Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition By Leonard F. Guttridge


Leonard F. Guttridge · 6 REVIEW

The ill-fated 1881 effort to establish an American fort in the Arctic is chronicled in full detail, covering the terrible saga of starvation, mutiny, suicide, shipwreck, execution, and cannibalism that destroyed nineteen of the original twenty-five explorers. Reprint. Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition

Great adventure and human folly story Paperback Okay, this is another gripping tale of arctic exploration and the race for Farthest North. This time it's an American expedition. They have the usual logistical, weather, and leadership problems that seem to plague most of the expeditions, combined with political dithering and flubbed rescue attempts. Pretty exciting stuff...except the dry-as-dust narration manages to suck most of the excitement out of it.

It's not that it's not well-researched, because it is, it's just that there are some really big questions hanging over the story - the journal that mysteriously gets from arctic Canada to the Mississippi river is mentioned, then dismissed with and no one knows how it got there. (Minor spoiler ahead.) The bodies were found mutilated, it's pretty clear there was some cannibalism going on, and although the author mentions that there was a scandal at the time, everyone involved denied it, and the author pretty much leaves it at that - he makes no attempt to explain it.

So, not great, but by no means bad. If you're into arctic exploration books, add it to your list. If you're not, I would start elsewhere. (Say with Pierre Berton, _Arctic Grail_.) Paperback Unfortunately, I found Leonard F. Guttridge's Ghosts of Cape Sabine too poorly written to enjoy. This should have been a great, epic tale of the Greeley expedition's misfortunes while spending years exploring the arctic. The story itself is fairly dramatic and interesting-- there is plenty of source material to make this a story worth telling.

Under Guttridge's pen, the story is extremely difficult to follow and unskillfully woven. (I defy you to find a paragraph in this book that does not mention at least three different people... it just becomes a confusing jumble of names all to frequently.) I found myself skimming and skipping page after boring page before I finally put down the book for good.

I love a good arctic (or antarctic) exploration story... there are tons of great books out there focused on the trials and tribulations of different expeditions. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. Paperback All in all a great book if you are interested in the history of arctic exploration - I had never heard of the Greely Expedition before. The author was obviously painstaking in his research, but in my opinion the book could have been much shorter. Especially the detail leading up to the launch of the expedition. I agree with the other reviewer who said it was difficult to keep all the names straight at times. Paperback Sometimes it's worth going back to read about past events to find out how they relate to others more current. This is the reason I've sought out a book from 20 years ago and spent the past few days reading it. The book, Ghosts of Cape Sabine, relates the tale of a tragic Arctic exploration from the 1880s. Amazingly, despite the traumas brought about through poor planning and poor execution, most of the scientific data collected are proving useful now in helping establish how our climate has changed over the past century and a bit.

It was a farce from the start, but one with a tragic end, something almost more devious in many ways than the mind of Terrance Dicks (recently deceased long term writer/script editor of Dr Who) might have devised.

Captain William Howgate and Lieutenants Adolphus Greely and Fred Kislingbury had worked together establishing a telegraph system to provide communication through much of the western United States. Greely was keen to head an expedition into the Arctic, accompanied by Kislingbury and a crew of 25 other men. Howgate had the connections to get a bill before the House of Representatives seeking funding. It passed in 1877 but was then stalled in the Senate.

Great bungling followed, with funding finally available for rushed preparation to charter a ship and get under way in Summer 1881. Despite a late start in the season, the expedition managed to get itself established on Ellesmere Island. In the meantime, Howgate did a disappearing act, charged with embezzlement. Soon after arrival on the island, petty issues between Greely, in command, and Kislingbury found the latter effectively persona non grata and banned from taking part in the work of the expedition.

Absurd delays, many due to lack of funding availability through further government bungling, meant that relief ships arranged to take provisions in 1882 and 1883 failed to manage the task. The balance of the story relates the privations suffered by men their country left to their own resources, and the final rescue of the handful of survivors. It is a harrowing tale.

My interest in rereading Ghosts of Cape Sabine was to remind myself of the importance we can now attach to the work done by the fateful expedition. I was again impressed by the story and its scientific outcome. It has similarities in the hardships faced to many other tales of (Ant)Arctic exploration/expeditions, not least those of Scott and Franklin. If you can find a copy, it's well worth the read. Paperback

This took way too long for me to read. The story of the expedition built for 200 pages before anything exciting (read horrifying)actually started to happen. Paperback Leonard Guttridge (1918-2009) published several non-fiction books about nineteenth-century seafaring and exploration, and in this one he did a fine job of assembling scattered sources for a history of the Greely expedition, especially the diaries kept by expedition members.

Unfortunately, Guttridge has a cast of characters almost uniformly anti-heroic: torpid, irresponsible, irrational, immature, and consumed by petty bickering. Adolphus Greely (1844-1935) seems to have had a genuinely useful career both before and after the Arctic episode that made him famous. But once the story reaches the ice, it’s hard for the reader to decide whom he dislikes most: Greely, the pig-headed commander; his second-rate and nearly mutinous party; the inept and unlucky attempted rescuers; or the woodenheaded bureaucrats back in Washington D.C.

The book might have been tightened up a bit. For instance, the posterior protection in which the bureaucracy seemed to be eternally engaged could have been presented more succinctly. Also, there’s a flatness to the characterization that seems especially surprising considering all the scribbling going on while the party starved to death. Paperback I liked this book, sort of as an exercise in schadenfreude. Dude had no idea what he was doing and ended up dooming his entire party, surviving the last few months by basically hiding in their tents. Ghastly. Paperback The story of the Greely expedition, sent to the arctic for some obscure purpose in the late 19th century. Most of the members of the expedition ended up dying. The survivors had to eat the dead to survive. This is what happens when you send stupid people into a potentially dangerous situation. Paperback This sounds like a really interesting story but I found the way it was being told to be boring, didn't finish.... Paperback

Ghosts