Overview

Alien and wild, the far north has the powerful allure of the unknown, a call explorers have heeded for hundreds of years.First came the search for a route through the polar icecap to the rich lands of Asia.The Northeast and Northwest Passages were painstakingly traced.Then the race was on to one of the remotest points on earth - the North Pole.The desire for knowledge, wealth, adventure, and fame fueled expedition after expedition.Some Arctic explorers met with success and celebrity; others found madness and death; a few simply disappeared.Into the Ice, graced with majestic acrylic paintings, traces the slow unveiling of the secrets of this mysterious and forbidding frozen region.

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9780395830130

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This handsome, slender volume provides a clear introduction to the multifaceted variety of arctic explorers and the diverse motivations for their dangerous-and often fatal-journeys into this forbidding, hostile environment.

This handsome, slender volume provides a clear introduction to the multifaceted variety of arctic explorers and the diverse motivations for their dangerous-and often fatal-journeys into this forbidding, hostile environment. School Library Journal Curlee rounds out this entertaining, informed history with unsensationalized episodes of cannibalism and toes snapping off to keep readers glued to the pages, and hypnotic, elemental paintings that are just as exquisite as those in his first book. Kirkus Reviews

From Curlee (Ships of the Air, 1996, etc.), a riveting history of Arctic exploration that begins, appropriately, with the Inuit, who moved into that bleak and treacherous land after the Ice Age. With little documented history of that period, the narrative plunges ahead to the stories of Pytheas, a Greek merchant of the fourth century B.C., and Saint Brendan, the Irish monk who plied the North Atlantic waters in an oxhide boat in A.D. 550, discovering icebergs and perhaps Iceland. Next came the Norsemen on their way to Vinland in North America around A.D. 1000, followed by the late 16th-century English and Dutch explorers hoping to reach China (including John Davis and his ships Sunneshine and Mooneshine). Curlee chronicles the efforts of the merchants and whalers, the labors for fortune and glory, the search for the northern passages, the misery of scurvy and arctic fever. He dwells on Fridtjof Nansen's efforts, highlights the 1845 disappearance of Sir John Franklin's party, and provides a balanced look at the quest for the North Pole featuring Peary and Cook and their vainglorious (and unwarranted) claims. Curlee rounds out this entertaining, informed history with unsensationalized episodes of cannibalism and toes snapping off to keep readers glued to the pages, and hypnotic, elemental paintings that are just as exquisite as those in his first book. (Kirkus Reviews)

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