Longtime friends make a dangerous Arctic voyage in Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery by Mark Synnott (The Third Pole), which crosses an adrenaline-fueled travelogue with a narrative history of exploration.
Synnott has summited Mount Everest and is known for his work for National Geographic Television, among other outlets. Still, he secretly nursed a lifelong ambition to traverse the Northwest Passage, a route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic. Synnott's purchase of a fiberglass sailboat he named Polar Sun spurred him to plan a voyage, and his promise to make an attempt at finding the grave of British explorer Sir John Franklin secured funding for the expedition. Franklin's famously ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage in 1845 ended in his death, and his resting place somewhere in the Arctic likely contains logbooks detailing his expedition's last days. Synnott and his small crew faced storms that caused immense waves, prowling polar bears, "ghostly walls of ice," and the strain that grueling conditions can place on even the oldest of friendships.
Synnott blends his research of the history and fate of the Franklin expedition with a 21st-century adventure story that includes bittersweet musings on the effects of global warming on polar ice levels and his impressions of the Inuit, whose understanding of the terrain was ignored by European explorers. This thrill ride of a voyage should please history buffs and armchair travelers alike. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads