Scores of nineteenth-century expeditions battled savage cold, relentless ice and winter darkness in pursuit of two great prizes: the quest for the elusive Passage linking the Atlantic and the Pacific and the international race to reach the North Pole. Pierre Berton's #1 best-selling book brings to life the great explorers: the pious and ambitious Edward Parry, the flawed hero John Franklin, ruthless Robert Peary and the cool Norwegian Roald Amundsen. He also credits the Inuit, whose tracking and hunting skills saved the lives of the adventurers and their men countless times. These quests are peopled with remarkable figures full of passion and eccentricity. They include Charles Hall, an obscure printer who abandoned family and business to head to a frozen world of which he knew nothing; John Ross, whose naval career ended when he spotted a range of mountains that didn't exist; Frederick Cook, who faked reaching the North Pole; and Jane Franklin, who forced an expensive search for her missing husband upon a reluctant British government. Pierre Berton, who won his first Governor General's award for The Mysterious North, here again gives us an important and fascinating history that reads like a novel as he examines the historic events of the golden age of Arctic exploration.
Source: Richard W. Bliss. Our Lost Explorers: The Narrative of the Jeannette Expedition as Related by the Survivors, etc. Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1883. 'Lost on the Ice-Cap', from a painting by Albert Operti.
Fatal Passage is Ken McGoogan’s brilliant vindication of John Rae’s life and rightful place in history, a book for armchair adventurers, Arctic enthusiasts, lovers of Canadian history, and all those who revel in a story of physical ...
Primary and secondary source quotes enliven the text. These books are ideal research tools for report writing and classroom discussion.
But after Sir John Franklin disappeared with all his men in 1845, serious efforts began to be made to find the true northernmost point of the globe. Fergus Fleming's book is a vivid, witty history of the disasters that ensued.
In Prisoners of the North, Pierre Berton depicts five extraordinary characters who were in thrall to the Artic's forbidding landscapes: a mining tycoon; an explorer; a titled lady; a backwoods eccentric; and a best-selling poet.
Kenney, Canton's Pioneers in Flight, 10–13. 12. Crouch, Bishop's Boys, 307. 13. “Record-Herald's North Polar Expedition by Wellman,” Albuquerque Evening Citizen, February 27, 1906, in which a local aeronaut translates news from the ...
Drawn from historic records and modern revelations, this is the only comprehensive account of Crozier’s extraordinary life. It is a tale of a great explorer, a lost love affair and an enduring mystery.
Voices in Stone: A Personal Journey Into the Arctic Past
This is the riddle of the “Arnold 294” chronometer, which reappeared in Britain more than a hundred years after it was lost in the Arctic with the ships and men of Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition.
The Franklin Conspiracy is an absorbing account of the single most enigmatic event in Canadian history.