French missionary Emile Petitot (1838 1916) was based in Canada's Northwest Territories for twelve years, from 1862. He visited the Inuit people five times and became so well accepted that they called him 'Mr Petitot, son of the Sun'. Petitot believed that understanding Inuit languages was crucial to the religious conversion of the natives. During his mission, he collected more linguistic material than ever before and prepared dictionaries of the various Dene dialects. In this book, published in 1876, he describes the Inuit's traditions and sets about the monumental task of compiling the...

In 1850, a small squadron of British naval vessels, under the command of Horatio Austin, sought to locate the missing Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin. The ships were trapped in ice by September 1850 and the men were forced to endure the forbidding Arctic winter, finally returning to England in October 1851. This book, published in 1852 and reissued here in the second edition that quickly followed the first, is a collection of articles which appeared in the Aurora Borealis, a newspaper edited by the surgeon James John Louis Donnet (1816 1905) aboard HMS Assistance. It features...

In 1881, Adolphus Greely led a US Arctic expedition to gather meteorological, astronomical and magnetic data. It was poorly supported by the US Army, neither Greely nor his men had experience of Arctic conditions, and their ship, the Proteus, sailed home once they had landed in Greenland. An inadequately planned relief mission failed to reach them in 1882, and a second expedition in 1883, including the Proteus (which was crushed by ice), also failed to locate the men or to land sufficient supplies. This official report was published in 1884, and proposes a further rescue mission, much more...