Arctic Exploration Quotes

Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.

One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it.

Sometimes Coraline would forget who she was while she was daydreaming that she was exploring the Arctic, or the Amazon rainforest, or darkest Africa, and it was not until someone tapped her on the shoulder or said her name that Coraline would come back from a million miles away with a start, and all in a fraction of a second have to remember who she was, and what her name was, and that she was even there at all.

quoted Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, once accused of being an “adventurer.” His response was, “An adventure is what happens when exploration goes wrong.

Fate is empty. Any Arctic explorer or common sailor can tell you this. So you must make the best choices you can, knowing they may lead you astray, but proceeding boldly lest your life become one long monotonous drift between death and your last interesting choice.

And one can better understand figures in arctic exploration so obsessed with their own achievement that they found it irksome to acknowledge the Eskimos, unnamed companions, and indefatigable dogs who helped them.

If you have ever wanted to visit somewhere completely wild – away from services, roads, people, and all signs of humanity – head to Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, one of Earth's last true wilderness places.

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest to England so that a flag for the colony could be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo.

The endearingly hopeless Martin Frobisher explored the Arctic region of Canada, found what he thought was gold, and carried fifteen hundred tons of it home on a dangerously overloaded boat only to be informed that it was worthless iron pyrites. Undaunted, Frobisher returned to Canada, found another source of gold, carted thirteen hundred tons of it back, and was informed, with presumed weariness on the part of the royal assayer, that it was the same stuff. After that, we hear no more of Martin Frobisher.

The difference between God’s being and ours is more than the difference between the sun and a candle, more than the difference between the ocean and a raindrop, more than the difference between the arctic ice cap and a snow flake, more than the difference between the universe and the room we are sitting in: God’s being is qualitatively different. No limitation or imperfection in creation should be projected on to our thought of God. He is the creator; all else is creaturely. All else can pass away in an instant; he necessarily exists forever.

She thought of the famous Arctic explorers crossing flat white lands of ice, and Captain Cook sailing to the Pacific, and the men who had started and fought wars over the centuries, and all that male energy going outward, seeking to conquer, seeking to own. And she had gone inward in a way, into the confines of a neglected old house, not even truly a home anymore. She had seen the thing right under everyone's eyes, and she hadn't let it go or been subsumed by the rigours of daily life. She had made space for that discover in the midst of a most contained life, the life that the world seemed bent on handing her.

I arrived always at the same, disquieting place: the history of Western exploration in the New World in every quarter is a confrontation with an image of distant wealth. Gold, furs, timber, whales, the Elysian Fields, the control of trade routes to the Orient—it all had to be verified, acquired, processed, allocated, and defended. And these far-flung enterprises had to be profitable, or be made to seem profitable, or be financed until they were. The task was wild, extraordinary. And it was complicated by the fact that people were living in North America when we arrived. Their title to the wealth had to be extinguished.

The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any of the known cultures, of a true civilization, of a comparatively advanced sort, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, may well have been more advanced than the civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. In astronomy, nautical science, mapmaking and possibly ship-building, it was perhaps more advanced than any state of culture before the 18th Century of the Christian Era. It was in the 18th Century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th Century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th Century did we begin to send out ships for purposes of whaling or exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas. The maps indicate that some ancient people may have done all these things.

There it was, the land under 80 degrees, a land of stern magnificence, where icebergs rear up almost to the very mountaintops, and mountain rises above mountain; there it was, inviolate, alive to the raucous voice of millions of birds, the continuous staccato bark of foxes, the castanet click as the hoofs of great herds of deer fell in a swinging trot; there it was, surrounded by waters whose surface was slashed and sprayed by schools of walrus and whales that had swum there before ever man was born.

Most of these maps were of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. But maps of other areas survived. These included maps of the Americas and maps of the Arctic and Antarctic seas. It becomes clear that the ancient voyagers traveled from pole to pole. Unbelievable as it may appear, the evidence nevertheless indicates that some ancient people explored the coasts of Antatica when its coasts were free of ice. It is clear, too, that they had an instrument of navigation for accurately finding the longitudes of places that was far superior to anything posessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval, or modern times until the second half of the 18th Century.

Owen couldn’t believe his luck. Candice Mayfair was the beautiful white wolf he’d seen that day so long ago. Not that she looked like a wolf right now. He only knew she was the wolf, unequivocally, because he recognized her scent. After the initial shock of seeing an unfamiliar and intriguing Arctic she-wolf, he’d gone after her. The whole pack had gone on a run that night, but they knew to stay far away from any campsite. He and the other guys had swum across the river to explore a bit. Cameron and his mate had stayed on the other side with the kids. He’d even swum back across the river to find her and discovered her scent had led right to one of the tents. Since she had moved into the tent, he knew she had to be one of their shifter kind. He’d even hung around the next day, waiting to catch a glimpse of her, but there were several women, and he had no idea which one had been her. Two blonds, a couple of brunettes, and a red-haired woman—none of whom looked like the picture he had of Clara Hart, though. Being a white wolf in summer had made it difficult to blend in, so he’d had to keep well out of sight. Candice Mayfair was definitely the author of the books on the website, though she didn’t look like the photo her uncle had of her, if she was Clara Hart. She had the same compelling eyes, different color, but they got his attention, grabbed hold, and wouldn’t let go. He carried her to her couch and set her down, staying close, his hand still on her arm until she seemed to regain her equilibrium. “The wolf pup was yours,” she accused, jerking her arm away from him. “Wolf pup?” “Yeah, wolf pup. Don’t pretend you don’t know about your own wolf pup.” Then all the pieces began to fall into place. Campers. Campfire. Food. Corey, the wolf pup she had to be referring to, hadn’t just found the food like they’d thought. Candice must not have been a wolf until that night. “You fed him? Corey? His mom wondered why he smelled of beef jerky that night. We thought he’d found some at the campsite. Don’t tell me…he bit you.

Indeed, the idea of “the right to be cold” is less relatable than “the right to water” for many people.This isn’t meant to denigrate the people on the human rights commission and in the warmer countries, but rather to point out that the global connections we need to make in order to consider the world and its people as a whole are sometimes lacking. Because as hard as it is for many people to understand, for us Inuit, ice matters. Ice is life. (There are two wonderful books that help to make clear the importance of ice to our people. The Meaning of Ice: People and Sea Ice in Three Arctic Communities is edited by Shari Fox Gearheard, Lene Kielsen Holm, Henry Huntington, Joe Mello Leavitt, Andrew R. Mahoney, Margaret Opie, Toku Oshima and Joelie Sanguya and published by the International Polar Institute. SIKU: Knowing Our Ice, edited by S. Gearhead, I. Krupnik, G. Laidler and L. Kielsen Holm [London: Springer], also explores this essential truth in moving detail.)

Early Arctic explorers made this same crucial error. They excitedly envisioned the place and came to it fortified by their own cultural assumptions. The result? They died. They were found frozen in the ice with their volumes of books and fine dishes, wearing coats unwisely tailored to handle the winters they’d always known. Others fared better. These explorers acted as if the Arctic had a storyline of conditions, people, and places that preceded them. They slowed down, studied the terrain, listened, and learned from the people who lived there. These explorers lived.

How did I happen to become an explorer? It did not just happen, for my career has been a steady progress toward a definite goal since I was fifteen years of age." Roald Amundsen

If you're not moving, you're standing still.

I have got the Arctic lure and will certainly go North again.

I must say that the charm of the Arctic, its infinite diversity, its aloofness from the rest of the world, made it a field which gives its own reward. Only those who have seen the magnificent sunsets over the ice, who have…been buffeted by storms… can appreciate the spell which always draws us back there.

Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to British slavers operating in the Bight of Biafra, from whence he was conveyed first to Barbados, then to a plantation in colonial Virginia. Equiano’s further adventures—and there were many—are narrated in his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. After spending much of the Seven Years’ War hauling gunpowder on a British frigate, he was promised his freedom, denied his freedom, sold to several owners—who regularly lied to him, promising his freedom, and then broke their word—until he passed into the hands of a Quaker merchant in Pennsylvania, who eventually allowed him to purchase his liberty. Over the course of his later years he was to become a successful merchant in his own right, a best-selling author, an Arctic explorer, and eventually, one of the leading voices of English Abolitionism. His eloquence and the power of his life story played significant parts in the movement that led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807.

EVERYTHING Before I knew we were poor, Everything was magic. An empty fridge meant freezer-burnt Popsicles for dinner. Purple-blue mouths and toothless smiles calmed the torment in my mother’s crux. Everything was an adventure. A shared bedroom with my little brother meant an eternal playmate. A warm tent, closed off by a blanket hung from a bunk bed and a hair dryer snuck under the sheets to keep warm. Arctic explorers waiting for a rescue unit. Everything was a mystery. Voices resounding from the living room vehemently snaking through the short halls of the apartment. And then one day, I had Everything And Everything was over too soon.

Greely had managed to lead this unlikely unit in one of the epic expeditions in the history of Arctic exploration and scientific discovery. It was remarkable.

Space Exploration Ethics 101 If we can colonize Mars, we can heal the Earth. But that's not the point here. The point is, we gotta explore space just like we gotta explore anything unknown - but we must do so as humble scientists, not as steroid-pumped, illegitimate offspring of musky retards like Columbus. We gotta explore space just like we explore the Arctic. Humankind has several outposts in the Arctic, dedicated solely to research - our endeavors into other planets oughta be exactly like that. Otherwise, what starts out as space exploration will soon turn into space imperialism, and will do to other planets what white terrorists have been doing to the indegenous people on earth for ages. Therefore, focus on space exploration, not on space colonization. Let me put this into perspective. NASA, ISRO, CNSA, ESA, KARI, JAXA (and more) - these represent the real democratic aspirations of humankind's endeavors of curiosity into space, whereas SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic these are the new-age posterboys of space imperialism. All I say is this, O Brave Explorers of Space - your mission is to explore the universe to facilitate human welfare, not to be some retarded billionaire's backboneless underwear. Beware, I repeat - space exploration doesn't turn into space imperialism!

As “the last great geographical problem left to the world for solution,” it symbolized the conclusion of the global journey of exploration begun many thousands of years ago when a few hundred bipedal hominids living in east Africa set out to learn what lay over the horizon.

Sometimes Coraline would forget who she was while she was daydreaming that she was exploring the Arctic, or the Amazon rain forest, or Darkest Africa, and it was not until someone tapped her on the shoulder or said her name that Coraline would come back from a million miles away with a start, and all in a fraction of a second have to remember who she was, and what her name was, and that she was even there at all.

Everything around you is touched by oil. Plastics are petroleum products. Foodstuffs and transportation of the foodstuffs, and everything else, are dependent on oil, and, ridiculously, our nation is dependent on foreign oil. Many Americans don’t realize that our government, unlike other countries’ governments, prohibits the sale of our domestic oil on the open market. That outdated export ban needs to end. Also needing to end is the bureaucratic prohibition on drilling for our own safe, reliable energy sources. Alaskans have been fighting for the right to drill on our state’s northern shore for decades. The vast majority see the government’s refusal to permit exploration and drilling as a nonsensical federal overreach. Tapping a tiny portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)—two thousand acres out of nineteen million uninhabited, frozen acres—would give us access to billions of barrels of oil that can be safely extracted and give a huge boost to our economy and energy independence. Oil in the ground is useless. Oil in the hands of American entrepreneurs and job creators means new products, lower prices, and improved national security.

After the fall of Atlantis and Lemuria, the elements of civilization were brought by survivors to the British Isles and Scandinavia, which, along with the Arctic, make up the remnants of what had once been. Due to the devastating after-effects of the Age of Catastrophe, the inhabitants of Britain were forced to vacate their habitats and flee for safety to the eastern climes. They crossed the land-bridge between Britain and Scandinavia, and ventured into lands less affected by the great cataclysm. Southward and eastward they went, taking their customs, religious rites, technology, language, art, music and symbolism. However, because these forced emigrations occurred before the official dates posited for civilization's rise, they have been deliberately ignored. Nevertheless, in 2008, new found evidence revealed that Egypt was indeed colonized by Westerners over fifteen thousand years ago. Wall paintings dating from this remote period have been found in southern Egypt bearing a striking resemblance to those found in the caves of Lascaux, France. As Comyns Beaumont said, this artwork is Nordic in origin. It belongs to travelers from the North-West who desperately sought refuge from the cataclysm that made their own homelands uninhabitable. The races of Egypt, Libya and India knew these handsome visitors as “Men of Gold,” “God Men,” “Good Men,” “Goat Men,” and “Stag Men.” In the Bible they are cryptically referred to as “Edomites” or "Red Men." This title - attributed to early Egyptians - simply denotes sunburn. Red is the color a fair Caucasian man’s skin turns when exposed to intense equatorial heat. It is singular to find a white

Perhaps Nansen, or at least the name of his ship, owed something to Verne as well. Jules Verne, the great French pioneer of science fiction, had also shown interest in the Arctic. Some thirty years earlier, he had published The English at the North Pole, in which there figured an expedition ship called Forward – of which Fram, naturally, was the Norwegian equivalent.

You want this one?” he asked me softly, placing his hand on my forearm and giving it a squeeze. “Huh?” I asked distractedly. “Cyrus just said he has an assignment in Paris, year 1925. You want it, right?” Did arctic explorers want hot showers? “We’ll take it!” I exclaimed. For

I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height. As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest—this was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.

The English explorer Martin Frobisher developed a novel technique for using the services of the Inuit as pilots for his ship during his first Arctic exploration, in 1576. When he sailed around Baffin Island, searching for a northwest passage to the Pacific, Frobisher watched for Inuit men out in their kayaks. When he saw one, he leaned over the bow of his ship and rang a bell, which he held out as though offering a gift to the passing native. When the friendly Inuit came closer and reached up for the bell, Frobisher grabbed him and forced him to pilot the large ship through the Arctic bays and inlets.

The natives of North America were some of the best hunters ever known anywhere in the world; their skill and accuracy frequently astounded the early European explorers. When the Arctic explorer Martin Frobisher made his voyage to Baffin Island, the skill of the Inuit so impressed him that he kidnapped a hunter to take back to England as a prize. The hunter’s skill with a harpoon thrilled Queen Elizabeth I so much that she invited him to harpoon her royal swans for the amusement of her court.

You know those Arctic explorers who leave caches of food scattered on the route to the North Pole? Just in case they may need them someday? That's my father's favors. Someday he'll be at each one of those people's houses and they had better come across

Why this hobby, Mr. Scovil?” I inquired. “You’ve the means to explore any field you desire, and then add more—form Arctic expeditions, excavate tombs. Why dark magic?” He shrugged in the fashion very rich people do, when the slight flex of a muscle is pleasing to their own bodies. “It’s in the family, as it were. Anyway, why art?” he replied, smiling. “Why hospitals? Why battle and conquest? Why patronage or charity? A man has to have something to work for, doesn’t he, besides money?

I refuse to listen to the insidious arguments of the skiers, who are constantly trying to persuade me to abandon the kayaks. I trust my kayaks and will not give in. I have reminded my companions of my unswerving conviction on more than one occasion.

Exxon also signed a $500 billion deal to explore for oil in the Russian Arctic (exploration that was possible only because the area was rapidly melting), and for his billions, Tillerson was officially awarded the Russian Order of Friendship in a ceremony at Vladimir Putin’s villa. No matter the danger posed by fossil fuel, Exxon was never going to let anything change. As Tillerson told his last shareholder meeting, the planet “is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.

If I never left it for the rest of the year, I wouldn’t get to explore all of it. Not that I was Dora the g@dd*mn Explorer looking for adventure.

For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton

An explorer soon discovers that the world is full of busybodies righteously ready to save him, as they probably think, from himself. The only way to deal with such people is to agree to their terms and then go ahead as one pleases. There are enough legitimate discouragements in the world without submitting to artificial ones

When it is darkest there is always light ahead

A good book we like, we explorers. That is our best amusement, and our best time killer

If you wish to know what men seek in this land [the Arctic regions], or why men journey thither in so great danger of their lives, then it is the threefold nature of man that draws him thither. One part of him is emulation and desire of fame, for it is a man's nature to go where there is likelihood of great danger, and to make himself famous thereby. Another part is the desire of knowledge, for it is man's nature to wish to know and see those parts of which he has heard, and to find out whether they are as it was told him or not. The third part is the desire of gain, seeing that men seek after riches in every place where they learn that profit is to be had, even though there is great danger in it." Fridjtof Nansen, citing an old Norse saga

the rise of representative institutions, is wrong on racial grounds.[71] It is wrong on high cultural grounds as well: Russia has contributed one of the greatest literary traditions to the West, starting with Alexander Pushkin, the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolay Nekrasov, dramas of Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Anton Chekhov, and the prose of Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Ivan Goncharov. It is wrong on geopolitical grounds: Russia’s relentless geographical expansion into Siberia, beginning in the late-1500s and reaching the Pacific by 1639, is as deserving of admiration as the achievements of other well-known European explorations. Russia has been a land of numerous great explorers associated with heroic expeditions from Siberia to the Arctic into Space; it launched the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, the first human spaceflight in 1961, the first spacewalk in 1965, the first space exploration rover, on the Moon in 1970, and the first space station in 1971.[72] Guillaume Faye’s vision of a Euro-Siberia federation covering all European lands in between the Atlantic and the Pacific is a salutation to Russia’s geographical achievement and possible impending role in the struggle with the Asian world for the survival of Western civilisation.

over her mouth to stifle a giggle. She wouldn’t have had Her Majesty down as a heckler. Poor Lankester looked aghast, as you might if the most powerful person in the world was barracking you. The man tried to carry on as best he could. “YOUR MAJESTY, MY LORDS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” he began again, his voice cracking with nerves. “As director of the Natural History Museum, it is a huge honour to house what I am sure you will all agree is the greatest find of the century. When a group of explorers set off across the Arctic…

CCP analyst Jichang Lulu has explored the localisation of united front influence activities in the Nordic countries, where local officials with considerable decision-making power are targeted for ‘friendly contact’ because they are insulated from strategic debates in the capital cities and do not have the expertise to understand Beijing’s intentions and tactics.1 He notes that Beijing has been actively cultivating political influence in Greenland, which Beijing sees as important for resource supply and for being an Arctic state. The strategy includes investments, an attempt to acquire a derelict naval base, and political work on Greenland’s elites, activities that have rung alarm bells in Denmark.

Freuchen, der på opturen fungerede som fyrbøder sammen med Hagerup og Gundahl, kvæstede en dag to mellemhåndsben alvorligt, da en hel bunke tunge kulstykker væltede ned over hans hånd. Da Freuchen er en af dem, der sjældent lader en lejlighed gå fra sig til at komme galt af sted, faldt det ham naturligvis ikke ind at benytte den sædvanlige jernstang til at rage kullene ned med inde i boksene. Da vi bebrejdede ham det uforsigtige i at stikke hænderne ind gennem det farlige hul, sagde han: "Jamen, jeg havde da først stukket hovedet langt ind for at se, hvor jeg skulle ta' og rive løs.

Other people's homes always smell different but it takes a certain mindset to believe that your home is the way that all homes should smell.