The Romance of Polar Exploration

The search for the poles from the early navigators to Scott's Discovery: Franklin's ships and their fate, the American attempts, the Greely disaster, the drift of the Fram. G. Firth Scott wrote just after the Discovery came home in 1904, when the poles were the great unfinished business of geography. His chapter on the Franklin searches is careful about the evidence and does not soften what was found. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Caspar David Friedrich and Ivan Aivazovsky carry the ice, light and open water that give these voyages their atmosphere.