The Arctic Sky

Record summary

Donald Baxter MacMillan’s Arctic writings, including The Arctic Sky, draw on repeated expeditions to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic and describe travel, weather, local communities and northern environmental knowledge. They provide a lead for examining how twentieth-century explorers recorded or reframed Arctic stories about dangerous places, storms, sea ice and catastrophe. The material is valuable as a transmission history of Arctic knowledge into popular English-language literature, but it is not an Indigenous-authored folklore corpus and may blend observation, anecdote and adventure writing.