Across Iceland

In the summer of 1900, six travelers set out from Leith harbor aboard a small vessel bound for Iceland. Among them: a botanist, a geologist, a geographer, and remarkably, one woman whose presence alone signals that this will be no ordinary expedition. W. Bisiker, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, leads his party through the volcanic heart of a country still under Danish rule, where geysers thunder columns of boiling water into the Arctic sky, where black lava fields stretch in endless silence, and where quicksand lurks in hidden pockets ready to swallow the unwary. The narrative moves from the fog-shrouded crossing past the Faroe Islands, through remote settlements where farmers live in near-total isolation, to the political heart of Reykjavik, where Bisiker offers a rare contemporary glimpse of a nation straining toward independence. Part rigorous scientific observation, part adventure narrative, this is travel writing from an age when reaching the interior of Iceland required genuine courage and weeks of grueling foot travel. The expedition's botanical findings, compiled in an extensive appendix by Arthur William Hill, remain valuable to this day. For readers who long for the romance of exploration when the world still held vast blank spaces on the map.