Adolphus Greely

In 1881, Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely led the US Lady Franklin Bay Expedition to northern Ellesmere Island as part of the first International Polar Year (a series of coordinated international expeditions to the polar regions). One of the aims was to create an Arctic base. However, the adventure ended with Greely and six others being rescued in June 1884. Soon after, the expedition received international attention due to evidence of cannibalism.

Michael Robinson writes on Time to Eat the Dogs that "the Greely Expedition was supposed to represent a new kind of Arctic exploration, one focused on international, collaborative science rather than pell mell dashes to the North Pole. In the end, however, the expedition signaled the end of serious collaboration between Arctic explorers and scientists for decades". This is followed by a excerpt about Greely from The Coldest Crucible. Michael was also an advisor and contributed to a recent PBS documentary about the exhibition which can be viewed here.

Incidentally, the post includes page images from the Illustrated London News. Between 1842 and 1971, the paper was one of London's major publishing institutions, pioneering the use of drawings in the service of reportage. At its peak, the ILN had a circulation of about 300,000 and was the publication of choice for the Victorian middle classes, transforming illustrations into a credible, factual, news reporting tool. Previously, illustrations had been used mainly for political caricatures or for sensational events like public hangings. Compared with the dense, text heavy, pages of other papers from the time, the ILN is a joy to view (and the reason why I decided against including Greely content from the Manchester Guardian in the post).

See here for access to the ILN digital archive.

Franklin fictions review

The disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 man crew somewhere off the eastern coast of Canada in 1845 has spawned at least 24 novels, not to mention poetry, films and drama. Russell Potter, on his Visions of the North blog, reviews some of the literature as well as asking what it is about Franklin that appeals to such a wide array of authors.

On the Proper Use of Stars

Another day, another Franklin story. The latest news is that TV adventurer Bear Grylls claims to have found human bones, the remnants of huge fires built from ship timber, and tools carved from whale bone, which may help to explain the fate Sir John Franlin, his 129 men and their two ships. Grylls and his crew made the discovery while on a mission to enter the record books as the first team to navigate the treacherous Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean in inflatable boats. More details here.

Meanwhile, On the Proper Use of Stars, a novel about Franklin's doomed expedition has just been published. An English translation of Quebec writer Dominique Fortier's Du bon usage des etoiles (2008), it focuses on Francis Crozier, Franklin's second-in-command who turns a sceptic eye on the ambitions of his leader.

Life moves on and Grylls has just tweeted "off to start filming new Degree deodorant commercials today".

Georgy Brusilov

The fate of Russian adventurer Georgy Brusilov, whose legendary Arctic expedition vanished in 1912, has been revealed. Explorers discovered his camp complete with skeletons and the perfectly-preserved pages of the sailor's log on Franz Josef Land, Europe's northernmost land mass, in July. Brusilov was trying to forge a route through the ice-choked North-east passage, the elusive Arctic trade route from Asia to the West. Midway into the journey along the Siberian coast, Svyataya Anna, the expedition ship, ran aground on thick ice floes.

The 24-member crew clung to the doomed ship for two winters as it floated ever closer to the North Pole. In the Spring of 1914 a 14 man team left to sledge south to Franz Josef Land. Of those who left the ship, only two survived, one of whom was the navigator Valerian Albanov, who later described the ordeal in The Land of White Death. These formed the basis for Soviet author Veniamin Kaverin's novel Two Captains. More detail about the 2010 can be found here.

Global warming and the Arctic

'Global warming is crap' - so said UK Independence Party Leader Lord Pearson of Rannoch in a press release, last week. Each to their own and other views are available. I mention this as someone sent me the UKIP email while I was reading about explorer Pen Hadow's new expedition to the Arctic to research the acidification of the oceans caused by emissions of carbon dioxide. His team will cross more than 1,000 km of ice pans, frozen ridges and open ocean to help scientists discover how long it will be before the Arctic sea ice disappears due to climate. Video of Hadow can be seen here.

Of course the expedition may well discover that Lord Pearson is indeed correct and 'carbon really ain't pollution' but let's wait and see. Read about the team's training regime here, and more about the expedition itself on the Catlin arctic survey site. Meanwhile an Irish team is about to set off on an endurance trek to the North Pole.

While on the subject of climate change, I was recently searching the Guardian/Observer digital archive for early references and came across the following piece by the Astronomical Correspondent (May 17 1932).

(click to enlarge)

The search for Amundsen

The Winter 2009/2010 issue of the Explorers Journal, the official quarterly of the The Explorers Club, is a bipolar special. Features include a travel piece on sailing the 90 degrees North in a Russian nuclear icebreaker and exploring Antarctica by kayak.

In the news section I spotted an item about a Norwegian Navy vessel heading to the Barents Sea where they will scour an area of the seabed in search of the missing seaplane of polar legend Roald Amundsen. The Norwegian explorer, the first person to navigate the Northwest Passage and the first to reach the South Pole, disappeared in 1928 while trying to rescue Umberto Nobile, an Italian who had flown to the pole in the airship Italia and crash landed on the ice on the way back.

Despite having fallen out with Nobile after a 1926 flight over the pole, two years later Amundsen offered to go and look for him. On June 18 1928 at around 4.00 PM, he took off with a crew of six in a state of the art twin-engine Latham 47. Three hours later the plane transmitted what were to be its final signals. Nobile and his crew were rescued on June 22.

Last August, a team led by New Zealand explorer Rob McCallum returned from a two week search for the aircraft empty handed. Lots of useful information can be found at Search For Amundsen.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

With much of Britain under a thick blanket of snow, the nation's press has been hard at work trying to come up with clever headlines and different ways of writing about the white stuff. Snow problem, in today's Guardian, is an interesting essay by Charlie English in which he argues that society's determination to try and carry on as normal under these conditions is dangerously foolhardy. English, author of The Snow Tourist, starts off with the example of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson relating how when an Inuit becomes lost in a blizzard he will make himself comfortable and conserve energy. When the storm has passed he will carry on to his destination. A European, by contrast, will instinctively want to thrash on.

Stefansson was a noted explorer and ethnologist who spent five consecutive record-making years exploring vast areas of the Canadian Arctic after adapting himself to the Eskimo way of life. However, he was also a controversial figure, particularly with regard to his 'blonde Eskimo' theory. This, he explained to members of the Royal Geographical Society, as reported in the Guardian March 11 1913:

'The thing that roused greatest interest is his account of his five years' trip has been his discovery of some Eskimo tribes of an unusual type. These tribes have never seen white men, at all events in recent times. The had distinct European characteristics (light , blue eyes, brown beards, and so on) , and tonight Mr Stefansson suggested that they might be descendeds of some Scandanavian settlers from Greenland who disappeared from there in the fifteenth century and may, he thinks , have made their way westward into these remote snowy places. He scouted the idea that these people might be descended from survivors of Sir John Franklin's expedition'.

Stefansson later regretted making the comments and recent studies have discredited the theory.

Fridtjof Nansen and his single ski stick

Travel writer Sara Wheeler chooses Fridtjof Nansen as My Hero, a new column in the Guardian review. The piece is accompanied by a picture which, while it looks like it was taken in a studio, perfectly conveys her description of the Norwegian explorer as "a long-faced Norseman with a touch of the archetypal brooding Scandinavian (as well as a hint of the Sphinx.)"

One interesting point is that while it was becoming the norm to use two ski sticks at the end of the 19th century it, Nansen was fiercely devoted to using just one.