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A fascinating and poignant account of one man’s life on the sea and the love it continues to inspire in him.
In the golden age of polar exploration (from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s), many an expedition set out to answer the big questionÑwas the Arctic a continent, an open ocean beyond a barrier of ice, or an ocean covered with ice? No one knew, for the ice had kept its secret well; ships trying to penetrate it all failed, often catastrophically. NorwayÕs charismatic scientist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, convinced that it was a frozen ocean, intended to prove it in a novel if risky way: by building a ship capable of withstanding the ice, joining others on an expedition, then drifting wherever it took them, on a relentless one-way journey into discovery and fame . . . or oblivion. Ice Ship is the story of that extraordinary ship, the Fram, from conception to construction, through twenty years of three epic expeditions, to its final resting place as a museum. It is also the story of the extraordinary men who steered the Fram over the course of 84,000 miles: on a three-year, ice-bound drift, finding out what the Arctic really was; in a remarkable four-year exploration of unmapped lands in the vast Canadian Arctic; and on a twoÐyear voyage to Antarctica, where another famous Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, claimed the South Pole. Ice Ship will appeal to all those fascinated with polar exploration, maritime adventure, and wooden ships, and will captivate readers of such books as The Endurance, In the Heart of the Sea, and The Last Place on Earth. With more than 100 original photographs, the book brings the Fram to life and light.
Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.
Includes 'official report of the (Swedish) Royal Board of Health on the hygiene and care of the sick during the Swedish polar expedition, 1872-73' by A. Envall.
From the book: "They were five weeks out of England, driving through a storm on the icy edge of the world, when a sudden blast knocked Gabriel on her side. The helmsman tried frantically to turn the tiny ship into the wind that pinned it down, but the rudder had lifted clear of the surface and took no purchase. Water poured over the side, roaring into hatches as the wind drove the vessel across the waves and the crew clung frozen in despair. Only the captain acted, scrambling along the almost-horizontal upper sides, casting off lines to spill wind from the sails, forcing the crew into action to cut away the mizzenmast and the broken foreyard, then preventing them from doing the same to the mainmast. Finally Gabriel rose sluggishly, heavy with seawater but steering slowly off the wind. A tangle of broken rigging and sodden sails, she wallowed before the storm through the remainder of the day and all of the following night, while the captain restored order and set men to pumping the ship dry." Under orders from Queen Elizabeth I, Gabriel's captain B privateer and adventurer Martin Frobisher B took up the search for a northwestern route to Asia. A few days after enduring the storm of 14 July 1576, Frobisher sighted the most easterly outlier of Arctic North America and for the first time England became aware of this vast northern region. Over the next three summers it would be the scene of an adventure involving the fruitless search for a northwest passage, the first attempt by the British to establish a settlement in the New World, and the first major gold-mining fraud in North American history. Over 1,200 tons of rock were mined from Baffin Island and shipped to England, where they were found to contain not an ounce of gold. Yet Frobisher's claim of possession established British interest in northern North America and was the first step in the eventual establishment of British sovereignty over the northern half of the American continent. Using reports from the men who participated in the venture, details preserved in the oral histories of the Inuit, and archaeological information recovered from the sites of Elizabethan activities on Baffin Island, Robert McGhee describes Frobisher's expeditions and offers new insights into this audacious venture. The story ends on an ironic note B the capital of the new Territory of Nunavut, which restores to the Inuit a measure of the sovereignty claimed for England by Frobisher, lies at the head of the bay named after him, where over four centuries ago the English first ventured into Arctic America.