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Discovery was built for Captain Scott's first Antarctic expedition of 1901-04 and was launched more than 100 years ago in 1901, at Dundee. She had a long and intriguing career before her final voyage back there in 1986; this book tells the story of that chequered history.Despite a number of expeditions to the Southern Ocean during the nineteenth century, the continent of Antarctica remained mostly a mystery by the turn of the twentieth. To remedy this the Royal Geographical Society proposed a National Antarctic Expedition, and a purpose-built vessel, the Discovery, was designed. Based on a whale ship, she was massively built to withstand ice, and was equipped with a hoisting propeller and ru...
With our access to Google Maps, Global Positioning Systems, and Atlases that cover all regions and terrains and tell us precisely how to get from one place to another, we tend to forget there was ever a time when the world was unknown and uncharted--a mystery waiting to be solved. In On the Edge, Roger McCoy tells the captivating--and often harrowing--story of the 400 year effort to map North America's Coasts. Much of the book is based on the narratives of mariners who sought a passage through the continent to Asia and produced maps as a byproduct of their journeys. These courageous explorers had to rely on the most rudimentary mapping tools and to contend with unimaginably harsh conditions:...
From a study of knowledge of the sea among indigenous cultures in the South Seas to inquiries into the subject of sea monsters, from studies of Pacific currents to descriptions of ocean-going research vessels, the sixty-three essays presented here reflect the scientific complexity and richness of social relationships that characterize ocean-ographic history. Based on papers presented at the Fifth International Congress on the History of Oceanography held at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (the first ICHO meeting following the cessation of the Cold War), the volume features an unusual breadth of contributions. Oceanography itself involves the full spectrum of physical, biological, and...
Savours examines the British encounters with the Esquimaux (Eskimo) and their assistance in charting the Arctic archipelago, the way yearly ice floes affected each expedition, and the boats, diet, and clothing of the early explorers. 85 illustrations.
Inuit elders who grew up in camps on the shores of Frobisher Bay can tell you what happened when Martin Frobisher arrived with his vessel in 1576: "He fired two warning shots into the air. So right away there were some grievances." Frobisher's shots were the opening salvos in the search for the Northwest Passage, a search that lasted for more than four hundred years and riveted the Western world, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Encounters on the Passage, present day Inuit tell the stories that have been passed down from their ancestors of the first encounters with European explorers. In many of these stories the old cosmogony is still in place, with shamans pla...
Humans, over many millennia, have been intrigued with magnetism and continuously revealing its nature and association with other objects, both animate and inanimate. Started with reverence for its mystic power, the beautiful minds soon find the means to harness it. This book is an omnibus that helps one travel through time over many millennia until today while giving glimpses of human achievements in the Odyssey of human civilisation. This is a scientific essay. Nevertheless, it offers a range of flavours, such as the history of science, philosophy, social construct, the early scientific revolution, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of modern science, and discussion on scientific phenomena with no less scientific rigour, while remaining simple and intelligible. The book will be food for academic minds and a pleasant experience for general readers.
After Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909, polar explorers looked toward the South. Robert Falcon Scott, whose 1901?1904 expedition into Antarctica's frozen shoulder had made him a celebrity in England, began plans to return. In June1910 the Terra Nova sailed toward the earth's underbelly. When Scott'søparty reached the South Pole on January 17,1912, after severe hardships, they discovered that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beat them to it a month before. Demoralized, frozen, exhausted, and starved, they started to retrace their painful steps over the ice but were forced to stop only eleven miles from a supply depot. By a supreme act of will, the captain ...
This first comprehensive exploration of literary responses to Antarctica maps the far south as a space of the imagination.
The Shackleton of his day, Leopold McClintock from Dundalk was the leadig Antarctic explorer of the Victorian era. First to bring definite information on the lost Franklin party he rose to admiral and advised Scott before the Discovery expedition in 1901. This tale starts when he enlisted in 1831, not yet twelve years old. He began exploration in 1848 on the Enterprise expedition with Ross, the first in search of Franklin. After two further expeditions, he was the most experienced explorer in the Royal Navy, having sledged over 1,300 miles, over-wintered and discovered Prince Patrick Island. At the request of Lady Franklin he commanded the Fox in 1857 to again search for Franklin. By 1859 he had found written records and human remains after Eskimos told him of a shipwreck and survivors. He returned with the news that the entire crew of the Franklin expedition had perished, was greeted with acclaim and awarded honours. His account of the expedition became a best-seller. After his death a plaque remembering him was unveiled at Westminster Abbey, portraits hung in London's National Portrait Gallery and the McClintock Channel in the Arctic was named after him.
In 1768, Captain James Cook made the most important scientific voyage of the eighteenth century. He was not alone: scores of explorers like Cook, travelling in the name of science, brought new worlds and new peoples within the horizon of European knowledge for the first time. Their discoveries changed the course of science. Old scientific disciplines, such as astronomy and botany, were transformed; new ones, like craniology and comparative anatomy, were brought into being. Scientific disciplines, in turn, pushed literature of the period towards new subjects, forms and styles. Works as diverse as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Wordsworth's Excursion responded to the explorers' and scientists' latest discoveries. This wide-ranging and well-illustrated study shows how literary Romanticism arose partly in response to science's appropriation of explorers' encounters with foreign people and places and how it, in turn, changed the profile of science and exploration.