The Frozen Echo

Using new archaeological, scientific, and documentary information this book confronts head-on many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait.

It is now generally accepted the Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland across the Davis Strait and made landfalls on the North American continent almost a thousand years ago, but what happened in this vast area during the next five hundred years has long been a source of disagreement among scholars. Using new archeological, scientific, and documentary information (much of it in Scandinavian languages that are a bar to most Western historians), this book confronts many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait. The author brings together two distinct but tangential fields of inquiry: the history of medieval Greenland and its connections with the Norse discovery of North America, and fifteenth-century British maritime history and pre-colonial voyages to North America, including that of John Cabot. In order to evaluate the situation in Norse Greenland at the end of the fifteenth century (when documented English and Portuguese voyages of northern exploration began), the author follows the colony's development--its domestic economy and foreign trade and its cultural and ecclesiastical affinities--from its inception in the tenth century. In the process, she looks critically at commonly held views that have gone unchallenged until now. Among the questions about which the author sets forth new evidence and conclusions are: the extent to which Greenlanders explored and exploited North America after Leif Eriksson, the reasons for the baffling disappearance of the Norse settlement in Greenland, the connection between their disappearance and the beginning of the voyages of exploration that began around A.D. 1500, the routes by which information concerning previous voyages traveled, the history before Cabot of the advance of English fishing fleets from Icelandic waters to the coasts of Labrador, and the influence of the roman Catholic Church on Norse Greenland.

Originally published in 1956, this book is a memoir by Danish explorer Peter Freuchen, a close friend and travel companion of Arctic legend Knud Rasmussen, and ended up living in Greenland for fifteen years, 800 miles from the North Pole—adopting the native ways of life, marrying an Inuit woman, and having two children along the way. Arctic Adventure is filled with tales of seal and polar bear hunts, enduring starvation, encountering people who had resorted to cannibalism, and the stirring experience of seeing the sun again after three months of winter darkness. Rich in human saga, Freuchen’s warmth, wit, and literary talent make this recollection of real-life adventure stories a stand-out. “Except for Richard E. Byrd, and despite his foreign beginnings, Freuchen was perhaps better known to more people in the United States than any other explorer of our time.”—Evelyn Stefansson, The New York Times “[A] formidable and fascinating man”—Harriet Baker, AnOther Richly illustrated throughout with maps and black-and-white photographs.

This is a story of dysfunctional families and the effects encountered by one young woman who has been in a state of denial for decades. When the winds of change slowly blow in her direction-- this woman is reminded and convinced that her life has been a difficult one at best. She is forced to search her scattered and fragmented memories in an attempt to survive the unrelenting devastating blows of a difficult reality. The reality of her past begins to reveal it's haunting qualities early one morning after a disturbing dream and continues to grow while she survives one devastating blow after another. And through a persistant state of depression with a mutilated spirit and her amputated muse she begins therapy with a compassionate miracle worker. Her journey is a long one--as her therapist guides her though a maze of suppressed and repressed memories into recognition. And with recognition is a set of new eyes viewing and evaluating all of her choices while living in a life of denial that she created for existance. Survivng as a damaged person can dictate how a soul will evolve. An important component is the disposition of the person. A person's character dictates how the damaged person lives/survives and they usually know how to survive; it can be a negative or a positive life of survival. Survival depends strongly upon the individual, the boundaries and environment that they create to support his or her life. With the support of her family and friends she finds acceptance of her reality and purges her soul of a mistaken life style of fantasies.