Word: arctics
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When the northbound traveler invades the six million square miles of the Arctic Circle, he soon leaves the great timberlands behind and enters a region where the last, sparse outposts of birch, spruce and cottonwood gradually fade into the boundless levels of the tundra. Here is the world which "knows but two seasons: winter and August"; here great rivers of North America and Asia drain away and congeal into the titanic ice-blocks of the Arctic Ocean; here (and not at the North Pole) the thermometer has touched its recorded lowest (93° below zero) and the milk of Siberia...
This strange region and its gradual discovery are the subject of To the Arctic!, which Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson describes as "the best history of northern exploration so far written." New Jersey-born Jeannette Mirsky who, at 44, has never cried "Mush!" to a dog or put foot to floe, first published her book in 1934. But it was dropped by her publishers after the first printing, because the late...
...Mediterranean. Dramatic dashes to the North Pole take up little space in To the Arctic! Author Mirsky is never stingy in enthusiasm, but she keeps her eyes steadily on the varieties of men who so tenaciously explored and charted the Arctic that it may become what the Mediterranean was to the ancients-the natural connecting route between the principal centers of civilization...
...Mediterranean came the first news about the Arctic. In about 330 B.C., when Alexander the Great was marching on India and Aristotle was lecturing to his classes, Pytheas, a native of the Greek colony of Massilia (Marseille), sailed out through the Pillars of Hercules and turned north. After discovering Britain, he pushed on-to the Orkneys, to the Shetlands, perhaps even to Iceland. Then, like thousands after him in the next 2,200 years, Pytheas the Greek was halted by a dense world of ice. His account of his six years' voyage was later dismissed as balderdash...
Only Fit for a Saga. Like Pytheas, the Vikings, who roamed from Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen to Greenland and Newfoundland, were too far ahead of their time. By the15th Century, when their own exploratory impetus was spent, their Arctic trade-routes and their flourishing Greenland colonies had become mere fantastic stuff for sagas...