Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the son of Icelandic immigrants to Canada, was an Arctic explorer in the first part of the 20th century. In this book he covered some of the history of Arctic exploration concentrating above all on two explorers who lived more than 1,000 years apart. The first is Pytheas (c. 320–306 BC) who was a Greek geographer, explorer and astronomer from the Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille, France). He made at least one voyage from Marseille to Britain, where he spent some time, and then travelled further north to "Thule" which he believed to be the most northerly inhabited place on the globe. Scholars are divided about the location of Thule. Some believe it was just the Shetland or Faroe Isles. Others believe it to have been Iceland or Norway. Stefansson makes a convincing case for it being Iceland although he might have visited Norway too. Pytheas probably also made a visit to the Baltic. (Another book I have read but not yet reviewed, the Amber Road by Charles River says that Pytheas described the source of the amber imported by the Greeks which was the shores of the Baltic).
The other, much later Arctic explorer who Stefansson writes extensively about was none other than Christopher Columbus. We do not normally think of Columbus as an Arctic explorer but his son claimed that Columbus had not only visited Iceland but had sailed far beyond it Stefansson discuses the evidence for that in some detail. He also quotes from a letter of Columbus written after his last voyage to the New World in which Columbus made a brief mention of plans to sail to the North Pole!
Another fascinating aspect of the book is the amount of attention Stefansson gives to historical accounts of weather and climate by Arctic explorers and shows that hot weather in the Arctic in summer months is not a recent phenomenon. Even winter weather is not consistently bad. Columbus is supposed to have sailed to Iceland from England in February and about eight centuries earlier a group of Irish monks also made a voyage in February to Iceland!
Stefansson repeatedly criticises philosophers of ancient and medieval times who disbelieved the accounts of Pytheas and later explorers because the weather they described did not always accord with their their theories of what the climate should be in the places they claimed to have visited. Debates about climate and unusual weather are nothing new! At times Stefansson's writing becomes rather repetitive. He has a habit of telling us about things he has already mentioned more than once. But he does have a fascinating story to tell.
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Neglected Pioneers of Arctic exploration and debates about weather and climate.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 13, 2023