Introduction
What exactly is this?
What exactly is this project? It is a recreation of the diary of George W. Rice. George was the photographer of the expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in 1881, one of the expeditions for the First International Polar Year.
There have been books written about that expedition, and even a PBS special. That expedition, under the command of Lieut. Greely, only had 7 of the original 22 members return. George was one of the members who passed away before they were rescued. After the rescue, it appears that George’s diary was returned to his parents. The Berwick Register of Nova Scotia published extracts of his diary in the late 1800’s.
In addition, the diary, and his photographs became part of a collection for the Greely expedition that eventually ended up at Dartmouth College Library special collection.
Outside of those who read the newspaper when these were originally published in the Berwick Register in the late 1800’s, the researchers who have accessed the diary, I’m guessing many people have not read any of it.
George W. Rice’s family in Berwick, Nova Scotia, Canada, are a far removed branch of my Grandfather’s, Robert (Bob) E. Rice, family. Bob’s nephew (name currently escaping me), was very interested in Rice family history, and obtained a copy of the diary newspaper clippings. My Grandfather Bob made three copies of the clippings, one for each of his children. When my mother passed from early onset Alzheimer’s, I was given her copy. As far as I am aware, not even many in my family have read much of them, as the copies were very disordered. This felt like a challenging puzzle to me when I first started looking at them, so I decided to see if I could get them in the right order. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I got them in order. But the copies are still really hard to read, and I think they deserve to be shared (and the copyright is long gone on them).
When I contacted Dartmouth College Libraries about scans of the diary, I discovered that three individuals typed a transcript of the diary back in 2009 (thank you so much to Jim Lotz, KB Evans, and Suzanne Richardson). Dartmouth actually sent me photographs of the typed transcript! From the photographs, I can use some computer wizardry to extract the text from the images, with only correction needed on the badly warped pages where words get out of order. Which is much faster than typing up the newspaper extracts by hand.
I’ll probably have another meta post about that process later, as well as where to get the original full set of computer extracts with the pages of the diary noted as well. The primary changes I’ve made are to remove the reference to the original diary page, and changed the date format.
Let’s go along with George Rice, and the rest of the expedition to the then unknown northern reaches.
The first diary entry is here. You can use the side navigation to look for specific entries.
One note about the language and attitudes expressed in this work: George was living in the late 1800’s, and the writing reflects that, especially in his writing about the native peoples. I’m not editing anything out. I do encourage you to see those, be thankful how much some attitudes have changed, and perhaps also reflect on how much more change there needs to be.