Polar Hayes
Polar Hayes: The Life and Contributions of Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D. Douglas W. Wamsley Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-87169-262-7 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore Douglas Wamsley has filled a glaring gap in the historiography of 19th-century polar exploration by producing the first biography of Isaac Hayes, leader of perhaps the most overlooked US Arctic expedition before the age of Cook and Peary. But Hayes’s activities extended well beyond the Arctic, and in thoroughly charting them Wamsley has given us a picture not only of Arctic exploration but of many disparate aspects of 19th-century American life. The publishers are also to be commended for producing a pleasingly solid and attractively presented volume, illustrated with photographs, engravings, well-drawn maps, and a colour plate. Isaac Hayes was born into a Quaker community in rural Pennsylvania in 1832, and the author has taken great trouble to evoke the details of what that Quaker upbringing would ha