Cold Burial
A True Story of Endurance and Disaster
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
For schoolboys in the 1920s, too young to have experienced first-hand the horrors of World War One, theirs was yet the age of adventure. Their imaginations fired by the exploits of Robert Scott, T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Shackleton, and George Mallory, and by the novels of John Buchan and Jack London, they dreamed of exploring and conquering new frontiers. Lawrence had retreated from public life, and Scott, Shackleton, and Mallory were by then all dead, but their heroic feats remained the measure of British manhood, the standard to be carried forward.
In the Spring of 1926, Edgar Christian, a young man of eighteen fresh out of public school, joined his dashing cousin, the legendary (if somewhat self-styled) adventurer Jack Hornby, and a friend named Harold Adlard on an expedition into the Barren Lands of the Canadian Northwest Territories. The plan was to hunt caribou and trap for fur. For young Edgar, the Barrens expedition offered a chance to prove himself and to find his direction in life; for Hornby, a veteran of the Great War as well previous forays into the Northwest (he was known in some quarters as "Hornby of the North"), it represented his latest date with disaster. Together they would demonstrate that civilized men could survive, even thrive, in one of the world's most inhospitable regions. They were proved wrong.
Based in large part upon a diary left behind by Edgar, discovered when his body and those of his companions were found two years after their deaths, Clive Powell-Williams' account of the expedition is a gripping narrative of innocence and experience, youthful idealism and unyielding nature. It matters little that we know in advance the tragic outcome, for in its unfolding Cold Burial recounts a tale of courage, folly, and ultimately redemptive love that will haunt readers long after they've read the last page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Powell-Williams reconstructs the doomed 1927 expedition of renowned adventurer Jack Hornby to Canada's Northwest Territories, using the diary of his 18-year-old cousin and fellow traveler, Edgar Christian. Hornby was part of a wealthy, aristocratic family whose lifestyle he rejected. On a trip home to attend his father's funeral, Hornby so captivated his young cousin with romantic tales of the wilderness that Christian soon begged Hornby to allow him on a trip to the Barren Lands of the Northwest Territories. This was a return trip for Hornby, then in his mid-40s, to the harsh, uninhabited land (temperatures of 30 degrees Fahrenheit were not unusual). Yet according to the author, Hornby, driven by an exaggerated sense of his invincibility and distracted by an unrequited love affair, prepared badly for the trip. He mistakenly decided not to take sled dogs, traveled with inadequate food and clothing, and miscalculated the availability of caribou for hunting. Christian's diary, found two years later along with three dead bodies (Hornby's friend Howard Adlard had also joined them) in the rough cabin they built, describes how the men were critically weakened by starvation and cold. As the last survivor, Christian provided a harrowing account of the deaths of Hornby and then Adlard before the diary broke off. In the end, Hornby's is an arresting story of a reckless wilderness gamble that did not pay off. Photos not seen by PW.