Tragedy and Triumph: the Journals of Captain R. F. Scott’s Last Polar Expedition.

Scott, Robert Falcon. New York: Konecky & Konecky [n.d.].
  • 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

These journals include rather little on reading. The expedition’s lecture series implies a good library available to the lecturers, all 13 of them. Subjects included mostly scientific matter: parasitology, scurvy, polar clothing, sledging diets, motor sledges, geology, volcanoes, surveying, Lololand, biology, horse management, Burma, China, India, Japan; Scott himself lectured on the icebarrier and inland ice, and on plays for the Southern Journey. Other topics were coronas, hales, rainbows and auroras, general meteorology, the Beardmore glacier, physiography, flying birds, penguins, ice problems, radium, and the constitution of matter. [see index p. 511-12]

The People of the Polar North: A Record.

Rasmussen, Knud. Compiled from the Danish Originals and Edited by G. Herring. Illustrations by Count Harald Moltke. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1908. [another edition London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1908].
  • Greenland.
  • Arctic Reading: Canada
 Preview 

But, as its title implies, it is first and foremost an account of the most northerly dwelling people in the world, that is to say, of the little Eskimo group of nomads who wander from settlement to settlement between Cape York, North of Melville Bay, and Cape Alexander (approximately therefore between 76˚ and 78˚ N. latitude), and who are called in this book the Polar Eskimos [Editor’s Preface].

Fourteen Men: The Story of the Antarctic Expedition to Heard Island

Scholes, Arthur. New York: Dutton, 1952.
  • 1947-49 Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (Heard Island and Macquarie Island).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

An expedition of scientific research, chiefly meteorological and magnetic, but with an interest in Australian claims in Antarctica. Stokes was a radioman but also one of the “mets.” The Captain of the ship was Lt. Cmd. George Dixon; the leader of the shore party for Heard Island was Stuart Campbell. The ship was Ellsworth’s Wyatt Earp, where the officers and men were separated even for the alternate night movies. The trip to Heard Island (4000 kilometers southwest of Australia) was so full of weather-related dangers that references to reading do not occur until one third of the way into the book, and then not very many. Most winterover books have a central winter chapter (July/August) that discusses what the men did to pass the time. This lacks such a chapter, never talks about what the author himself read, and mainly recounts weather-related adventures during that period. Most of the last 150 pages deals with the fauna of Heard Island.

Diary, 1881 July 7—l883 Aug 2.

Rice, George W. Stefansson MSS. 186, Dartmouth College Library.
  • 1881-84 International Physical Year US Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay (led by Adolphus Greely).
  • Arctic Reading: United States
 Preview 

A record of Rice’s experiences as photographer on the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 1881-1884. Unpaged but carefully dated throughout.

Forty Years for Labrador.

Grenfell, Wilfred, Sir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Riverside Press, 1932.
  • Arctic Reading: Canada
 Preview 

A revised and mostly rewritten version of his earlier A Labrador Doctor,the autobiography of a medical missionary in Labrador.

Lansing, Alfred. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1959.
  • 1914-16 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (Shackleton on Endurance).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

Lansing was an American journalist who interviewed all of the survivors of the Expedition from the 1950s and used all of the extant journals (mostly at SPRI) to write this amazing book.

A Voyage Around the World with the Romanzov Exploring Expedition in the Years 1815-1818 in the Brig

Chamisso, Adelbert von. Rurik, Captain Otto von Kotzebue. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986).
  • 1815-18 Russian Exploring Expedition (Captain Otto von Kotzebue aboard Rurik).
  • Global Circumnavigations and Cape Horn Transits.
  • Maritime Reading
 Preview 

p. 27, a paean to Kotzebue as author, the father of this Captain: How often in the far ends of the earth, namely on O-Wahu [O’ahu], Guaján [Guam], etc., have I been praised for my small share in the enterprise of his son, in order to cast a hem of the mantle of his fame over me. Everywhere we heard his name mentioned. American newspapers reported that The Stranger had been performed to extraordinary applause. All the libraries in the Aleutian Islands, as far as I have investigated them, consisted of a single volume of the Russian translation of Kotzebue.”

Kah´Da: Life of a North Greenland Eskimo Boy.

MacMillan, Donald Baxter. Garden City. NY: Doubleday, 1930.
  • Arctic Reading: United States
 Preview 

A juvenile about the Smith Sound Eskimos, with whom MacMillan had lived for a total of six years.

The Seamen’s Friend: a Sketch of the American Seamen’s Friend Society by its Secretary.

Webster, George Sidney. New York: American Seamen’s Friend Society, 1932.
  • Whalemen's Reading
 Preview 

p. 9: NY Bethel Union formed June 4, 1821, modeled on the Bethel Union of London. Mariners’ Magazine in April 1825 advocated for a similar society in NY. By then, the Magazine said, there were seventy Bethel Unions, 33 Marine Bible societies, and 15 seamen’s churches and floating Bethels.

A Year in Space: A Lifetime of Discovery.

Kelly, Scott and Margaret Lazarus Dean. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Review by Jaroslav Kalfar in New York Times Book Review(Dec. 10, 2017) p. 29.
  • Arctic Reading: General
 Preview 

After comparison to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff as an influence on the author: Another noted inspiration is the book after which Kelly named his own, and which he carries with him on multiple voyages to the International Space Station: “Endurance,” by Alfred Lansing, about Ernest Shackleton’s historic expedition to the South Pole, during which his crew cheated death after their ship became trapped in a polar pack ice, overcoming 850 miles of heavy seas on small lifeboats [not true] … Lansing’s account is a stark reminder that along with the rock-star image of the explorer comes the omnipresent specter of death. …

Under the Ocean to the South Pole; or, The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Porpoise.

Rockwood, Roy. New York: Cupples & Leon, 1907.
  • Antarctic Reading: General
 Preview 

This is a sequel to Through the Air to the North Pole, in which some boys reached the North Pole but fought some savage Eskimos. Professor Henderson, probably modeled on Peary [who incidentally called himself Professor in Snowfolk], has a black companion named Washington White, probably modeled on Henson: “The Negro, who was a genius in his own way, though somewhat inclined to use big words, of the meaning of which he knew little and cared less” (p. 5). The novel posits land and an open sea at the SP, says he had read all the explorer accounts (p. 11). Professor Henderson is the Mate and the inventor of the ship (cf. Roosevelt). The ship after many adventures makes it to the SP amidst a sea of boiling water. Next adventure promised is a balloon to the center of the earth.