Antarctica: Both Heaven and Hell.

Messner, Reinhold. Translated by Jill Neate. Seattle, WA: Mountaineers, 1991.
  • 1989-90 Trans-Antarctic Expedition (Messner and Arved Fuchs).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

On the two-person Transantarctic expedition of 1989-90, including visit to South Pole, and which included a number of days stranded in their tent. The trek was 2,800km on foot.

High Latitude.

Davis, John King. Melbourne, Victoria, NZ: Melbourne University Press, 1962.
  • Heroic Age 1901-1921.
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

John King Davis participated in three epochal Antarctic expeditions as 1) Chief Officer of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition in 1907, 2) as Mawson’s Second in Command and Master of the Aurora in 1911, and 3) he commanded the Ross Sea Relief Expedition in search of Shackleton’s transcontinental party stranded on Ross Island in 1916. Covering his many other assignments before and after, Davis gives a comprehensive autobiography of his career. He is a fine but not dramatic story teller who handles the crises of his expeditions with a certain detachment. He speaks of loneliness but not with how it was relieved, and therefore little about reading. His descriptions of preliminary planning for voyages is particularly good.

No Man’s Land: A History of Spitsbergen from its Discovery in 1596 to the Beginning of the Scientific Exploration of the Country.

Conway, Sir William Martin. Cambridge: University Press, 1906.
  • Arctic Reading: Europe including Scandinavia
 Preview 

A general history of the archipelago, based on Conway’s studies and his earlier visits. Although he reviews a number of books in preparation for his manuscript, he does not here reveal the thoughtful reader who appears in his earlier narratves

Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex

Chase, Owen.
  • Whalemen's Reading
 Preview 

Owen Chase's memoir of the sinking of the Essex by a whale, which inspired Herman Melville's epic Moby-Dick and the film In the Heart of the Sea. Owen Chase was the first mate on the ill-fated American whaling ship Essex, which was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific Ocean in 1820. The crew spent months at sea in leaking boats and endured the blazing sun, attacks by killer whales, and lack of food. The men were forced to resort to cannibalism before the final eight survivors were rescued. Chase recorded the tale of the ship's sinking and the following events with harrowing clarity in the Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex: "I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods [500 m or 550 yards] directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed of around 24 knots.

Arctic Odyssey: The Diary of Diamond Jenness 1913-1916.

Jenness, Diamond. Hull, QU: Canada Museum of Civilization, 1991.
  • 1913-16 Canadian Arctic Expedition (Led by Stefansson with Captain Bob Bartlett commanding the Karluk).
  • Arctic Reading: Canada
 Preview 

p. xxi: The author [Jenness] was unusually fond of Homer’s The Odyssey. In the summer of 1906, as one of only two students in a Greek class with Professor William von Zedlitz at Victoria University College, Wellington, New Zealand, he was invited to read The Odyssey each Friday evening in Greek at his professor’s home…. during the seven months he wandered about southwestern Victoria Island with his Copper Eskimo friends, in 1915, my father often found moments for reading passages in and obtaining spiritual comfort from a small copy of The Odyssey he carried with him. This book evidently had a special meaning to him, and he continued to extract both pleasure and comfort from it on later occasions, including a time two years later when he was in the muddy wartime trenches in France.

Archives.

Hudson’s Bay Company.
  • Hudson's Bay Company.
  • Arctic Reading: Canada
 Preview 

The archives, now in Winnipeg, has a mss. catalogue of the HBC library, ca1800s and later, described as a memorandum book with index at front and tabs used to list the books; lists of books borrowed by borrower (mostly committee members but includes Beechey, Franklin, and Richardson, and dates of loan. (The following list courtesy of Ann Morton, HBC)

This Accursed Land.

Bickel, Lennard. Melbourne: Macmillan, 1977.
  • 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic Expedition (Mawson).
  • Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
 Preview 

Bickel notes the absence of “heroics” in Home of the Blizzard, betrayed by his journals, however modest. An earlier version of Mawson’s Will, with some additional reading passages.

The Big Ship: An Autobiography

Larsen, Henry A. Toronto: McClelland & Stuart, 1957.
  • Arctic Reading: Canada
 Preview 

On the first commercial vessel to transit the North West Passage.

To the Ends of the Earth: The Truth Behind the Glory of Polar Exploration.

Dippel. John V. H. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018.
  • Arctic Reading: General
 Preview 

p. 17, re Belgica winter in 1897: They read and reread books on navigation and lighthouses, played whist, listened to records, told stale jokes—anything to break the monotony. They ached like teenagers for a glimpse of a woman. [Cook, First Antarctic Night, p. 250, 252]

An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, Wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Month of August, 1815, with an Account of the Sufferings of the Surviving Officers and Crew, Who were Enslaved by the Wandering Arabs, on the African Desart, or Zahahrah….

Riley, James. Hartford: Judd, Loomis, 1836.
  • 1815 US Naval Expedition to African West Coast (aboard Commerce commanded by James Riley).
  • Global Circumnavigations and Cape Horn Transits.
  • Maritime Reading
 Preview 

p. 117, an attempt to recreate a reading experience of a letter with liberating news: My feelings, during the reading of this letter, may perhaps be conceived, but I cannot attempt to describe them; to form an idea of my emotions at that time, it is necessary for the reader to transport himself in imagination to the country where I then was, a wretched slave, and to fancy himself as having passed through all the dangers and distresses that I had experienced: reduced to the lowest pitch of human wretchedness, degradation, and despair, a skinless skeleton, expecting death at every instant: then let him fancy himself receiving such a letter from a perfect stranger, whose name he had never before heard, and from a place where there was not an individual creature that had ever before heard of his existence, and in one of the most barbarous regions of the habitable globe : let him receive at the same time clothes to cover and defend his naked, emaciated, and trembling frame, shoes for his mangled feet, and such provisions as he had been accustomed to in his happier days — let him find a soothing and sympathising friend in a barbarian, and one who spoke perfectly well the language of a Christian nation ; and with all this, let him behold a prospect of a speedy liberation and restoration to his beloved family:

The Wreck of the

Dickens, Charles. Golden Mary.By Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. (New York: Library Publishers, 1956). [Originally published in Household Words, 1856.].
  • Arctic Reading: Great Britain
 Preview 

A compelling tale of shipwreck told by Dickens in the first section, followed by a kind of Decameron of tales told by survivors of the shipwreck as they waited for rescue, and the story of the rescue as told by Collins.

Danish Arctic Expeditions, 1605 to 1620. In Two Books: Book I. The Danish Expeditions to Greenland…; Book II. The Expedition of Captain Jens Munk.

Gosch, C.C.A. Edited, with Notes and Annotations by C.A. Gosch. Two Volumes. London: Hakluyt Society, 1897.
  • 1605-1620 Danish Arctic Expeditions.
  • Arctic Reading: Europe including Scandinavia
 Preview 

Book I: The Danish Expeditions to Greenland in 1605, 1606, and 1607; to which is Added Captain James Hall’s Voyage to Greenland in 1612.

The Historical Russian Library of Alaska

Andrews, Clarence L. Pacific Northwest Quarterly 29 (April 1938) p. 201-04.
  • Arctic Reading: Russia
 Preview 

Describes a collection of about 1200 volumes, mostly in Russian, sent from the Russian ship Nadezhda in 1803 and following years to “Our Colonies in America.” It was first at Kodiak, and then in Sitka before removal to the Mercantile Library of San Francisco in 1871, and eventual disposition. By 1825 it was described by Kyril Khlebnikof, chief of the counting house at Sitka: “The library in Sitka consists in more than one thousand two hundred volumes, which are held at 7500 rubles, in the number which are more than 600 Russian, 300 French, 130 German, 35 English, 30 Latin, and the remainder in Swedish, Dutch, Spanish and Italian languages.” How it was eventually found abandoned in San Francisco is not known, nor how it escaped the Great Fire. By 1869 Sitka had another library, its post library, but connected to the earlier one as far as the author can see.