100 books like White Eskimo

If there’s one name that thrills anyone interested in Antarctic exploration, Shackleton is it.

In 1914, he led a crew of 28 men to Antarctica aboard the sailing ship Endurance, with the goal of crossing the continent by dog sled. The weather was bad, and Endurance was frozen into the icepack. The following summer was cold, and the ice did not melt. It was almost two years on the ice and traversing the sea in small boats before Shackleton was able to bring his crew home. He lost not a single man.

What I found fascinating, besides the physical dangers they survived, was the camaraderie among the men and—hard to believe—some of them even went back on later expeditions.

Never in Anger was a life-changing book for me. It led me to my deep interest in anthropology and, ultimately, to me writing.

Jean Briggs was dropped off in Northern Canada to do her fieldwork for her PhD by studying an Eskimo (now Inuit) family. The bush pilot would be back to pick her up in a year! She wanted to study shamanism, but they refused to talk about what they considered their primitive past, so she studied the children instead.

Some of the book is about language acquisition, I skipped over that part when I reread it. What interests me is how she learned to understand and live in a culture so totally foreign to hers—an amazing journey for her and for me.

Peter Freuchen, a Danish explorer, first came to Greenland in 1906 and immediately fell in love with the land and its people. He spent the better part of the next 50 years there. He was a partner in adventure with the famous explorer of the north, Knud Rasmussen. Freuchen wrote many books, some of which have been translated into English, including novels.

I chose this one to recommend because it seemed a good place to start, but I love them all. Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimos, a summation of much of what he learned over the years, was edited by his second wife, Dagmar, and published three years after he died in 1957.

This one’s just for fun.

An inuksuk (plural: inuksuit) is a cairn of stones, sometimes small, sometimes huge, sometimes shaped like a human, built by the Inuit (and by you if you want to; the book includes instructions). They have many functions: to mark a meat cache, a good place to haul out your kayak, or a useful pass through mountains; to scare caribou into a hunting area; and even to act as a silent companion for a lonely person.

An inuksuk is the symbol on the flag of Nunavut, the relatively new Inuit territory, established in 1999 in northern Canada. This book, including many photos and drawings, gives the reader a good introduction to the historical and contemporary Inuit. 

This book had me shivering. Every chapter introduced another character and another set of often frightening but exhilarating arctic adventures spanning more than 100 years.

I found myself imagining what it must have felt like to cross Greenland’s ice on foot or to have spent the winter living in a rat warren of snow caves at the summit of the ice sheet with the Wegner expedition over the winter of 1930-1931.

An excellent read with well-referenced details and history galore. I couldn’t put it down and read the whole book in two nights.

First published in 1991, this book draws on Inuit oral history to challenge the “standard reconstruction” of how the Franklin expedition played out, presenting a more complex narrative. A master mariner, Woodman not only repeatedly searched King William Island for relics and bones but was the first to do an in-depth analysis of the unpublished Inuit testimony gathered by Charles Francis Hall with the help of Tookoolito. 

Woodman deduced that after the abandonment, some of Franklin’s men returned to the ice-locked vessels. Intensely focused and detailed, this book speaks to aspiring experts–and, for me, drew attention to the need for a broad, accessible survey of Arctic exploration highlighting the Indigenous contribution.  

I had never been to Greenland when I first read Gretal Erlich’s book, and I knew very little about this mysterious continent. What I loved most about Erlich’s writing is that she really takes readers on a journey, introducing us to the people she meets in her travels, which are as fascinating as her singular way of describing the landscape, which is like no other place on earth.

Many years later, I travelled to Greenland and appreciated the accuracy of her descriptions firsthand. 

I love the sagas. They are stories first told a thousand years ago about the Norse settlers in Iceland. They are crisp, subtle, exciting with some excellent characters, especially the women. My favourites are the two Vinland Sagas, which describe the discovery of Greenland and then North America (Vinland) by Erik the Red and his family. This includes the wonderful Gudrid, who was born in Iceland, got married in Greenland, gave birth to a child called Snorri in Vinland, and then went on a pilgrimage to Rome. All in about 1000 AD! 

Di Robilant again, of course. This book follows the trail of the story, apocryphal or not, made up or true, of the two Venetian Zen brothers who supposedly sailed to the North Sea in the 14th century. I loved this book because it is like a mystery story, full of questions with no real answers, and yet, in the end, I was convinced by Di Robilant’s investigation that Zens did indeed make it to Greenland and places North in the 1300s.

I really love a nonfiction book by an author who takes a sort of obscure topic and drills down to find the truth. The combination of geography, cartography, Venetian life, and mystery is indeed “irresistible.” 

One of the best ways to envision a historical period is to see its artifacts. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga is a companion to a Smithsonian exhibit of the same name and contains a rich trove of images and descriptions of viking physical culture, along with essays about the archeology of their discovery, and how they were used in the exploration of the North Atlantic, and the eventual journey to the New World.