Excerpt from Wrinkles in Practical Navigation Should this belief be justified by results, the Fifteenth Edition of Wrinkles will serve not less than two purposes: It will continue to awaken the interest of the student by making the subject attractive, and to train his intelligence by bringing before him whatever is striking, novel, and instructive in the particular branches of the nautical profession with which it deals; and it will perpetuate the high navigational knowledge, and the capacity for taking pains, which were such marked features of the Author's lil'e. 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.

William Scoresby (1789-1857) made his first voyage in the whaler Resolution from Whitby to the Greenland Sea, west of Spitsbergen, in 1800. Three years later he was formally apprenticed to his father and another three years saw him promoted to chief officer. On 5 October 1810, his twenty-first birthday, ’the earliest at which, by reason of age, I could legally hold a command’, his father moved to Greenock and another ship, relinquishing the Resolution to his son. Another ten years would see the publication of what has been described as ’one of the most remarkable books in the English language’, his two-volume An Account of the Arctic Regions, with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery (1820). Even before he took command of the Resolution, two developments had occurred that, when combined with his seamanship and whaling skill, were to make that book ’the foundation stone of Arctic science’ and cause the journals of his annual voyages to be remarkable accounts in their own right. First, Scoresby had studied, during two brief winters at the University of Edinburgh. Teachers such as John Playfair and Robert Jameson had made him aware of the scientific importance of his arctic experience. Together with Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society, they encouraged him to observe, experiment and record, and provided opportunities for his data to be published. Secondly, this encouragement, and the study habits he developed at Edinburgh, led Scoresby to expand the logs of his arctic voyages into lengthy journals that contained scientific records and social and religious comment as well as detailed descriptions of navigation and whaling.

This is the third and final volume in the set of William Scoresby's journals. It contains the unpublished accounts of his three voyages 1817, 1818 and 1820. During the years of the voyages in this volume Scoresby's life changed profoundly. An unsuccessful hunt for whales in 1817 led to a break with the Whitby shipowners, and command of the Fame in 1818 in partnership with his father. The partnership was a brief one, and at the end of 1818 Scoresby broke with his father and moved to Liverpool, finding new partners, completing the writing of An Account of the Arctic Regions and watching the construction of his new ship, the Baffin. Meanwhile he suffered a severe financial loss and made a profound religious commitment. After his first summer ashore for many years in 1819, he brought back to Liverpool in 1820 a 'full ship' of seventeen whales, despite being faced by mutineers in the crew who earlier had been involved in piracy in the Caribbean and, apparently, hoped to seize the Baffin 'and convey her and her valuable cargo to a foreign country'. In each of the journals, Scoresby wrote detailed descriptions of his landings: on Jan Mayen in 1817, western Spitsbergen in 1818, and the Langanes peninsula in northeast Iceland in 1820. The 1817 voyage, when Scoresby and others found the Greenland Sea relatively free of ice, involved him in the renewed British interest in arctic maritime exploration after the Napoleonic Wars. The Introduction to this volume contains a major reappraisal of Scoresby's role, especially in regard to his alleged mistreatment by John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty. The volume also contains an appendix by Fred M. Walker on the building of wooden whaleships such as the Baffin that were capable of routine ice navigation under sail as far north as 80°N, based on Scoresby's account, as Owners' Representative, at the beginning of the 1820 journal.