Only hope of advancement was if someone higher up the Navy List died. Mothballed on half-pay they yearned for something - a war would have been good - to get them back into service. But 90 per cent of these officers had nothing to do. In fact, their numbers increased until the navy, reduced to a rump of some 23,000 men from a peak of more than 130,000, had one officer for everyįour men. Men, they had political clout and they could not be dismissed so easily.

The officers, however, were a different matter. Ships were laid up `in ordinary' and the seamen were simply thrown back onto the streets from which they had often been press-ganged in the first place. On the whole it was a straightforward process. Having swelled during the Napoleonic Wars to proportions that would not be equalled for a century, the Royal Navy was in the throes of massive disarmament. Were read by few but their swords-to-ploughshares sentiment was shared by many, particularly by the officers of the Royal Navy. These words were written in 1816 by John Barrow, Second Secretary to the Admiralty, in the introduction to Captain James Kingston Tuckey's journal of his expedition to the Congo of that same year. Outlines have been boldly and broadly sketched by Cook, Vancouver and Flinders, and others of our countrymen?' Review Quotes has great narrative gifts, and his brief character sketches draw readers in while pithy summaries of each expedition carry us on breathlessly from one ice hummock to the next.`To what purpose could a portion of our naval force be, at any time, but more especially in time of profound peace, more honourably or more usefully employed than in completing those details of geographical and hydrographical science of which the grand Ninety Degrees North is a riveting saga of humankinds search for the ultimate goal. Drawing on unpublished archives and long-forgotten journals, Fleming tells this story with consummate craftsmanship and wit.

In scintillating detail, Ninety Degrees North tells of the vying governments (including the United States, Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) and fantastic eccentrics (from Swedish balloonists to Italian aristocrats) who, despite their heroic failures, often achieved massive celebrity as they battled shipwreck, starvation, and sickness to reach the top of the world. Was it an open sea? Was it a portal to new worlds within the globe? Or was it just a wilderness of ice? When Sir John Franklin disappeared in the Arctic in 1845, explorers decided it was time to find out. Book Synopsis In the nineteenth century, theories about the North Pole ran rampant. About the Book The author of Barrows Boys presents the epic story of the men who stopped at nothing to unravel the mysteries of the North Pole.

Barrow's Boys by Fergus Fleming