3-074-951 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Earl of Lonsdale in his Arctic travelling dress, 1890. 'Lord Lonsdale's Travels in Arctic North America. The enterprising and courageous performance of the Earl of Lonsdale in travelling northward, from the Saskatchewan River of the Great Western Territory of Canada to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and thence crossing Alaska westward to the North Pacific...has excited much attention...Few people, except some officers of the Hudson Bay Company and of the Alaska Fur Company, have made acquaintance with those desolate regions... It was on Feb. 22, 1888, that his Lordship left England for Canada, determined to travel as far as he could overland in the Far West of the American continent, as well as to shoot a musk ox and a white [ie polar] bear in the most distant haunts of those animals, and to examine some facts in the natural history of that region...'. After an affair with the actress Violet Cameron caused a scandal, Lonsdale set out to explore the Arctic regions of Canada as far north as Melville Island, nearly dying before reaching Kodiak, Alaska in 1889 and returning to England. His collection of Inuit artefacts assembled during his explorations in Alaska and north-west Canada is now in the British Museum. From "Illustrated London News", 1890.