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This weekend I was listening to Andrea Pitzer's marvelous history Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. I happened on it thanks to Pitzer's lovely thread detailing her search for the King of Zembla -- turns out there was one, very briefly and only by chance, and that Nabokov very likely knew the story. So anyways: listening to Icebound on Audible, and early in the book where it is talking about Barentsz making his plans to seek a Northeastern Passage, I hear a reference to how Dutch scientists thought the climate at the North Pole was temperate. This rings a bell for me as something the Chums of Chance in Against the Day might have believed... I asked Ms. Pitzer for further reading suggestions and she forwarded me a link to Colin Dickey's excellent article On the Open Polar Sea, about John Franklin's lost expedition to the North Pole... I was well down the rabbit hole by the time I hit on Dickey's reference to "Cornelius P. Broadnag, who claimed to have the journal of an American named Jonathan Wilder, which told of an “internal region” inside the earth that Wilder had traveled extensively." Well: Broadnag's account is online in full at Google Books, a little illegible though and you cannot copy and paste from it. So I spent Sunday putting it into Google Docs:
posted morning of February 8th, 2021: 1 response
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