About this item
The enthralling and often harrowing history of the adventurers who searched for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth-century British exploration.After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying to do since the sixteenth century: find the fabled Northwest Passage, a shortcut to the Orient via a sea route over northern Canada. For the next thirty-five years the British Admiralty sent out expedition after expedition to probe the ice-bound waters of the Canadian Arctic in search of a route, and then, after 1845, to find Sir John Franklin, the Royal Navy hero who led the last of these Admiralty expeditions and vanished into the maze of channels, sounds, and icy seas with two ships and 128 officers and men.
About the Author
Born and raised in Westfield, New Jersey, went to Princeton and Columbia for undergraduate and advanced degrees, worked for aviation pioneer Sherman Fairchild as his personal historian. When he died in 1972 became a free-lance writer. First book, REALITY POLICE, was a muckraking look at the mental health system. Subsequently went into magazine journalism, wrote for ESQUIRE, AMERICAN HERITAGE, THE ATLANTIC, CONNOISSEUR, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, GQ, MEN'S JOURNAL, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE, and many other magazines. Was the essays editor of the Pushcart Prize for eighteen years. In 2002 served as a non-fiction judge for the National Book Awards. Edited the Adventure Classics series for National Geographic Books, which included an edition of the JOURNALS OF LEWIS AND CLARK and 24 other books, including THOMAS JEFFERSON TRAVELS, a selection of Jefferson's writings while he was U. S. minister to France. THE MAN WHO ATE HIS BOOTS is his first book for Knopf.