Midnight to the North: The Inuit Woman Who Saved the Polaris Expedition

Title: Midnight to the North: The Inuit Woman Who Saved the Polaris Expedition
Author: Sheila B Nickerson
F: 1704000
ISBN: 9781585421336
Publisher: Tarcher
Published: 2002
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 224
Section: History | Polar Regions
Condition Note: Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: In 1871, Charles Francis Hall's Polaris expedition set out to be the first official American party to reach the North Pole. Five months later, the Polaris had become locked in ice and Hall was dead-likely murdered. The expedition members were set adrift for six months on the icy seas: a fifteen-hundred-mile journey that all survived, thanks to the skills of Hall's translator, Tookoolito, a thirty-four-year-old woman subsequently referred to as the "Sacagawea of the Ice."
In "Midnight to the North," Sheila Nickerson brings to life the emotional struggle of a wildly various group of people forced to stay together-despite one another's self-centered failings-during circumstances of extreme desperation. Imaginatively re-creating Tookoolito's life, she describes the Inuit woman's decades-long relationship with Hall; her presentation to the English court and experience as an exhibit in P. T. Barnum's museum; and the undermining of her sturdy faith in her native heritage by Hall's stern and often treacherous world.
A meticulously researched, gripping story of awesome peril and fascinating insight, "Midnight to the North" debunks contemporary Polaris accounts and reveals an untold side of Arctic exploration.