From the book: "They were five weeks out of England, driving through a storm on the icy edge of the world, when a sudden blast knocked Gabriel on her side. The helmsman tried frantically to turn the tiny ship into the wind that pinned it down, but the rudder had lifted clear of the surface and took no purchase. Water poured over the side, roaring into hatches as the wind drove the vessel across the waves and the crew clung frozen in despair. Only the captain acted, scrambling along the almost-horizontal upper sides, casting off lines to spill wind from the sails, forcing the crew into action to cut away the mizzenmast and the broken foreyard, then preventing them from doing the same to the mainmast. Finally Gabriel rose sluggishly, heavy with seawater but steering slowly off the wind. A tangle of broken rigging and sodden sails, she wallowed before the storm through the remainder of the day and all of the following night, while the captain restored order and set men to pumping the ship dry." Under orders from Queen Elizabeth I, Gabriel's captain B privateer and adventurer Martin Frobisher B took up the search for a northwestern route to Asia. A few days after enduring the storm of 14 July 1576, Frobisher sighted the most easterly outlier of Arctic North America and for the first time England became aware of this vast northern region. Over the next three summers it would be the scene of an adventure involving the fruitless search for a northwest passage, the first attempt by the British to establish a settlement in the New World, and the first major gold-mining fraud in North American history. Over 1,200 tons of rock were mined from Baffin Island and shipped to England, where they were found to contain not an ounce of gold. Yet Frobisher's claim of possession established British interest in northern North America and was the first step in the eventual establishment of British sovereignty over the northern half of the American continent. Using reports from the men who participated in the venture, details preserved in the oral histories of the Inuit, and archaeological information recovered from the sites of Elizabethan activities on Baffin Island, Robert McGhee describes Frobisher's expeditions and offers new insights into this audacious venture. The story ends on an ironic note B the capital of the new Territory of Nunavut, which restores to the Inuit a measure of the sovereignty claimed for England by Frobisher, lies at the head of the bay named after him, where over four centuries ago the English first ventured into Arctic America.

The book highlights the 16th-century English-Atlantic connections based on the world division defined by two fundamental documents of the late 15th century: namely, the papal bull Inter Caetera, and the Portuguese-Spanish Treaty of Tordesillas. Despite this, an imaginary Northwest Passage to the wealth and markets of the Far East captured the attention of Elizabethan merchants and navigators searching for an alternative sea route to Asia to challenge the Portuguese and Spanish commerce monopoly. The core of the book is Sir Martin Frobisher’s three Arctic voyages of 1576–78, intended to connect the Protestant focus on wealth acquisition with the territorial expansion. Although Frobisher’s venture lacked opportunities for advancement, he marked his place in history by creating a fascination for the mythical Northwest Passage and an interest in North America. The book is based on the eyewitness accounts of the expeditions’ captains, and will appeal to a large audience, from teachers and students in the general humanities to those specifically interested in language, literature, and trans-Atlantic and Renaissance studies.

The elusive dream of locating the Northwest Passage--an ocean route over the top of North America that promised a shortcut to the fabulous wealth of Asia--obsessed explorers for centuries. Until recently these channels were hopelessly choked by impassible ice. Voyagers faced unimaginable horrors--entire ships crushed, mass starvation, disabling frostbite, even cannibalism--in pursuit of a futile goal. Glyn Williams charts the entire sweep of this extraordinary history, from the tiny, woefully equipped vessels of the first Tudor expeditions to the twentieth-century ventures that finally opened the Passage.

European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North – a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination – offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “nonsite,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts – and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art’s very legitimacy. Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth – long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.

In 1897, at the height of the heroic age of Arctic exploration, the visionary Swedish explorer S. A. Andrée made a revolutionary attempt to discover the North Pole by flying over it in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty-three years later, his expedition diaries and papers would be discovered on the ice. Alec Wilkinson uses the explorer’s papers and contemporary sources to tell the full story of this ambitious voyage, while also showing how the late 19th century’s spirit of exploration and scientific discovery drove over 1,000 explorers to the unforgiving Arctic landscape. Suspenseful and haunting, Wilkinson captures Andrée’s remarkable adventure and illuminates the detail, beauty, and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling on the ice.

A searing, true tale of extraordinary darkness, Harper's critically acclaimed history is an absorbing and poignant portrait of the short, strange, and tragic life of the boy known as the New York Eskimo. Two 16-page photo inserts and one 8-page insert.

The 2014 discovery of HMS Erebus - a ship lost during Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage - reignited popular, economic, and political interest in the Arctic’s exploration, history, anthropology, and historical geography. Lines in the Ice investigates the allure of the North through topographical views, maps, explorers’ diaries, and historic photographs. Following the course of major journeys to the Arctic, including those of Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, and John Franklin, Philip Hatfield assesses the impact of these incursions on the North’s numerous indigenous communities and reveals the role of exploration in making the modern world. Besides detailing the area’s vivid history, Lines in the Ice also focuses on beautiful works created over the last 500 years by people who live and travel in the Arctic. Lavishly illustrated with reproductions of items rarely seen outside of the British Library, this volume meditates on humans’ relationships with the Arctic at a time when climate change poses a catastrophic threat to the peoples and ecosystems of this enigmatic region. A timely work that traces the past’s influence on the present day, Lines in the Ice showcases the rich visual history of Arctic exploration, indigenous cultural works, and the longstanding ways in which the North has captivated the public.

“An extraordinary real-life adventure of men battling the elements and themselves, told with ice-cold precision.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review) In the dark years following the Civil War, America’s foremost Arctic explorer, Charles Francis Hall, became a figure of national pride when he embarked on a harrowing, landmark expedition. With financial backing from Congress and the personal support of President Grant, Captain Hall and his crew boarded the Polaris, a steam schooner carefully refitted for its rigorous journey, and began their quest to be the first men to reach the North Pole. Neither the ship nor its captain would ever return. What transpired was a tragic death and whispers of murder, as well as a horrifying ordeal through the heart of an Arctic winter, when men fought starvation, madness, and each other upon the ever-shifting ice. Trial by Ice is an incredible adventure that pits men against the natural elements and their own fragile human nature. In this powerful true story of death and survival, courage and intrigue aboard a doomed ship, Richard Parry chronicles one of the most astonishing, little known tragedies at sea in American history. “ABSORBING . . . Suspense builds as Parry describes the events leading up to Hall’s ‘murder,’ then climaxes in horrifying detail.” –Publishers Weekly “RIVETING.” –Library Journal