Description:
Travelers from more southerly climes have been trying to unlock the secrets of the far north for centuries, a quest that continues to the present day and that has given birth to countless books. In A Fabulous Kingdom, a strong addition to that library, engineering scholar Charles Officer and science writer Jake Page trace the history of Arctic exploration to its origins in antiquity, when Greek and Roman travelers returned home with tales of a "monster-bearing Ocean" full of ice islands, strange animals, and terrifying astronomical phenomena. Those tales were often dismissed, even then, as fabrications of the first order, but they remained current centuries later, when European explorers sought to chart the earth on spherical maps that would point a course to Asia by way of the fabled Northwest Passage. Armed with modern scientific equipment but not much more solid information than their ancient counterparts, 19th-century explorers such as Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (who is little known outside his native Sweden but, Officer and Page write, was the John Glenn of his day) and the ill-fated Charles Francis Hall (whose Polaris expedition is the subject of two recent books but is more effectively summarized here) helped effect the discovery of that sea route, but at the cost of hundreds of lives. Today, write the authors, "the greatest interest in the Arctic is as a vital region for environmental research," bringing still more travelers to the distant north. They are returning with stories, too, and Officer and Page end their well-written survey with those explorers' warnings that the Arctic and its peoples merit both protection and respect. --Gregory McNamee
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