Lands Forlorn: A Story of an Expedition to Hearne’s Coppermine River.

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p. 45-46, on finding two dead bodies, a dirty note-book, and some carbolic acid: The stench was insufferable, worse than any other form of decomposing animal matter, and blended with it was the peculiarly acrid smell of old smoke from spruce fires. One could remain in that loath some atmosphere only a few minutes at a time; the bodies were in a state of decomposition so advance that it was necessary to break the bunks down and carry them out as they lay. Close to the house on that pleasant point we buried them both in one grave, dug as deep as the frozen ground permitted.

The Search for the North Pole; Or, Life in the Great White World….

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Baldwin’s papers are at the Library of Congress (q.v.); this book was written before some of his expeditionary work. Interestingly, he seems to have been an ardent Freemason and his chapter XLVI “Lovers of the Arts and Sciences: Free and Accepted Masonry in Arctic Exploration,” lists a number of explorers who shared that association: Kane, Hayes, Greely, Melville, Gilder, and Lt. Peary (with whom he later squabbled. See p. 507-12.)

Torrey’s Narrative, Or, The Life and Adventures of William Torrey. Written by Himself.

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p. 152, on conflicts between missionaries and Marquesas natives: The Otaheitean and Marquisian languages are so nearly alike they could converse without an interpreter. Mr. Daylia, in one of his meetings, said much about the good land and a bad land, telling them if they would be good and pray they would go to the good land, when they died. This he explained in a manner suited to their understanding. One of the chiefs jumped up and asked if the missionary who died at Nukuhivah (an English missionary who died about two years before) had gone to that good land. Mr. Daylia assured them he had, when, unwilling to believe it, they sent four men to that island, (about fifty miles) to get some of the bones. At the expiration of five or six days they returned, bringing bones with them; and at the next meeting, when Daylia was again telling of the good land, they set up a shouting, calling him a liar and showed him the bones. They told him he had been driven from his own land and had come to live with them, and he might stop preaching about his good land and his bad land, for they would not believe him. In vain were his remonstrances with them. They told him if he would climb a lofty cocoa-nut tree, which stood near, and jump among the rocks unhurt, they would believe him.

Journal of the lst 2 months Dec 1910, Jan 1911 of the Terra Nova expedition

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[Griffith] Taylor Collection. “Journal of the lst 2 months Dec 1910, Jan 1911 of the Terra Nova expedition, some of which was published in the Melbourne Argus, and in fact he was composing this journal with that publication in mind (see p. 34).

High Latitude.

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John King Davis participated in three epochal Antarctic expeditions as 1) Chief Officer of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition in 1907, 2) as Mawson’s Second in Command and Master of the Aurora in 1911, and 3) he commanded the Ross Sea Relief Expedition in search of Shackleton’s transcontinental party stranded on Ross Island in 1916. Covering his many other assignments before and after, Davis gives a comprehensive autobiography of his career. He is a fine but not dramatic story teller who handles the crises of his expeditions with a certain detachment. He speaks of loneliness but not with how it was relieved, and therefore little about reading. His descriptions of preliminary planning for voyages is particularly good.

Children of the Light: The Rise and Fall of New Bedford Whaling and the Death of the Arctic Fleet

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A somewhat elegiac tale of the decline of whaling and New Bedford, contrasted with descriptions of the life of the Inuit, before and after the coming of the whalers to the Beaufort Sea area. Main focus at the end is on the disastrous season at Pt. Barrow of the whaling fleet which abandoned over 25 ships, but managed to rescue over 1200 whalemen.

Born Adventurer: The Life of Frank Bickerton, Antarctic Pioneer.

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Bickerton was a member of Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, but resigned from Shackleton’s Endurance to join the war effort before Shackleton left for Antarctica. Although this is a full biography of Bickerton, the story of the AAE takes up the first half of the book, followed by a separate chapter on the Endurance. John King Davis, a multi-facited friend of Mawson, served as captain of Aurora, irritating a good number of officers and men, though seldom Mawson.

Explorers Club Archives II

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Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, EC2007-07 [Not all of these files have been carefully reviewed and some await further inspection.]

Farthest North.

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On Nansen’s 1893-96 Fram expedition and the first wintering over.

The Content of the Kettles.

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An even-handed account of Dickens’ attack in Household Words on John Rae’s reports of cannibalism among the Franklin party, reporting Rae’s eventual vindication.

The Voyage of Captain Bellingshausen to the Antarctic Seas 1819-1821

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Only a fraction of Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin Bellingshausen’s (aka Thaddeus, 1778-1852) long career in the Russian Navy was devoted to Antarctic exploration, his two-year expedition exploring Antarctic in 1819-21. It was nonetheless a notable venture as the second circumnavigation of the continent (the first was by Captain Cook in 1773-74), and the first actual sighting of the Continent in January 1820. His discovery of Alexander Island and the naming of the Bellingshausen Sea were not much honored in Russia since they were of little immediate practical use, but his achievements are now much more fully recognized, At least as translated and then edited in this version, Bellingshausen appears to have an easy-going if formal style of writing and shows himself to be a most judicious man in both his navigation and his leadership of the voyage, a character much doubted by his critics.

An Arctic Whaling Diary: The Journal of Captain George Comer in Hudson Bay, 1903-1905.

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A straightforward and not too revealing journal of Hudson Bay whaling at the beginning of the 20th century, just as Amundsen was coming through on his NW Passage. Comer was commanding the American whaler Era at the end of the whaling era. Has a few interesting book notes:

James Eight and the Palmer-Pendleton Expedition of 1829-1831,

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p. 146-47: The scientific program of the expedition was sponsored by the Lyceum for Natural History of the City of New York. Newspapers encouraged private citizens to lend books, charts, and instruments to the expedition, and when the Annawan sailed it was said to have on board a fine collection of instruments and several hundred books.