Schwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led the largest expedition in British naval history into the Arctic, and vanished completely. For three decades, the mystery of what happened to Franklin and his 129 men haunted the Victorian imagination. In 1878, Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka mounted the most methodical search yet, and he did something radical: he hired Inuit guides and adopted their survival methods, abandoning the British navy tradition of brute-force exploration. William H. Gilder's account follows Schwatka's party as they sled across thousands of miles of frozen wasteland, battling temperatures that cracked rifle barrels, running out of food, and pushing their dogs and themselves to the edge of human endurance. The journey is equal parts adventure narrative and meditation on obsession, what drives men to risk everything for a stack of waterlogged papers and the truth about the dead. Gilder writes with the blunt honesty of a man who nearly died out there, and his account remains remarkable for its respect for the Inuit people who made survival possible.