Fidler was a rather obscure surveyor and mapmaker of English birth, who served the Hudson’s Bay Company for over thirty years, just beyond the 1820 amalgamation of the HBC with the North West Company. His interest here is that he was instrumental in buying books for the HBC to send from London to their various posts in Canada. This volume is confined to Fidler’s full journals of his travels for his surveying career. They make little of Fidler’s book life, but it does not that he build a personal collection of 500 volumes which he left to the Red River Colony. He had fourteen children by an illiterate Metis woman whom he finally married. He is someone you’d like to meet. Though he suffered through some very hard times he seems to have met them with a stoic resolve, and he died a rather rich man after years of £100 pay per year.
Peter Fidler: Canada’s Forgotten Surveyor 1769-1822.
- Hudson's Bay Company.
- Arctic Reading: Canada
Carpenter on Erebus with James Ross Clark: character used by Peter Delpeut in the film Forbidden Quest
- Arctic Reading: United States
This bound, indexed volume contains the following documents: papers and correspondence dated c.1887-1903 relating the National Antarctic Expedition of the HMS Discovery (1901-1904) including a photograph of the ship; correspondence dated c.1842-1843 by J. Davies, J. Savage and C.J. Sullivan whilst on HMS Erebus and HMS Terror (1839-1843), including some poetry by Sullivan; and a lecture (original manuscript and typed transcript) given by J.D. Hooker on this expedition at the Royal Institution of South Wales, Swansea on 17 June 1846.
Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages….
- Maritime Reading
p. 3: the exotic literature of Europe “was most clearly manifested in fiction about the regions that remained unknown the longest….their works, too, would finally be overtaken by history and supplanted by scientific descriptions of the material and social worlds.” (his examples are Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Poe, Lovecraft)
The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross, R. N. Knt. To the Arctic Regions; For the Discovery of a North West Passage; Performed in the Years 1829-30-31-32 and 33.
- 1829-33 British Private Second Voyage to the Northwest Passage (John Ross aboard Victory).
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
Includes accounts of earlier British voyages to the high Arctic. Huish is wonderfully sardonic in viewing the whole operation from Captain Ross on down.
The Discovery of the North-West Passage by H.M.S. Investigator, Capt. R. M’Clure, 1850, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854.
- 1848-59 The Franklin Search.
- Arctic Reading: Great Britain
HMS Investigator was one of the ships assigned to the western end of the as yet undiscovered Northwest Passage in the search for Franklin and the hope that his expedition had made it through. By confusion or arrangant independence the Investigator proceeded without its companion ship HMS Enterprise, commanded by Richard Collinson. Caught by the ice, it returned to Hong Kong while Investigator headed eastward into the Passage. The ship spent the next three winters in winter quarters until April of 1854 when the men were found by a rescue team from HMS Resolute and they escaped to the east leaving the ship abandoned. One positive outcome, despite several deaths, was that the voyage definitively established the existence of the Northwest Passage’