The wife of Donald MacMillan gives this account of her voyage to the Arctic on the Bowdoin in 1940 or 41.
p. 98, an evening of reading interrupted by the need to get into Battle Harbour.
p. 111, during storm in Davis Strait: Our cabin looked as though a cyclone had hit it…. At each lurch something flopped to the floor—kaplunk! Even books, which we had thought were securely boarded in on shelves around the walls, came flying across the cabin. Just as I was leaning over in an attempt to pull on my boots, my head bent for’ard in the effort, The Open Polar Sea [Hayes] left the shelf and flooded down squarely on top of my head; a terrific thud which practically knocked me out. I was reaching over to pick up that book when Arctic Experiences, [Hall] a still heavier volume, renewed the attack. It seemed to say, ‘Now aren’t you sorry you didn’t stay at home?’ I frankly admit I hadn’t fully solved the lure of the North at that point.
222-23: Time, however, never dragged on the Bowdoin. Not with the large library of arctic books we carried. I’d read many of them at home, sitting comfortably before an open fire, but reading them right here gave many of those old records an icy realism. I reached for Arctic Experiences by Charles Frances Hall, the one man who has given more information about this locality than all others combined. How vivid it all seemed now. Near by was Brewster Point, the scene of Hall’s visit; a few yards astern of us was No-yarn Island. I soon discovered that we had anchored right on the spot where he had found winter sledge tracks. It was all there on page 263:…
p. 243 gives reference to Frederick Wright’s Greenland Ice Fields and his account of fast-moving glaciers.
p. 282, refers to small library MacMillan left at a scientific station in Labrador in 1927.