Schwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records

Gilder, William H. (William Henry), 1838-1900Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.3
Word count
438K words
Chapters
44

Tags

English Originals Documentary Literature Icy FrontierPolar ExplorationNature ObservationAdventure JourneySearch ExpeditionHeroismSurvivalExpeditionDocumentary NarrativeSea Journal

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Schwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin RecordsAuthor: Gilder, William H. (William Henry), 1838-1900,Language: English, Class: G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation, Release Date: Sep 1, 2004

Editor's review

This is a solid documentary work in the nineteenth-century polar exploration literature: the author, William H. Gilder, an eyewitness participant, records Schwatka's sledging expedition deep into the Arctic in search of the fate and relics of the Franklin expedition. Its value lies not in providing a final answer to the mystery but in showing how nineteenth-century polar expeditions were organized, the daily details of sledging, the condition of team members under severe cold and supply pressure, and the obsession that persisted for decades over Franklin's disappearance. Readers will find the restrained narration of a ships' log and feel the tension woven from polar landscape and survival hardship. The Project Gutenberg edition is an English public-domain ebook, suitable as a primary source for the history of polar exploration and the Franklin search, and for readers interested in nineteenth-century travel writing. Comparing the routes and figures in the book with later Arctic exploration history will make the documentary weight of such material more apparent.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the preface and chapter titles first to clarify the search route and timeline before the main text
  2. Mark place names and personal names on a map or in notes to reduce the burden of unfamiliar proper nouns
  3. Read the details against the public historical background of the Franklin expedition to create intertextual context
  4. One or two chapters a day is enough to avoid the cumulative weight of documentary prose

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a documentary work? It is a documentary record of polar exploration, centered on Schwatka's sledging expedition into the Arctic in search of the Franklin expedition records. It belongs to nineteenth-century travel and exploration literature, not fiction, and its narration should be read with the expectations of a historical source and travel account.
Can it be read without a background in polar history? Yes, but it is best to first learn the basic outline of the Franklin expedition's disappearance; otherwise the recurring names, places, and motives for the search can seem fragmented. With that background, the documentary details carry more weight.
What are the features of this edition? It is a public-domain English ebook released by Project Gutenberg, a free resource convenient for searching and excerpting, but without modern annotations or an introduction. Readers must supply background knowledge themselves, and the experience is closer to direct contact with a primary document.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Gilder, William H. (William Henry), 1838-1900 Author · American · 1838–1900

William H. Gilder (1838–1900) was an American explorer and journalist. Public information on his early life and education is limited, so details cannot be given here. His known representative work, Schwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records, recounts the search for the missing records of the Franklin expedition and belongs to the classic nineteenth-century genre of polar exploration narrative. Combining the roles of participant and reporter, Gilder writes with a strong sense of first-hand observation while keeping the sequence of events clear, balancing documentary detail with journalistic presentation. Such works gave contemporary readers information about Arctic geography and the progress of exploration, and they remain useful narrative sources for later study of the Franklin search. Only one work by him is currently held in the collection.