Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions, or, The Adventures of Sir John Franklin

"A historical celebrity who remains one of the best remembered of the arc-

tic explorers. . . . Sir John Franklin is still instructive to read and worth

thinking about as a man. . . . [He was] an unusual and, in my opinion, an

unusually good arctic travel writer." -_Bil Gilbert.

In 1845 Sir John Franklin and his expedition, sailing on the Erebus and

the Terror, set out in search of the Northwest Passage. In their pursuit of

that elusive water route across North America they all perished, their fate

remaining unknown for many years. Franklin and his crew inspired a

spate of books on exploration in the nineteenth century, and interest in his

expedition has revived with the recent discovery of the bodies of several of

its members, perfectly preserved by ice for nearly a century and a half.

Thirty Years in the Arctic Regions, originally published in 1859, is Frank-

lin's own record of his earlier explorations that put the high arctic on the

map, and includes his last letter and reports tracing the expedition's last

movements. He describes the daily progress of his two overland expedi-

tions from 1818 to 1827, which covered a thousand miles between the

Great Slave Lake and the Arctic Ocean and charted fourteen hundred

miles of coastline between Cape Beechey in present-day Alaska and

Bathurst Inlet to the north of Hudson Bay. It is a narrative filled with un-

imaginable he wiship endured heroically and the exhilarating strangeness

of everything about the Far North.

Bil Gilbert's introduction is informed by a first-hand feeling for what

Franklin was up against. Several years ago he followed much of the ex-

plorer's route, an experience that is described in Our Nature (also a Bison

Book).

Image	Author	Author Website	Twitter	Author Location

	Trapping, Exploring, Hunting	The sales of furs, and the exploration of new routes to new lands, and finally the hunting of animals made a significant impact in the history of the modern world, and often the people living remote to civilization would have to take advantage of the ways of the native people and eat like them. In this way, they would be carnivores by need, as fishing, hunting, and eating trapped animals would be the best way to get a meal, and animals can be processed down into high fat pemmican to get the best bang for the buck when it comes to transporting fuel as weight.
	Eskimo	The Inuit lived for as long as 10,000 years in the far north of Canada, Alaska, and Greenland and likely come from Mongolian Bering-Strait travelers. They ate an all-meat diet of seal, whale, caribou, musk ox, fish, birds, and eggs. Their nutritional transition to civilized plant foods spelled their health demise.
	Carnivore Diet	The carnivore diet involves eating only animal products such as meat, fish, dairy, eggs, marrow, meat broths, organs. There are little to no plants in the diet.