Abstract
THE recent success of the Duke of the Abruzzi's expedition, which carried the Italian flag nearer the North Pole than ever flag flew before, has doubtless prepared a public in Italy for the literature of Polar exploration. The firm of Hoepli, who have conferred many favours on Italian-speaking geographers, have just published a history of Polar exploration in the nineteenth century by Signor Hugues.1 The book makes no claim tP originality, being merely a condensed popular description ofthe Polar voyages ofthe late century, and although more detailed on account of the shorter range of time dealt with, and coming down to the year 1900, it cannot compare with General Greely's compact handbook as a work of reference for the student. The most serious drawback is the want of a bibliography or a uniform system of acknowledging sources of information. Another, which strikes an English reader, is the curiously unfamiliar aspect of well-known names of people and places in their Italian form—Giovanni Ross and Giuseppe Wiggins, Terra del Re Guglielmo and San Giovanni de Terranuova require some thinking over. Where so many personal names are foreign to the author, misprints may easily escape detection, and in the index a cursory inspection reveals about a dozen slips, of which the worst are Gordfelow for Goodfellow, and Newes for Newnes. Probably no English author could handle more than 600 foreign names with fewer accidents. Except for a tangle of dates on p. 98, and the necessary baldness in the treatment of some picturesque episodes induced by brevity, the narrative is clear, interesting and, so far as we can test it, correct. Most space is, of course, given to the Arctic regions; but the history of South Polar voyages is also summarised.
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Italian Exploration in Arctic Regions. Nature 64, 158–159 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/064158d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/064158d0