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Rabu, 29 April 2020
You could be the target of a spell or curse and not even know it! All people, witches or not, are susceptible to these attacks. The difference: witches and magicians can do something about it. Now you can too. Protection & Reversal Magick is a complete how-to manual on preventing, defending, and reversing magickal attacks of any kind. You will learn to:
Set up early-warning systems.
Appease angry spirits through offerings.
Perform daily banishings and make amulets that will prevent most attacks.
Make magickal decoys to absorb attacks against you
Summon guardian spirits or gods for help.
Bind, confuse, or expel a persistent enemy who will not leave you be. These techniques aren't just for Wiccans, either, but for ceremonial magicians, rootdoctors, witches, and anyone else who puts magick to a practical use. Like the cunning men and women of old, now you can defend yourself and your loved ones against even the strongest attacks!
Product details
- Paperback | 224 pages
- 152 x 229 x 13mm | 349.27g
- 30 Jun 2006
- Career Press
- New Jersey, United States
- English
- 1564148793
- 9781564148797
- 23,684
Download Protection and Reversal Magick : A Witch's Defense Manual (9781564148797).pdf, available at WEB_TITLE for free.
Protection and Reversal Magick : A Witch's Defense Manual (9781564148797)
Sabtu, 08 November 2014
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.
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.
Rough Weather All Day
Selasa, 05 Juni 2018
Summer is drawing to a close as Huntley Manor is due to have its grand re-opening. Abbie is determined to save the hotel from closure but she has to remember her own career too… As she and Thomas grow ever closer, will she end up making Littlewood her home for good? Or will she set up her own PR company back in London…?
Eszter has to decide whether it is time to go back to Hungary... But what has she got to return to? She has no career to speak of, and their home is filled with painful memories of her beloved husband. But can a new job, a new home and a surprise new dog convince Eszter and Zoe to stay?
Louise wants to tell Alex how she feels but decides she needs to show him after pushing him away for so long. Will a grand gesture be enough to show him she won't run away this time?
As the town of Littlewood comes together to help Huntley Manor, we’ll find out if kindness really does have the power to save the day…
Eszter has to decide whether it is time to go back to Hungary... But what has she got to return to? She has no career to speak of, and their home is filled with painful memories of her beloved husband. But can a new job, a new home and a surprise new dog convince Eszter and Zoe to stay?
Louise wants to tell Alex how she feels but decides she needs to show him after pushing him away for so long. Will a grand gesture be enough to show him she won't run away this time?
As the town of Littlewood comes together to help Huntley Manor, we’ll find out if kindness really does have the power to save the day…
I have mixed feelings about part 4 of Random Acts of Kindness, I was so eager to read this after waiting 2 months for the release but on the other hand I know I am going to be leaving these much loved characters behind.
This final part of the 4 part book ties everything up beautifully for our three protagonists. Eszter has a big decision to make about her and Zoe’s future, Abbie is praying her event for Huntley Manor is successful for Thomas and Louise is still trying to let the barriers down that are shielding her heart.
I won’t say any more then this about the details of the storyline as it is always difficult not to give too much away when a book is released in parts. The great thing is with each part we are given a brief recap as to what has happened in the previous part to refresh our minds and keep us up to speed.
I have come to really care about our characters in this book, they are three strong determined ladies who with the support of each other have taken some big steps to change the paths of their lives. The author has managed to create such realistic likeable characters who soon feel like friends to us.
The Kindness board features again in part 4 and this is something I love, the idea of sharing everyone’s acts of kindness to remind us that through all the negative press we hear there is still a lot of good in the world and the kindness board brings an uplifting and positive part to the storyline.
As I have mentioned in my review for part 1 I am not a fan of books broken down and released in parts, however, I have absolutely loved Random Acts of Kindness and I was eagerly waiting for the release of each part to catch up with the women again to see what they are upto next.
I can not recommend this book enough, the authors writing style is so captivating and she builds such rounded characters who will stay with me for a long time. I really hope this isn’t the end to these characters and that we see a sequel or at least their heads popping up in another book to see how they are all getting on.
This final part of the 4 part book ties everything up beautifully for our three protagonists. Eszter has a big decision to make about her and Zoe’s future, Abbie is praying her event for Huntley Manor is successful for Thomas and Louise is still trying to let the barriers down that are shielding her heart.
I won’t say any more then this about the details of the storyline as it is always difficult not to give too much away when a book is released in parts. The great thing is with each part we are given a brief recap as to what has happened in the previous part to refresh our minds and keep us up to speed.
I have come to really care about our characters in this book, they are three strong determined ladies who with the support of each other have taken some big steps to change the paths of their lives. The author has managed to create such realistic likeable characters who soon feel like friends to us.
The Kindness board features again in part 4 and this is something I love, the idea of sharing everyone’s acts of kindness to remind us that through all the negative press we hear there is still a lot of good in the world and the kindness board brings an uplifting and positive part to the storyline.
As I have mentioned in my review for part 1 I am not a fan of books broken down and released in parts, however, I have absolutely loved Random Acts of Kindness and I was eagerly waiting for the release of each part to catch up with the women again to see what they are upto next.
I can not recommend this book enough, the authors writing style is so captivating and she builds such rounded characters who will stay with me for a long time. I really hope this isn’t the end to these characters and that we see a sequel or at least their heads popping up in another book to see how they are all getting on.
Kindle
Random Acts of Kindness Part 4 by Victoria Walters
Sabtu, 25 April 2020
Dancing on Water is both a personal coming-of-age story and a sweeping look at ballet life in Russia and the United States during the golden age of dance. Elena Tchernichova takes us from her childhood during the siege of Leningrad to her mother's alcoholism and suicide, and from her adoption by Kirov ballerina Tatiana Vecheslova, who entered her into the state ballet school, to her career in the American Ballet Theatre. As a student and young dancer with the Kirov, she witnessed the company's achievements as a citadel of classic ballet, home to legendary names--Shelest, Nureyev, Dudinskaya, Baryshnikov--but also a hotbed of intrigue and ambition run amok. As ballet mistress of American Ballet Theatre from 1978 to 1990, Elena was called "the most important behind-the-scenes force for change in ballet today," by Vogue magazine. She coached stars and corps de ballet alike, and helped mold the careers of some of the great dancers of the age, including Gelsey Kirkland, Cynthia Gregory, Natalia Makarova, and Alexander Godunov. Dancing on Water is a tour de force, exploring the highest levels of the world of dance.
Product details
- Hardback | 312 pages
- 162.05 x 234.7 x 27.43mm | 653.17g
- 14 May 2013
- University Press of New England
- Northeastern University Press
- Massachusetts, United States
- English
- 1555537928
- 9781555537920
- 1,185,909
Download Dancing on Water : A Life in Ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT (9781555537920).pdf, available at WEB_TITLE for free.
Dancing on Water : A Life in Ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT (9781555537920)
Senin, 05 November 2012
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.
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.
Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure
Minggu, 16 Maret 2014
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.
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.
Shipwreck at Cape Flora
Selasa, 28 April 2009

NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, $24
Reviewed by Russell A. Potter
Wanting is the latest, but surely not the last, in the tradition of fiction inspired by some aspect of the career of Sir John Franklin. And yet, even in this crowded field, it stands out as one of only two or three that draw fully and richly from the indigenous cultures among which Franklin sojourned, and it is the only one to take on his and Lady Jane's relationship with the aboriginal peoples of Tasmania. At the same time, by alternating this narrative with a fictionalized account of Charles Dickens's personal crises in the later 1850's -- a period which would see both the death of his youngest daughter and his separation from his wife -- he complicates the colonial landscape with a cobblestone corollary. The most unexpected figure in all of this is a tragic heroine of almost Dickensian proportions, the native Tasmanian girl Mathinna, adopted by the Franklins during their time at Government House in Hobart Town, then abandoned when they returned to England in 1843.
Mathinna's story has been told before -- most powerfully in a radio play by Carmen Bird, In Her Father's House, which was broadcast on ABC Australia in 2003. Yet here, interwoven into Flanagan's dense, Tolstoyesque garden of forking narratives, it seems somehow even darker and more desperate. Mathinna was part of that remnant of Tasmania's original people who had been rounded up and isolated on Flinders Island (named after Franklin's uncle) under a policy conceived of as protection but in practice both a cultural and literal act of genocide. The program was administered by George Augustus Robinson, the chief "Protector of Aborigines," a man who never appreciated the irony of his title. Early on, Flanagan gives us a vivid portrait of the workings of his mind, and we see the method in the madness he directed. To him, Lady Jane's desire to adopt Mathinna is a conundrum; he recognizes a certain imperious selfishness to which, given the Franklins' position, he has little choice but to accede. Jane comes across as a bossy, breezy, and thoughtless woman, and her husband -- when he comes across at all -- is reduced to little but a wheezing, overweight sack of compliance. Rarely in the tradition of Franklin fiction has the "great man" appeared so reduced; when, as he always does, he dies in this narrative, one can scarcely even muster a feeling of pity.
At the same time, we are introduced to the world of Dickens, and here again Flanagan has clearly done his historical homework. We see him both as the toast of polite society and the restless recluse, wandering the streets of London by night; we meet two men -- John Forster and Wilkie Collins -- whose rivalry for his intimacy triangulates this period of his life. Dickens, of course, was quite carried away by the public feeling over the disappearance of Franklin, offering his services to Lady Jane to dispel Dr. John Rae's reports of cannibalism in 1854, as well as producing, with Collins, the 1857 play The Frozen Deep, which was in many ways a public elegy for Franklin's men. And it was during the Manchester performances of the play at which he met Ellen Ternan, a young actress who quite won his heart, and with whom he spent the rest of his life in a possibly Platonic relationship (they burned all their letters, so the world may never know).
The parallels between the world of Dickens and that of Mathinna seem at times a bit strained; the "experiment" of "civilizing" an Aboriginal girl, and her later abandonment, seems quite distant from Dickens's emotional travails in the midst of a bustling London literary scene. And yet time, being made of moments, works some wonders here; Flanagan frames the epiphanies of his characters as vividly and multifariously as the famous seven hundred looking glasses with which the "Erebus" and "Terror" were festooned for a fancy dress ball while calling on Hobart Town in the midst of James Clark Ross's circumnavigation of Antarctica. That these same ships, only a few years later, would be witness to Franklin's own death and nearly twenty of his men, is a fact not lost on Flanagan, who finds light in darkness and darkness in light. He makes the ball into a costume party, giving Mathinna a wallaby mask and Sir John -- who escorts her on board -- that of a black swan, which enables richly memorable lines: "'Our princess of the wilds,' sighed a wolf."
Mathinna herself comes through vividly, and with the kind of uncondescending empathy that's rare in fictional depictions of tragic native figures. Flanagan has caught something of the weave and the weft of her world, of the impossibility of the promise leant to her by Lady Franklin's stiff affection, the gazes of the white fellas, and the famous red dress given by her Ladyship, preserved in the oil portrait she commissioned. The details of Mathinna's known life form a kind of armature for the fabric of Flanagan's imaginings, but he leaves some parts of his own cloth unwoven and gauzy, as he should.
It would be unfair to the reader to trace the ultimate denouement of these darkly twinned, deeply tangled tales -- suffice it to say that Flanagan manages to make a sort of resolution out of the lack of resolution offered by history. In a Beckettian phrase, Garney Walch, the old oxcart driver who had first driven Mathinna into Hobart Town muses on the meaning of it all:
"How it goes,' he murmured," and keeps on going."And so it goes.
Wanting: A Novel
Sabtu, 11 Juli 2020
David Bowie: The Golden YearsAuthor Roger GriffinABOUT THE BOOKDavid Bowie's career is defined by the 70s, his golden years. This book chronicles Bowie's creative life during that decade in a year by year, month by month, day by day format, placing his works in their historical, personal and creative contexts. Every live performance: when and where and who played with him. Every known recording: session details, who played on it, who produced it and release details. Every collaboration is also covered, including production and guest appearances. Film, stage and television appearances: Bowie brought his theatrical training into every performance and created a new form of rock spectacle.Follows Bowie on his journeys across the countries that fired his imagination and inspired his greatest work. A detailed illustrated discography documenting every Bowie recording during this period, including tracks he left in the vault. Many of these ended up on reissues and compilations, which are covered comprehensively - an invaluable reference work.
Product details
- Hardback | 448 pages
- 254 x 314.96 x 38.1mm | 2,948.35g
- 01 Nov 2016
- OMNIBUS PRESS
- London, United Kingdom
- English
- colour photos
- 178038016X
- 9781780380162
- 141,262
Download David Bowie: The Golden Years (9781780380162).pdf, available at specialbooks.site for free.
David Bowie: The Golden Years (9781780380162)
Senin, 09 Januari 2017
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:
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.
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.
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Tookoolito at Hall's Grave (from a sketch by Bessels) |
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.
Polaris: The Chief Scientist's Recollections of the American North Pole Expedition, 1871-73
Jumat, 26 Juni 2020
This book is about how to give outstanding feedback to patients, their family members, and other professionals. Effective feedback sessions have the potential to help patients understand their neurocognitive syndromes in the larger context of their real world environments and in a manner that positively alters lives.
As our profession has matured, feedback sessions with patients and family members have become the norm rather than the exception. Nonetheless, many senior and even mid-career neuropsychologists were never explicitly taught how to give feedback. And despite the burgeoning neuropsychological literature describing sophisticated assessment methods and neuropsychological syndromes, there has been almost no parallel literature describing techniques for communicating this information to patients and
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Feedback that Sticks presents a compilation of the clinical feedback strategies of over 85 neuropsychologists from all over the country: training directors, members of tertiary medical teams, and private practitioners. It offers the reader the ability to be a fly on the wall as these seasoned neuropsychologists share feedback strategies they use with patients across the lifespan, and who present with a wide variety of neurological and developmental conditions. Like receiving the best feedback
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Product details
- Hardback | 336 pages
- 163 x 241 x 29mm | 576g
- 24 Feb 2013
- Oxford University Press Inc
- New York, United States
- English
- New
- 0199765693
- 9780199765690
- 106,207
Download Feedback that Sticks : The Art of Effectively Communicating Neuropsychological Assessment Results (9780199765690).pdf, available at WEB_TITLE for free.
Feedback that Sticks : The Art of Effectively Communicating Neuropsychological Assessment Results (9780199765690)
Sabtu, 06 Juni 2009

by Andrew Lambert
London: Faber & Faber, 2009
£20
Reviewed by Russell A. Potter
Andrew Lambert's Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation is the first new scholarly biography of Sir John Franklin in many years. How many? Well, it depends on how you count. Deadly Winter, Martyn Beardsley's 2002 biography, was more of a general-interest work, while John Wilson's lively 2001 volume, John Franklin: Traveller on Undiscovered Seas, was geared to younger readers. Before that, if one wanted a detailed biography by a naval historian one would have to reach back almost to Richard J. Cyriax's Sir John Franklin's Last Expedition in 1939. So there can be no doubt that the appearance of Lambert's study is an occasion for celebration among all with an interest in the strange fate of this unhappy navigator.
And yet, as Franklin has come to mean so many things for so many people, it might be wise to say at the outset what this book is not. It is not a psychological study; those looking for insights into Franklin's character would be far better served by Beardsley's book. It is not, in fact, a summa of Franklin's entire career; for that, one would have to reach back to G.F. Lamb's Franklin - Happy Voyager from 1956. Like Cyriax, Lambert's real subject is Franklin's last expedition, and his great aim is to set that event in the richest possible naval and historical context. As such, Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation is a resounding success, easily the most comprehensive and authoritative account we have of the reasons why this man did, and died.
(For those who may resent my pun on Tennyson, who was Sir John's cousin, I would only add that it was -- of all people -- Lady Jane Franklin who caused 10,000 copies of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" to be distributed to soldiers in the Crimea).
Lambert's labor is to give his readers the fullest possible account of the motivations of those who sent Franklin and his men to what turned out to be their demise. In order to do this, he seems to feel, he must take away the popular notion that the Franklin Expedition sailed in order to complete the "Arctic Grail" of the Northwest Passage, and give us instead an account of Franklin as scientist-in-chief of a great voyage of magnetic and geographical observation. The correction, like that for the declination of the compass, is a vital one, and yet in his effort to re-orient our gaze Lambert, in my view, risks distorting the reader's perspective in the opposite direction.
In his strongest declaration, on page 167, he goes so far as to say that "the Victorians were not so foolhardy as to risk two ships and 129 men in pursuit of a geographical curiosity of no practical utility. Instead, [Franklin's] expedition was designed to address a high-profile scientific agenda, and the decision to send him was driven by the political power of organised science." There's certainly no doubt that a scientific imperative, driven (as Lambert vividly recounts) by the Humboldtian quest for the mapping of terrestrial magnetism, was a key factor in getting the necessary government support. But to say that the Victorians were uninterested in geographical accomplishments "of no practical utility" is to distort the political and public sense, driven home over the years by men such as Sir John Barrow, that it was precisely the useless things that mattered. After all, had not Sir John Ross, testifying before a Parliamentary committee in 1834, declared that the Northwest Passage, even if obtained, would be "absolutely useless"? And had not Barrow, in his last and most emphatic defense of the quest for the Passage, rejected the utilitarian view, declaring that "it must be a very narrow spirit and view of the subject which can raise the cry of "Cui bono?" and counsel us to relinquish the honor and peril of such enterprises?"
The divergence between the reasons necessary to justify an undertaking on purely scientific grounds, and those vital to capturing the public imagination, is a persistent one. In response to those who questioned why the United States needed to despatch a man to the surface of Earth's Moon before the Soviets could do so, many an otherwise calm and rational man fell back upon disquisitions about Tang, "space food sticks," and improvements to onboard telemetry. Truth be told, while all of these things had some significant practical value, if their practical value alone had been the only argument, the mission to the Moon would never have been undertaken. Just so, while from a scientific view the "Passage" as such was a nil value, whereas magnetic data obtained near the Pole was worth its weight in scientific gold, such marvelous observations would not have been possible without the public's passion for a national achievement, even and especially one of so little immediate use that only the greatest nations dared undertake it.
So let us simply say that, while that the urge to obtain newly accurate magnetic observations near the North Magnetic Pole was indeed a vital impetus for Franklin's mission, that mission would have never have received Government backing had it not "piggybacked" upon the public's passion for the elusive laurels of the Passage. We need not lessen one achievement by disparaging the allotment of the other. Indeed, Roald Amundsen, who eventually achieved this long-sought goal, was only able to justify his undertaking by making similar protestations that magnetic observations were his chief object. Let us look kindly upon such claims, accepting the boon to science while permitting some degree of adulation for the accomplishment of a useless, yet widely lauded goal.
But back to Lambert's study. He skims over Franklin's earlier expeditions, allotting only a few pages apiece to his voyage under Buchan to Spitsbergen, and his first and second land expeditions. Franklin's time in Tasmania receives more substantial coverage, and rightly so, as it was there, on the colonial frontier, that Franklin was able to take up the mantle of the prime intellectual magnate. Through his, and through Jane's, public foundations, journals, and societies, they laid the foundation of an enlightened country far before -- as it turned out -- the country was ready for them. Nevertheless, it was a grand period, and never more so than when Sir James Clark Ross and Francis Crozier sojourned in Hobart Town. Lambert passes quickly over the dress balls with their famous mirrors, and gives us in their place a contrasting portrait of a Franklin, more Benjamin than John in his inclinations, supporting and encouraging vital magnetic and geological observations.
The buildup to the great undertaking is aptly handled by Lambert, who gives a vivid account of the machinations by which Franklin won the command, as the great gears and cogs of science rotated their contributions into place. As he notes pointedly, on 12 July 1845, as the last parcels of mail headed south, the inner thoughts of Franklin, along with all of his men, passed forever out of direct knowledge, and all the rest is speculation. And yet, in its place, the drama of the search for Franklin soon engaged more men, more resources, and more ships than anything conceived of in Franklin's original orders. Lambert proves a capable chronicler of the Franklin search, and while he does not add a great deal of new insight to our understanding of it, he keeps the drama vividly alive, and sprinkles the salt of lesser-known facts which keep the matter savory.
When it comes, though, to the "last resource" and other events which depend on a complex, ambiguous, and permanently incomplete assortment of Inuit testimony, archaeological finds, and grand conjectures, Lambert remains -- resolutely though frustratingly -- aloof. I'm relieved that, unlike Beardsley, he accepts it as established that cannibalism occurred among some groups of survivors; the preponderance of the forensic and historical evidence leaves no room for comfort here. Nevertheless, he follows Beardsley in setting aside any detailed analysis of this same evidence, leaving his readers with a similar sense that, if they wish to know more, they will have to turn to Woodman, Loomis, Eber, and others. While I respect Lambert's sense of integrity in drawing his limits, I still regret that his study declines to offer what I'm sure would have been his sensible overview of what, by patient inquiry, has at least so far been learned.
The remainder of Lambert's study is largely memorial, in the sense that it traces the evolution of Franklin's reputation in the world he had long since left. His section "Brazen lies" offers an observant and detailed account of Lady Franklin's attempts to secure her husband's posthumous reputation. And yes (how) does that brass lie? The line from Richardson is one of contention: "they forged the last link with their lives." And yet the Inuit testimony of their encounter with Franklin's men at Washington Bay, on whose southern edge Simpson's cairn had been erected -- testimony which Lambert elsewhere accepts -- corroborates this very line. It is strange indeed that Lambert, and -- more notably in the press -- Inuit politician Tagak Curley -- have taken to calling this line a lie. It seems as though Lambert wants it both ways; he desires to free Franklin of falsely-flaunted explorer's laurels while re-crowning him with Science -- and yet at the same time loudly proclaims that the statue on Waterloo Place has feet of clay.
Yet the end, I must say, I remain an admirer of this well-written, challenging, and thoughtful book. It is not precisely a biography, and it has less of social and literary context than I should have liked -- but it is an ardent, energetic volume which does much to correct and balance the historical record. It rewards its readers with a new sense of the substance of the man and his mission, and while it only pauses to observe a few of the many cultural monuments he left in his wake, it restores to us a man who, whatever fancies have kept him in the public's mind since, had an eminently practical and valuable career in the eyes of his Victorian compeers.
SPECIAL FEATURE: Check out our interview with Andrew Lambert.
Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation
Sabtu, 12 Desember 2015
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.
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.
Discovering the North-West Passage
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