A THOUSAND DAYS IN THE ARCTIC

First US edition. Publisher's original dark grey cloth with pictorial upper board, titles in gilt to the upper board and spine. Top edge gilt. Two portrait frontispieces, 11 additional plates and 188 illustrations (many full page) throughout the text from photographs by the author and drawings by R. W. Macbeth, Clifford Carleton, Harry C. Edwards and F. W. Frohawk. Five folding maps. Publisher's catalogue to the rear. A very good or better copy, the binding square, with mild bumping, rubbing and fraying to the spine tips. The contents, with a previous owner's bookplate to the front pastedown, are otherwise clean throughout. The map on page 320 has a 7cm tear along one of the folds, page 423 with a semi-circular tear to the top corner, both without loss. An attractive example.

A comprehensive account of the Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition, led by Frederick Jackson and funded by the newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth. The party left England in 1894 and spent 1000 days based on Northbrook Island surveying much of Franz-Joseph Land and recording in excess of 600 zoological species. The Norweigan explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen encountered Jackson's camp purely by chance in June 1896 and enjoyed several weeks of generous hospitality (they had been living on the ice, surviving on walrus and bear meat since leaving the beset expedition ship 'Fram' on 14 March 1895). Jackson's account of "well ordered survival, so impressed Roald Amundsen that he filled two exercise books with notes from it" (Howgego).