Lieutenant George Washington De Long was an American explorer whose disastrous Arctic expedition gave evidence of a continuous ocean current across the Polar Regions. In July of 1879 he set sail from San Francisco taking the Jeannette through the Bering Strait and heading for Wrangel Island, off the northeast coast of Siberia. On September 5th, the ship became trapped in the pack ice near Herald Island (now Gerald Island), east of Wrangel. With crewman George Melville’s engineering skill, the boat was kept afloat for almost two years until it was finally crushed on June 12, 1881. The crew, including De Long, escaped with most of their provisions and three small boats. Their destination, the Siberian coast, lay some 600 miles away. They endured extreme hardships for the next two months as they crossed the ice. After reaching open water, one of the boats and the men aboard were lost. The remaining two boats became separated. De Long's boat reached the eastern side of the Lena River delta, Melville’s, reached the western side. Melville's party was rescued, but De Long and his men died of exposure and starvation. Melville later led an expedition that found the remains of De Long and his party the following Spring. De Long's journal, in which he made regular entries until shortly before his death, was found a year later and published as The Voyage of the Jeannette (1883). Three years after the Jeannette was sunk, wreckage from it was found on an ice floe on the southwest coast of Greenland, a discovery that gave new support to the theory of trans-Arctic drift.

Also includes an account of the Jeanette search expeditions, their discoveries, the burning of the Rodgers, etc.

This is the adventure story of the year -- how Conrad Anker found the body of George Mallory on Mount Everest, casting an entirely new light on the mystery of the explorer who may have conquered Everest seventy-five years ago. On June 8, 1924, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine were last seen climbing toward the summit of Mount Everest. Clouds soon closed around them, and they vanished into history. Ever since, mountaineers have wondered whether they reached the summit twenty-nine years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. On May 1, 1999, Conrad Anker, one of the world's strongest mountaineers, discovered Mallory's body lying facedown, frozen into the scree and naturally mummified at 27,000 feet on Everest's north face. The condition of the body, as well as the artifacts found with Mallory, including goggles, an altimeter, and a carefully wrapped bundle of personal letters, are important clues in determining his fate. Seventeen days later, Anker free-climbed the Second Step, a 90-foot sheer cliff that is the single hardest obstacle on the north ridge. The first expedition known to have conquered the Second Step, a Chinese team in 1975, had tied a ladder to the cliff, leaving unanswered the question of whether Mallory could have climbed it in 1924. Anker's climb was the first test since Mallory's of the cliff's true difficulty. In treacherous conditions, Anker led teammate Dave Hahn from the Second Step to the summit. Reflecting on the climb, Anker explains why he thinks Mallory and Irvine failed to make the summit, but at the same time, he expresses his awe at Mallory's achievement with the primitive equipment of the time. Stunningly handsome and charismatic, Mallory charmed everyone who met him during his lifetime and continues to fascinate mountaineers today. He was an able writer, a favorite of the Bloomsbury circle, and a climber of legendary gracefulness. The Lost Explorer is the remarkable story of this extraordinarily talented man and of the equally talented modern climber who spearheaded a discovery that may ultimately help solve the mystery of Mallory's disappearance.

This American account of one thousand years of exploration in the Arctic was published in 1874. It remains a readable synthesis, which ends with an appeal to the British Admiralty to resume the work of polar exploration which had gone into decline after the end of the search for Franklin.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

The Cartographic Eye is about the mythologies of land exploration, and about space and the colonial enterprise in particular. An innovative investigation of the presumptions, aesthetics and politics of Australian explorers' texts, it concentrates on the period 1820-1880. Simon Ryan looks at the journals of John Oxley, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt and Ludwig Leichhardt and shows that they are not the simple, unadorned observations the authors would have us believe, but are complex networks of tropes. The Cartographic Eye scrutinises and undermines the scientific and literary methodology of exploration. Its insightful analysis of the tendencies of colonialism will make a major contribution to 'new historicist' interrogations of colonialism. It will be a crucial text for readers in Australian literary and cultural studies, and for those interested in colonial discourse and postcolonial theory.