Inuit

Two American explorers, one white, one black, made a historic assault on the North Pole a century ago and then headed home, leaving behind a legacy of daring and discovery, and of two little boys in sealskins — their half-Inuit sons. Today it's the descendants of those 3-year-olds who are exploring the world. "He said, 'I'll find the way or I'll make a way.' That's what I'm doing, too," Robert E. Peary II, 55, a well-traveled Inuit lecturer-performer, says of his famous great-grandfather, Rear Adm. Robert E. Peary.

 Excerpted from Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man, by Mark Kurlansky, copyright © 2012 by Mark Kurlansky, available May 8. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc. HE HAD WORKED for the United States government in the frontier West and as a fur trapper in Canada's frigid Labrador, but the life of adventure seemed well behind Clarence Birdseye...

The Last Gentleman Adventurer: Coming of Age in the Arctic By Edward Beauclerk Maurice Houghton Mifflin, 392 pp., $25 As the Great Depression deepened in June 1930, Edward Beauclerk Maurice's widowed mother could no longer sustain herself and her four children in England. Off they sailed to try their fortune in New Zealand, all but 16-year-old Edward. A foreword by Cambridge essayist Lawrence Millman, author of "Lost in the Arctic," draws Maurice's life into focus.

Two American explorers, one white, one black, made a historic assault on the North Pole a century ago and then headed home, leaving behind a legacy of daring and discovery, and of two little boys in sealskins — their half-Inuit sons. Today it's the descendants of those 3-year-olds who are exploring the world. "He said, 'I'll find the way or I'll make a way.' That's what I'm doing, too," Robert E. Peary II, 55, a well-traveled Inuit lecturer-performer, says of his famous great-grandfather, Rear Adm. Robert E. Peary.

IQALUIT, Nunavut Territory -- Simon Nattaq lost both feet to frostbite when his snowmobile crashed through the ice, made thin by rising Arctic temperatures. All his gear plunged into the water too, leaving him stranded for two days. He now walks -- and still hunts -- with prosthetic feet, and believes God kept him alive to warn the world about global warming. "Today I am here because the creator allowed it," says Nattaq, 61, a city counselor for Iqaluit, a one-time US Air Force base that is today Canada's northernmost city with 7,000 residents.

CAPE DORSET, Nunavut -- The art capital of Canada is not located on the tony streets of Toronto or Montreal, but on a remote tip of Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut. It is Cape Dorset, a community of slightly more than 1,300 mostly Inuit people, with an unforgiving climate and no paved roads, almost to the Arctic Circle on the fringes of the inhabited world. Nearly one in four workers here is an artist. Carving and printmaking are important economic activities in Cape Dorset, recently named the nation's "most artistic municipality" by a government-financed research...

 Excerpted from Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man, by Mark Kurlansky, copyright © 2012 by Mark Kurlansky, available May 8. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc. HE HAD WORKED for the United States government in the frontier West and as a fur trapper in Canada's frigid Labrador, but the life of adventure seemed well behind Clarence Birdseye...

IQALUIT, Nunavut - When you look over the railing of your cruise ship directly into the piercing black eyes of a polar bear, it suddenly doesn't matter that the cruise has no chocolate buffet or that the swimming pool is used as storage space. The bear doesn't care about chocolate buffets, either. Since there's scant chance you'll become his entree, probably he would rather the ship move on so he can get back to hunting ringed seal, his preferred meal. It's hard to fathom, but common tourists like you and me now have access to the waters of Canada's Arctic region.

ABOARD THE AKADEMIK IOFFE IN THE CANADIAN HIGH ARCTIC - He was a cooperative walrus, but a strange one, lolling in the September sunshine on an ice floe in Croker Bay, somewhere around the 75th parallel. He seemed oblivious to the 60 humans in inflatable boats closing in on him. We were only about 20 yards away, close enough to distinguish his tusks (splayed outwards, a clue to his gender). The engines were idling, the cameras clicking. Yet his only response was to test the water with a flipper and lean his head over the surface as though rehearsing an escape plan.

KANGIQSUJUAQ, Quebec - A meteorite nearly 400 feet in diameter falls through the atmosphere in a fiery flash. Traveling at 20 miles per second, it slams into the earth, sending boulder-sized rocks flying in all directions and carving a gaping hole in the planet's crust. About 1.4 million years later, I am seated in a Twin Otter aircraft flying over Quebec's Nunavik region, looking out the window at endless tundra. All of a sudden I see a blue eye three miles wide and perfectly circular staring up at me: the meteorite's crater, now filled with water.

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories - Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline. They’re building windmills. That’s wind-power turbines, to be exact - a token first try at “getting rid of this fossil fuel we’re using,’’ said Mayor Merven Gruben. It’s a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of “you people in the south,’’ as Gruben calls the rest of us who...

CHURCHILL, Manitoba - On the edge of a snow-covered field, dog city slept. The cold silence was broken by an occasional yelp as a dreaming husky perhaps encountered a polar bear. A wolf howled, a lonely, plaintive call that carried across vast stretches of snow. The sled dogs huddled closer. High in this province on the shore of Hudson Bay, 19 teams awaited the dawn like a group of old-time fur traders. Competitors in the fifth Hudson Bay Quest, a dogsled race of nearly 250 miles, they would carry everything necessary for survival.

ABOARD THE AKADEMIK IOFFE IN THE CANADIAN HIGH ARCTIC - He was a cooperative walrus, but a strange one, lolling in the September sunshine on an ice floe in Croker Bay, somewhere around the 75th parallel. He seemed oblivious to the 60 humans in inflatable boats closing in on him. We were only about 20 yards away, close enough to distinguish his tusks (splayed outwards, a clue to his gender). The engines were idling, the cameras clicking. Yet his only response was to test the water with a flipper and lean his head over the surface as though rehearsing an escape plan.

KANGIQSUJUAQ, Quebec - A meteorite nearly 400 feet in diameter falls through the atmosphere in a fiery flash. Traveling at 20 miles per second, it slams into the earth, sending boulder-sized rocks flying in all directions and carving a gaping hole in the planet's crust. About 1.4 million years later, I am seated in a Twin Otter aircraft flying over Quebec's Nunavik region, looking out the window at endless tundra. All of a sudden I see a blue eye three miles wide and perfectly circular staring up at me: the meteorite's crater, now filled with water.

BYLOT ISLAND, Nunavut - I had always considered global warming an alarming, but strangely abstract concept, until the phenomenon took on a human dimension here in the Canadian High Arctic. Known as one of the great breeding grounds of northern seabirds, much of this eastern island is covered with a tongue of ice that remains from the Wisconsin glaciation, which gave up its grip on most of North America some 15,000 years ago. But here the glacier lives on, indistinguishable from the permanent polar ice. Six dozen of us from a Cruise North expedition...

IQALUIT, Nunavut - When you look over the railing of your cruise ship directly into the piercing black eyes of a polar bear, it suddenly doesn't matter that the cruise has no chocolate buffet or that the swimming pool is used as storage space. The bear doesn't care about chocolate buffets, either. Since there's scant chance you'll become his entree, probably he would rather the ship move on so he can get back to hunting ringed seal, his preferred meal. It's hard to fathom, but common tourists like you and me now have access to the waters...

TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories - Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline. They’re building windmills. That’s wind-power turbines, to be exact - a token first try at “getting rid of this fossil fuel we’re using,’’ said Mayor Merven Gruben. It’s a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of “you people in the south,’’ as Gruben calls the rest of us who...

CHURCHILL, Manitoba - On the edge of a snow-covered field, dog city slept. The cold silence was broken by an occasional yelp as a dreaming husky perhaps encountered a polar bear. A wolf howled, a lonely, plaintive call that carried across vast stretches of snow. The sled dogs huddled closer. High in this province on the shore of Hudson Bay, 19 teams awaited the dawn like a group of old-time fur traders. Competitors in the fifth Hudson Bay Quest, a dogsled race of nearly 250 miles, they would carry everything necessary for survival.

IQALUIT, Nunavut Territory -- Simon Nattaq lost both feet to frostbite when his snowmobile crashed through the ice, made thin by rising Arctic temperatures. All his gear plunged into the water too, leaving him stranded for two days. He now walks -- and still hunts -- with prosthetic feet, and believes God kept him alive to warn the world about global warming. "Today I am here because the creator allowed it," says Nattaq, 61, a city counselor for Iqaluit, a one-time US Air Force base that is today Canada's northernmost city with 7,000 residents.

CAPE DORSET, Nunavut -- The art capital of Canada is not located on the tony streets of Toronto or Montreal, but on a remote tip of Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut. It is Cape Dorset, a community of slightly more than 1,300 mostly Inuit people, with an unforgiving climate and no paved roads, almost to the Arctic Circle on the fringes of the inhabited world. Nearly one in four workers here is an artist. Carving and printmaking are important economic activities in Cape Dorset, recently named the nation's "most artistic municipality" by a government-financed research...