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Four Years in the Ice - John RossDisgraced and dishonored for his report of an imaginary mountain range blocking the most likely access to the North West Passage, in 1829 Ross returned to Canada's frozen archipelago to vindicate his reputation. He rounded the north of Baffin Island and entered what he named the Gulf of Boothia. Here the Victory, his eccentric paddle-steamer, became frozen to the ice. Through three tantalizingly brief summers the expedition tried to find a way out and through fo...

"On a perfect day in March, 2009, with the temperature hovering near -40℗ʻ Fahrenheit, John Huston and Tyler Fish stepped off the North American continent and onto the frozen, jumbled surface of the Arctic Ocean. The two seasoned adventurers had their sights set on one goal: to travel under their own power to the North Pole without resupply. If they succeeded, they'd be the first Americans to do so. Forward is their story. Over a period of nearly two months, John and Tyler skied more than 500 mi...

Vilhjalmur Stefansson has long been known for his groundbreaking work as an anthropologist and expert on Arctic peoples. His three expeditions to the Canadian Arctic in the early 1900s, as well as his groundbreaking work in northern anthropology, helped create his public image as a heroic, Hemingway-esque figure in the annals of twentieth-century exploration. But the emotional and private lives of Stefansson the man have remained hidden - until now. Much new evidence of these other lives has rec...

The subzero temperatures were only one of the dangers explorer Frederick Cook (1865-1940) faced in his attempts to reach the North Pole. During his extraordinary and harrowing journey, he fought off arctic wolves and polar bears, lived through ice storms, almost starved on several occasions, and faced long and lonely hours of isolation. His book relates how he learned from Eskimos how to survive in the Arctic, hunting musk ox to survive, harpooning walruses, and traveling by dog sled. After his...

"One of the great strengths of Arctic Voices is that it shows how Alaska and the Arctic are tied to the places where most of us live. In this impassioned book, Banerjee shows a situation so serious that it has created a movement, where 'voices of resistance are gathering, are getting louder and louder.' May his heartfelt efforts magnify them. The climate changes that are coming have hit soon and hard in the Arctic, and their consequences may be starkest there."–Ian Frazier, The New York Review o...

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 wintr...

The world's subantarctic islands circle the lower part of the globe below New Zealand, Australia, Africa and South America in the 'Roaring Forties' and 'Furious Fifties' latitudes. They are filled with unique plants and wildlife, constantly buffeted by lashing rain and furious gales, and surrounded by a vast, powerful ocean. New Zealand and Australian subantarctic islands in particular have a rich and fascinating human history, from the early 19th-century explorers and sealers through to modern-...

In their own words, explorers reveal the hardships, wonders, and spiritual effect of the polar experience.

In 1933, Antarctica was essentially unexplored. Admiral Richard Byrd launched his Second Expedition to chart the southernmost continent, primarily relying on the muscle power of dog teams and their drivers who skied or ran beside the loaded sledges as they traveled. The life-threatening challenges of moving glaciers, invisible crevasses, and horrific storms compounded the difficulties of isolation, darkness, and the unimaginable cold that defined the men's lives. Stuart Paine was a dog driver, r...

This under-documented expedition was a pivotal moment in the annals of polar exploration and was the starting point, in historical terms, of revealing the great unknown continent of Antarctica. It was the first time in nearly 70 years since Captain James Cook had circumnavigated Antarctica, that a Royal Naval voyage of discovery had ventured so far South. They set a new ‘furthest south’ record in the process beating the one set up by James Weddell in a whaling ship in 1823. The expedition set...

"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so...

Polar Winds traces a century of northern flight from balloonatics to bush pilots and beyond. "They were all gamblers and fortune seekers. They did things on their own - were independent people who wanted to be free to roam. They were good people, but, of course, some were loners or escapists. They all depended strictly on their wits." Joe McBryan, pilot and owner of Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways, was talking about gold prospectors in the 1940s when he said this, but he could just as easil...

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen 16 July 1872 - 18 June 1928) was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the first Antarctic expedition to reach the South Pole between 1910 and 1912. He was the first person to (undisputedly) reach both the North and South Pole. This book records that historic journey that made Admundsen one of the greats of polar exploration. Kean Guides (Travel) have developed to take advantage of new reading media and to appeal to the modern reader. Specially formatt...

Farthest South - Ernest Henry ShackletonBorn in Ireland, Shackleton joined the merchant navy before being recruited for Captain Scott's 1901 expedition to Antarctica. He was with Scott on his first attempt to reach the South Pole and, though badly shaken by the experience, realized that success was now feasible. In 1907, with a devoted team but little official support, he launched his own expedition. A scientific programme gave it respectability but Shackleton was essentially an adventurer, begu...