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The Cruise of the Corwin (The John Muir Library)

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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 This book, in fact, was compiled after his death from scientific articles, correspondence, and unpublished journals kept by Muir during the voyage.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.