Irascible Arctic and Canadian Explorer
SIMPSON, Alexander.
The life and travels of Thomas Simpson, the Arctic discoverer … London, Richard Bentley, 1845.
8vo, pp. viii, 424; with engraved frontispiece portrait of Simpson and folding engraved ‘Map of the country north of Athabasca Lake, North America’; some light foxing and browning; very good in recent half calf with marbled sides, spine gilt in compartments with lettering-piece, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers; some rubbing to spine and corners; marginal pencil note to p. 381.
First edition of this account of the life and adventures of the Scottish Arctic explorer Thomas Simpson (1808–1840), by his brother Alexander. Simpson joined the Hudson’s Bay Company and arrived in Canada in 1829. Between 1836 and 1840 he took part in a remarkable expedition under Peter Warren Dease, which saw him journey from the Red River settlement to Lake Athabasca to Point Barrow on the Arctic coast, then to Fort Confidence on the Great Bear Lake, and up the Coppermine River to the Boothia Peninsula: ‘they had almost, but not quite, discovered the north-west passage’ (ODNB). Not the easiest of men, Simpson was killed in June 1840 by a gunshot wound to the head: ‘The men of mixed race who were with him deposed that he went mad, killed two of the party, and then committed suicide; others suggested that he was attacked by his own men, two of whom he shot before he was killed’ (ibid.). Alexander Simpson also edited and published Thomas’s Narrative of Discoveries on the North Coast of America (1843).
Arctic Bibliography 16116; Sabin 81338.