Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole.

Nielsen, Jerri. New York: Hyperion, 2001.
  • 1998-99 South Pole Winterover (NSF) at Amundsen-Scott Base.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

This book created considerable controversy by the author going public with her medical condition, despite commitments not to call for special services in case of serious illness. Her cancer was the cause.

Operation Deepfreeze.

Dufek, George J. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957.
  • 1957- Operation Deep Freeze.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

Rear Admiral Dufek was Commander U.S. Naval Support Force Antarctica, but apart from a fairly extensive bibliography his book shows no sign of his own reading. However, there are a few references:

No Latitude for Error.

Hillary, Sir Edmund. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1961.
  • 1955-58 TAE: Trans-Antarctic Expedition (Fuchs and Hillary).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

Re Trans Antarctic Expedition of 1956-57, with Vivian Fuchs. Unlike their joint book, Hillary’s at least shows some interior pictures with shelves of books, incl. one opposite p. 97 with one title legible, Into China.

The Eskimo of Baffin Land and Hudson Bay….

Boas, Franz. [ Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History . Volume XV, 1901] New York: AMNH, 1901.
  • Arctic Reading: Inuit and other indigenous people
 Preview 

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:

Four Years aboard the Whaleship. Embracing Cruises in the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Antarctic Oceans, in the year 1855, ‘6, ‘7, ‘8, ‘9.

Whitecar, William B. Philadelphia: Lippincott; London: Trubner, 1864.
  • 1855-59 US Whaling Voyage aboard Pacific.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

[From a bookseller’s catalogue on ABEBooks]: Whitecar, an intelligent observer, sailed from New Bedford aboard the Pacific, on a whaling voyage which took him to Antarctic waters, Australia & New Zealand. His narrative gives good details of the whaler's life on ship and ashore from 1855-59, one of the best for the time, including observations & comparisons of whaling equipment and practices. Whitecar includes much on the West Australian coast, visiting the Vasse & Cape Leeuwin a number of times. He spends time in Albany (King Georges Sound), visits Geraldton (Champion Bay), Esperence (the Recherche Archipelago) and the Houtmans Abrolhas. In observing W.A., he comments “I didn't see a glass of spirits drank. ale and beer were however swallowed without regard to quality or quantity.” The majority of the book relates to West Australian waters & anecdotes. A very readable & informative account, one of the best we've read on West Australia. Bookseller Inventory # 8363. [This annotation is partly plagiarized in a Bartfield listing for the same book. Whitecar’s account is quite a charming account of the whaling life, somewhat sanitized for the domestic reader, pointing out the foibles and peccadilloes of sailors on other ships but seeing his ship as something of a model of discipline and benign leadership.]

The Whale and the Supercomputer: on the Northern Front of Climate Change.

Wohlforth, Charles P. New York: North Point Press, 2004.
  • Whalemen's Reading
 Preview 

A traditional Eskimo whale-hunting party races to shore near Barrow, Alaska, while their trapped comrades drift out to sea on ice that should still be solid. Elsewhere, a team of scientists transverses the tundra, measuring the thinning snow every ten kilometers in a quest to understand the effects of albedo the heat-deflecting property of snow that helps regulate the planet's temperature. Journalist and lifelong Alaskan Charles Wohlforth here crystallizes how climate change isn't an abstraction in the far North; it's a reality that has already dramatically altered daily life. He describes how Alaskan Natives and scientists attempt to reconcile their radically different ways of observing changes in the environment, and the implications for us all. (Daedalus Books Description)

Mawson: a Life.

Ayres, Philip. Melbourne, Aus.: The Miegunyah Press, 1999.
  • 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition (Mawson).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

A balanced biography of Mawson, emphasizing his achievements but not ignoring his sometimes depressive personality and temper.

Letters Written during the Late Voyage of Discovery in the Western Arctic Sea.

By an Officer of the Expedition. London: Printed for Sir Richard Phillips, 1821.
  • 1819-20 British Voyage of Discovery to the Arctic Regions (Edward Parry aboard Hecla and Griper).
  • Arctic Reading: Great Britain
 Preview 

The letters are ostensibly addressed to a Brother of the officer-author named Thomas, giving in the first paragraph the conclusion “that a practical communication by sea, round the northern coasts of North America, is not to be attained. The letters recount an officer’s view of the second Parry voyage of 1819, which wintered in Winter Harbour, produced work of the Royal Arctic Theatre, and started a ship’s newspaper. This account gives ample evidence of Parry’s benevolent rule over the men and his religious dedication. Possible authors of these letters were officers Matthew Liddon, Edward Sabine, Henry Hoppner, and Frederick Beechey. [Find the author??]

Two Years in the Antarctic, Being a Narrative of the British National Antarctic Expedition.

Armitage, Albert B. London: Edward Arnold, 1905.
  • 1901-04 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott aboard Discovery).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

Unlike many on the first Scott expedition, Armitage had previous polar experience as second in command of the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition (Franz Josef Land) and in the rescue of Nansen in 1895. He was also second in command for Scott and served as the. Discovery navigator. His diaries show some ambiguities in his relationships with Scott, but this is a very respectful account, devoid of many of the pieties which blemish so many expedition narratives.

The Cruise of the Cachalot.

Bullen, Frank (Franklin) Thomas. [Foreword by Curtis Dahl]New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947.
  • Maritime Reading
 Preview 

This fictional description of the whaling life, written in the later 19th-century, should rank with Melville but devoid of Melville’s allegorical meanings. It is arguably a work of fiction by a fairly prolific novelist, though it hardly reads like fiction. Although Cachalot was a maritime pseudonym, the work seems to be an accurate account of the trials and occasional pleasures of whaling. It was published in 1898, probably 25 years after his whaling journeys. Scattered references do show his fairly wide reading, but these likely did not stem from his youthful shipboard reading.

The Great Frozen Land (Bolshaia Zemelskija Tundra). Narrative of a Winter Journey across the Tundras and a Sojourn among the Samoyads.

Jackson, Frederick George. Edited from his Journals by Arthur Montefiore. London: Macmillan and Co, 1896.
  • 1893-94 British Russian Journey between White Sea and Kara Sea.
  • Arctic Reading: Great Britain
 Preview 

Purpose to test newly developed equipment in severe conditions, but also to “visit and, for some months, to live with that primitive group of the human family, the Samoyads of the Great Frozen Tundra of Arctic Russia; to dwell in their tents, to eat of their food, to go and come with them in their daily life, to share their labour and their rest; to mark their ways and seek their motives, to note their relations to one another, and to learn, if possible, something of their sense of a higher influence” (p. ix).

Survival in Antarctica.

National Science Foundation. 1974 Edition. Washington, DC: NSF Office of Polar Programs, 1974.
  • Antarctic Reading: General
 Preview 

On the purpose of this manual: Today people go from the United States to Antarctica in hours. Warm buildings and home comforts shield them from months-long darkness, high winds, and temperatures sometimes below -75°C. (-100°F.). At stations like McMurdo, life seems so normal that it is easy to forget Antarctica's dangers. Tragedy and disaster can strike unexpectedly. It has happened, and it will happen again. This manual will help you prepare for the possibility, when all seems to be going well, of suddenly being in a survival situation.

Whaling Wherein are Discussed the First Whalemen of Whom We Have Record

Hawes, Charles Boardman. … [to] the Present State of a Once Flourishing and Lucrative Industry. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1924.
  • Whalemen's Reading
 Preview 

p. 320-21, on the decline of the industry, and the sources of its history: Thus dies old-fashioned whaling. There is only one way now to see it, and that is in its records and relics. Of records there are many, beginning away back with the days of Basque and Norseman and coming on down, through the Spitzbergen days—both English and Dutch accounts of them—the later Arctic whaling of the Hull and the Dundee fleet, and the "southern whale fishery" to our own American whaling. Of those earlier days some few first-hand accounts still survive, and of American whaling there are literally hundreds of log books and account books—the one showing life at sea; the other, the counting-house side of the game.