Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

This is an OK read about the Arctic. There are actually two stories here. The first revolves around English explorer and pirate Martin Forbisher and the second about an American Charles Francis Hall. Forbisher was searching for the northwest passage to China and found what he thought was a passage way and a black stone. Assayers felt the stone could yield a fortune in gold. The passage Forbisher found was a bay and the stone contained little in the way of precious metals. Hall searched for the survivors of an earlier Artic expedition of Franklin. He was disappointed too. What he found were the traces of Forbisher's expedition. Both explorers searched for something that was not there.
The book is of interest to those historians who like the explorations of the Arctic and Antarctic. What is facinating is the life of the Inuit or native peoples who inhabit this inhospital land. It was interesting to read of how these people adapted to their environment. The white man may have thought them savages. They were far more civilized than the white man. As stated an OK read about a little known expedition.

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.

I've read plenty of historical non-fiction. This was an excellent read, good adventure story and importantly, it held my attention better than the last six books I've read. I've been fascinated, although still largely puzzled by arctic adventures for years--put this one alongside all of the Shackelton and Franklin stuff as worth your time. The book had some interesting little tidbits about Elizabethan courtly life and of course the Inuit then and now. I had no idea the Canadian government i'ded them with a series of numbers and assigned surnames, sad. I guess ours isn't the only government to dehumanize and subjugate indigenous populations.