Ring of Ice: True Tales of Adventure, Exploration, and Arctic Life - Hardcover

From the time of the ancient Greeks until the 19th century, European explorers imagined that beyond the ring of ice that encircled the Arctic lay a warm, calm sea that would take them to the Orient. Instead of this easy Northwest Passage, notes Peter Stark, those explorers found what the Inuit and Eskimo inhabitants of the region knew they would: "ice, ice, and more ice."

In this well-chosen anthology, Stark offers a documentary history of changing views of the Arctic over the last two and a half centuries. His collection begins with the words of Georg Wilhelm Steller (for whom many Arctic animal species are named), who accompanied the star-crossed Danish explorer Vitus Bering across the far northern Pacific. The memoirs of other explorers follow, intermingled with prose and poetry from the indigenous peoples of the region. Most of those explorers, like the unfortunate American surveyor Adolphus Greely and the Italian aviator Umberto Nobile, recount wrong decisions taken in the face of horrendous circumstances, whether howling gales or the madness of companions. Few of their stories end happily, save that their narrators usually survived. The closing pages of Stark's anthology are given over to a new kind of explorer, the literary naturalist, whose greatest exemplar is Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams).

Students of the history of exploration and the peoples of the Arctic will find Stark's book to be an engaging survey. --Gregory McNamee

Well into the nineteenth century Arctic explorers believed that they needed only to smash their ships through a ring of ice circling the top of the globe and from there they could tack easily on soft breezes to the North Pole. Acting on this belief, these adventurers were crushed by ice, wasted by scurvy, and frozen to death on the ice floes.This European notion of the Arctic as a ring surrounding a void not only lured countless sailors to their deaths but also had the effect of drowning out the voices and visions of the native Arctic people. Now this vibrant collection celebrates both the unheard voices of the Arctic peoples and the trail of words left by the Europeans who pushed forward to fill the hole in their knowledge of the world.Spanning the years from 1741 to the present, Ring of Ice presents many such works, including the story of Captain Tyson and his crew who, marooned by their own shipmates, were forced to float precariously on a tiny iceberg for five months before being rescued. And the tale of Duncan Pryde, a fur-trader employed by Hudson's Bay Company, who finds himself unwittingly caught up in the Inuit tradition of wife exchange.Juxtaposed with these European tales are stories of survival, skill, and daily life among the Eskimos, as told through dozens of native poems and legends as well as by some of today's most promising writers, including Finn Lynge and Rachel A. Qitsualik.Enriched by the writings of Richard K. Nelson, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, Sir John Franklin, and classics such as Gontran de Poncins' Kabloona and Adolphus Greely's Three Years of Arctic Service, Ring of Ice is a comprehensive and altogether unique anthology representing the colorful history that pervades this monochromatic landscape. (61/4 X 91/4, 468 pages)