Shackleton Collection.

Rendell, Kenneth. Exhibited at Boston Museum of Science, March 2001.
  • Heroic Age 1901-1921.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

Included in the exhibit were: Tennyson, Alfred Lord. Complete Works. Given in 1908 to Lt. Shackleton and the Officers of the Nimrod, and kept in officer’s mess; Swinburne Poems. Signed by Shackleton; South. First ed. Signed by Shackleton; Nautical Almanac. 1908. Shackleton’s copy from the Nimrod; Inscribed portrait of Shackleton; Signed 1914 solicitation letter for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition; Signed photograph of Frank Hurley’s Winter Night; Cover illustration of South, presented to a Mrs. Pearson.

Siberia in Europe: A Visit to the Valley of the Petchora in North-East Europe.

Seebohm, Henry. London: John Murray, 1880.
  • Arctic Reading: Russia
 Preview 

p. 3-4: My friend Harvie-Brown had been collecting information about the river Petchora for some time, and it was finally arranged that we should spend the summer of 1875 there together. We were under the impression that, ornithologically speaking, it was virgin ground, but in this we afterwards discovered that we were mistaken. So far as we were able to ascertain, no Englishman had travelled from Archangel to the Petchora for 250 years. In that curious old book called ‘Purchas his Pilgrimes,’ published in 1625, may be found the narrative of divers merchants and mariners who visited this river between the years 1611 and 1615 for the purpose of establishing a trade there in furs and skins, especially beaver, for which Ust-Zylma on the Petchora was at that time celebrated.

In Search of a Penguin’s Egg.

Norman, Nelson. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009.
  • 1958-59 British FIDS (BAS) Expedition at Halley Bay.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

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.

Report on Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1883.

Garlington, Ernest A. Washington: Signal Office, 1883. Signal Office Notes No. 10, re the Yantic and Porteus debacle.
  • 1883 Lady Franklin Bay Relief Expedition.
  • Maritime Reading
 Preview 

p. 25-7: Scientific Outfit of the Lady Franklin Bay Relief Expedition of 1883. Memorandum B, includes the following items:

Safe Return Doubtful: The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration.

Maxtone-Graham, John. New York: Scribner’s, 1988.
  • Heroic Age 1901-1921.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

p. 1: On the night of January 30, 1916, a frail, white-haired gentleman retired to the bedroom of his house in London’s Eccleston Square. Once undressed, he swung expertly into a hammock and, as he had done for more than seven decades, read himself to sleep in traditional Royal Navy fashion: One hand held his book, the other a candle, exactly as he had learned as a midshipman in 1844.

And the Whale is Ours: Creative Writing of American Whalemen.

Miller, Pamela A. (Boston: David R. Godine: Kendall Whaling Museum 1979).
  • Maritime Reading
 Preview 

A book of extensive excerpts of whalemen’s own escape literature, their own personal journals, often sentimental claptrap about home, love, and death, but best when devoted to their trade of whaling which they tended to depict accurately and realistically.

Redburn: His First Voyage, being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service

Melville, Herman. . (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern-Newberry, 1969).
  • Maritime Reading
 Preview 

p. 47-8: And I remembered reading in a magazine, called the Sailors’ Magazine, with a sea-blue cover, and a ship painted on the back, about pious seamen who never swore, and paid over all their wages to the poor heathen in India; and how that when they were too old to go to sea, these pious old sailors found a delightful home for life in the Hospital, where they had nothing to do, but prepare themselves for their latter end. And I wondered whether there were any such good sailors among my ship-mates; and observing that one of them laid on deck apart from the rest, I thought to be sure that he was one of them: so I did not disturb his devotions: but I was afterwards shocked at discovering that he was only fast asleep, with one of the brown jugs by his side.

Before the Heroes Came: Antarctica in the 1890s.

Baughman, T. H. Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1994.
  • Antarctic Reading: General
 Preview 

A solid but rather dry account of exploration in Antarctica during the decade before Robert Falcon Scott’s first expedition aboard the Discovery, and centered on Carsten Borchgrevink, his first landing on the Antarctic Continent, and his 1898-1900 Southern Cross expedition. In his concluding chapter, “Lessons not Learned,” Baughman explicitly accuses Clements Markham and Scott of failing to learn the lessons from the previous decade, thus leading to their “heroic” failure. In particular Markham insisted on naval leadership by the wrong people, avoiding scientific expertise, bypassing William Speirs Bruce for Scott, etc.

High Latitude.

Davis, John King. Melbourne, Victoria, NZ: Melbourne University Press, 1962.
  • Heroic Age 1901-1921.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

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.