Farthest North : the quest for the North Pole

A history of the search for the North Pole through a compilation of extracts from the ships' logs, diaries and journals, letters and memoirs of the explorers themselves. The narrative covers over 400 years of exploration from 1527 to 1994 and features the stories of early explorers such as Willem Barentsz and Henry Hudson as well as those of the nineteenth-century German, Austrian and British expeditions, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Peary and Frederick Cook. The editor also provides accounts of early attempts to reach the Pole by air including those of Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd and Umberto Nobile and concludes with mention of more recent expeditions by submarine and icebreaker.