Volume I: p. 231: The Charles and Henry also offered stimulus for his mind from books. On the real Lucy Ann the real John Troy, Melville says in the partly fictional Omoo, possessed books, but “a damp, musty volume, entitled ‘A History of the most atrocious and Bloody Piracies’ ” may be an imaginary composite of real titles such as The History of the Lives and Bloody Exploits of the Most Noted Pirates (Hartford, 1835). After being taken off the Lucy Ann Melville had spent weeks in Tahiti and Eimeo outdoors all the time, “an utter savage” (in the phrasing he used of himself in 1852, after spending weeks out of doors), reading nothing so far as we know. Once he got aboard the Charles and Henry and settled into the routine of sailing without sighting whales or at least without capturing whales, he had time to catch up on his reading. The wealthy Nantucket owners of the ship had supplied their craft remarkably well in every regard, not omitting the ship’s library. Thanks to the surviving bill for $16.24 that the Nantucket Coffins paid on 5 April 1841, we have a good idea of what Melville could have laid his hands on—the first books we have much reason to think he read since, by his own account, he read Owen Chase’s Narrative in his early months in the Pacific. The surviving list of the books purchased (all new, apparently) often gives only short titles and no authors; from the list Wilson Heflin identified likely editions of the books named. Following Heflin’s identifications, here I sort the ship’s library into rough categories. Like Heflin, I assume that most of the books shipped at the end of 1840 were still aboard after less than two years; vandalism or even careless handling would not likely be tolerated in a well-run ship, despite the perhaps fictional bibliographical mutilation Melville describes (Omoo, ch. 20) as taking place on a poorly captained Australian whaler. In addition, individual sailors brought some books aboard, which in due course might have found their way into the community book-chest.
Herman Melville: A Biography.
- Arctic Reading: United States
Sleeping Island: The Story of One Man’s Travels in the Great Barren Lands of the Canadian North.
- Hudson's Bay Company.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
A delightful book of Chipawyan and Cree folklore by a regular American summer visitor in the 1930s and early 40s, a Harvard man (AB ’33) and high school teacher at Belmont Hill School. He loved exploring the Barren Lands during his summer breaks between 1937 and 1947. Shows signs of his fairly wide reading on the history of the region, but none of his own reading on this particular voyage. Since he never overwintered his opportunities for reading were limited.
Mark Well the Whale! Long Island Ships to Distant Seas.
- Whalemen's Reading
A rather light bit of local history re Cold Spring Harbor and whaling out of Long Island, incl. Sag Harbor, and descriptions of voyages and disasters.
Antarctica: The Worst Place in the World.
- 1964-65 Operation Deep Freeze.
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Baum was a NYTimes reporter and photographer assigned to Operation Deep Freeze for later expeditions. The book is really quite a crude one with a large number of historical inaccuracies, but it has some appeal to romantisizers of the worst place in the world.
Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica.
- 2002-03 Australian Base Resupply (Griffiths).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Recounts a summer 2002-03 resupply trip, combining diary entries, with reflections, historical discursions, and thoughtful reporting on the trip. Some reading tidbits:
Antarctica’s First Lady.
- 1946-48 Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition.
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Primarily an account of the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition of 1947-48 in which she accompanied her husband. Based largely on her diaries of that period, she is a staunch defender of Ronne’s leadership, dismissing his critics as merely bitching about his more disciplined Norwegian regimen. The complaints are taken as inevitable and nothing was done to contain them, here or on his later IGY expedition. There is nothing here about reading, even in her chapter on the long winter night where one usually finds some mention of antidotes to boredom. What a contrast to Walton’s book below.
The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in Search of a Passage to Cathay and India by the North-West, A.D. 1576-78.
- 1576-78 The Baffin Island Voyages of Martin Frobisher.
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
p. cii-ciii, re the first voyage: The ship’s library included two works of André Thevet, the French royal geographer, his Cosmography, in French, which had been published only the previous year, and his Singularités de l’Amérique, both in French and in the English translation of 1568, by Thomas Hackett, under the title The New found World or Antarctike. It included William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse, published in 1559, which, to quote Professor Taylor, ‘contains little of purely geographical interest, but is notable for its exposition and illustration of the method of survey by triangulation….’ This volume and Dr Record’s Castle of Knowledge, 1556 (‘containing the explication of the sphere’), which they also took along, ‘were certainly adequate reference books for such astronomy and mathematical geography as was necessary to understand the principles of these various instruments’ (i.e. Cole’s instruments). As they took Medina’s Arte de Naviguar in the original it is to be presumed that the Master could read Spanish. The only English work included was Mandeville, ‘presumably for the sake of its account of the Far East, which was the ultimate goal of the expedition’. They also took ‘a Bible Englishe great volume’, possibly Richard Jugge’s Bishop’s Bible of 1572.
Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled: A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska.
- 1913-18 US Private Journeys round the Coast and Interior of Alaska (Hudson Stuck, “Archbishop of the Yukon”).
- Arctic Reading: United States
p. 77: The division of the labour of camping amongst four gave us all some leisure at night, and I found time to read through again The Cloister and the Hearth and Westward Ho! with much pleasure, quite agreeing with Sir Walter Besant’s judgment that the former is one of the best historical novels ever written. There are few more attractive roysterers in literature to me than Denys of Bergundy, with his “Courage, camarades, le diable est mort!” This matter of winter reading is a difficult one, because it is impossible to carry many books. My plan is to take two or three India-paper volumes of classics that have been read before, and renew my acquaintance with them. But reading by the light of one candle, though it sufficed our forefathers, is hard on our degenerate eyes.
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.
Travels through the Interior Parts of North-
- 1766-68 British Overland Journey to North America (led by Jonathan Carver).
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
America, in the Years 1766, 1767, and 1768. (London: Printed for the Author; And Sold by J. Walter, 1778).
Fatal Passage: The True Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot.
- Arctic Reading: General
p. 27, shows small library at HBC’s Moose Factory.
Peter Fidler’s Library: Philosophy and Science in Rupert’s Land.
- Hudson's Bay Company.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
p. 209: Peter Fidler, Hudson’s Bay Company servant [surveyor] 1788-1822, was one of the first owners and collectors of books in Rupert’s Land. His penchant for books was not an isolated case of individualism gone berserk, but his permanent acquisition of vast numbers of books was a unique occurrence in Rupert’s Land…. Fidler’s library eventually reached five hundred volumes, a massive collection for a man of modest means.
David Thompson’s Narrative 1784-1812.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
The second edition of 1962 has a new Introduction, followed by Tyrrell’s original “David Thompson’s Itinerary in North-Western Americana, 1785-1812.” From the outset of this new Introduction, Glover is critical of the critics of the HBC, for example Hearne, Thompson, and Umfreville, as well as of the hagiographers of those traders and authors, e.g. even Tryrell could sink to writing that Thompson bore continuously “the white flower of the blameless life”, and lesser men wrote still worse stuff” (p. xii). Grover is a stylish and provocative writer, and few escape his ascerbic pen.
Antarctic Comrades: An American with the Russians in Antarctica.
- 1957- Operation Deep Freeze.
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Dewart was an American scientist who joined the Russians in 1960 at their Mirny base.
Danish Greenland: Its People and Its Products
- Arctic Reading: Europe including Scandinavia
p. 168: on training of indigenous boys: The author cannot omit adding one instance to illustrate this. Once he took such a boy with him to Denmark, where he stayed only one winter as apprentice in a printing-office, and acquired a skill in book-printing, lithography, and bookbinding, of which he has afterwards given proofs by managing, all by himself, without the least assistance, a small office in Greenland, the productions of which will be mentioned by and by. This young man is by no means a rare exception; perhaps one out of ten may be found to be equally highly gifted. It cannot be denied that the half-breeds seem to surpass the original race as regards such perfectibility.