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Title details for The Man Who Ate His Boots by Anthony Brandt - Available

The Man Who Ate His Boots

The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage

by Anthony Brandt
Simon Vance
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
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.
In The Man Who Ate His Boots, Anthony Brandt tells the whole story of the search for the Northwest Passage, from its beginnings early in the age of exploration through its development into a British national obsession to the final sordid, terrible descent into scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism. Sir John Franklin is the focus of the book but it covers all the major expeditions and a number of fascinating characters, including Franklin’s extraordinary wife, Lady Jane, in vivid detail. The Man Who Ate His Boots is a rich and engaging work of narrative history that captures the glory and the folly of this ultimately tragic enterprise.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 2, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307712318
      • File size: 440870 KB
      • Duration: 15:18:28

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The definition of insanity springs to mind when listening to Brandt's history of the search for the Northwest Passage. Time and time again British explorers set out to find a navigable route through northern Canada, spent a year or two stuck in the ice, then (at best) went home with more detailed maps but without success. Simon Vance gives an impeccable narration, as usual. It's nothing fancy, but his calm, dignified, and fittingly British tone is perfect for delivering this tale of unceasing optimism, folly, scurvy, race, and empire. The fate of Sir John Franklin is gripping--he ate his boots on his first expedition and disappeared, along with 129 men, on his third. (Bones in the kettle illustrate the depths of despair to which men were driven.) Vance conveys the poignancy of the ensuing searches for survivors. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 1, 2010
      In this engrossing chronicle of arctic exploration, Brandt (Reality Police: The Experience of Insanity in America
      ) follows the many expeditions launched by the British navy in the 19th century to find a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the maze of islands north of the Canadian mainland. He treats the story as an exercise in majestic futility: ship after ship became trapped in the region's labyrinthine, perpetually ice-clogged waters, dispatched by naval officials who believed that the Arctic Ocean was ice-free beyond its frozen rim. Sailors braved immense ice floes that squeezed and crushed their ships; summer overland treks featured mosquito swarms that blotted out the sun; everyone faced the likelihood of frostbite, scurvy, and starvation. Brandt pens a colorful narrative full of gothic horrors, quiet daring, and petty personality clashes, and probes the social meaning of these odysseys: to the explorers and the public that idolized them, the tacit point, he suggests, was to court danger as a proof of British grit and resolve. The result is a gripping—and sometimes appalling—tale of heroism and hubris.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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