EXCERPT :

When Benjamin Leigh Smith was born amid the rolling countryside of East Sussex on March 12, 1828, the British naval officer William Edward Parry was publishing the results of his attempt to reach the North Pole from the islands north of Svalbard the previous summer. Parry, one of the most active Arctic explorers of his generation, had served as junior officer for John Ross’s search for the Northwest Passage in 1818, and then commanded three expeditions of his own in search of a solution to the mystery of the passage, before turning his attention to the North Pole.