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W W Norton & Co Inc

Voyage of the Narwhal

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Title: Voyage of the Narwhal
Author: Andrea Barrett
ISBN: 9780393046328
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Published: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Condition: Used: Very Good
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.

F 1663050

Publisher Description:
Part adventure narrative, part love story, this unforgettable novel captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-nineteenth-century romance with the mystery of the Arctic. Combining fact and fiction, Andrea Barrett focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a scholar-naturalist accompanying the expedition of the Narwhal. Through his eyes we meet the various crew members and the expedition's blustery commander, obsessed with the search for an open polar sea. And through his eyes we experience the wild, disturbing beauties of that last unexplored region.

In counterpoint to his views are those of the Esquimaux, witness to the expedition's exploits, and of the women left behind in Philadelphia, who can only imagine what lies beyond the north wind. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and history. In the real nineteenth-century expeditions, explorers' documents always cast the writer as hero. But what really happened up there, in the long winter darkness, entrapped in ice?

On the Narwhal, everyone is frightened, nothing is certain, and heroes emerge in unexpected guises. Barrett's explorers discover -- as all explorers do -- not what was always there and never needed discovering, but the state of their own souls.