From the author of the 1996 National Book Award Winner Ship Fever.Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-nineteenth century romance with the Arctic, Andrea Barrett focuses on a particular expedition and its accompanying scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells. Through his eyes, we meet the Narwhal's crew and its commander—obsessed with the search for an open polar sea—and encounter the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we see the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery. And finally they discover—as all explorers do—not what was always there and never needed discovering, but the state of their own souls. 16 steel engravings and one map