| Description Of Item | From the collection of David Craigie. This series includes two seemingly complete accounts, the beginning of an account and three fragments. It is not known how they relate to each other or who wrote them although it is possible that David Craigie was on the voyage as he would have been 25 years of age. The work was written for publication, and quotes from a book by Scoresby of the time, but for whatever reason (and quite possibly the appearance of Scoresby’s own work on The Arctic Regions in 1820) never reached that stage.
The journey was a whaling voyage and, as such, not a disaster as the ship made it home safely. But it was certainly unprofitable, bringing back only three whales. The ship was icebound for a very large part of the summer and the author, presumably David Craigie, uses the enforced idleness to write about a variety of arctic topics. His scientific background is impressive. He is particularly interested in mineralogy, and, given that he was writing more than a decade before the appearance of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, he is very knowledgeable. Similarly his meteorology is written very early in the science, and yet his inferences and conclusions are usually credible in terms of modern knowledge.
There is a transcript of the account in The Journal of the Hakluyt Society: C. Ian Jackson 'The Voyage of David Craigie to Davis Strait and Baffin Bay (1818)', Journal of the Hakluyt Society (www.hakluyt.com), February 2013. |