Exploring the Frozen North

In Exploring the Frozen North, Pierre Berton documents the amazing lives of the men and women who mapped the Arctic at great personal cost. Berton tells the stories of the explorers, but he does not ignore the stories of those people living in the Arctic – the Inuit. Berton often remarks that if only the English and Americans had learned more about living in the far north from the Inuit people, they may have had better luck in their explorations.

Retold in accurate detail, these are stories of the triumphs and the hardships of early expeditions to the Canadian Arctic.

In Exploring the Frozen North, incredible Arctic adventurers abide:

• William Edward Parry was the first white man to attempt exploration of the Arctic islands. Ultimately imprisoned by the Arctic ice, he made it farther north than any other expedition would for another thirty years.
• Jane Franklin, in her relentless search for her lost explorer husband, rallied seamen from England to the United States to comb the Arctic islands. Berton argues that because of her much of that part of the world was mapped.
• Elisha Kent Kane was a sickly American doctor, who, on the pretext of searching for the lost Franklin expedition, instead sought the legendary Open Polar Sea, a purportedly ice-free passage to the North Pole.
• Robert John McClure’s ambitious and aggressive race for the North West Passage almost ended when he was trapped in the ice for two long years.