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Polaris: The Chief Scientist's Recollections of the American North Pole Expedition, 1871-73 Translated and Edited by William Barr U. Calgary Press $44.95 (ebook free) Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Since it's already been the subject of quite a number of books -- Chauncey Loomis's Weird and Tragic Shores , not to mention dueling exposés by Bruce Henderson ( Fatal North ) and Richard Parry ( Trial by Ice ), one might be forgiven for thinking that there's not much new to be learned about the ill-fated Polaris expedition to the North Pole commanded by Charles Francis Hall in 1871. One would be wrong, of course. The expedition's doctor, Emil Bessels, published his own account of the voyage in Germany in 1879 under the title  Die Amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition , but until now, there has been no English translation of his memoir. Thankfully, William Barr has undertaken this invaluable project, as he did earlier with Heinrich Klutschak's account of the Schwatka expedi

At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic By Lawrence Millman St. Martin's Press, 2017 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter The Arctic has been the theme of many a book – tales of  lost explorers, stories of oddball nothern "characters," and ecological parables of that bellwether northern zone. And yet some, though true in every particular to that portion of the earth which is their theme, have had a deep and profound resonance throughout a far wider swathe of our human experience. Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams , and John McPhee's Coming Into the Country come to mind. Lawrence Millman's At the End of the World is one of these. Millman's central story – that of a fit of religiously-inflected madness in which a number of Inuit on the remote Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay set upon their neighbors, whom they regarded as incarnations of  "Satan" –  is the main, but in a sense only partial theme of this book. Our solid-seeming world may en

A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier by David Welky New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017 [2016]. Reviewed by Kenn Harper In late June of 1906 Robert Peary stood on a mountain top on Ellesmere Island and surveyed Nansen Sound, still ice-covered, to the west, and beyond it a land that he called Jesup’s Land, which we know today as Axel Heiberg Island. And to the northwest? Much later he wrote, “… northwest it was with a thrill that my glasses revealed the faint white summits of a distant land…” A few days later, having crossed Nansen Sound with his two guides, Iggiannguaq and Ulloriaq, he climbed Cape Thomas Hubbard. From there, he later wrote, “… with the glasses I could make out apparently a little more distinctly, the snow-clad summits of the distant land in the north-west, above the ice horizon…. in fancy I trod its shores and climbed its summits, even though I knew that that pleasure could be only for another in another season.” Thus, on R

Lines in the Ice: Exploring the Roof of the World by Philip Hatfield Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Over the years, the staff here at the Arctic Book Review have seen more than our share of large-format pictorial books about the Arctic, its explorers, and inhabitants. Yet until now, no single book has so richly brought together all the historical, cultural, and geographical aspects of the frozen zone in quite the way that Philip Hatfield's Lines in the Ice manages. From Hakluyt's charts in the sixteenth century to the very latest in digital maps, we see here, in  panoramic procession, the full panoply of our predilection with the Earth's vast, yet far from trackless northern regions. Part of this is by design; the book is, in essence, an extended, expanded catalogue of an exhibition of the same name at the British Library, whose resources in this, as in other areas of visual culture, are enormous. The differe

Minds of Winter by Ed O'Loughlin London: riverrun, 2016 Reviewed by Russell A. Potter Over the years here at the ABR we've reviewed quite a few novels inspired by one or another aspect of the lost Arctic expedition commanded by Sir John Franklin. Since 1990, when Mordecai Richler 'broke the ice,' as it were, with Solomon Gursky Was Here , there have been at least twenty of them, and in their pages we have had just about every version of Franklin one can imagine. As Margaret Atwood whimsically prophesied in a CBC documentary in 1994, we've gone all the way from 'Franklin the dolt' to 'Franklin the mystic' -- and many other versions in-between. Franklin's seconds have not been neglected (Crozier and Fitzjames having a novel apiece), nor have his Dene and Inuit guides, the prisoners he oversaw in Van Diemen's Land, or his persevering, long-searching wife. And now we have Ed O'Loughlin's Minds of Winter -- which may well be the Franklin

The greatest show in the Arctic: The American exploration of Franz Josef Land, 1898-1905. By P. J. Capelotti. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. ISBN 978-0-8061-5222-6 Reviewed by William Barr. The American contribution to the exploration of Franz Josef Land, the Russian archipelago north of the Barents Sea, occurred during what were effectively three separate expeditions – the expeditions which are the focus of Capelotti’s book – over the period 1898-1905. The aim of all three expeditions was to reach the North Pole; ironically, however, none of them attained any significant distance north of Rudolf Island, the northernmost island of that archipelago. The irony was that during this same period a party from the Duke of the Abruzzi’s expedition, led by Cagni Umberto and starting from Rudolf Island, reached the record high latitude of 86° 34’N (Amedeo of Savoy 1903)! On the other hand the Americans did contribute significantly to the exploration of the archipelago.  The first of these

Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration by Adriana Craciun Cambridge: Cambridge UP, $120 (hardcover); $70 (Kindle) Reviewed by Russell A. Potter In the wake of the renewed interest in the history of the Franklin expedition and those who searched for it, we are beginning to see two different  -- yet complementary -- phenomena: First, a fresh effort to better understand what went wrong, and with it why the search still inspires such passionate feeling; and second, an emerging body of scholarship that points the way to a more critical consideration of the larger mythos of Franklin, and of Arctic exploration generally. Adriana Craciun's Writing Arctic Disaster is, as it were, the flagship of this second fleet, gathering together recent scholarly work and using it as the foundation for a reconsideration of the old myths and counter-myths that have, at times, trapped scholarly perspectives in an icy tomb just as unchanging and sterile as the graves of Franklin's men on B