Fort Monmouth Communications Museum

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An extensive collection of Greely material, much of it given to Fort Monmouth by Mrs. Stafford in March 1964, shortly before her and her brother’s gifts to the Explorers Club. This included chinaware from Fort Conger (brown floral design) and from the Proteus (2 eggcups), botanical specimens, other artifacts, and a good number of manuscripts and printed material. These were materials retrieved by Peary in 1899 and included letters, condensed meteorological and other observations, etc. The Collection was moved to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland, in 2008.

The Seaman’s Friend; Containing A Treatise on Practical Seamanship; A Dictionary of Sea Terms; Customs and Usages of the Merchant Service; Laws Relating to the Practical Duties of Master and Mariners.

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A comprehensive manual of most aspects of seamanship at the height of sail, and near the beginning of steam. There are a few rudimentary references to books and reading, rather surprisingly few for a man of Dana’s literary tastes.

Pilgrims on the Ice: Robert Falcon Scott’s First Antarctic Expedition.

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p. 27: for the Discovery expedition, the Executive Committee of the RGS commissioned an Antarctic Manual, “an idea that hearkened back to the British Arctic expedition of 1875. Edited by George Murray, it dealt with fields of science to be investigated, and was well received.”

Cold Burial: A True Story of Endurance and Disaster.

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An account of a disastrous winter in the Barrens of the Northwest, of three patrician adventurers, led by a rather irresponsible John Hornby. All three died of starvation in 1927.

Confessions of A Leigh Hunt.

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No relation to Leigh Hunt, this one founded the NZ Antarctic Club and knew several explorers, and gave lantern lectures to schools about Scott etc.

The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay….

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Boas’s work says nothing about Inuit reading but is included here for his lengthy accounts of oral tales from Cumberland Sound (81) and from the West Coast of Hudson Bay (30). Here is one brief example chosen at random:

Two Men in the Antarctic: An Expedition to Graham Land 1920-1922.

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Elaborate plans made by John Cope, including a flight to the South Pole with George Hubert Wilkins, diminished for lack of funds to a winter spent by Bagshawe and Lt. Maxime Lester in an abandoned whaleboat, turned over to provide some shelter. Remarkably, the two men did perform some scientific work and observations. William Mills called it “the smallest party ever to winter on the Antarctic continent.”

The American on the Endurance: Ice, Sea, and Terra Firma Adventures of William L. Bakewell.

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Homespun memoir of a footloose and feckless wanderer from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, who happened to be in Buenos Aires in 1914 when Shackleton was looking for an able bodied seaman and took Bakewell on for the voyage.

James Eight and the Palmer-Pendleton Expedition of 1829-1831,

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p. 146-47: The scientific program of the expedition was sponsored by the Lyceum for Natural History of the City of New York. Newspapers encouraged private citizens to lend books, charts, and instruments to the expedition, and when the Annawan sailed it was said to have on board a fine collection of instruments and several hundred books.