Annotations on polar exploration

These are annotations for the fourteenth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 268
•epigraph: I’d wanted the epigraph here to be:

In Baffin’s Bay, where the whale-fish blows,
Is the fate of Franklin—no one knows.
Ten thousand pounds I would freely give
To learn that my husband still did live.
§“The Sailor’s Dream”; quoted in Joseph P. Faulkner, Eighteen Months on a Greenland Whaler (...