| Summary: | This book by two Oxford authors, one, Charles Officer, a well-known geophysicist, and the other, Jake Page, a seasoned trade writer formerly with Smithsonian magazine, will parallel in part their previous book for Oxford, Tales of the Earth. The "tales" will be those of the earliest explorers, such as Oittar the Norseman, who rounded North Cape in about 870; the sixteenth-century searches for a Northeast or Northwest passage across the Arctic Ocean; later Polar explorers such as Elisha Kent Kane and his heroic deeds (and fanciful claimes); nd the great Nordic explorers such as Fridtjof Nansen and Roadl Amundsen. The stories of the "fallen idols" - Frederick Cook, Robert Peary. amd Rocjard Burd - will be told, as well as those of such unsung heroes as Matthew Henson, Peary's valet who drove the sledges in the 1909 final dash toward the Pole, and Floyd Bennett, pilot of the plane that made the polar attempt in 1926. Recent exploration will be covered: submarine transits across the Arctic under the ice, supertanker traverses from Alaska along the Northwest Passage, and tourist treks across the ice to the North Pole. Setting the scene for the tales will be a broad description of the Arctic
|
|---|
