The Man Who Ate His Boots

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.

February 15, 2010
Heroism tinged with scandal, high adventure beset by unbearable suffering—Great Britain's 19th-century obsession with finding a Northwest Passage to Asia had it all.

National Geographic Adventure books editor Brandt (The People Along the Sand: Three Stories, Six Poems, and a Memoir, 2001, etc.) traces the European notion of a fabled Northwest Passage back to roots both documented and apocryphal. The author focuses on the second decade of the 1800s as England, flushed with victory in the Napoleonic Wars, was confidently anticipating the accretion of empire. While not an immediately exploitable resource given maritime capabilities, proof of a Northwest Passage would still be Britain's"gift to the world." Throughout the book, Brandt offers a wealth of reasoned detail, including his observations about less high-blown motivations. Hundreds of former seamen, pressed into service to defeat the French, now clogged the streets and public houses of port cities and towns, a public nuisance bordering on a menace to society. The Royal Navy needed a new mission. The architect was Sir John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty and as such both strategist and operations director for Arctic explorations. Barrow sent renowned captains and explorers like John Ross on missions to the deadly ice pack, then published scathing anonymous reviews of their pusillanimity and failure to push harder toward the ultimate goal. One by one they sailed and failed—Ross, William Edward Parry and others. Sir John Franklin, who became known by Brandt's book title, was the ultimate tragic hero, taking 120 men to their deaths in 1848 by disease, freezing and starvation after their ships were captured and crushed by ice. Conclusive evidence later showed that the party's final hours were marked by incidents of cannibalism.

A sterling examination of a national obsession that tracks the finds as well as the futilities of more than 60 years of harrowing Arctic exploration.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from January 15, 2010
While Brandt's title refers to Sir John Franklin's fateful expedition in search of the Northwest Passage (Franklin indeed ate his boots), this book is not a biography. Instead, Brandt examines Britain's numerous 19th-century attempts to explore the Canadian Arctic and discover the Northwest Passage. He introduces many of the main characters: Sir John Barrow, second secretary of the Admiralty and chief promoter of the search for the Northwest Passage; Sir William Edward Parry, a four-time explorer of the Arctic without much success; and Franklin himself. The 19th century was the age of "conjectural geography" in which "what we wish to be true, we readily believe," e.g., the "Open Polar Sea," a madcap geographic idea supported by Barrow, among others, who insisted that the Arctic Ocean "never remains frozen over." Brandt focuses not only on what the officers and men on the expeditions had to say but on the public responses and the waxing and waning of interest in the Arctic. VERDICT Often witty in his approach, Brandt makes the absurdity of Arctic exploration and the quest for the Northwest Passage entertaining for the general reader. Highly recommended for fans of British or Arctic exploration history. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 11/1/09.]Margaret Atwater-Singer, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
Whether it is Gordon of Khartoum or Scott of the Antarctic, British imperial history is replete with heroic failures, deemed martyrs for the Empire. Brandt, the editor of the National Geographic Adventure series, illustrates that the search for the fabled Northwest Passage provides a good share of such men. Once geographers realized that the Americas were new continents rather than the edge of Asia, the discovery of an all-water route through the landmass to the Pacific became a goal for European imperial powers. For the nineteenth-century British explorers, it was the equivalent of the Holy Grail. In a practical sense, the passage was non-existent because the waters north of Canada were icebound all year. That didnt prevent a parade of adventurous, often heroic, and sometimes foolhardy British mariners from challenging the ice in an incredibly hostile environment.This is a superior tale of nobility, hubris, and sadly, futility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)