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[CCBC-Net] Survival Stories from True Accounts
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From: Sherif, Sue <sue.sherif>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:29:48 -0800
Two of my favorite polar survival stories in picture book format are nonfiction: The Lamp, the Ice, and the Boat Called Fish by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and After the Last Dog Died by Carmen Bredeson. Both retell actual survival stories and are based on the accounts of survivors.
Martin adapts an amazing story for a young audience in her creative nonfiction work The Lamp, the Ice and the Boat Called Fish. Beth Krommes' scratchboard illustrations contribute much to Martin's retelling of the fate of the Karluk expedition of 1913-14. In the summer of 1913, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian-Icelandic explorer, commissioned a fishing boat, the Karluk [fish in Aleut], to transport him, a group of scientists, the crew, and an Inupiaq family up the coast of Alaska to discover the continent that Stefansson erroneously thought would be found under the Arctic polar ice cap. The voyage was curtailed when the boat was iced in off the coast of Alaska. Stefansson and three scientists left the rest to fend for themselves and set off over land. The boat with the remaining crew and the family on board was trapped in a slow but horrible drift northwest in sea ice until the Karluk sank off the coast of Siberia. A party of survivors was rescued on Wrangel Island 8 months later, 12 months after the expedition set sail, thanks to the survival skills of the Inupiaq family and a heroic trek hundreds of miles over ice by two of the party members. Two children and a cat were on board and were among the survivors, a fact that Martin uses to focus her story for a younger audience. She consulted Barrow descendants of the Eskimo family in her research and includes photos of the family at the end. Adult readers may want to try The Ice Master by Jennifer Niven or The Last Voyage of the Karluk: A Survivor's Memoir of Arctic Disaster by William Laird McKinlay. (Niven has written a compelling account of another doomed Stefansson project, involving one of the Karluk survivors, in Ada Blackjack.) Martin's children's version might be a little slow-going for some independent readers, but as a read-aloud it's terrific.
After the Last Dog Died: The True-Life, Hair-Raising Adventure of Douglas Mawson's 1912 Antarctic Expedition is a retelling for children of the fate of a smaller three-person Antarctic exploration. Strikingly designed and well illustrated with large-format historical photographs, this book gives more context for Mawson's true-life survival story than Martin provides for the Karluk story. Mawson, a seasoned Australian polar explorer at age 29, led a geologic expedition of 30 men and 39 dogs that was much more carefully planned and reasoned than Stefansson's, but took a nightmarish turn when Mawson, two of the team, and 16 dogs set off on a mapping trek. What followed was a hellish experience that only Mawson survived. The miracle of Mawson's enormous desire to survive has been documented for adults both in his own telling, The Home of the Blizzard, and in Lennard Bickel's Mawson's Will. Bredeson used these and her own interviews with Mawson descendents to produce a solid work of nonfiction for children. If the results are less poetic than Martin's, the power of the actual story and Bredeson's attention to detail make this nonfiction title one to recommend to young fans of survival fiction.
Please excuse the intrusion of nonfiction titles in the discussion, but both of these stories are so powerful that they deserve to be remembered by adults and children.
Sue Sherif
Alaska State Library
sue.sherif at alaska.gov
Received on Thu 19 Jul 2007 03:29:48 PM CDT
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:29:48 -0800
Two of my favorite polar survival stories in picture book format are nonfiction: The Lamp, the Ice, and the Boat Called Fish by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and After the Last Dog Died by Carmen Bredeson. Both retell actual survival stories and are based on the accounts of survivors.
Martin adapts an amazing story for a young audience in her creative nonfiction work The Lamp, the Ice and the Boat Called Fish. Beth Krommes' scratchboard illustrations contribute much to Martin's retelling of the fate of the Karluk expedition of 1913-14. In the summer of 1913, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian-Icelandic explorer, commissioned a fishing boat, the Karluk [fish in Aleut], to transport him, a group of scientists, the crew, and an Inupiaq family up the coast of Alaska to discover the continent that Stefansson erroneously thought would be found under the Arctic polar ice cap. The voyage was curtailed when the boat was iced in off the coast of Alaska. Stefansson and three scientists left the rest to fend for themselves and set off over land. The boat with the remaining crew and the family on board was trapped in a slow but horrible drift northwest in sea ice until the Karluk sank off the coast of Siberia. A party of survivors was rescued on Wrangel Island 8 months later, 12 months after the expedition set sail, thanks to the survival skills of the Inupiaq family and a heroic trek hundreds of miles over ice by two of the party members. Two children and a cat were on board and were among the survivors, a fact that Martin uses to focus her story for a younger audience. She consulted Barrow descendants of the Eskimo family in her research and includes photos of the family at the end. Adult readers may want to try The Ice Master by Jennifer Niven or The Last Voyage of the Karluk: A Survivor's Memoir of Arctic Disaster by William Laird McKinlay. (Niven has written a compelling account of another doomed Stefansson project, involving one of the Karluk survivors, in Ada Blackjack.) Martin's children's version might be a little slow-going for some independent readers, but as a read-aloud it's terrific.
After the Last Dog Died: The True-Life, Hair-Raising Adventure of Douglas Mawson's 1912 Antarctic Expedition is a retelling for children of the fate of a smaller three-person Antarctic exploration. Strikingly designed and well illustrated with large-format historical photographs, this book gives more context for Mawson's true-life survival story than Martin provides for the Karluk story. Mawson, a seasoned Australian polar explorer at age 29, led a geologic expedition of 30 men and 39 dogs that was much more carefully planned and reasoned than Stefansson's, but took a nightmarish turn when Mawson, two of the team, and 16 dogs set off on a mapping trek. What followed was a hellish experience that only Mawson survived. The miracle of Mawson's enormous desire to survive has been documented for adults both in his own telling, The Home of the Blizzard, and in Lennard Bickel's Mawson's Will. Bredeson used these and her own interviews with Mawson descendents to produce a solid work of nonfiction for children. If the results are less poetic than Martin's, the power of the actual story and Bredeson's attention to detail make this nonfiction title one to recommend to young fans of survival fiction.
Please excuse the intrusion of nonfiction titles in the discussion, but both of these stories are so powerful that they deserve to be remembered by adults and children.
Sue Sherif
Alaska State Library
sue.sherif at alaska.gov
Received on Thu 19 Jul 2007 03:29:48 PM CDT
