Summary [from ABEBooks]: In becoming "a useful man" on the maritime stage, Matthew Fontaine Maury focused light on the ills of a clique-ridden Navy, charted sea lanes and bested Great Britain's admiralty in securing the fastest, safest routes to India and Australia. He helped bind the Old and New worlds with the laying of the transatlantic cable, forcefully advocated Southern rights in a troubled union, and preached Manifest Destiny from the Arctic to Cape Horn. Late in life, he revolutionized warfare in perfecting electronically detonated mines. Maury's eagerness to go to the public in person and in print on the questions of the day riled powerful men in business and politics, and the U.S., Confederate and Royal navies. They dismissed him as the "Man on the Hill." Over his career, Maury more than once ran afoul of Jefferson Davis, and Stephen R. Mallory, secretary of the Confederate States Navy. He argued against eminent members of the nation's emerging scientific community in a decades-long debate over science for its own sake versus science for the people's sake. Through the political, social and scientific struggles of his time, however, Maury had his share of powerful allies, like President John Tyler; but by the early 1870s they, too, were in eclipse or in the grave.
Matthew Fontaine Maury, Father of Oceanography: A Biography, 1806-1873.
- Maritime Reading
Narrators of the Arctic: Images and Movements in Northland Narratives.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
Asks what imperatives the narrator of the Arctic operates under, i.e. how did motivation change their narratives?
Either/Or
- Arctic Reading: General
p. 281, in “The Rotation Method” section (p. 279-96): Starting from a principle is affirmed by people of experience to be a very reasonable procedure; I am willing to humor them, and so begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. The principle possesses the quality of being in the highest degree repellent, an essential requirement in the case of negative principles, which are in the last analysis the principles of all motion. It is not merely repellent, but infinitely forbidding; and whoever has this principle back of him cannot but receive an infinite impetus forward, to help him make new discoveries. For; if my principle is true, one need only consider how ruinous boredom is for humanity, and by properly adjusting the intensity of one’s concentration upon this fundamental truth, attain any desired degree of momentum. Should one wish to attain the maximum momentum, even to the point of almost endangering the driving power, one need only say to oneself: Boredom is the root of all evil. Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and stolid, should have such power to set in motion. The influence it exerts is altogether magical, except it is not the influence of attraction, but of repulsion.
In the Strange South Seas.
- Maritime Reading
p. 10-11: So, to The Man Who Could Not Go, I address this book ---to the elderly, white-waistcoated city magnate, grave autocrat of his clerkly kingdom (never lie to me, sir what was your favourite reading in the sixties, and why were you a very fair pistol shot, right up to the time when you were made junior manager ?)—to the serious family solicitor, enjoying his father’s good old practice and house, and counting among the furnishings of the latter, a shelf of Marryats, Mayne Reids, and Michael Scotts, wonder fully free of dust—to the comfortable clergyman, immersed in parish cares, who has the oddest fancy at times for standing on dock-heads, and snifling up odours of rope and tar—to all of you, the army of the brave, unwilling, more or less resigned Left Behinds, who have forgotten years ago, or who will never forget while spiring masts stand thick against blue skies, and keen salt winds wake madness in the brain—to all I say: Greeting l and may the tale of another’s happier chance send, from the fluttering pages of a book, a breath of the far-off lands and the calling sea.
The Making of an Explorer: George Hubert Wilkins and the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1916.
- 1913-16 Canadian Arctic Expedition (Led by Stefansson with Captain Bob Bartlett commanding the Karluk).
- Arctic Reading: Canada
The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the ‘Fram,’ 1910-1912.
- 1910-12 Norwegian National Antarctic Expedition (Amundsen on Fram).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Volume I, p. 68: aboard the Fram: We carried an extraordinarily copious library; presents of books were showered upon us in great quantities. I suppose the Fram’s library at the present moment contains at least 3,000 volumes.
Dr Kane’s Arctic Voyage: Explanatory of a Pictorial Illustration of the Second Grinnell Expedition.
- 1848-59 The Franklin Search.
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
This is a printed version of Morton’s oral narrative of a panorama of Grinnell’s second expedition, devised shortly after Kane’s death. The introduction is a glowing panegyric to Kane.
Voyages of a Modern Viking
- Arctic Reading: Europe including Scandinavia
A very pleasant autobiography of someone who sailed with Amundsen on the Gjoa, the Fram, and the Maud, based on his diaries and presumably translated from Norwegian (though there is no indication).
A Report on the Resources of Iceland and Greenland.
- Arctic Reading: United States
This is a report commissioned by William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, on the desirability of acquiring Iceland and Greenland for the US, just as the U.S. had acquired a few Caribbean islands and Alaska.
Icy Graves: Exploration and Death in the Antarctic
- Antarctic Reading: General
Haddelsey here explores the primary causes of fatal accidents and mistakes causing death in Antarctica: fire, sea ice, mechanical transport, mental illness, aviation, and hypothermia. It is not surprising that a book dealing mostly with sudden catastrophes does not pause to reflect on what reading matter the destined figures had with them. The author tells quite familiar stories extremely well, and ends with a short chapter on risks and risk-taking in Antarctica, a British shortcoming in their vaunted amateurism.
A Yachting Cruise in the South Seas.
- 1872- Private British Voyage to Sandwich Islands (Cunard Line).
- Maritime Reading
p. 6-7, Chapter I: The weather now was intensely hot and fine, and that feeling of drowsiness and languor came over me, which I have always experienced on first reaching the tropics. Reading becomes a delusion and a snare, and to take up a book means to be asleep in a few minutes. On Sunday, May 11th, we sighted Rotumah. This was the first island I intended visiting, my object here being to ship some of the natives, to strengthen my present crew. No one ought to attempt a voyage through the South Sea Islands without carrying an extra crew of this kind. For in the first place there are so many islands where there is no anchorage or perhaps a very precarious one, that it is better to keep the vessel standing off and on, worked by the white crew, while those who wish to visit the island go away in the boat manned by the South Sea Islanders. A coloured crew, too, are better able to row about all day in the hot sun; they are cheery, light-hearted companions, and are always ready, and enjoy the fun of diving into the water after any shell or piece of coral that one may fancy whilst rowing over the reefs.
Journal of the lst 2 months Dec 1910, Jan 1911 of the Terra Nova expedition
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
[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).
. Arctic Manual
- Arctic Reading: Canada
p. xi: Describes use of Stefansson’s library of over 15,000 books, pamphlets, and manuscripts in preparing his report on living and operating conditions in the Arctic, and also the preparation of this Manual ( 1935-43).
A Narrative of the Life, Travels and Sufferings of Thomas W. Smith: Comprising an Account of His Early Life, Adoption by the Gipsys; His Travels during Eighteen Voyages to Various Parts of the World… near the South Pole
- Whalemen's Reading
Some of the text in the Hathi Trust version of this early whaleman’s memoir is illegible from over-inking in the original, but there is this account of a typical promise of conversion:
Ned Myers; Or, A Life before the Mast.
- Whalemen's Reading
An 1840 Cooper work in which he served as amanuensis in telling the narrative of Ned Evans attempting to “lay before the world the experience of a common seaman,” such as Cooper himself knew, and which follows that pattern of degradation and conversion. I confess to an early impression that the work was more novel than narrative, and it certainly is an hybrid genre of edited narrative, or a semi-imaginary reconstruction. The repeated cycle of debauchment does become tiresome.