Land of Feast and Famine
"Ingstad is a good witness ... His writing is lively and he shoes great skill in keeping his reader with him ... This book is an adventure/travel story that is also a first-hand account of the last days of the fur trappers' society and as such is a valuable document ... a first Canadian edition is appropriate and timely." Dorothy Harley Eber, author of When The Whalers Were Up North.
The young Norwegian was Helge Ingstad, now famous for his discovery in 1960 of a Viking village at L'Anse aux Meadows (on the northern tip of Newfoundland) -- the oldest known European settlement in North America. Les mer
He recounts many close calls of his own as well as the fates of those far less fortunate. On his way out of the North, Ingstad learned that the colourful adventurer John Hornby and two of his companions starved to death while on a expedition to the Barren Lands -- one of them outliving the others by months. But Ingstad's life in the Canadian Arctic was also full of heart-warming experiences. He describes the native companions and fellow trappers with whom he shared adventures and relates stories of numerous hunts and how he learned first hand about beaver, caribou, wolf, and other wildlife. He also provides a remarkable body of knowledge about native medicine. The arrival of the age of aviation opened up the North and, as Ingstad prophetically observed in 1931, the way of life of the native people, who were "still pursuing the free nomadic existence of their forefathers," would be irrevocably changed. At a time when the ways of life of Canada's native and Inuit people are more threatened than ever before, The Land of Feast and Famine provides a fascinating glimpse at a time already far in the past.
Detaljer
- Forlag
- McGill-Queen's University Press
- Innbinding
- Paperback
- Språk
- Engelsk
- Sider
- 360
- ISBN
- 9780773509122
- Utgivelsesår
- 1992
Anmeldelser
"Ingstad is a good witness ... His writing is lively and he shoes great skill in keeping his reader with him ... This book is an adventure/travel story that is also a first-hand account of the last days of the fur trappers' society and as such is a valuable document ... a first Canadian edition is appropriate and timely." Dorothy Harley Eber, author of When The Whalers Were Up North.