4 comments about Cold Burial: A True Story of Endurance and Disaster.

1. I first read about northern frontiersman Jack Hornby in McKay Jenkins's excellent "Bloody Falls of the Coppermine." Hornby was a guide to two missionaries who would later be killed in the far north by two Inuits. Hornby had vast knowledge of survival in the far north and even spoke the native language of the Inuit people. Alas, he was unreliable, irresponsible, and had the tendency to go off on his own. "Cold Burial" covers Hornby's final adventure where many of his personality flaws that made him not the best of guides led to his death. The saddest part is that he took two young men with him--including his 19-year old cousin.
   
   Hornby's cousin, Edgar Christian, had just recently finished schooling at Dover College with little distinction save for a swimming tournament (19). Edgar had a taste for adventure that was probably, in large part, inspired by tales of England's heroes like Robert Falcon Scott where tragedies created a "composite account of what made a man" and that "frozen lands [were] ideal theatres for trial and courage" (22). He worshiped his legendary cousin, Jack Hornby. Edgar having limited prospects, his parents consented in having Hornby take their son to the barren lands of the Northwest Territories.
   
   Edgar had high expectations of Jack and of the trip. Jack prided himself on his self-sufficiency and his young cousin believed he would acquire the same independence and "never be in need of a job if I want one" (92). Jack, however, was self-sufficient to the extreme. He never believed in taking much on a trip save for the barest of essentials and survived his many treks not through planning and organization but through stamina, intuition, and luck. During his 1926-7 trip to the Thelon River--though he was warned many times along the way against taking two young, inexperienced men with him with such limited supplies (Hornby also invited 27-year old Harold Adlard who, sadly, is often forgotten in the Hornby/Edgar saga)--his luck ran out.
   
   Clive Powell-Williams relies mostly on primary sources to tell this sad story: Harold's few letters home, Edgar's letters and diary entries, notes left on the trail, observations of those who met up with the three men on their way to the Barrens, and post-death writings of those who knew Hornby. He uses conjecture to fill in the gaps but he demonstrates plenty of knowledge on the types of conditions and animals they encountered and their techniques for survival.
   
   The last several chapters are the most intriguing, as well as heart-rending, as the men had to survive largely on animal skin and bone marrow while they slowly died from starvation. Then there is the final diary entry and letters of Edgar--the last survivor--left all alone in the cold, empty land knowing his death was imminent. The book continues with the discovery of the bodies and aftermath and ends with the unfortunate fate of former Hornby traveling partner Capt. James Critchell-Bullock. Included is a section of photos, photo of Edgar's last letters, and maps. I didn't find the maps useful as they did not include places with which I was familiar (i.e. Canada) to give the areas mapped a point of reference.



2. In 1926, the Barren Lands of the Canadian Northwest Territories were rightly regarded as an inhospitable region of appalling weather coupled with the threat of starvation, accident, and loneliness, a place where men (meaning Europeans) would be tested to the limit. Jack Hornsby, a troubled veteran of WWI, drifter, and adventurer, had been there, and liked it. He put together an expedition with Harold Adler and Edgar Christian, two young and inexperienced friends, with the intention of wintering north of the Great Slave Lake. They would hunt and trap to support themselves and pay for the expedition, and Hornsby would collect scientific data. Hornsby was knowledgeable about the region, but apparently was unable to organize effectively and failed to make basic preparations despite warnings. After many hardships and colossal mistakes in judgment, all three died. Mounties found their bodies, letters to parents, and the detailed diary kept by Christian, two years later. The author has used the diary and a number of surviving letters to reconstruct the adventurers' trip in great detail. Counterpoint to stories of survival under harsh conditions, but rather depressing. An absorbing read for anyone interested in arctic exploration, and a thought-provoking sidelight on Canadian history



3. In recent months there have been several books written about polar exploration, and their success indicates that the reading public seems to have a continuing fascination with these expeditions. This spring, the A and E cable network produced "Shackleton", a cold-country-frontier saga. In this tradition, Clive Powell-Williams has written "Cold Burial."

   This book is an engrossing page-turner and a quick read. You will be caught up in the tale of 18 year old Edgar Christian and his mother's double-cousin, Jack Hornby, an experienced Canadian-Northwest Territories outdoorsman. Experienced he may be, but seasoned he is not. Impulsive, improvident, and arrogant to boot, he takes his cousin on what will be their first and final adventure together. Having relied heavily upon luck and upon the help of natives, Jack finds his luck has run out. He does try to spare his young cousin, but events proceed inevitably
   to a tragic end. Powell-Williams relies upon the diaries of young Edgar to put together a chilling story of their days in a climate hostile to human life. Female readers may be tempted to ask, "Why would they want to do that?" The only answer is the famous one, "Because it's there!" Apparently that insouciant reply makes sense to males; but to a mother, it rings hollow.




4. For anybody that has read and enjoyed some of the adventurer books released in the last few years (Into Thin Air, etc.), Cold Burial is a must.

   75 years ago, 3 British men set out on a journey up the Thelon River (in Northern Alberta) and into the Canadian Arctic. None of them made it back alive. When their bodies were discovered by the RCMP, the investigators also found a diary. This diary, written by the youngest member of the party (Edgar Christian, age 18) chronicled the shift from courageous optimism in the early days of the voyage, into hopeless abandon as the 3 men starved and froze to death.

   Clive Powell-Williams has taken this diary and researched the history behind the 3 adventurers. In Cold Burial, he tells the whole story; from their original meetings at school in Britain, to Edgar's last days, alone in the cabin.

   Cold Burial is a tremendously well-written account that will certainy rank with the top adventure/disaster books of all time. An extremely good read. Highly recommended.

No comments about Shackleton: Leadership Lessons From Antarctica.

3 comments about A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley.

1. On the surface, Victorian Englishwoman Mary Kingsley was an unlikely choice for intrepid explorer. The spinster daughter of a wealthy British nobleman who dedicated almost fifteen years of her life to nursing first her invalid mother and then her father, Mary's life was trapped by duty and honoring her parental bond. But when her parents died within months of each other, 29-year old Mary was faced with the task of shaping her own destiny. Her flamboyant, careless father George Kingsley had imbued Mary with a passion for travel and adventure through his occasional letters home to Mary and her sickly mother who suffered from the common complaints of upperclass Victorian women: inexplicable headaches, neuralgia and fainting spells that would always worsen if Mary attempted to escape the family homestead. Inspired by her father, Mary set out to explore West Africa. Dressed in a white cotton blouse and a long black woolen skirt, Mary ran the treacherous rapids of the Ogooue River; fell into a twenty-foot elephant trap studded with spikes, walked unarmed into Fang villages and unflinchingly confronted hostile native chiefs. Through it all, Mary retained a quintessential British attitude of cheerful competence in the face of danger. When a loose bag with a suspicious smell yielded human body parts in the camp of a tribe of cannibals, Mary matter-of-factly took an inventory of everything before returning everything to their containers. She spent almost a year forging through jungles, observing natives before returning to England to write about her adventures. Kingsley's two books, "Travels in West Africa" and "West African Studies" became best sellers. She became a sensation on the lecture circuit, bringing her exciting stories and her dry wit to many venues. But back in England, Mary was plagued by illness, headaches, colds and neuralgia like her mother. Her younger brother expected Mary to become his housekeeper and nurse as she had done for her mother and father. But Mary had fallen in love --- with a country that claimed her soul and filled her waking hours with yearning to return. Frank has written an excellent biography that draws the most exciting, telling parts of Kingsley's books but also fills in what Mary preferred to leave out: the wild, alluring heart of a continent.



2. Rudyard Kipling said of MH Kingsley, "Being human, she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they were." Three species of fish and several books are only part of Kingsley's singular legacy.
   
   Very interesting biography of this intrepid Victorian explorer, whose extraordinary exploits one suspects might have been aided by the blessedly poor socialization afforded her as an untrained, unschooled, half-Cockney and half-forgotten "poor little rich girl", who later escaped a confining existence.
   
   The prose is deft but echoes Kingsley a little gratingly at times, rather than quoting.



3. I picked up this book at a thrift shop - my usual venue for book purchases - solely due to the title. I knew nothing of Mary Kingsley prior to reading this absorbing account of her life. Her childhood and early adult life would give no clue to the extraordinary adventures she would have in Africa, culminating in her death while serving as a nurse with the British Army in South Africa. Rudyard Kipling said of her that she was "the bravest person I know" - I hope I have the quote correct. I cannot check as I gave my copy of the book to a friend who bears a striking resemblance to Miss Kingsley.

5 comments about Tracks in the Sea : Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans.

1. In the days before computers there was Matthew Fontaine Maury. Almost unknown today, Maury was a navigation and sailing genius, a Lieutenant in the US Navy, who was the father of modern navigation and ocean science. He was a land lubber.
   
   During the age of sail longitude was an uncertain calculation. As a result, it was often impossible for ships to know exactly where they were. After the invention on the chronometer, things improved, but chronometers being expensive, route planning was a hit or miss thing. As a result, for the most part, navigation was anecdotal. There were no highways in the seas, no scientifically determined sailing truisms or protocols, and hundreds of ships were lost each year.
   
   Until Maury, knowledge of prevailing winds and currents had advanced little from Columbus. But between 1842 and 1861, he and his staff mapped the ocean's great surface currents and wind systems. They showed ship captains how to shave weeks, even months from voyages. Tracks in the Sea is the biography of this remarkable, self taught, self made man whose remarkable career culminated as head of the U.S. Navel Observatory. In a world interconnected by maritime commerce, Maury's work was critically important, not just to Americans, by to all nations.
   
   This is an amazing story. To have compiled the thousands and thousands of ship's logs and sailing observations, drawing trends and systematic sailing instructions, by month, for all the oceans of the world, has to be one of man's most astounding scientific achievements. This is a most remarkable work about a most remarkable American.



2. This is simply a wonderfully written book about an almost forgotten man, Matthew Fontaine Muray.
   
   Maury lived in the golden days of sail, the 1800's. In those days, the ocean was a big, mysterious, and dangerous place. Sailors had decent charts of the continents, and by the middle of the century. they had decent chronometers to help them navigate (find the Longitude). But what they did not have was a set of charts showing where the winds blew when. Sure, they had some knowledge, gained by long experience, but no scientific knowledge.
   
   What Maury did was to make a life-long scientific study of the winds and currents around the world, with a view of shortening sailing times, thus reducing expenses and increasing safety. At first glance, this does not sound like much, but it took reading literally hundreds of thousands of logs to collect this information, then making charts showing the direction and strength of the wind and current in every month of the year.
   
   Did Maury's efforts work? Would you call shaving a month off a sailing trip from New England to Rio worthwhile? This was the typical result of skippers who followed Maury's charts.
   
   He also 'invented', to a large degree, the science of oceanography, and did a lot to standardize and strengthen the science of meteorology.
   
   Many think this information has been rendered useless by powered ships. Wrong. People who sail long distances always have a current copy of this type of chart onboard, and plan their itineraries around the winds and tides. Professional seamen, especially of very large ships, also continue to use this information, as the sea can overpower even enormous ships like supertankers.
   
   If you enjoy reading books like Dava Sobel's book Longitude, about John Harrison and his clocks, you will equally enjoy Tracks in the Sea. Highly recommended.



3. Mr. Hearn's splendid account of the life of the self-taught Matthew Maury is one that should be read by anyone with the remotest interest in sailing or the industrial revolution. He should also be of interest to those who want a concrete account of the benefits of "data-mining" in which miscellaneous, disparate sources of information are aggregated into something which is tremendously useful.

   Maury took crates of old ship logs, and extracted the data about weather and currents as a function of date and location, and produced ingenious maps of the sea that could be used to plot voyages that minimized the time of passage. In the age of the American clipper ships, the time saved could be quite substantial, even amounting to as much as factor of two over the haphazard routes used by the intuitive captains of the day.

   The reduction of the data and the production of the maps was carried out by only a handful of men at the U.S. Naval Observatory, but produced tremendous economic advantages to those who used them. They were quickly adopted by the merchant marine, and by cleverly requiring the recipients of the latest maps to turn over to him logs taken in a standard format, he was able to gather tons of new data for ever-improving successive maps. Maury also discovered the feasibility for the route of the first transatlantic cable, and fought to establish the first weather bureau in the US.

   He also brought about the convening of a Brussels Marine meteorology Conference in 1853 that was attended by nine countries and resulted in the adoption of a uniform method of gathering and disseminating the information among the world. Not bad for a simple Lieutenant! His quarrels with the jealous Joseph Henry (of electromagnetic induction fame) and others of his ilk are instructive to those interested in stories of how pettiness and obstructionism of powerful men can be overcome by men of true ability.

   This story is well researched and ably told by Mr. Hearn, and is another exciting adventure of the heroes who made the industrial revolution.




4. Maury's life, rising from the humble origins of a farming family in Virginia and then Tennessee, to a career as an internationally renowned scientist, is quite interesting, and generally well told by author Chester Hearn. Most scientists would feel their careers were a success if they made a few contributions to their area of science. Maury's genius invented two whole sciences: oceanography and marine astronomy. He significantly improved navigation by finding "tracks in the sea," the patterns which numerous currents and winds follow all over the globe. Perhaps because he sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War, he became a relatively obscure figure. Since he had an enduring influence on the human race's knowledge of the oceans, he deserves to be better known. This book will help, and is well worth reading.



5. This is a great book for anyone with an interest in or passion for sailing, navigation, mapping and charting or who holds an interest in the challenges of early explorers.

1 comments about Soul Snatchers: A Quest for True Human Beings.

1. I finished this book in four days, and what a terrific journey the author takes us on. From the deserts of New Mexico, where he gets guidance from a 102-year-old Native American named Nino Cochise, to the Swamps of Florida, where he meets a most unusual evangelist and has encounters with things he cannot explain, to the wilds of Washington State, where he and his team experiment with a method known as "dowsing" to attempt to track the Forest Giants, Robert W. Morgan has had a life's journey most would be rather envious of. He has met with Native American elders, elderly cowboys who were around in the time of the Wild West, disbelieving skeptics, scientists and other luminaries, and over his life's journey, he has experienced unusual phenomenon, which may or may NOT be connected to the Forest Giant People (Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Omah-ah, Dsonoqua and many other variations of names for these unique beings). Morgan writes in a style of absolute comfort and a sense as if he is sharing private secrets around a campfire. The only rating I can give on this book is an 11 out of 10!!!!!! GET THIS BOOK!!!!!! It is available at Product Listing - and is terrific for Summer reading, or for curling up beside a roaring fire in colder weather.

No comments about In the Heart of the Canadian Rockies (Mountain Classics Collection).

1 comments about Face the North Wind (Western Canadian Classic).

1. The first time I ever read this book was 10 years ago back in highschool when I did a report/essay about man and his struggle in the wilderness. Ever since, it has been a cornerstone for all my books about the North and man's struggle to make a living in it. I though I would write a few lines here after reading 'Face the North Wind' once again. Although I have not read 'North to Cree Lake' by the same author yet, A.L. Karras needs to be congratulated on a fine job of writing down an excellent narrative of an historic past. The book is based upon the yearly adventures of two trappers by the names of Fred Darbyshire & Ed Theriau to the winter wilderness of Northern Saskatchewan. The events in this book are written from actual diary events and personal conversations the author has had with these two gentlemen. Much of this area back then was uncharted and unexplored. This book gives a truly beautiful insight as to how these brave men survived in the sheer depths of winter and made a living at it year after year. Filled with excellent side notes, thoughts, and some photos/maps, 'Face the North Wind' will be just enjoyable to read over again as it was the first time. It make you want to get out your own pair of snowshoes and head on up to the North!

1 comments about Memoirs of a Yukon Priest.

1. "Memoirs of a Yukon Priest "by Segundo Llorente Georgetown University Press, 1990.
   This is the autobiography of a Spaniard,(born in Leon, Spain), who spent most of his adult life as a missionary to the natives of Alaska. At the age of ten, Llorente went to the local preseminary school, where "...the main academic fare was Latin eight hours a day". Then, he studied at the Jesuit novitiate in Castile and, at twenty, he made plans to go to Alaska, which had no native priests. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in the United States, where he studied English at Gonzaga University. This illustrates one of the main themes in this book: language. Fr. Llorente had to first learn Spanish, then Latin, then English, and then the different Eskimo (Inuit) languages. In 1935, the author was a"...full-fledged priest" and, in the midst of the Great Depression, he was able to earn enough money to purchase a brand-new typewriter with Spanish characters, with which he intended to "... support myself in Alaska by writing for publication in his spare times". He must have written very well since the WEB lists quite a few books, in Spanish, under his name.
   
   After the first seven pages of the book, introducing his life, the author spends the remainder of the book, about 233 pages, describing this life, his work, his loneliness, and his priesthood among the Eskimos in Alaska. He spends a few chapters on Alaska, itself, the Yukon River, the climate and especially travelling in the coldness of Winter. Much of the book, however, is devoted to his relations with the local people and the local priests. The writing is superb.
   
   Throughout the book, there is a subliminal sense of humor, which surfaces, now and then, into print. Look at pages 64 and 65, where the town of Kotzebue wanted Fr. Llorente to treat them to a full-blown bull fight, since he was Spanish. The good father did so, pulled the bull by his tale, and then whacked the bull on his nose. Finally, the priest "...stood there with ... (his) ...cane raised to the sky - a symbol of victory". Fr. Llorente has written a very funny story of the convergence of two different cultures, the Spanish and the Eskimo, in the town common when a bull had been delivered. Later, the bull was butchered to serve as a source of protein for the coming long winter.
   
   Besides all the material aspects of life, the good priest-author deals with the spiritual, showing signs of Spanish mysticism. Recall that both St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross were Spanish. When Fr. Llorente writes about Christ in the Holy Eucharist, with both of them alone in a cold church on the Yukon, his writing and description become very close to what I would consider mysticism. (See the first chapter of "Truth And Tolerance" by Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, Ignatius Press, 2003).
   
   But Fr. Llorente was also man of the world, and was popular enough amongst his flock for them to elect him to the State Legislature. It would seem that he was the first Roman Catholic priest to be elected to a legislature in these United States. His service as a legislator brought him into a sort of conflict with his bishop, the Rev. O'Flanagan, who was concerned with separation of church and state; this brief episode is described at the very end of the book. This book is a wonderful record of the excellent efforts of one man, Fr. Segundo Llorente, S.J., 1906-1989.
   
   Disclosure: I received this book as result of a very small donation to the Catholic Bishop of Northern Alaska.

No comments about Marco Polo (Life & Times) (Life&Times).

1 comments about WINGS AROUND THE WORLD: The Exhilarating Story of One Woman's Voyage From the North Pole to Antarctica.

1. If you love travel and adventure you will enjoy this book. It is written with candor by a female pilot about her remarkable flight around the world via the North and South Poles. Polly Vacher describes the meticulous preparation of such a flight and then takes the reader on that trip with details of the places she visits, the people she meets, the obstacles she encounters as she travels to all seven continents. Often she is flying for hours at a time, over ocean waters or inhospitable terrain. The book is filled with color photos and is an amazing story.