Fast in the Ice

This little book describes a visit up to the Arctic regions, that was supposed to have taken place long before the book was written, in other words in the early part of the nineteenth century. The purpose of the journey was to get near to the North Pole, which was considered to be surrounded by a large area of ice-free water. The vessel in which they sailed became beset by ice, and could not be moved. They met with Esquimaux, and saw how they survived, how they killed walrus, how they caught birds, and how they lived in their ice-houses, or igloos. They also had several encounters with polar bears, and musk-ox.

Eventually they have been in the ice for a couple of years, and some of the men are suffering from scurvy. Europeans get scurvy from lack of fruit and vegetables, but this condition doesn't seem to affect the Esquimaux, whose meat and fat diet does not cause them to have heart disorders, either.

The crew eventually abandon the vessel, which has been crushed suddenly and totally by a stream of ice-floes, and are obliged to walk out of where they had spent so much time. Luckily, when at their last gasp, they find an Esquimaux village, where they learn that there is a Danish settlement not too far away, and that from it they can take ship for Europe, and eventually make their way back to Britain.

Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825-1894), A Short Biography, with acknowledgements to Chambers Biographical Dictionary.

Scottish author of boys' books, born in Edinburgh, a nephew of James and John Ballantyne, the printers. Educated at The Edinburgh Academy, he joined the Hudson's Bay Company in 1841, and worked as a clerk in the Red River Settlement in the backwoods of northern Canada until 1847, before returning to Edinburgh in 1848. He wrote his first stories on his experiences in Canada, with books such as The Young Fur Traders (1856). Coral Island (1858) is his most famous work.

After that he wrote over eighty books for boys, which were well researched, so that he gained a reputation which led to some of his books being written at the special request of the Post Office and the London Fire Brigade. He wrote marvellous books about the building of such lighthouses as the Eddystone and the Bell Rock. He also spent time aboard the Lightship in the Goodwin Sands, and was able to write a very informative novel about his experiences there. He produced about three books a year right up to the end of his life, but his earlier books are generally thought to be his best ones.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk