Bowdoin Alumnus Volume 8 (1933-1934)

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A Memory of Ice

"In the southern summer of 1972/73, the Glomar Challenger was the first vessel of the international Deep Sea Drilling Project to venture into the seas surrounding Antarctica, confronting severe weather and ever-present icebergs. A Memory of Ice presents the science and the excitement of that voyage in a manner readable for non-scientists. Woven into the modern story is the history of early explorers, scientists and navigators who had gone before into the Southern Ocean. The departure of the Glomar Challenger from Fremantle took place 100 years after the HMS Challenger weighed anchor from Portsmouth, England, at the start of its four-year voyage, sampling and dredging the world’s oceans. Sailing south, the Glomar Challenger crossed the path of James Cook’s HMS Resolution, then on its circumnavigation of Antarctica in search of the Great South Land. Encounters with Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the US Exploring Expedition and Douglas Mawson of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition followed. In the Ross Sea, the voyages of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror under James Clark Ross, with the young Joseph Hooker as botanist, were ever present. The story of the Glomar Challenger’s iconic voyage is largely told through the diaries of the author, then a young scientist experiencing science at sea for the first time. It weaves together the physical history of Antarctica with how we have come to our current knowledge of the polar continent. This is an attractive, lavishly illustrated and curiosity-satisfying read for the general public as well as for scholars of science.

Catalogue of manuscripts from the Hayes Collection in the University of Queensland Library

Index to correspondence and manuscript material on literary and historical matters, mostly in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia held in the Fryer Library, University of Queensland - UQFL2. Authors and subjects include J.H.M. Abbott, Archer Family, E. Armitage, R. Bedford, H.S. Bloxome, E.J. Brady, 'Broadside', F. Broomfield, A.H. Chisholm, C.B. Christesen, R.H. Croll, Z. Cross, F.W.S. Cumbrae-Stewart, E. Dark, D. Deamer, C.J. Dennis, J. Devaney, E.M. England, P. Fitzgerald, R.D. Fitzgerald, Dame Mary Gilmore, C. Gittins, A.L. Gordon (criticism), P. Grano, M. Haley, W.A. Horn, R.G. Howarth, J. Howlett Ross, E.H. Lane, H. Lane, F.J. McAuley, D. McConnel, G. McCrae, K. (S) Mackenzie, P. Miles, J.K. Moir, C.P. Mountford, A. Muir, D.A. O'Brien, J.H. O'Dwyer, W.H. Ogilvie, M. Potter, T. Playford, H. Power, Queensland Authors' and Artists' Association, I. Southall, W. Sowden, A.G. Stephens, P.R. Stephensen, H. Tyron, A.J. Vogan, B. Vrepont, T. Welsby, H.R. White and Duke of Windsor. Also personal papers of Father Hayes, relating to his activities as parish priest

Distant vistas: Bradford Washburn, expeditionary science and landscape, 1930-1960

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1997Bradford Washburn is primarily known for his Alaskan mountaineering accomplishments and mountain photography. Between 1930 and 1960, Washburn led 19 expeditions to Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory on which he surveyed, photographed and mapped some of the last unexplored mountain regions in North America. This study, however, analyzes Washburn's lesser known role in directing interdisciplinary field research involving high altitude physics, glaciology, cartography and geology, which he accomplished by linking such disparate entities as the motion picture industry, geographic organizations, the U.S. military, and prominent U.S. scientists. Washburn's career can be viewed as an intersection of nineteenth and twentieth century geographic traditions. He combined emerging technologies with new and innovative vehicles of exploration to more accurately study geological, geographical and environmental phenomenon in mountainous regions. During the Second Great Age of Discovery, which began with the Renaissance, explorers ventured into the heart of the world's continents by utilizing various vehicles of exploration such as canoes and pack animals. This style continued into the middle of the twentieth century when the present day Third Great Age of Discovery, characterized by the use of remote sensing platforms and space age satellites, allows for a more accurate geographic study and inventory of our planet. Washburn's interdisciplinary field work reflects the fundamental goals and patterns of expeditionary science found in both ages of discovery. In this study three important themes are examined: Washburn's role as innovative field scientist; geography as a disciplinary bridge; and the work of the independent geographer. By analyzing Washburn's work in the pre World War Two and Cold War era, we gain an understanding of the ways in which expeditionary science was funded and carried out within two fundamentally different political and economic frameworks. Moreover, this study provides an important window into our understanding of interdisciplinary earth sciences in the mid twentieth century. It also explores the often unappreciated link between environmental science and geography in the American context

Dread and portent: reading H. P. Lovecraft`s Necronomicon as social commentary

This dissertation explores the narratives of twentieth-century American author H. P. Lovecraft, focusing on those tales which feature his creation of a metafictional spellbook titled the Necronomicon. Relying on a close reading of the texts, critical materials, and Lovecraft's letters, I demonstrate how the use of the Necronomicon throughout Lovecraft's fiction reflects how clearly the author espouses the faddish ideas and prejudicial fears of his era. Use of the spellbook delineates the breadth of moral decline he perceived in the world, from such causes as miscegenation, physical and spiritual decadence, and incest. Additionally, the project provides evidence of how the Necronomicon functions as a tool for chronicling and interpreting scientific facts and discoveries popular in Lovecraft's lifetime, particularly advancements in theoretical physics, by scientists like Albert Einstein, and the exploration of the polar regions by adventurers such as Rear Admiral Richard Byrd. In many of these latter narratives where the Necronomicon plays such a role, readers encounter a strange dichotomy: the author's genuine love of and appreciation for the various sciences tempered by a fear of humanity's terrifying use of the knowledge it has gained. This results in the Lovecraft's perception of a universe wholly apathetic to the presence of mankind, a space of limitless dimensions which dwarf human perceptions. My project also discusses the influence of the Necronomicon on popular culture and on modern fiction, proving how the spellbook inspires current writers of genre fiction and those in the field of contemporary literature

The Spectral Arctic

Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships

Island bodies: registers of race and 'Englishness' on Tristan da Cunha c.1811 - c.1940

Tristan da Cunha, a small island in the South Atlantic, is perhaps best known today as the remotest inhabited island in the world. Historical scholarship relating to the island has either focused on its supposed insularity, or has completely elided it in the broader thematic and theoretical studies that often dominate scholarship of the Atlantic world. By placing Tristan da Cunha and metropolitan Britain together within the same analytic field and using an interdisciplinary approach, this work traces metropolitan representations of the island from c.1811-c.1940. Part One traces the ways in which Tristan da Cunha was drawn into the European geographic imagination as well as the economic networks and channels of global circulation during the era of mercantile capitalism. This process saw the island framed as a Romantic English rural idyll displaced into the South Atlantic, and resulted in a metonymic linkage being created between the island body and the bodies that inhabited it. The shift from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism and the rise of modernity in the metropole led to (re)negotiations regarding who formed part of the social body of the metropole and Part Two traces the impact of this shift on the island body(ies) of Tristan da Cunha. The (re)negotiation and (re)constitution of the island body(ies) as a result of new metropolitan optics and debates regarding race, degeneration, social belonging, and bourgeois norms resulted in the increasing nativisation and concurrent racialisation of the islanders in metropolitan representations. The island bodies became both coloniser and colonised, Briton and nativised other, Anglo-Saxon and racialised other. These discourses - the island as Romantic English rural idyll, or as isolated, degenerating and inhabited by nativised others - would coexist from the turn of the nineteenth century. They sometimes cut across one another, at other times they reinforced one another, only to diverge and then cut across one another once again. This work unpacks the polyphonic and often contradictory registers of race and Englishness in these metropolitan representations. At the same time it unsettles and attempts to reconstitute the dominant lenses through which the island has previously been analysed