Search results

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...

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...

Andrew Lambert, a leading authority on naval history, reexamines the life of Sir John Franklin and his final, doomed Arctic voyage. Franklin was a man of his time, fascinated, even obsessed with, the need to explore the world; he had already mapped nearly two-thirds of the northern coastline of North America when he undertook his third Arctic voyage in 1845, at the age of fifty-nine.His two ships were fitted with the latest equipment; steam engines enabled them to navigate the pack ice, and he a...

A lavish account of pioneering polar photography and modern portraiture, Face to Face brings together in a single volume both rare, unpublished treasures from the historic collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), University of Cambridge, alongside cutting-edge modern imagery from expedition photographer Martin Hartley. The first book to examine the history and role of polar exploration photography, Face to Face is a unique project of unsurpassed quality. Face to Face features t...

'An elegant, densely textured work, like a tapestry ... A welcome contribution to polar studies.' Sarah Wheeler, Spectator '[MacInness] handles the whole thing with masterly skill...takes us to the heart of the hope, love, anguish and grief' The Times The men of Captain Scott's Polar Party were heroes of their age, enduring tremendous hardships to further the reputation of the Empire they served by reaching the South Pole. But they were also husbands, fathers, sons and brothe...

Intrepid voyager, writer and comedian Michael Palin follows the trail of two expeditions made by the Royal Navy's HMS Erebus to opposite ends of the globe, reliving the voyages and investigating the ship itself, lost on the final Franklin expedition and discovered with the help of Inuit knowledge in 2014. The story of a ship begins after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, when Great Britain had more bomb ships than it had enemies. The solid, reinforced hulls of HMS Erebus, and another bomb shi...

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

The North Pole was a mystery in the mid-19th century, many explorers who ventured into its wastelands never returned. After another failed expedition in 1845, even more concerted efforts were made to reach the Northernmost point of the globe. Fleming relays these stories. Elisha Kane was a poor leader of his crew, Charles Hall died of a stroke after his men refused to obey his orders. Later, the obsessive Robert Peary even took his pregant wife with him in order to set the record for the most no...

In 1893, Fridjtof Nansen set sail in the Fram, a ship specially designed and built to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel with the sea’s drift closer to the North Pole than anyone had ever gone before. Experts said such a ship couldn't be built and that the voyage was tantamount to suicide.  This brilliant first-person account, originally published in 1897, marks the beginning of the modern age of exploration. Nansen vividly describes the dangerous vo...

Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017.'Ed O'Loughlin is a skilled cartographer of both the Arctic and the human heart. What a magnificent novel' Ron Rash'A brilliant paean to the obsessions of the polar explorers . . . stupendously good' Australian'Vastly entertaining' Sunday TimesFROM BOOKER-LONGLISTED ED O'LOUGHLIN: THE PERFECT NOVEL FOR FANS OF AMY SACKVILLE'S THE STILL POINT AND FRANCIS SPUFFORD'S I MAY BE SOME TIME.It begins with a chance encounter at the top of...

Hard on the heels of his masterful and critically acclaimed Wales Book of the Year, Cloud Road: A Journey Through the Inca Heartland, John Harrison's Forgotten Footprints is the untold story of the sailors, sealers and eccentrics who discovered the last continent: Antarctica. A thrilling record of lost triumph and tragedy, a saga of adventure and ambition against all odds, and a compelling insight into extraordinary personalities and the times that shaped them, Forgotten Footprints captures the...

In this title, an acclaimed historian tells the tale of Henry Hudson's doomed final voyage in search of sea passage across the New World on its 400th anniversary. Henry C. Hudson - English mariner, storied explorer, and eponymous navigator of the Hudson River - throughout the final years of his life had a single obsession: The Northwest Passage. Finding a water route through America to East Asia was foremost on the minds of many explorers of the 17th Century, but no explorer of that era had the...

Cold and isolated, yet home to some 4 million people; harsh and unyielding, yet disintegrating with every passing year: the Arctic defies definition. In the modern mind it represents the quintessentially timeless - its landscape imagined both as a realm of crystalline purity and as a frozen kingdom of dread and death. A unique ecosystem that hosts such beloved creatures as the polar bear and the narwhal and serves as the homeland for some of the world's most robust peoples, the Arctic domain has...