The Cruise of the Corwin (The John Muir Library) [Paperback]

John Muir (Author), Roderick Nash (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: The John Muir Library | Publication Date: April 13, 1993

John Muir relates the story of his 1881 voyage aboard the steamer Thomas Corwin, which set sail from San Francisco for arctic waters off the coast of Alaska in search of a ship tragically lost two years before.

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About the Author

John Muir (1838-1914), founder of the Sierra Club, is a major figure in American history--the man who did more than any other person to shape the twentieth-century conservation movement. Roderick Nash is Professor Emeritus of Environmental History at Dartmouth College and author of Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), regarded as the one of the leading manifestos on humans coexisting with nature.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Sierra Club Books; 1 edition (April 13, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871565234
• ISBN-13: 978-0871565235
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,290,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #12 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( N ) > Nash, John

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arctic voyage, May 11, 2006

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Bomojaz (South Central PA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cruise of the Corwin (The John Muir Library) (Paperback)

After decades of wandering the western half of the country, particularly in the Sierra's of California, and soon to be married, in 1881 John Muir saw a chance for one last hurrah in wilderness exploration. An Arctic expedition was being formed to search for the missing De Long polar expedition which had sailed two years earlier aboard the Jeannette and hadn't been heard from since. The search party would sail on the Thomas Corwin and would cruise the waters off Alaska, from the Aleutians to the Chukchi Sea off the northern coast. John Muir was a member of this Corwin crew.

The voyage lasted from May to October, 1881. The Corwin never found any remnants of the De Long expedition, but it did a great deal of exploring amongst the many islands off Alaska's coastline. The biggest accomplishment was the "discovery" of Wrangel Island off the coast of Siberia. Muir was fascinated with glaciation and made numerous sketches and wrote articles about the subject. He also collected flora from a number of locations in the arctic and had them sent to Harvard for cataloguing. This book, in fact, was compiled after his death from scientific articles, correspondence, and unpublished journals kept by Muir during the voyage.

Muir writes about what he sees, mainly, though also of what he hears on occasion: he tells of a group of prospectors who are about to set sail up the Yukon River in search of a mountain of silver they'd heard about. He also gives a harrowing report of a starved out village after suffering an extremely harsh winter. The book is an intriguing, straight-forward account of a six-month voyage to the Arctic, and anyone interested in Muir or Arctic exploration will find it worthy of your attention.