Over on my Wild Great Lakes site, I’ve been wreck hunting again, this time to verify the locations of two cruising boats, the Elton III and Sloopy, on the east side of Giant’s Tomb Island.
Wreck hunting again
Wreckage
This summer, as the third wave of a pernicious pandemic waned in Ontario, I decided, as one does, to find a shipwreck. The quest seemed appropriate to the times. After about fifteen months of fear, isolation, professional and personal disruption, and daily reports of deaths and infections, why not celebrate the return to something resembling... Continue Reading →
Jackson’s Wars: an update
It’s been a long, strange trip, riding these covid waves, but my book on A.Y. Jackson is nearing completion. “Jackson’s Wars” is now going into copyedit at McGill-Queen’s University Press, I’m finalizing images, and if we can keep it on track, it will be out in Spring 2022. Stay tuned.
Cormorant Tree, Monument Channel
Cormorant Tree, Monument Channel After executing a fair bit of drawing work in the fall of 2018 and into early 2019, I went through a two-year lull in which I didn’t produce a single new finished drawing. There were a lot of stops and starts and abandonments, and distractions of writing work. I have finally... Continue Reading →
Not Above It All: Henry Hudson’s Troubled Exploration Record
Gotham, the blog of the Gotham Center for New York City History, sponsored by the Graduate Center, CUNY, asked me to contribute to a weeklong series on Monuments of Colonial New York. I obliged with this essay on the Henry Hudson statue that overlooks his eponymous river.
Spectral Passages
The history of Arctic exploration is full of cul de sacs, of narrow channels in ice fields, of straits that turn out to be bays, and of illusions that appeared to be opportunities. Some adventurers hesitated and missed breakthroughs of discovery. Others rushed in and found their retreats cut off by enclosing pack ice that ground their ships to flinders. Islands also appeared where none existed: cloudbanks and enormous ice fields masqueraded as solid ground. People saw things that were not there—or that we insist could never have been there.
