Download or read book The Coldest Crucible written by Michael F. Robinson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1800s, “Arctic Fever” swept across the nation as dozens of American expeditions sailed north to the Arctic to find a sea route to Asia and, ultimately, to stand at the North Pole. Few of these missions were successful, and many men lost their lives en route. Yet failure did little to dampen the enthusiasm of new explorers or the crowds at home that cheered them on. Arctic exploration, Michael F. Robinson argues, was an activity that unfolded in America as much as it did in the wintry hinterland. Paying particular attention to the perils facing explorers at home, The Coldest Crucible examines their struggles to build support for the expeditions before departure, defend their claims upon their return, and cast themselves as men worthy of the nation’s full attention. In so doing, this book paints a new portrait of polar voyagers, one that removes them from the icy backdrop of the Arctic and sets them within the tempests of American cultural life. With chronological chapters featuring emblematic Arctic explorers—including Elisha Kent Kane, Charles Hall, and Robert Peary—The Coldest Crucible reveals why the North Pole, a region so geographically removed from Americans, became an iconic destination for discovery.
Download or read book Arctic Exploration International Relations 1900 1932 written by Nancy Fogelson and published by Fairbanks : University of Alaska Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of early twentieth century North American exploration and will be useful to anyone interested in the development of arctic aviation.
Download or read book The Greatest Show in the Arctic written by Peter Joseph Capelotti and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines the American exploration of Franz Josef Land between 1898 and 1905, when three expeditions launched from the archipelago in attempt to reach the geographic North Pole, but ended in failure: the Wellman expedition run by Walter Wellman, a Chicago journalist and bon vivant in search of fame; the Baldwin-Ziegler expedition, led by Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a Midwestern government meteorologist; and the Fiala-Ziegler expedition, run by Anthony Fiala, a photographer and graphic artist in search of God."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book American Explorations in the Ice Zones written by Joseph Everett Nourse and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The North Pole written by Robert E. Peary and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The North Pole is a book by Robert E. Peary. It presents the discovery of The North Pole in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club in colorful fashion.
Download or read book North American Exploration written by Michael Golay and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-04-21 with total page 837 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, highly readable reference This is an authoritative, one-stop resource for essential information on the exploration of North America, from alleged pre-Columbian explorers to polar expeditions in the twentieth century. Completely up-to-date in content and historical approach, the book is divided into seven sections, each covering a major area of exploration. Vivid, narrative entries bring to life early expeditions (e.g., African and Scandinavian voyages, real and apocryphal), voyages of European explorers, Western expeditions, and explorations of the Arctic. From the Atlantic seaboard to the Appalachians to the Mississippi to the northernmost regions, readers will discover the Native nations, geographical features, private and governmental institutions, and settlements that played a role in the history of exploring the continent. Maps, photos, and sidebars with lively first-person accounts from contemporary diaries, reports, and news accounts round out this thorough examination of the numerous adventures taken around the continent. Michael Golay has published five books on American history, including most recently The Ruined Land. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire. John Bowman is the Editor of the Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography and numerous other reference works. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Download or read book Our Lost Explorers written by Raymond Lee Newcomb and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1879-1881, a crew of thirty-three men, led by Lieutenant Commander George Washington DeLong, participated in an Arctic adventure that defines the limits of human endurance. The Navy-operated, but privately owned, steamer Jeannette left San Francisco, California, for the North Pole through what was then believed to be open water beyond the Arctic icepack. The Jeannette remained in the ice as it drifted to the northwest through the first half of 1881. During this time, the crew made scientific observations, hunted seals and polar bears. In May 1881, they landed on Henrietta Island, 600 miles from Wrangell. In June 1881 the ice parted and they hoped they might reach open sea, but on the 12th the flows closed in with such force that Jeannette's hull was crushed. Her crew removed three boats, supplies and some equipment and began a difficult trek, dragging the boats over the ice towards open water. They reached the Kotelnoi and Simonoski Islands in early September, after which the way was clear to sail to the Lena Delta. However, the three boats were separated in a storm. One, commanded by Lieutenant Charles W. Chipp and seven other men, was not seen again. The other two, commanded by DeLong with thirteen others and Chief Engineer George W. Melville with ten others, landed far apart on the delta. Melville's party was saved by local inhabitants. DeLong and his men trudged south over the desolate terrain. After one man died of the effects of frostbite and the others were weakened by exposure and hunger, Seamen Nindemann and Noros were sent ahead to find help. Before that materialized, the remaining eleven succumbed, with DeLong and two others surviving perhaps a few days beyond 30 October 1881, when he made his final journal entry. The bodies of ten were discovered in March 1882, as Melville conducted a search for the other members of the expedition, and were transported back to the United States in early 1884.
Download or read book The Spectral Arctic written by Shane McCorristine and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.
Download or read book The Utilization of the Scientific Reports of the United States Arctic Expeditions 1850 1909 written by John Edwards Caswell and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Arctic Expeditions written by John Edwards Caswell and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Polar Explorers for Kids written by Maxine Snowden and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2003-11-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heroism and horror abound in these true stories of 16 great explorers who journeyed to the Arctic and Antarctic regions, two exquisite and unique ice wildernesses. Recounted are the exciting North Pole adventures of Erik the Red in 982 and the elusive searches for the &“Northwest Passage&” and &“Farthest North&” of Henry Hudson, Fridtjof Nansen, Fredrick Cook, and Robert Peary. Coverage of the South Pole begins with Captain Cook in 1772; continues through the era of land grabbing and the race to reach the Pole with James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Ernest Shackleton; and ends with an examination of the scientists at work there today. Astounding photographs and journal entries, sidebars on the Inuit and polar animals, and engaging activities bring the harrowing expeditions to life. Activities include making a Viking compass, building a model igloo, making a cross staff to measure latitude, creating a barometer, making pemmican, and writing a newspaper like William Parry's &“Winter Chronicle.&” The North and South Poles become exciting routes to learning about science, geography, and history.
Download or read book Abandoned written by A. L. Todd and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alden L. Todd’s Abandoned has been called “A model account of perhaps the most ill-fated and certainly the most grimly fascinating episode in the annals of Arctic exploration....” Working extensively with primary sources—official correspondence, diaries, letters, notes by the expedition’s participants and those left at home and in the nation’s capital—Alden Todd presents an evenhanded, elegantly written account of the greatest tragedy in the history of American arctic exploration: the Greely expedition of 1881-1884. Launched as part of the United States’ participation in the first International Polar Year, the expedition sent twenty-five volunteers to what is now Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic, off the northwest coast of Greenland, commanded by Adolphus Washington Greely, a thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. The ship sent to resupply them in the summer of 1882 was forced to turn back before reaching the station, and the men were left to endure short rations and unbroken isolation at their icy base. When the second relief ship, sent in 1883, was crushed in the ice, Greely led his men south, following a prearranged plan. The crew spent a third and increasingly more wretched winter camped at Cape Sabine. Supplies ran out, the hunting failed, and men began to die of starvation. Abandoned is a gripping account of men battling for survival as they are pitted against the elements and each other. It is also the most complete and authentic account of the controversial Greely Expedition ever published, an exemplar of the best in chronicles of polar exploration.
Download or read book Our Lost Explorers written by George W. DeLong and published by Digital Scanning Inc. This book was released on 2000-10-01 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lieutenant George Washington DeLong was an American explorer whose disastrous arctic expedition gave evidence of a continuous ocean current across the Polar Regions. In July of 1879 he set sail from San Francisco taking the Jeanette through the Bering Strait and heading for an island off the northeast coast of Siberia. However, on September 5th, the ship became trapped in the ice. With crewman George Melville's engineering skill, the boat was kept afloat for almost two years until it was finally crushed on June 12, 1881.
Download or read book Polaris written by Emil Bessels and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Polaris is a thoroughly edited, annotated translation of Die Amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition by Emil Bessels (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1879). Bessels recounts the expedition of the ship Polaris, led by Captain Charles Francis Hall, on its failed attempt to reach the North Pole. Bessels, Polaris's chief scientist, provides a thorough account of the voyage, including detailed descriptions of St. John's, Newfoundland, Greenland settlements, Inuit people and culture, and plentiful scientific data on the flora, fauna, geography, oceans they encountered. Recent discoveries concerning a more sinister aspect of the voyage also make this a vital critical edition. While wintering at Thank God Harbour in Northwest Greenland, Hall died suddenly; Bessels proclaimed the cause of death was stroke. In 1968 English professor Chauncy Loomis and pathologist Franklin Paddock exhumed Hall's body from the permafrost, discovering that Hall had in fact been poisoned with arsenic. Bessels had the knowledge and opportunity to poison Hall, but for decades no motive could be found. However, new evidence has emerged of a romantic triangle between Hall, Bessels, and a young American sculptor Vinnie Ream, providing, at last, a motive for murder. Barr's introduction and epilogue outline the unique aspects of Bessels book, placing it in the historical context of arctic exploration. Barr has added 723 endnotes, drawing on 73 bibliographic sources, to explain and to contextualize Bessels writing. Barr's appendices cover Bessel's scientific appendix, Hall's instructions, the Board of Inquiry that followed the expedition's return, and biographies of the seven major players in this tale of exploration and murder."--
Download or read book The Greatest Show in the Arctic written by P. J. Capelotti and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 760 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gilded Age America, Arctic explorers were fabulous celebrities—assured of riches and near-immortality so long as they reached the North Pole first. Of the many attempts to meet that goal, three American expeditions, launched from the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, ended in abject failure, their exploits consigned to near-oblivion. Even so, these ventures—the Wellman expedition (1898–99), the Baldwin-Ziegler (1901–2), and the Fiala-Ziegler (1903–5)—have much to tell us about the personalities, politics, and economics of exploration in their day. In The Greatest Show in the Arctic, the first book to chronicle all three expeditions, P. J. Capelotti explores what went right and what, in the end, went tragically wrong. The cast of colorful characters from the Franz Josef Land forays included Walter Wellman, a Chicago journalist and bon vivant running from debts, his mistress, and an illegitimate daughter; Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, a deranged meteorologist with a fetish for balloons and a passion for Swedish conserves; and Anthony Fiala, a pious photographer in search of God in the Arctic. Featuring an international cast of supporting characters worthy of a three-ring circus, The Greatest Show in the Arctic follows each of the three expeditions in turn, from spectacular feats of financing to their bitter ends. Along the way, the explorers accumulated considerable geographic knowledge and left a legacy of place-names. Through close study of the expeditions’ journals, Capelotti reveals that the Franz Josef Land endeavors foundered chiefly because of poor leadership and internal friction, not for lack of funding, as historians have previously suspected. Presenting tales of noble intentions, novel inventions, and epic miscalculations, The Greatest Show in the Arctic brings fresh life to a unique and underappreciated story of American exploration.
Download or read book Across Arctic America written by Knud Rasmussen and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrative of the Fifth Thule expedition.
Download or read book Our Lost Explorers written by Raymond Lee Newcomb and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1879-1881, a crew of thirty-three men, led by Lieutenant Commander George Washington DeLong, participated in an Arctic adventure that defines the limits of human endurance. The Navy-operated, but privately owned, steamer Jeannette left San Francisco, California, for the North Pole through what was then believed to be open water beyond the Arctic icepack. The Jeannette remained in the ice as it drifted to the northwest through the first half of 1881. During this time, the crew made scientific observations, hunted seals and polar bears. In May 1881, they landed on Henrietta Island, 600 miles from Wrangell. In June 1881 the ice parted and they hoped they might reach open sea, but on the 12th the flows closed in with such force that Jeannette's hull was crushed. Her crew removed three boats, supplies and some equipment and began a difficult trek, dragging the boats over the ice towards open water. They reached the Kotelnoi and Simonoski Islands in early September, after which the way was clear to sail to the Lena Delta. However, the three boats were separated in a storm. One, commanded by Lieutenant Charles W. Chipp and seven other men, was not seen again. The other two, commanded by DeLong with thirteen others and Chief Engineer George W. Melville with ten others, landed far apart on the delta. Melville's party was saved by local inhabitants. DeLong and his men trudged south over the desolate terrain. After one man died of the effects of frostbite and the others were weakened by exposure and hunger, Seamen Nindemann and Noros were sent ahead to find help. Before that materialized, the remaining eleven succumbed, with DeLong and two others surviving perhaps a few days beyond 30 October 1881, when he made his final journal entry. The bodies of ten were discovered in March 1882, as Melville conducted a search for the other members of the expedition, and were transported back to the United States in early 1884.
