This voyage spent a little time in the Falklands and saw a few icebergs but it was not an Antarctic voyage. Reynolds, however, is an interesting character who influenced Poe with Mocha Dick and Poe died with delirious shouts of Reynolds name, espoused Symmes theory of the hollow earth, and almost single-handedly pushed for the U.S. Exploring Expedition, whose command eventually went to Wilkes. Here Reynolds asks for a strong navy in defense of American commerce, dedicated the work to Secretary and Officers of the Navy (with whom he later fought). His incisive and sharply sardonic style is best scene in his “Correspondence” a few years later with Harlan Davidson, Secretary of the Navy, whom he attacks for his delaying tactics over the expedition, which was approved 4 or 5 years before its departure.
Voyage of the United States Frigate Potomac…1831-34.
- 1831-34 US Circumnavigation (Downes aboard Potomac ).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
The Outpost of the Lost: An Arctic Adventure.
- 1881-84 International Physical Year US Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay (led by Adolphus Greely).
- Arctic Reading: United States
Mainly Brainard’s diary of the Greely retreat from Fort Conger, starting on August 9, 1883, to the rescue of only six survivors of the twenty-eight men, including Brainard, in June 1884.
Hell on Ice: The Saga of the “Jeannette“
- 1879-81 US North Pole Expedition (commanded by George De Long aboard Jeannette).
- Arctic Reading: United States
p. viii-ix, Preface: Reading what I could get my hands on concerning it [the Jeannette expedition], I soon enough saw that De Long's early failure was a more brilliant chapter in human struggle and achievement than the later successes of Peary and of Amundsen.
Melville in the South Seas.
- Arctic Reading: General
Melville joined the navy in August 1843, and joined the United States in Honolulu in 1844, spending fourteen months on U.S. naval duty between Honolulu and Boston, arriving there in October 1844.
To the Ends of the Earth.
- Antarctic Reading: General
Begins with 1925 cruise to Antarctica aboard Discovery, Scott’s old ship, commanded by Stenhouse. First brought gifts to Tristan da Cunha, including many writing implements, essentially useless to that population, and “a large quantity of Bibles, in which, however, the Tristans displayed very little interest, for the reason…that during the course of the years so many Bibles had been sent to the island that there was now an average of seven copies per inhabitant” (p. 20).
The Lure of the Labrador Wild: The Story of the Exploring Expedition Conducted by Leonidas Hubbard, Jr.
- 1903 US Personal Exploring Expedition to Labrador by Leonidas Hubbard Jr. and Dillon Wallace.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
As a young lawyer Wallace met Hubbard, an editor of Outing magazine, in 1900 and in 1903 they departed New York to explore the wilder and hitherto unexplored parts of Labrador. It was a difficult journey in which Hubbard died of starvation and Wallace managed to survive and go on to further explorations and successful books. Hubbard’s wife Mina felt that Wallace had disparaged her husband by implying that Leonidas caused the failure—she went on to her own career as successful competitor of Wallace as a Labrador explorer in the “great race of 1905.” All the reading that I could find was Scriptural and from The Book of Common Prayer.
The South Pole Expedition 1910-1912.
- 1910-12 Norwegian National Antarctic Expedition (Amundsen on Fram).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
A heavily illustrated English translation of Amundsen’s diaries from his South Pole expedition. The overwhelming impression of the first 100 pages is Amundsen’s love affair with the dogs, even when he is killing them or sacrificing them for food for the others.
In Search of a Polar Continent, 1905-1907.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
p. 22, re the Catholic mission at Resolution: The children are not only educated but clothed and fed. The girls are taught how to sew and how to make their own clothes, as well as how to read and write; whilst the boys, who are also trained in these latter academic, if elementary, exercises, acquire a variety of crafts which will be useful—in fact indispensable—to them in afterlife.
Labrador: Its Discovery, Exploration, and Development.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
p. 36: A book called the Chronicles of Eusebius, published by Henry Estienne in Paris, in 1512, describes seven savages who had been brought to Rouen from the country called Terre Neuve. There can be no doubt that the French fishermen, particularly from Normandy and Brittany, greatly preponderated in the fisheries of Newfoundland and Labrador during the sixteenth century. The New Interlude, 1517, to be quoted fully later, laments that while the English were neglecting the countries discovered by them, “full a hundred sail,” of the French loaded with fish there every year. While some allowance must be made for poetic licence, it was no doubt mainly correct. John Rut encountered eleven Norman vessels in the harbour of St. John’s in August, 1527, and the St. Malòins showed by their opposition to Jacques Cartier in 1533 that they carried on a regular fishery in the Straits of Belle Isle, and probably in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as well. In Edward VI’s Journal of his reign, he mentions that the French Ambassador informed him that the Emperor of Spain “had stayed certain French ships going fishing to Newfoundland.”
The Arctic in the British Imagination.
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
Starts with 1818 and Barrow’s Admiralty focus on the north for geographical, scientific, commercial, and nationalistic purposes. David describes three phases:
Edge of the World: Ross Island Antarctica: A Personal and Historical Narrative.
- Antarctic Reading: General
Neider tells much of the history of Antarctic exploration by focusing on the geographic area of Ross Island and the Ross Sea. The book has a good series of maps which helped me understand what I have often found a confusing place. The book itself is highly derivative, including long passages quoted from some very familiar works of the explorers, from Ross onwards, including Scott and Shackleton, but it also recounts the author’s own experiences and near disasters on his Deep Freeze expeditions to McMurdo and travels elsewhere in Antarctica.
History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876.
- Whalemen's Reading
One of the classics of early whaling literature, though with little material about whaling life at sea or ways to occupy time.
David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in Western America 1784-1812.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
David Thompson (1770-1857), after early education at a London charity school where he studied mathematics and navigation, signed on as an apprentice with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1784, and worked as surveyor for both the HBC and the North West Company.
The Life and Adventure in the South Pacific. By A Roving Printer.
- Whalemen's Reading
The attribution comes from the Nautical Magazine 23 (1864) p. 66, but who it is I haven’t learned. A bit more literate than the average whaleman but not a riveting book—a good overview of whaling but not with the art of a Melville or Bullen.
Autobiographical manuscript
- Antarctic Reading: General
J-3] Typescript, with corrections in pencil by G.H.G. Pre-1935.