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Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Stairs (1863-1892) attended the Royal Military College in Kingston before being commissioned in the British army. Wearied of peacetime soldiering, he volunteered in 1887 to participate in Sir Henry M. Stanley's final trans-African expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, the last of \"Chinese\" Gordon's lieutenants in the Sudan. The expedition emerged almost three years later in Zanzibar, a reluctant Pasha in tow, having left a trail of havoc and suffering behind it.

In 1933 Antarctica was essentially unexplored. Admiral Richard Byrd launched his Second Expedition to chart the southernmost continent, primarily relying on the muscle power of dog teams and their drivers who skied or ran beside the loaded sledges as they traveled. The life-threatening challenges of moving glaciers, invisible crevasses, and horrific storms compounded the difficulties of isolation, darkness, and the unimaginable cold that defined the men's lives. Stuart Paine was a dog driver, radio operator, and navigator on the fifty-six-man expedition, the bold and complex venture that is now famous for Byrd's dramatic rescue from Bolling Advance Weather Base located 115 miles inland. Paine's diaries represent the only published contemporary account written by a member of the Second Expedition. They reveal a behind-the-scenes look at the contentiousness surrounding the planned winter rescue of Byrd and offer unprecedented insights into the expedition's internal dynamics. Equally riveting is Paine's breathtaking narrative of the fall and summer field operations as the field parties depended on their own resources in the face of interminable uncertainty and peril. Undertaking the longest and most hazardous sledging journey of the expedition, Paine guided the first American party from the edge of the Ross Sea more than seven hundred miles up the Ross Ice Shelf and the massive Thorne (Scott) Glacier to approach the South Pole. He and two other men skied more than fourteen hundred miles in eighty-eight days to explore and map part of Antarctica for the first time. Footsteps on the Ice reveals the daily struggles, extreme personalities, and the matter-of-fact bravery of early explorers who are now fading into history. Detailing the men's frustrations, annoyances, and questioning of their leader, Paine's entries provide rare insight into how Byrd conducted his expeditions. Paine exposes the stresses of living under the snow in Little America during the four-month-long winter night, trapped in dim, crowded huts and black tunnels, while the men uneasily mulled over their leader's isolation at Advance Base. The fates of Paine's dogs, which provided some of his most difficult and rewarding experiences, are also described—his relationship with Jack, his lead dog, is an entrancing story in itself. Featuring previously unpublished photographs and illustrations, Footsteps on the Ice documents the period in Antarctic exploration that bridged the \"heroic era\" and the modern age of mechanized travel. Depicting almost incomprehensible mental and physical duress and unhesitating courage, Paine's tale is one of the most compelling stories in polar history, surpassing other accounts with its immediacy and adventure as it captures the majesty and mystery of the untouched Antarctic.

Admiral Richard Byrd launched his Second Expedition to chart the southernmost continent. This work reveals the daily struggles, extreme personalities, and the bravery of early explorers. Detailing the men's frustrations, annoyances, and questioning of leadership, it provides insight into how Byrd conducted his expeditions.

TheCastorland Journalis a diary, a travel narrative about early New York, a work of autobiography, and a narrative of a dramatic and complex period in American history. In 1792 Parisian businessmen and speculators established the New York Company, one of the most promising French attempts to speculate for American land following the American Revolution. The company's goal was to purchase and settle fertile land in northwestern New York and then resell it to European investors. In 1793, two of the company's representatives, Simon Desjardins and Pierre Pharoux, arrived in New York to begin settlement of a large tract of undeveloped land. The tract, which was named Castorland for its abundant beaver population (\"castor\" is the French word for beaver), was located in northwestern New York State, along the Black River and in present-day Lewis and Jefferson counties. John A. Gallucci's edition is the first modern scholarly translation of the account Desjardins and Pharoux wrote of their efforts in Castorland from 1793 to 1797. While the journal can be read as tragedy, it also has many pages of satire and irony. Its descriptions of nature and references to the romantic and the sublime belong to the spirit of eighteenth-century literature. The journal details encounters with Native Americans, the authors' process of surveying the Black River, their contacts with Philip Schuyler and Baron Steuben, their excursions to Philadelphia to confer with Thomas Jefferson, Desjardins' trip to New York City to engage the legal services of Alexander Hamilton or Aaron Burr, the planting of crops, and the frustrations of disease and natural obstacles. TheCastorland Journalis historically significant because it is an especially rich account of land speculation in early America, the displacement of Native Americans, frontier life, and politics and diplomacy in the 1790s. The Cornell edition of the journal features Gallucci's introduction and explanatory footnotes, several appendixes, maps, and illustrations.

\"As Anne Hart's biography shows, Mina Benson Hubbard's life (1870-1956) was an adventure of frequent reinvention. Raised on an Ontario pioneer farm, Mina Benson was a shy nurse in New York when she married Leonidas Hubbard, an ambitious American journalist. Following his death during his 1903 attempt to cross Labrador, the devoted housewife set out to complete his expedition. While in England to finish her now-famous book, she met and married Harold Ellis, the scion of a landed North Country family. Mina became an enthralling public speaker, part of intellectual London circles, and involved with women's suffrage and other burning issues of the day.\"

Over a three-year period from 1837 to 1939, operating from a base-camp at Fort Confidence on Great Bear Lake, the expedition achieved its goal. Despite serious problems with sea ice, Dease and Simpson, in some of the longest small-boat voyages in the history of the Arctic, mapped the remaining gaps in a model operation of efficient, economical, and safe exploration. Thomas Simpson's narrative, the standard source on the expedition, claimed the expedition's success for himself, stating \"Dease is a worthy, indolent, illiterate soul, and moves just as I give the impulse.\" In >From Barrow to Boothia William Barr shows that Dease's contribution was absolutely crucial to the expedition's success and makes Dease's sober, sensible, and modest account of the expedition available.