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Product details

• Format Paperback | 224 pages
• Dimensions 152 x 229 x 13mm | 349.27g
• Publication date 30 Jun 2006
• Publisher Career Press
• Publication City/Country New Jersey, United States
• Language English
• ISBN10 1564148793
• ISBN13 9781564148797
• Bestsellers rank 23,684

Rough Weather All Day: An Account of the “Jeannette” Search Expedition

by Patrick Cahill, edited by David Hirzel

Pacifica, CA: Terra Nova Press.  173 pp., $20.00 USD.

Reviewed by: P.J. Capelotti, Division of Social Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Abington College, Abington, PA 19001, USA. E-mail: pjc12@psu.edu


James Gordon Bennett, the publisher of the New York Herald and the man who had dispatched Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone, was equally fascinated with the Arctic. In 1873, Bennett dispatched two reporters to search for the survivors of Charles Francis Hall’s doomed North Pole expedition.  Five years later, he assigned a reporter to an expedition in search of Sir John Franklin sponsored by the American Geographic Society and led by a U.S. Army lieutenant named Frederick Schwatka.

Bennett sponsored his greatest Arctic venture in 1879.   A U.S. Navy captain, George Washington DeLong, was ordered to locate the ‘lost’ expedition of the Swede Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld—and then attempt to reach the North Pole itself.  DeLong sailed from San Francisco in the Pandora, a former Royal Navy vessel which Bennett had purchased and renamed Jeannette after his sister.  The navy agreed to man the ship if Bennett paid all the expenses of the expedition.

Even before the Jeannette reached the Arctic, Nordenskiöld and his ship Vega broke through the ice north of Russia and emerged into the Bering Sea.  With no dramatic rescue to report, DeLong continued with his secondary mission and turned north towards Elisha Kent Kane’s chimerical open sea and the North Pole beyond.  The Jeannette was soon beset in the ice north of the New Siberian Islands and, after two grueling years drifting about in the ice, crushed.  DeLong and his men made a desperate retreat in the ship’s small boats to the Lena River delta on the Siberian coast.  Only one of the three boats reached safety, another vanished with all hands, and DeLong’s own small boat made it to shore where he and all but two of his men starved to death as they waited in vain for relief.  To intensify the disaster, a newly-commissioned U.S. Navy vessel sent to find DeLong, the U.S.S. Rodgers, was itself burned to the waterline and blown to pieces.

This interesting volume presents an edited version of the diary of a sailor on board the Rodgers, a thirty-two-year-old Irish-American mechanic named Patrick Cahill.  Cahill was brought to the U.S. as a boy and by his mid-twenties had found work as on a railway in Panama.  In 1880, Cahill joined the U.S. Navy as a Machinist’s Mate and the following year volunteered for service on the Rodgers as the navy sought to learn the fate of DeLong and his ship and crew.

Cahill must have possessed some literary ability in addition to his skills with machinery, as he was contracted by the San Francisco Chronicle to act as a correspondent during the Rodgers search for DeLong.  Cahill’s notes from the cruise never seem to have made it to the Chronicle, but a typescript was later made of them and, combined with interviews he gave in his seventies to the Oakland Tribune, form the source material for this edited volume.

Cahill’s observations make for terrific reading.  He describes his mates as “some pretty rough sailors” (p. 26), many of whom had been north previously and knew to carry a stash of trade goods with which to barter for furs and ivory in the far north.  As Cahill wrote: “We expect to have all kinds of curios when we return” (p. 30).  While the carpenter and cook suffered grievously from sea-sickness, Cahill loves being under sail: “it is grand to look at a big sea just as it comes aboard and dashes all over everything” (p. 31).  When the Rodgers arrived in ‘Port Petropaulovski’ (now Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky) in late July, the officers on board the Russian cruiser Strelok (Cahill called it the 'Straylok') toasted the men of the Rodgers and the Russian Emperor, at which point the Americans who exactly was the emperor since the assassination of the last one.  This quickly ended the celebrations, as the Russians, on the far side of the empire, had not yet learned of the assassination of Alexander II in St. Petersburg more than four months earlier.

By late August, the Rodgers had cleared the Bering Strait and searched at Wrangel Island and along the north coast of Siberian for any trace of the Jeannette.  Finding none, the ship returned southwards and November anchored for the winter in St. Lawrence Bay on the eastern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula on the far eastern tip of Siberia.  There, on November 30th, after the fire pumps had been disconnected to keep them from freezing, a fire in the fore hold broke out.  The crew battled the fire as long as possible while the ship was run aground in about three fathoms.  The ship burned to the waterline, and these are some of Cahill’s most vivid descriptions, as the crew scurried supplies ashore in the small boats before the ship was a total loss.

The entire crew escaped, to face a forced winter amidst four small villages of Inuit who nevertheless shared out what limited stocks of walrus and seal they possessed.  Despite the near-starvation diet that nearly killed him, Cahill maintained his daily observations throughout the winter until a whaler arrived in the spring and took the men off to San Francisco.  There Cahill recovered from his fascinating ordeal, left the navy, and made a career for himself in the city’s cable cars.

The volume is the product of Terra Nova Press, described as a ‘small POD publishing enterprise [that] seeks to bring into print the smaller, less-well-known true stories of polar exploration in the days of the sailing ship.’  The press is the result of editor David Hirzel’s longtime interest in Arctic and Antarctic exploration and, in  particular, the Irish contribution to same, as previous works have covered the life and travels of the ‘Irish Giant’ of the Royal Navy, Tom Crean.

The lack of proper editing does show at times, with errors in punctuation and especially with inconsistencies in the use of italics and/or underlining for the names of ships and the titles of newspapers.  In spite of these, the volume contains fascinating insights into a little-known sideshow of the vast saga of the Jeannette expedition and its aftermath.

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Product details

• Format Hardback | 312 pages
• Dimensions 162.05 x 234.7 x 27.43mm | 653.17g
• Publication date 14 May 2013
• Publisher University Press of New England
• Imprint Northeastern University Press
• Publication City/Country Massachusetts, United States
• Language English
• ISBN10 1555537928
• ISBN13 9781555537920
• Bestsellers rank 1,185,909

Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure

by Arthur Conan Doyle; Edited by Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower

University of Chicago Press, $35

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter



That Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "came of age in the Arctic," celebrating his 21st birthday at nearly 80 degrees north, is one of those little diamonds of fact in whose facets all kinds of unexpected light is prismed. For, although the editors don't mention it, Doyle was born in May of 1859, the very month that Sir Leopold McClintock came upon the last note left by Sir John Franklin's men on King William Island, and although Doyle describes his shipboard service as a bit of a "lark," the future creator of Sherlock Holmes was surely drawn to the Arctic partly for its air of unsolved mysteries,  implacable ice, and uncharted hazards. It featured in two of his stories -- "The Captain of the Pole Star" (based on the same experiences this diary recounts) and, somewhat less directly, in "Black Peter," from the Holmes canon, both included in the present volume.

Lellenberg and Stashower have done an admirable job in presenting this material, and the volume encompasses both a complete facsimile of the actual diary -- filled with Doyle's illustrations, some of them full-page or folding -- and a transcription of the same with copious notes.  These, however, are directed mostly at readers who will know Doyle from his Holmes stories, and don't -- alas -- provide much in the way of Arctic context.  For instance, although Doyle's ship, the "Hope," sails in the company of the Peterhead whalers "Erik" and "Windward," one will not learn from these notes that both vessels later played key roles in the relief of the Peary Arctic Expedition in 1899-1900 (though  the Windward's bringing home of Nansen is mentioned). In fact, there's not much about any earlier Arctic expeditions, with the exception of the fictionalized one of Mary Shelley's "Captain Walton" in Frankenstein.

Doyle's journal, like that of Walton, is framed at first with a series of letters home, then quickly moves on to the daily business of the ship. Comic relief is offered with a boxing match between Doyle and the ship's steward, which -- since the seaman was short and unacquainted with sparring -- ended with Doyle landing most of the blows, and later overhearing the steward's admiration: "He's the best surrr-geon we've had! He's blackened my e'e!"

Doyle seems to have made a similarly favorable impression on the rest of the crew, finding the Captain, John Gray, an especially congenial comrade.  The ship's first stop was at the edge of the pack ice, where there were baby seals to be clubbed, an activity in which Doyle endeavored to do his best, though remarking "it is bloody work dashing out the poor little beggars brains while they look up with their big dark eyes into your face." He fell into the water several times, once -- not being noticed -- nearly fatally, but was no worse the wear for it, enduring the well-meant gibes of crew and Captain, who dubbed him "the great northern diver."

The journal itself, aside from a few amusing anecdotes such as these, continues on a fairly pedestrian manner; there are accounts of various hunts, of the chasing and securing of two (disappointingly small) whales, and a fair number of days with "nothing to do but grouse, and so we did." Doyle's handwriting is fairly readable once one gets used to it, and his drawings -- as good of ships and animals as any nautical amateur, though dismal at people -- provide numerous delightful illustrations of the account. The tale of one "John Thomas"-- a pet sea-snail Doyle kept in a jar -- is told with high drollery, concluding with an obituary in which the dear departed is praised for "never looking down upon his smaller associates because they were protozoa while he could fairly lay claim to the high family of Echinodermata." It is charming, but were it not the work of Doyle, it would scarcely be distinguished among ship-board narratives.

But of course, it was written by Doyle. And it offers many enticing details to the very early part of his career: that while on ship he devoured Carlyle's On Heroes and Hero-Worship; that in his first medical practice, his consulting room was adorned with Esquimaux sealskin pants, along with the bones of a bladdernose seal he shot himself; that he launched his public speaking career with a lecture on the Arctic in December of 1883, mentioning Davis, Baffin, Hudson, and Parry; and that two early publications on the Frozen Regions -- "The Captain of the Pole Star" as well as an essay, "Glamor in the Arctic," which ran in the Idler -- were among his very first published works. Reading the essay and the fictional tales, one can't help but see in Doyle a wily brain at work, a brain more clever by far than the somewhat conventional skull in which it found itself encased. Such a mind could spin the merest straws of an uneventful polar voyage into gripping tale of dark moods leading to Arctic madness amidst the frosty Sirens of snow and ice.

This visually very pleasing volume is sturdily bound, beautifully printed, and very reasonably priced. And although, in terms of life on the Arctic seas, its contribution is quite modest, it gives us a truly singular and delightful insight into the mind and habits of a man who would, not long after, bring to life two of the most enduring characters in the history of literature.

Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England’s forgotten Arctic Explorer

by P.J. Capelotti

Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013.

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore


Peter Capelotti, anthropologist at Penn State University, archaeologist of human space travel, sometime poet, and writer on many lesser-travelled byways in the exploration and exploitation of the seas, has now written the first biography of Benjamin Leigh Smith (1828–1913), who appears as a shadowy presence in the annals of late-19th-century Arctic exploration—mentioned in passing in the narratives of more famous names—but who is now given centre stage in an account that focuses on his three yachting expeditions to Svalbard and two to Franz Josef Land in the 1870s and 80s.

It doesn’t take long to understand the reason for Leigh Smith’s ghostly absence from the feast of Arctic exploration history, and consequently the challenge that Capelotti set himself. The explorer was such a shunner of public attention—friendly as well as hostile, in print as well as in person—that even medals awarded to him ended up being sent in the post rather than collected. He never wrote (let alone published) accounts of any of his expeditions beyond the bare bones of a ship’s log, and never presented a paper at a meeting or wrote one up for a journal. Even the private correspondence that survives rarely concerns itself with anything beyond the practical arrangements for his voyages, and there is no body of letters from him to other explorers or theorists of the day that might place him as part of the conversation of the time. Most of his letters are to family members and rarely stray beyond the domestic.

The great majority of what we know of him has therefore come from the writings of others. Some of his expeditions resulted in the publication of popular accounts by other participants—of varying quality—and colleagues were also responsible for writing up or analysing the scientific results of his voyages. Most of the rest comes from the dedication of an indefatigable family archivist, Charlotte Moore, without whose work in preserving the documents of her ancestor’s life Capelotti’s task, already difficult, would have been almost impossible.

Benjamin Leigh Smith was the eldest son in a wealthy but socially eccentric family of dissenters that, in the way of such families, produced some groundbreaking and impressive lives; Florence Nightingale was a cousin of the explorer, and the early feminist Barbara Bodichon was a sister. His parents were never married, and only in midlife did he and his siblings discover that their father had sired another family with another unmarried partner who was a few rungs down the social ladder—with the result that, in the stratified society of the time, the two families would never meet and could be kept in ignorance of each other. Capelotti identifies Leigh Smith’s sense of vulnerability to the social stigma of his illegitimacy as one of the drivers behind his reluctance to establish a public profile; his outsider status as a non-Anglican—not unusual among Victorian industrialists but surely rare among Home Counties landed gentry—was no doubt another.

After education at Cambridge and training in law, he coasted without much direction until the death of his father gave him the income to indulge a passion for sailing to the Arctic—something that, like much else in his life, seems to come out of the blue, an almost arbitrary whim for someone with no background in sailing or geographical research beyond an amateur's dabbling. Capelotti gives some possible antecedants for his dream in the voyages of other wealthy yachtsmen to the Arctic, including Lord Dufferin and James Lamont, for both of whom the primary interest had been hunting. This too became the rationale for Leigh Smith’s first expedition, in 1871 in the yacht Sampson, which he had purchased from another landowning huntsman, John Palliser (leader of the British North American Exploring Expedition of 1857–60, though the author notes the name without seeming aware of the identity). If there is more than a touch of self-indulgent vanity in a rich man going hunting in exotically remote locations, Leigh Smith at least avoided hubris: he knew his limitations. All of his voyages were skippered by professional captains and crewed by workaday fishermen and whalers, British or Norwegian, who knew their way around the ropes, and Leigh Smith never seems to have insisted on a dangerous course to prove either his authority or his manliness. Indeed, he made a virtue of his ships’ relative powerlessness against the forces of nature, developing an exploration philosophy that emphasized going with the flow, allowing wind, current, and ice conditions to dictate where the exploring would be done. It’s notable that hard-bitten skippers like the whaler David Gray wrote about him not as a dilettante they tolerated, but as a colleague they genuinely respected.

At a time when no government-sponsored expeditions had been sent to the Arctic from Britain in more than a decade, Leigh Smith’s first voyage showed what patience and modest expectations could accomplish in a much smaller craft than the adapted bomb vessels sent out by the Royal Navy. His target was Svalbard, and in searching to the east of it for Gillies Land (one of many landmasses in Arctic exploration history that turn out to have been mirages) the Sampson became the first ship to reach the easternmost tip of Nordaustlandet—and thus of the Svalbard archipelago as a whole—which was later fittingly named Cape Leigh Smith. Cruising back along the northern coast of the island a lucky run of very late-season fine weather in September allowed them to sail to the northernmost end of the archipelago as well, adding new coastlines and place names to the map. A second expedition to the same area the following year was less lucky with the weather and added only one further name to the map, while a third in 1873 became famous primarily as a humanitarian venture, when Leigh Smith arrived in time to give desperately needed help and supplies to the Swedish North Pole expedition, whose support ships had been frozen in the previous autumn, leaving its leader Nordenskiold with double the expected number of mouths to feed through the winter.

After three expeditions in as many years, it seems that Leigh Smith had got it out of his system, but after the disappointing results of Nares’s British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76 (Capelotti is somewhat unfair in branding this a complete failure, with its significant science programme and its new furthest norths for both men and ships), the triumph of Nordenskiold’s first sailing of the North-East Passage in the Vega in 1879, and the loss of the Jeannette north of the Lena, Leigh Smith seems to have reconsidered his retirement to the sidelines, and he returned to the fray on a grander scale than ever, this time having his own yacht purpose-built for Arctic work with an icebreaking bow and a supplementary steam engine. In 1880 in this vessel, the Eira, he made his most successful expedition and one of the most geographically productive single-season voyages in the history of Arctic exploration. Following up on the discovery of Franz Josef Land by Weyprecht and Payer in the year of his last expedition, 1873, he managed to sail more than a hundred miles further west along the archipelago’s southern coast than its discoverers had done, charting coastlines, identifying and naming individual islands and their prominent features, and showing it to be a significant landmass rivalling Svalbard in overall dimensions.

This voyage sealed his acclaim among the geographers of Europe and America, but when he tried to follow it up the next year Leigh Smith had only a couple of weeks of further discoveries in the same area before a misjudgement of ice conditions by the Eira’s skipper led to the book’s eponymous shipwreck at Cape Flora, when the vessel was pinned between fast and moving ice and soon crushed, though before she sank there was time to remove almost all of her supplies and equipment. Like Nordenskiold’s crews, they now faced an unexpected overwintering, but unlike the Swedes they were relatively few in number and very well supplied with food, though they had to improvise a hut from local stone plus canvas and wood from the ship. If one guiltily acknowledges a sense of bathos in reading of the almost complete lack of drama during the winter of 1881–82, it is a tribute to Leigh Smith’s leadership and sense of responsibility for his men that ensured everyone had enough to eat. Again, modest expectations came into play: with no superiors to impress, promotion to gain, or desire for fame, Leigh Smith made no ambitious plans for overland expeditions in the spring that would add to their stock of geographical discoveries before attempting their escape southwards. He was content for everyone to stay as warm, dry, and well-fed as himself. And when the ice broke up in 1882 they made a well-ordered voyage towards Novaya Zemlya in the boats, meeting relief just where they expected to from one of a small flotilla of craft sent out that year from Europe to find them.

Two seasons of significant geographical discovery, and involvement in two overwinterings—once as the reliever, once as the relieved—gave Leigh Smith an almost complete set of classic Arctic exploratory experiences, and even if age and the financial burden of the lost ship had not been factors, perhaps he sensed that his career as an explorer was now complete, for he never went north again. Instead, after the inevitable blaze of publicity had been, as usual, diverted onto the heads of colleagues and companions, he retreated to the domestic concerns of his family and the management of his estate.

Peter Capelotti has done a remarkable job in pulling together the rather slender sources for Leigh Smith’s life and voyages into a coherent narrative that benefits from its author’s deep familiarity with the wider background of exploration, geographical theory, and social history of his subject’s time (I spotted only one minor error, a repeated reference to the Royal Geographic, rather than Geographical, Society). The one serious drawback is not in the writing but in the lack of good maps. Apart from reproductions of 19th-century maps, which really provide only historical interest, there are a small number of modern maps in inconsistent formats, and none of sufficient scale to follow the track in detail or note all of the place names bestowed—and none at all of Franz Josef Land, where the greatest number of these names are found . Instead, we have only Payer’s and Markham’s contemporary maps, which are almost impossible to relate to each other, let alone to the reality on a modern map.

But there is a more central lack than maps, and one that no author could supply if it were not available in the sources: a sense of a subject’s real personality. The few genuinely self-revelatory writings we have by Leigh Smith (in his letters) reveal a character solipsistic and startlingly vindictive in personal relationships. But for a man of his drive and achievements, liked and admired by colleagues, there must have been more, and the lack of writings that would have given a sense of his wider view of the world, and of his activities in it, are a keenly felt absence that no maps could make up for. The contradictory outlines refuse to resolve into a coherent whole, so while the ghostly figure at the feast has been adumbrated, he can probably never be made solid.

Product details

• Format Hardback | 448 pages
• Dimensions 254 x 314.96 x 38.1mm | 2,948.35g
• Publication date 01 Nov 2016
• Publisher OMNIBUS PRESS
• Publication City/Country London, United Kingdom
• Language English
• Illustrations note colour photos
• ISBN10 178038016X
• ISBN13 9781780380162
• Bestsellers rank 141,262

Polaris: The Chief Scientist's Recollections of the American North Pole Expedition, 1871-73

Translated and Edited by William Barr

U. Calgary Press $44.95 (ebook free)


Reviewed by Russell A. Potter


Since it's already been the subject of quite a number of books -- Chauncey Loomis's Weird and Tragic Shores, not to mention dueling exposés by Bruce Henderson (Fatal North) and Richard Parry (Trial by Ice), one might be forgiven for thinking that there's not much new to be learned about the ill-fated Polaris expedition to the North Pole commanded by Charles Francis Hall in 1871. One would be wrong, of course.

The expedition's doctor, Emil Bessels, published his own account of the voyage in Germany in 1879 under the title Die Amerikanische Nordpol-Expedition, but until now, there has been no English translation of his memoir. Thankfully, William Barr has undertaken this invaluable project, as he did earlier with Heinrich Klutschak's account of the Schwatka expedition, and this edition has all the customary hallmarks of his care and erudition. And, as Barr notes in an Epilogue, there's a new reason to take an interest in Bessels' version of events, since evidence has recently emerged giving him a powerful motive to have murdered his commander.

Those expecting such a book to have a lurid element will, however, be disappointed. Bessels, whatever his human failings, turns out to have been quite a good writer, seasoning his account with humor, relating events dispassionately, and demonstrating substantial knowledge of previous polar exploration. Early on, in giving his account of Isaac Israel Hayes's claim of a new furthest north, along with the sighting of an "open polar sea," Bessels offers an acute analysis, showing that Hayes's observations are completely inconsistent with both claims. Of course, it helped that the Polaris had just sailed through, and beyond, this purported open sea, but the clarity of his assessment is still impressive.

A few pages later, we're treated to one of the more wryly delightful accounts of the frustrations of shipboard dining in the frozen north that I know:

The food that was served up hot suffered a more significant cooling on its trip from the platter to the plate, and from the latter to the mouth, than the crust of the earth did at the start of the Ice Age; and food that came cold to the table became even colder there, before it could be eaten. Mayonnaise attained the consistency that properly prepared arrowroot ought to possess; English mustard reached the degree of hardness that a sculptor gives his modelling clay, and butter acquired the consistency of air-dried Swiss cheese.  Anyone who had a feeling heart beating in his breast would be moved to deep sadness by the sight of the sour pickled cucumbers. Half a dozen cycles of thawing and freezing which they had experienced in succession had etched massive wrinkles in their youthfully green skins which covered the wrinkled, shrunken flesh in folds. Surrounded by plump onions, slender beans and crisp heads of cauliflower that swam in crisping vinegar, they formed the saddest component that any still-life ever incorporated. 

Through passages such as these, the reader, quite naturally, begins to trust Bessels' account, and so of course wonders how he will treat of the death of his commander -- but here he or she will be disappointed. Hall's sickness and death are dealt with in very plain and prosaic manner, a bit surprising for someone who as the ship's doctor might feel that his readers would expect a greater degree of medical detail. There is, however, a telling moment after Bessels describes Hall's burial; he offers as his elegy a stanza from Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno.  The passage, which he may have chosen for its evocative imagery of sinners buried up to their necks in ice, has another significance: it's from that particular circle of Hell where those who have been treacherous to kin and country are punished.

Tookoolito at Hall's Grave (from a sketch by Bessels)

For there can be little doubt that Bessels possessed not only the means, but the motive for murdering Hall. As Barr notes, letters written by him to the young sculptress Vinnie Ream, with whom both he and Hall dined on several occasions before sailing, show that he was infatuated with her; my own research revealed that Hall, too, had special feelings for Ream (though his may have well been merely platonic). Bessels couldn't have helped but have noticed the gifts for Hall, including a miniature copy of her famous bust of Abraham Lincoln, that arrived by steamer at the Polaris's last stop at Upernavik, which were prominently displayed in his cabin. Jealousy, it seems, got the best of him, and augmented by the general resentment against Hall felt by others of the German scientific staff, led him to poison the captain's coffee with arsenic, with additional injections as "treatment" (Bessels claimed these were quinine), leading to the slow painful death of the one man who might, had he lived, have managed a sledge-trip to the pole.

Yet despite our knowledge of his crime, Bessels remains an observant and even charming narrator, and as Hall's death recedes into the background, the tale takes on, once again, the general descriptive tones of exploration narrative. As Barr notes, there's considerable information about climate, flora, and fauna, not to mention early Inuit settlements, that is elsewhere unavailable. Among these passages, though, there are some which raise still another concern.  According to the testimony given at the board of inquiry, the logbooks and journals from the Polaris were lost -- and yet Bessels, oblivious to this (or perhaps thinking his German readers would be unacquainted with the circumstances), seems at places to be drawing from them. It raises suspicions as to whether Bessels might have absconded with some of the missing logbooks, which might well have contained material he thought could incriminate him.

One gets the impression that Bessels was a methodial, efficient man who took pride in his scientific work, and hoped that his association with the disastrous expedition would not impede his overall career. If so, his hopes were largely unfulfilled; although a participant in some minor expeditions in the years after Polaris, the more ambitious ones he sought were postponed or cancelled due to difficulties with funding and other support. Along the way, he lost his office at the Smithsonian, and a fire destroyed his home near Washington D.C. (and with it, one supposes, any evidence for malfeasance there might have been among his papers); his last few years were marked by illness and instability, and he died of a heart attack at the age of forty-one.

William Barr, as ever, has produced a well-translated and throughly annotated edition. Extensive footnotes clarify many of Bessels' more obscure references, and the end-matter of the book includes a note on the new evidence as to his motive for murdering Hall, an account of the finding of the Board of Inquiry in his case, brief biographies of the senior members of the Polaris expedition, and a thorough bibliography. The University of Calgary Press has done the scholarly world a favor by making the book available as a free .pdf, but the printed version is well worth it; the quality of its production is high, and it's a book that deserves to be on the shelf beside any other accounts of the Polaris affair. It balances them, both with what it adds -- and what we know it withholds -- from that tragic story.

Product details

• Format Hardback | 336 pages
• Dimensions 163 x 241 x 29mm | 576g
• Publication date 24 Feb 2013
• Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
• Publication City/Country New York, United States
• Language English
• Edition Statement New
• ISBN10 0199765693
• ISBN13 9780199765690
• Bestsellers rank 106,207

£20

Reviewed by Russell A. Potter

Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of H.M.S. Investigator and the McClure Expedition

By Glenn M. Stein.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. ISBN 978-07864-77081

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore


In October 1853 the sensational news was announced in London that the captain and crew of HMS Investigator had discovered the last link with previously known routes in the Arctic to complete a maritime North-West Passage, finally proving its existence after some three centuries of uncertainty. Those who had brought the news, Lieutenant Samuel Cresswell and the Mate Robert Wyniatt, were almost certainly the first individuals ever to make a complete transit through the passage, but at the time of the announcement the captain and most of his crew were still in the Arctic, far from completing the passage and still far from safety—and it would be another year before they returned home. The discovery had actually taken place in the autumn of the voyage’s first year, 1850, when a sledging party had reached the northern end of Prince of Wales Strait and seen, some 75 miles to the north across Viscount Melville Strait, the looming bulk of Melville Island, reciprocating the view that Parry had had in the opposite direction thirty years before. With that connection made—by sight, if not on the ground—the route of a complete northern sea passage from Atlantic to Pacific was finally known, though the way the men were obliged to come home, sailing in three successive ships connected by sledge journeys, ironically showed how unviable a route it was for vessels: it was the crew that came through the passage, not the Investigator.

But ships cannot write their own histories, so half a century before Roald Amundsen navigated the Gjøa through the passage, it was Robert McClure’s crew who stole the limelight, winning renown and a grand prize of £10,000 that went some way to lightening the mood of a nation still recovering from the disaster of the lost Franklin Expedition, which the Investigator had ostensibly been searching for. This achievement, hailed as a landmark at the time, makes it all the more odd that no monograph on the expedition seems to have appeared since the publication of the official account, based on McClure’s log but smoothed and polished by Sherard Osborn, in 1856. Now polar historian Glenn Stein has rectified the oversight by producing a book that aims to be, and largely succeeds in being, the comprehensive, scholarly account that will form the essential benchmark against which all future work on the expedition will be judged. A glance at the list of archival references, journal articles, monographs and reference works in the bibliography is enough to show the extraordinary range and depth of his research, and the voluminous notes and appendices show the use he has made of them.

Robert McClure was born in 1807 into a comfortably off Irish family, with a father and grandfather who had made their careers in the army. After an abortive start in a military career Robert quickly switched his attention to the navy, meaning he was entering a world in which family connections—the usual lubricant to promotion—could no longer help him, and at a more advanced age than those of equivalent experience. But in the way of ambitious naval officers he got himself noticed, rising to mate and then lieutenant while serving on anti-slavery patrols in the Caribbean and then coast-guard service. Stein’s diligent archival research has also revealed for the first time McClure’s previously unknown first marriage during this period (in 1831). When the chance came for an adventure he grabbed it with both hands, volunteering as mate aboard the Terror on George Back’s expedition to Repulse Bay in 1837. More years on the Great Lakes and in anti-slaving duties intervened before another shot of polar glamour when he was chosen as 1st Lieutenant of HMS Enterprise in James Ross’s Franklin search expedition of 1848–49, which however was stopped by ice before advancing far beyond the entrance to Lancaster Sound. The fact that both of McClure’s first two Arctic voyages were frustrated from achieving their purpose seems only to have increased his resolve, when finally given command, to make certain of success.

In 1850 the Admiralty’s next throw of the dice in searching for Franklin was to send ships in a pincer movement from the west as well as the east, so as soon as they had returned Enterprise and Investigator began to be readied for a voyage to the Pacific, where they would enter the Arctic via Bering Strait and search along the continental coastline in case Franklin’s men had made their way westwards along it. McClure commanded the Investigator this time, with the Enterprise—and the expedition as a whole—commanded by Richard Collinson.

McClure has been much criticized for bamboozling his superior in order to take the Investigator into the Arctic alone, unimpeded by a commander whose lack of Arctic experience probably made him an object of contempt in McClure’s eyes. But Stein reminds us that Collinson gave every indication of trying to do the same to McClure, rarely waiting for the slower vessel to catch up and losing visual contact for the last time as far back as the Strait of Magellan. Moreover, it was Collinson himself (in a letter that Stein reproduces) who suggested that McClure take the dangerous but time-saving shortcut through the Aleutian Islands, the manoeuvre usually considered underhand by McClure’s critics. It was not the only characteristic the two commanders shared. Both seemed incapable of maintaining good relations with their officers, taking the almost unique step in Arctic voyages of placing officers under arrest for extended periods. Simultaneously, both courted the favour of the rest of the crew, although McClure, unlike Collinson, undercut his own efforts in this regard by his harsh punishments for offences, several times ordering the maximum 48 lashes. Both were deeply suspicious of rivals—which goes far to explain their attempts to shake each other off—and both wished to control the official version of events, suppressing accounts of rival officers to make sure their own were taken at face value. But McClure had the quality that would have endeared him to Napoleon—luck—one that Collinson conspicuously lacked.

Chief in rank among McClure’s rivals on board was 1st Lieutenant William Haswell, whom McClure said openly should not be on board even before the ship had lost sight of Britain. Yet without any personal writings by Haswell the long-suffering officer virtually disappears from the book for long stretches, reflecting the way he was systematically sidelined by his commander. A more formidable rival was the surgeon Alexander Armstrong. Dismissed by McClure as a fairweather officer with exaggerated self-regard, Armstrong was nevertheless solicitous of the entire crew’s health, and it’s striking that most of them contributed to buying him a gold watch after their return to Britain, a token of affectionate esteem not recorded for any other officer. Most endearing among the senior crew was the Moravian missionary and Inuktitut translator Johann Miertsching, seemingly the only one McClure treated with consistent friendliness, and in whom he seems to have confided as a sort of confessor. As a German among Britons, a landlubber among sailors, and a convinced Christian among mostly nominal ones, Miertsching was trebly a fish out of water, but every time the crew came in contact with local people his communication made a decisive difference in overcoming mistrust and soliciting information on geography and other expeditions.

Stein’s book is effectively a counterpart for the Investigator to William Barr’s similarly groundbreaking account of the Enterprise’s voyage, Arctic Hell Ship (University of Alberta Press, 2007). Both authors have been faced with the same problem in writing about two exceptionally acrimonious voyages: a conundrum of sources. In one way voluminous (the databases of 19th-century bureaucrats compiling service records, medal citations, ships’ stores, dockyard records, and logs, along with institutional histories, published and manuscript correspondence, charts, plans, drawings, watercolours and engravings) in crucial respects the sources are seriously lacking (in both cases most of the private journals written on board are missing—either deliberately destroyed or suppressed and then lost). Or to put it another way, there is a plentiful supply of dull raw material and a rather limited supply of interesting raw material. Barr responded with a frustrating refusal to reveal his own views, or use his own judgement to think himself into the shoes of the men he was writing about. Stein is nothing like as self-abnegating a writer as Barr, but he too is overly reluctant (for this reviewer’s taste) in trying to illuminate for his readers what was going on inside his subjects’ heads, or attempting to present events from their varying points of view, beyond simply quoting the surviving written sources.

His main strength is as an archival researcher, so it’s no surprise that the book contains no fewer than seven appendices, of which appendix 2 is the most important: a thorough discussion of the primary sources, both surviving and lost. Although Stein leaves the reader to fill in the blanks, it seems likely that McClure, who had ordered all those keeping a journal to deliver them to him, deliberately destroyed them once it became clear he would have to abandon the Investigator, since a search the following spring could not locate any but Haswell’s—ironically the officer McClure most loathed; yet somehow it too later vanished. Only Armstrong managed to retain his journal, either by making a secret copy as he wrote (McClure’s mistrust of him was entirely mutual) or by somehow retrieving it, officially or unofficially, from under McClure’s nose once command of the crew had passed to their rescuer Captain Kellett. Appendix 7 reveals Stein’s specialist interest in a usually overlooked form of ephemera: medals. His research into the history of individual medals and the official citations that accompanied them opened a narrow but often invaluable shaft of light into the service records of many of the expedition participants. Along with admiralty service records and other official data these have enabled Stein to build up small vignettes of practically every man on board, which he organizes in concentrated form in Appendix 3 but also sprinkles in narrative form throughout the book whenever some individual action by them is reported, giving an unusually egalitarian flavour to his account.

The book is well illustrated throughout with contemporary engravings—some news illustrations, some generic—alongside the talented Lieutenant Cresswell’s evocative and well-known watercolours. There are a handful of good area maps, but as in so many exploration books, maps showing routes, whether of the ships or of sledge journeys, are sadly missing, depriving readers of the most intuitive way of absorbing and contextualizing placenames, directions and distances.

The book contains a few solecisms and errors: “Kent County” and “Dorset County” are not formulas anyone living there would use; crewman Fawcett’s “society” being coveted has nothing to do with friendly societies—the nascent mutual insurance and banking organizations—but simply meant that people enjoyed being in his company, as any reader of Austen or Dickens would recognize; Andrew Dunlop’s short biography of McClure has been misattributed to Kenneth Douglas-Morris through some alphabetization malfunction in the references. Readers with different awarenesses would doubtless find others. But in a book of such density and range of information, the brevity of this list is a testament to the seriousness of the author’s commitment to accuracy and scholarship. Only his decision to quote himself—more than once—when choosing chapter epigrams betrays a lapse of judgement and a pardonable trace of authorial vanity.

No doubt there will be other books on the expedition in the future, especially perhaps if the contents of the Investigator, whose wreck was relocated with much fanfare in 2010 (the subject of a brief epilogue here), are ever thoroughly investigated. Some may be written with a greater flair for language and a surer sense of narrative drive, but it is hard to see Glenn Stein’s monument to scholarly devotion and documentary research ever being surpassed.