Arctic

The search for the North Pole and the North-West Passage was a magnificent obsession of 19th century Britain and America. Fergus Fleming tells the story of these two great quests through word and image – extracts from the diaries and expedition accounts of the explorers themselves, original drawings and watercolours, ephemera, superb photography and glorious Arctic landscape paintings. Beginning in 1818 with an early (and naive) British expedition to search for the North-West Passage and concluding in 1909 with American Robert Peary's achievement of the North Pole (or so he thought), Arctic is full of incredible stories of sheer survival, outright determination and encounters in unknown lands almost unimaginable today.