the life of an apprentice, I would advise him to be very careful how he enters upon his duties. He should be civil to everybody and dutiful to his officers, doing his best to gain their good-will by performing what he is told, cheerfully. When he is set to do anything, do it quickly with a good grace. Nobody gains ill-will so soon as a sulky, grumbling boy. I will vouchsafe to say at the end of a long voyage a civil boy will be respected. Do not listen to the yarns of some men. When they wish you to stay, leave at once, and begin some trifling job, also improve your mind with reading, and your spare time in learning navigation. When the men see you are superior in education to them, they will treat you with respect. If a poor fellow cannot write, proffer to write his letters for him. It will cost nothing, and he will send a letter to his friends, otherwise he would neglect doing so, and I can assure you that he will befriend you in some way or other. Help those who are not so well educated as yourself, and do not taunt them because they are not so, although there are not so many now as formerly who cannot write.
Old Whaling Days.
- Whalemen's Reading
To the Pole: The Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd, 1925-1927.
- 1928-30 First U.S. Antarctic Expedition (Byrd on City of New York).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Goerler’s edition has nothing to do with Antarctica other than Byrd’s having read about Scott’s death on returning from the South Pole:
Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818-1860.
- Arctic Reading: General
An important if a bit theoretical approach to telling the Arctic story in the earlier nineteenth century, and especially in their serial publication (as in Dickens e.g.). She compares Arctic exploration narratives, serially reported, with serialized fiction of the period. Main emphasis is on John Franklin, from his earlier land journeys to his disappearance in 1845, and the periodic discoveries of his fate.
In Search of a Penguin’s Egg.
- 1958-59 British FIDS (BAS) Expedition at Halley Bay.
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Norman Nelson was in the British National Service when he was transferred to a FIDS expedition to the Falklands and the Antarctic Peninsula in 1958. Raymond Priestley introduced him to the prospect of following up on Edward Wilson’s penguin studies of 1911. His experience was similar.
Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica.
- 2002-03 Australian Base Resupply (Griffiths).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Recounts a summer 2002-03 resupply trip, combining diary entries, with reflections, historical discursions, and thoughtful reporting on the trip. Some reading tidbits:
High Arctic: The Story of the British North Greenland Expedition.
- 1952-54 British North Greenland Expedition (Commander James Simpson).
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
Captain Banks was in the Royal Marines and was Officer-in-Charge of a Weasel team on this 1952-54 expedition.
Ice: The Antarctic Diary of Charles F. Passell.
- 1939-41 Third Byrd Antarctic Expedition.
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Passell was a paleontologist and geologist at the West Base of Byrd’s 3rd Antarctic expedition in 1939-41. Passell’s style is rather naïve (e.g., “Boy was it ever hot last night”), but he does mention a good deal of his reading:
My Life among the Bluejackets.
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
Agnes Weston initiated the English Sailor’s Rest institutions in Devonport and Portsmouth, where she provided food, lodging, reading and smoking rooms, and evangelical teaching for naval enlisted personnel. Her work here is distinguished by overweening piety, celebration of the heroism and probity of most of the royal navy members, a strong message of teetotalism and salvation. She published tracts and pamphlets such as Ashore and Afloat, and her Monthly Letters.
Ice and Esquimaux
- Arctic Reading: Inuit and other indigenous people
A series of articles on his 1864 voyage to Labrador on the Benjamin S. Wright with artist William Bradford. Passengers included a Colonel: A Greenland voyager, and better read than any man I have met in the literature of Northern travel.
South Polar Times
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Only copy, owned by Cherry-Garrard and largely produced by him. Introduction written later by Frank Debenham. No mention of Scott’s Polar party. “Ed., typed & illus. largely by me”—ACG. Drawings by Cherry have a remarkable delicacy.
Sailors’ Life and Sailors’ Yarns
- Whalemen's Reading
A journalistic kind of composite by a somewhat pious and rather strict naval disciplinarian. The following extracts some may read as the comments of a urbane writer of sound but severe morals; I see them as those of a pompous ass.
The Cruise of the Cachalot.
- Maritime Reading
This fictional description of the whaling life, written in the later 19th-century, should rank with Melville but devoid of Melville’s allegorical meanings. It is arguably a work of fiction by a fairly prolific novelist, though it hardly reads like fiction. Although Cachalot was a maritime pseudonym, the work seems to be an accurate account of the trials and occasional pleasures of whaling. It was published in 1898, probably 25 years after his whaling journeys. Scattered references do show his fairly wide reading, but these likely did not stem from his youthful shipboard reading.
The History Of Greenland: Containing a Description of The Country And Its Inhabitants: And Particularly a Relation of the Mission Carried on for above These Thirty Years by the Unitas Fratrum, at New Herrnhuth and Lichtenfels, in that Country.
- Greenland.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
First Edition of the English Translation. An authoritative description and history of Greenland and chronicle of the establishment and progress of the Moravian missionary settlements at New Herrnhuth and Lichtenfels. Cranz's work contains extensive discussion of natural history, whaling, sealing and fishing, the manners and customs of the native Greenlanders, their moral character, diseases, health and medicine, language, &c., and an account of early Norse exploration. Dr. Johnson declared that very few books had ever affected him so deeply as Cranz's. The continuation, covering the period 1763 to 1768, includes the narrative of Matthaeus Stach's travels in the south of Greenland, and further observations on the country and its inhabitants.
Under Sail to Greenland, Being an Account of the Voyage of the Cutter “Direction”. 1929.
- 1929 Private US Voyage to Greenland (aboard Direction with Arthur Allen and Rockwell Kent).
- Arctic Reading: United States
An easygoing and relaxed account of the Greenland trip by three twenty-year olds including Rockwell Kent (who took the trip for painting purposes primarily) in a small vessel which was wrecked near Godthaab in the summer of 1929. Tragic in that the author was killed in a car crash the month after returning to the US. A few reading and library references are included in this adventure:
To the Arctic: The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present.
- Arctic Reading: General
p. 103, on Parry’s 1819-20 expedition: A school was formed to teach the men to read and write. Captain Sabine edited a weekly, the North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, for the amusement of the officers, and they in turn amused the men. Fortnightly a farce that had had a successful run in London was given. Christmas was celebrated by a special dinner and an operetta, Northwest Passage. [A facsimile page of the gazette is on p. 102.]