Excerpt from Access to an Open Polar Sea: In Connection With the Search After Sir John Franklin and His Companions The north pole, the remote northern extremity of our earths axis of rotation, is regarded, even by geographers, with that mysterious awe which envelops the inaccessible and unknown. It is shut out from us by an investing zone of ice; and this barrier is so permanent, that successive explorers have traced its outline, like that of an ordinary seacoast. The early settlements of Iceland, and their extension to Greenland, as far back as 900 A. D., indicated a protruding tongue of ice from the unknown north, along the coast of Greenland. I must express a doubt if the early voyages of Cabot and Frobisher and the Cortereals did more than establish detached points of this line of ice. The voyages, however, of the Basque and Biscayan fishermen, about 1575, to Cape Breton, made us aware of a similar ice raft along the coasts of Labrador to the north; and the commercial routes of the old Muscovy company aided by the Dutch and English whalers, extended this across to Spitzbergen, and thence to the regions north of Archangel in the Arctic seas. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In 1913, an expedition was sent to the Arctic, funded by the American Museum of Natural History, the American Geographical Society and the University of Illinois. Its purpose was twofold: to discover whether an archipelago called Crocker Land--reportedly spotted by an earlier explorer in 1906--actually existed; and to engage in scientific research in the Arctic. When explorers discovered that Crocker Land did not exist, they instead pursued their research, made a number of important discoveries and documented the region's indigenous inhabitants and natural habitat. Their return to America was delayed by the difficulty of engaging a relief ship, and by the danger of German submarines in Arctic waters during the World War I.

In the late 1800s, “Arctic Fever” swept across the nation as dozens of American expeditions sailed north to the Arctic to find a sea route to Asia and, ultimately, to stand at the North Pole. Few of these missions were successful, and many men lost their lives en route. Yet failure did little to dampen the enthusiasm of new explorers or the crowds at home that cheered them on. Arctic exploration, Michael F. Robinson argues, was an activity that unfolded in America as much as it did in the wintry hinterland. Paying particular attention to the perils facing explorers at home, The Coldest Crucible examines their struggles to build support for the expeditions before departure, defend their claims upon their return, and cast themselves as men worthy of the nation’s full attention. In so doing, this book paints a new portrait of polar voyagers, one that removes them from the icy backdrop of the Arctic and sets them within the tempests of American cultural life. With chronological chapters featuring emblematic Arctic explorers—including Elisha Kent Kane, Charles Hall, and Robert Peary—The Coldest Crucible reveals why the North Pole, a region so geographically removed from Americans, became an iconic destination for discovery.

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