
The Man Who Ate His Boots
The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage
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Narrated by:
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Simon Vance
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By:
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Anthony Brandt
The enthralling and often harrowing history of the adventurers who searched for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of 19th-century British exploration.
After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying to do since the 16th century: Find the fabled Northwest Passage, a shortcut to the Orient via a sea route over Northern Canada. For the next 35 years the British Admiralty sent out expedition after expedition to probe the ice-bound waters of the Canadian Arctic in search of a route, and then, after 1845, to find Sir John Franklin, the Royal Navy hero who led the last of these Admiralty expeditions and vanished into the maze of channels, sounds, and icy seas with two ships and 128 officers and men. In The Man Who Ate His Boots, Anthony Brandt tells the whole story of the search for the Northwest Passage, from its beginnings early in the age of exploration through its development into a British national obsession to the final sordid, terrible descent into scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism. Sir John Franklin is the focus of the book but it covers all the major expeditions and a number of fascinating characters, including Franklin’s extraordinary wife, Lady Jane, in vivid detail. The Man Who Ate His Boots is a rich and engaging work of narrative history that captures the glory and the folly of this ultimately tragic enterprise.
©2010 Anthony Brandt (P)2010 Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...




















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Awesome book!
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Incredible story
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its overall not as good as Shackleton's book Endurance, but not many books can be that good.
Starts off slow.
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My only complaint is that the author looks back on history like a millennial, and I'm not speaking of the many references to global warming. There is an undeniable contempt for the ignorance and now foolish thinking of the many explorers of that time. Although their logic was completely flawed by today's standards, it must be remembered that those individuals did not have Google Maps to aid them in their travels. They did not have modern day theories and knowledge about nature and the earth. Were their theories of a Great Northern Passage crazy? Absolutely! Yet, very little was understood even about the oceans at that time. So, those men took a chance to make discoveries that helped create foundations for what we now know about the polar regions of the globe. - A very minor complaint when compared to the excellence of the rest of the book.
Recalls History with a Modernist Perspective
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excellent!
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They don't get any better than this
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good book, fantastic narrator
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Enjoyed the historical arc
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Good, but not great
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Great book!
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