The Arctic Grail

Here, for the first time in a single volume, is the full and detailed saga of the nineteenth-century quest for two of the world's great geographical prizes. Despite the savage cold, the snow and winter darkness, and most of all the relentless ice, scores of expeditions left home ports to seek the elusive Passage linking the Atlantic and the Pacific while others sought the North Pole. Some went missing, and the search for these lost seamen added to the expanding knowledge of the frozen world.
Covering the entire period of exploration from the expedition of William Edward Perry in 1818 to that of Robert Peary in a single volume, Pierre Berton has written a revisionist history of the search for the Northwest passage and the North Pole.