Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration -- the mid nineteenth-century romance with the Arctic -- this book 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,...

These elegant short stories take their impulse from the world of science, weaving together the historical and fictional. In "The English Pupil," Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach. In "The Littoral Zone," two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it. And in the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history's...