The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909 Paperback – 9 October 2001

Any one who is fired by a desire to aquaint oneself with the lore of Arctic exploration must begin with this masterfully crafted classic. Highly recommended.

A well written narrative sweep through the northern explorers, linking together their various exploits and rivalries. It is great historical background if you are taking an adventure-type cruise around the North West Passage and puts what you will see into perspective. For instance a recurring exploratory goal, apart from traversing round the myriad of ice-bound islands, was to find the location of the magnetic North Pole. When you get up there, you soon realise that Magnetic North is actually south of you, as well as moving around from year to year, making simple navigation not simple at all.

First thing, I ran out of Antarctic books to read. I've read them all. So, naturally, I had to find something else to read. First book I tried about Arctic exploration was Frozen in time. Excellent book. The Arctic was worth a second try. Here comes The Arctic Grail. Fantastic work. Couldn't put the book down. Learning about John Ross, Adolfus Greely, Soloman Andre, Robert McClure, John Rae and so on was a marvelous experience for me. The Artic's history is as fascinating has the Antarctic's.You'll get a fine introduction to the Peary-Frederick A Cook rivalry. However, if you need to deepend your knowledge of that controversy, may I suggest "Cook and Peary, the Polar controversy resolved". Dr Cook is a fellow one has to know.Back to the book at hand, you'll learn that the British Navy...learned absolutly nothing about polar travel and your appreciation of Robert Falcon Scott will sink even lower.5 big stars for Pierre Berton.

This excellent book, first published in 1988, stands as a fitting memorial to the prolific and accomplished writer Pierre Berton, who passed away at age 84 as recently as November 31, 2004. It details the events and personalities of Arctic exploration over nearly a century, beginning in 1818 with the first British naval expedition of John Ross and Edward Parry, and the related disastrous first naval land expedition led by the oddly ineffectual John Franklin. It concludes with the strange twentieth century tales of Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both of whom claimed to have reached the North Pole, though neither could prove actually to have done so (nor had they). Along the way we meet a host of players, including the indomitable Lady Jane Franklin, Admiralty puppeteer John Barrow, the underestimated arctic masters Edward Penny and John Rae; Robert McClure, M'Clintock, Charles Francis Hall, Sabine, Nares, Greely, Elisha Kent Kane, Nansen, Amundsen, a number of memorable Inuit personalities and a host of others.The great strength of this account is the repeated demonstration that the outcome of almost every event in the drama depended ultimately on the characters and personalities of the major players, their strengths, weaknesses, flaws and ambitions, and their capacities to learn from the experiences of their predecessors and their Inuit contacts. This gives a Shakespearian, if not biblical, dimension to the history, which is ably exploited by Berton. The book is as much about explorers as exploration.Berton's well-detailed sources include the numerous accounts of the explorers themselves, their biographers and ghost writers, and much archival material - letters, original field notes, official reports etc, all woven together in a skilful and compelling synopsis. The book can be heartily recommended!A few matters are missed among the vast number of items covered, for example James Cook in HMS Discovery, shortly before his death in Hawaii, reached Barrow Point, Alaska, from Bering Strait in 1780, setting the target for Franklin and others exploring from the east. One would like to have read the story of the Oval Office "Resolute desk", donated to the American Presidency by Queen Victoria in 1880, and constructed from timber salvaged from HMS Resolute, a ship mentioned frequently by Berton. The icebound Resolute was abandoned at Bathurst Island, Melville Sound by the British in 1854. She released the following summer and was later found adrift in Baffin Bay by a US whaler, sold on to the US government, refitted and returned to the British with a gorgeously attired naval band, much panoply and splendid one-upmanship. Also that Amundsen eventually disappeared in the arctic in 1928 while on an aerial search for the wonderfully zany General Umberto Nobile and his downed dirigible Italia (watch those late-night movie listings for the excellent film Red Tent (Krashnaya palatka), in which Peter Finch plays Nobile and Sean Connery Amundsen). Most of all perhaps, that the first expatriate to fully traverse the north west passage (on McClure's Investigator to Banks Island in the west and Intrepid from Barrow Strait in the east, with much walking and sledging between the two) was Lieut. Samuel Gurney Cresswell, in 1853 (he departed for Britain ahead of the other former Investigator crewmen with the news that McClure and his men had traversed the elusive passage).Many original works of relevance have appeared in recent years. Notable are the excellent commentaries and reprints of the first Franklin expedition journals and paintings of John Richardson, George Back and Robert Hood edited by C. Stuart Houston (Arctic Ordeal, Arctic Artist and To the Arctic by Canoe), and David C. Woodman's studies on the Inuit memories of Franklin and his lost crews (Unravelling the Franklin Mystery - Inuit Testimony and Strangers Among Us ( all published by McGill Queens UP). Also the hard-to-find and indispensable arctic chronology of Alan Cooke and Clive Holland (The Exploration of Northern Canada - Arctic History Press), a first version of which was used by Berton. Many others are well covered in Amazon.com documentation.

Having read individual books on most of these explorers, this book was a great retrospective, and I feel this is how it should be read. You need to read their full individual story to really appreciate their struggle. That being said, this book contains the most detailed account of the Franklin search effort. Other books on that subject focus too much on the theories of what could have happened and not on the hardship that followed. You are presented with the full history of the quest for the north-west passage and the North pole from Parry to Peary. I was surprised that so little was said about the de Long disaster. For me that was one of the most touching struggles for survival in the Arctic saga, but here is only mentioned briefly. Everyone else gets a fair portion of the book though. The material is very well researched and the narative is engaging. Some authors manage to make the most interesting event into a boring read, but not this one. Very good book, would recommend!

Pretty much the definitive narrative for Arctic exploration. Berton has such a gift for giving historical figures life, and the men and women involved in Arctic exploration are incredibly interesting to read about. The expeditions were insane and the cost was high, but the people involved struggled on through some truly horrific conditions. His chapters on the Franklin expedition and subsequent rescue attempts are the highlight, as well as the chapters on the race to the North Pole.I love Pierre Berton and this is probably my favorite book in his series on Canadian history, after Klondike.