Unknown Shore: The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony

I was very interested in Frobisher Air Base now Iqaluit Airport. My interest centered around the part it played in the US nuclear war plans, early warning, communications and strategic location during the 80s and 90s. First I needed to learn about the history of the area and exploration. Unknown Shore provided that first glimpse of early life and exploration. The cast of characters and the way their names became geographic locations are explained to a lesser degree though. If you like reading about remote and harsh areas of the world you will like this book. It could use a few more maps and pictures but I say that for every book I read.

An unfortunately rare example of an eminently readable work of history. Ruby does an outstanding job of setting his story in the context of the times with a modern historian's insight into social and cultural history. This is far more than just another in a series of the latest vogue in Arctic exploration narratives. Through skillful use of his sources, the author brings both his European and Inuit protagonists to life. The reader is left with the haunting image of fragments of a remote Arctic island studding the landscape of a prosaic London suburb as testimony to both the folly and awe-inspiring tenacity of the sixteenth-century explorers. This is fascinating complementary reading for students of the colonization of other areas of the world.

Robert Ruby's Unknown Shore is a little misleading in its subtitle (The Lost History of England's Arctic Colony) in as much as the history was not quite lost nor was there actually a colony, only the briefest of attempts at a colony in a farcical plan to mine the soil for gold. That said, the book is quite entertaining as it pieces together the story of Martin Frobisher and his ill-fated Elizabethean Arctic adventures and the always fascinating Charles Francis Hall's discovery of the location of Frobisher's Meta Incognita in the nineteenth century. (For a wonderful and full account of Hall, see the very fine Weird and Tragic Shores by C. Chauncey Loomis). The two stories blend fairly well and the author keeps the narrative sparkling along at an entertaining clip. This was a good Arctic read for those addicted to these books and a good place to begin for someone who wants to learn what the addiction to these Arctic books is all about from a book that shows men whose addiction to that cold world ran so much deeper than merely reading about it.

This is a tale about an English pirate-turned-explorer who few people have ever heard of, and the establishment of British colony on an Arctic island that is perhaps even less known...but that's short-changing this elaborate true adventure. Bought this one because I liked the author's last book, "Jericho," which was a history of a place, but also of archaeology itself and of wave after wave of quirky scientists who came to study the ruins of the famous city. This new book has an even broader sweep, from pre-naval power London where morality always took a back seat to fortune-seeking, to the coast of West Africa where a ship's crew was worth less to investors than a few tons of pepper, to the Czar's palace in Moscow, the roiling North Atlantic and the confusing, ice-packed passages above North America. This is a tale festooned with accurately-drawn characters. The scholarship is so clearly reliable that you know that you're not getting the pop-magazine caricatures of, say, Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm." Also, with Ruby's style of examining a place through the eyes of multiple adventurers from several eras, you're getting a deeply-textured tale that makes Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" seem one-dimensional. And you also get a fun - and often funny - yarn featuring modern reporters in polar bear pants, privateers who seize all shipping - even that of their countrymen - a pompous alchemist, mutual puzzlement as white man meets Inuit, horrific storms at sea, and discussions of the how Queen Elizabeth's sex life affected exploration. By the end, I had not only enjoyed myself but absorbed an extraordinary amount of the FEEL of an era - or two - and a place. In this sense it's also comparable to Patrick O'Brien's seafaring Maturin and Aubrey series.