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In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Voyage of the USS Jeanette By Hampton Sides 454 p., b&w illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography NY; Random House, 2014 Reviewed by William Barr Influenced by the deluded idea of German geographer and armchair explorer, August Petermann (and of many of his contemporaries) that the North Pole lay in the middle of an ice-free Open Polar Sea, surrounded by a relatively narrow annular belt of sea-ice, in the 1870’s, following the disastrous outcome of Charles Francis Hall’s expedition on board Polaris in 1871-73, Lt. George W. De Long of the US Navy conceived of mounting another attempt at the North Pole, but by a different route. With the financial backing of James Gordon Bennett, flamboyant   owner of the New York Herald, on   8 July 1879 he sailed from San Francisco on board the bark-rigged, three-masted steamer, Jeannette which, through Bennett’s influence, had been flagged as a unit of the US Navy.   She was northward-bound

Rough Weather All Day: An Account of the “Jeannette” Search Expedition by Patrick Cahill, edited by David Hirzel Pacifica, CA: Terra Nova Press.  173 pp., $20.00 USD. Reviewed by: P.J. Capelotti, Division of Social Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Abington College, Abington, PA 19001, USA. E-mail: pjc12@psu.edu James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald and the man who had dispatched Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone, was equally fascinated with the Arctic. In 1873, Bennett dispatched two reporters to search for the survivors of Charles Francis Hall’s doomed North Pole expedition.  Five years later, he assigned a reporter to an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin sponsored by the American Geographic Society and led by a U.S. Army lieutenant named Frederick Schwatka. Bennett sponsored his greatest Arctic venture in 1879.   A U.S. Navy captain, George Washington DeLong, was ordered to locate the ‘lost’ e

Cambridge Library Collection Various titles, $37.99 - $75 Cambridge University Press Reviewed by Russell A. Potter It's not often that we review multiple titles in a single notice -- but this case is exceptional. There's no other single publisher who offers such a range of classic expedition narratives, and it would seem unfair to single out any one of these many volumes. Chosen in consultation with the Scott Polar Research Institute, they represent the widest array of classic Arctic book currently in print and available from any publisher I know. And, though it's quite true that the majority of them can be read for free online via Google Books or archive.org, there's something about these particular books -- and these particular reprints -- that makes obtaining them as actual, physical books a particular value. Over past decades, a number of publishers have reprinted books such as these -- classics in their field which have long gone out of print -- and sold them, prim

The Dream of the North: A Cultural History to 1920 by Peter Fjågesund Rodopi, 2014, $175 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Every few years, a book comes out which offers -- or purports to offer -- a sweeping overview of the history of Arctic exploration and its historical significance. Most, however, take the explorers' accounts at face value, and are essentially elegant coffee-table books for armchair enthusiasts. When I first saw the title of this book, though encouraged by the subtitle "a cultural history," I was a bit skeptical -- how could any book, especially one just over five hundred and fifty pages in length, cover such a period, and cover it well? Peter Fjågesund manages this feat, and several others along the way: unlike other recent cultural histories, which -- rejecting the old grand narratives -- have cobbled together in their place a rather lumpy "new North" out of Scandinavian mythology, wandering antiquarians, and stuffed polar bears, Fjågesund is n

In 1852, the indefatigable Sherard Osborn -- a prolific if not always pleasant collaborator and author -- published his Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal . The stray leaves of this review, however, are of a quite different and more visually engaging variety: a chapbook and a small volume of illustrated cards inspired by words in in the Greenlandic Inuit dialect. Both share slight dimensions and lightness of weight; they seem as though they might almost have arrived at our doorstep via message balloons like t hose dispatched in 1851 in the search for Sir John Franklin, or perhaps fallen out onto our desk as we opened some more ponderous tome of Arctic journeys. We can only express our delight that they have. The first is Nancy Campbell's How to Say 'I Love You' in Greenlandic , a miniaturized version of her fine press art book of the same name. Campbell, who was a writer in residence at the Upernavik Museum in 2010, is presently the holder of the Lady Margaret Hall Visua

Graves of Ice: The Lost Franklin Expedition By John Wilson Scholastic Canada, CDN$ 14.99 Ages 9-12 Reviewed by Kristina Gehrmann In Graves of Ice , author John Wilson tells the story of Franklin’s Lost Expedition as part of the I am Canada series, a collection of stories about adventure and exploration geared toward a pre-teen audience. He has explored the same theme previously in the novel North with Franklin: The Lost Journals of James Fitzjames ; and in the young-adult book Across Frozen Seas . A biography of Sir John Franklin - Traveller on Undiscovered Seas is also part of his repertoire of many historical books and novels.  The story is told from the viewpoint of one of the expedition's boys. Eighteen-year-old George Chambers can read and write, works as a clerk, and thanks to his father’s connections manages to get a spot aboard HMS Erebus, one of the ships to sail for the Arctic on Sir John Franklin’s much-awaited expedition. They are to leave England in May of 1845 to f

Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England’s forgotten Arctic Explorer by P.J. Capelotti Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013. Reviewed by Jonathan Dore Peter Capelotti, anthropologist at Penn State University, archaeologist of human space travel, sometime poet, and writer on many lesser-travelled byways in the exploration and exploitation of the seas, has now written the first biography of Benjamin Leigh Smith (1828–1913), who appears as a shadowy presence in the annals of late-19th-century Arctic exploration—mentioned in passing in the narratives of more famous names—but who is now given centre stage in an account that focuses on his three yachting expeditions to Svalbard and two to Franz Josef Land in the 1870s and 80s. It doesn’t take long to understand the reason for Leigh Smith’s ghostly absence from the feast of Arctic exploration history, and consequently the challenge that Capelotti set himself. The explorer was such a shunner of public att