p. 22, on the murder of a native by other natives: About 11 o'clock in the forenoon on the 17th of November, 1807, Mr. Rustan Nelson was sitting in his house reading, and Messrs. Charles Sandbourne and George F. Tilton were working in one of the other rooms, when they all heard two rifle shots fired in quick succession, followed shortly after by four others. Nelson thrust his revolver in his pocket, rushed out of the house, and there saw, close to the house, two natives, Avulik and Shukurana, each with a smoking rifle in his hand, standing over the body of Washok, which was lying on the snow close to his sled, pierced with six bullet holes. Washok's wife was close by, and several other natives were running to the scene of the firing. Sandbourne and Tilton ran out soon after Nelson, and after ascertaining that Washok was dead and beyond all help, they all returned to the house. Soon after the body was carried out into the country and put up on sticks, after the native fashion, the murderers aiding in the ceremony.
Report of the Cruise of the U. S. Revenue Cutter Bear and the Overland Expedition for the Relief of the Whalers in the Arctic Ocean, from November 27, 1897 to September 13, 1898.
- 1897-98 US Revenue Service Cruise and Overland Rescue Expedition in Relief of Whalers (Tuttle aboard Bear).
- Arctic Reading: United States
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:
The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768-1771.
- 1768-71 British Voyage to the South Pacific (aboard Endeavour commanded by Captain James Cook).
- Global Circumnavigations and Cape Horn Transits.
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Maritime Reading
Captain Cook’s first voyage rounded Cape Horn but came no closer to Antarctica. His second voyage was marked by his complete circumnavigation of the Antarctic continent, and his pessimistic statements that no one was likely to get any closer than he did through the impenetrable ice and fog.
The Heart of the Antarctic, Being the Story of the British Antarctic Expedition 1907-1909.
- 1907-09 British Antarctic Expedition (Shackleton on Nimrod).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
[From ABEBooks description] Shackleton's narrative of the "Nimrod" voyage and expedition of 1907-1909 is not only one of the classics of Polar exploration, but a great read in its own right. Shackleton had three goals for the mission and divided the company into three groups: one would set out to reach the Pole, another to plant a flag at the South Magnetic Pole, and the third to explore the Ross Barrier. This ambitious program was kept faithfully in the foreground, and although it was not possible to fulfill every detail of it, the mission is regarded as a triumphant success. "Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are incited simply by a love of adventure, some have a keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others are drawn away from trodden paths by the ‘lure of little voices,’ the mysterious fascination of the unknown. I think that in my own case it was a combination of these factors that determined me to try my fortune once again in the frozen south.
Narrative of the North Polar Expedition. U.S. Ship Polaris, Captain Charles Francis Hall Commanding.
- 1870-73 US North Pole Expedition of Charles Hall (aboard USS Polaris).
- Arctic Reading: United States
Here is the official report of the Expedition, prepared from the journals of the officers and men, including the incidents of George Tyson’s ice-floe party. William Barr, in his 2016 edition of Bessel’s journal, refers to this as a “sugar-coated” account of the expedition.
The Wonders of the Arctic World: A History of All the Researches and Discoveries in the Frozen North, from the Earliest Times. Together with a Complete and Reliable History of The Polaris Expedition. By William H. Cunnington.
- 1870-73 US North Pole Expedition of Charles Hall (aboard USS Polaris).
- Arctic Reading: United States
This large volume neatly combines two works, the first a general history of arctic exploration up to the Hall expedition (Sargent) with an early hagiography of Hall, or in Parry’s words, a “massive whitewash” .
She Went a-whaling: the Journal of Martha Smith Brewer Brown.
- 1847-48 Whaling Voyage to South Pacific (aboard Lucy Ann).
- Maritime Reading
An example of a whaling captain’s wife going to sea with him. Whaling wives were usually known for their New England piety amidst the rough-hewn crews of 19th-century whaling ships. This is the diary of one of them, Martha Brown, who sailed from Orient NY aboard the Lucy Ann on August 31, 1847, on an eastward voyage round the world that eventually passed Cape Horn:
A Visit to the South Seas, in the U.S. Ship Vincennes, During the years 1829 and 1830; with Scenes in Brazil, Peru, Manila, the Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena.
- 1829-30 US Circumnavigation (W.C.B. Finch aboard USS Vincennes).
- Global Circumnavigations and Cape Horn Transits.
- Maritime Reading
Stewart was in effect the missionary narrator of this somewhat odd circumnavigation in that it didn’t intend circling the globe until it was already on the Pacific Coast. He began on a different ship and then joined the round the world cruise aboard the Vincennes at Callao, Peru, on July 29th. [Note: there are variant editions of this work, with differing dates and paginations. The Google version of Vol. I does not indicate date but maybe 1832 rather than the first.
Antarctica Sixty Years Ago: A Re-appraisal of the British Expedition 1934-1937.
- 1934-37 British Graham Land Expedition.
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
p. 151: Our reading matter, our library, was limited and exiguous. We had a pleasing special bookplate that may be a collector’s item one day. We had a good collection of Antarctic exploratory histories of past expeditions, a few basic reference books, to which each of us had added a personal collection limited, I think it was, to 10 volumes each. The voyage of the Beagle and Anson’s voyage I read while we sailed the Southern Ocean, and we compared the size and shape of Beagle with that of Penola. Darwin was a gentleman scientist; for him no hauling on the ropes watch by watch, by day and by night. Nor did Darwin nor Anson cook for the entire ship’s company, baking bread and washing up: times had changed, and they have changed again since. Darwin in Beagle started out at age 22, whereas I was already 23. The incredible genius of Darwin must astonish us all. Would that one could say with him in his biography: ‘My industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the observation and collection of facts. What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and devout.’
Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration.
- Arctic Reading: General
Studies polar explorations to prepare for lunar space travel.
“Diary”
- Maritime Reading
This observation brings me to the prompt for my own back-country tourism. I was in pursuit of my Scottish great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair, from Turriff in Aberdeenshire. In a chapbook, The Story of His Life and Times as Told by Himself, published in Columbo [Ceylon] in 1900, Sinclair briskly sketches a career that had some parallels with John Clare (an elective Scot when the humour took him). Born in 1832, there was a mean village upbringing. A book-hungry lad leaving school at 12 years of age and commencing his education, ‘such as it was and is’. Sinclair describes a farming family of ‘discounted’ Jacobite stock, a father getting work when he could as a thatcher and a barely literate mother. With his first earnings as a garden labourer, the boy walked to Aberdeen and bought six volumes of James Hervey’s Reflections on a Flower Garden—just as Clare had tramped from Helpston to Stamford, before the bookshop opened, to secure a coveted copy of James Thomson’s The Seasons. And like Clare, Sinclair paused on his return journey to investigate his purchase. ‘As I walked from Aberdeen I could not help sitting down occasionally by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and the neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy rose at 4 a.m. to cultivate his own small patch among ‘a wilderness of moorland farms’. His special pride was a plot of potatoes. He bathed in a burn and caught trout. The pattern of his life, the intimacy with the ground, the eye on the weather, the threats from landlords and remote investors, was a northern version of the subsistence regime of the Ash à ninka. After reading Alexander Humboldt’s Essay on the Geography of Plants, Sinclair conceived an ambition to follow in the author’s footsteps over the Andes.
The Man on the Ice Cap. The Life of August Courtauld.
- 1930-31 British Greenland Air Route Expedition.
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
Courtauld was a British yachtsman who notably spent a winter alone as meteorologist on the Greenland icecap in 1930-31, where he had considerable reading matter.
Three Years of Arctic Service, An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881-84 and the Attainment of the Farthest North.
- 1881-84 International Physical Year US Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay (led by Adolphus Greely).
- Arctic Reading: United States
These volumes are Greely’s personal, not official, somewhat sanitized version of his expedition and its aftermath. Much of the work is taken from Greely’s journals, and those passages are given within quotation marks, as in the original publication.
The Three Voyages of Edmond Halley in the Paramore 1698-1701.
- Global Circumnavigations and Cape Horn Transits.
- Maritime Reading
[Note]: Despite an unsuccessful first voyage, Halley retained the confidence of the Admiralty, and his second cruise from September 1699 to September 1700 was successful. He went south as far as 52° into the ice field north of the site of the modern Halley Bay Geophysical Observatory and was in considerable danger, as he was later from a storm off the coast of Africa. (ODNB). Though they were in iceberg infested waters with fogbound conditions, the journals indicate no unusual events.
Typed transcript of Endurance journal, 1914-15 and 1915-16.
- 1914-16 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (Shackleton on Endurance).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
p. 7, Nov 3, 1915 Wedn, after smashup: At the ship I entered Clark’s cabin which is just above water and got some books for him.