1. An Inuit hunter negotiates the floes in the Canadian Arctic (© Bryan and Cherry Alexander)
2. Allakasingwah, the Eskimo lover of Robert Peary (Library of Congress)
3. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arctic had entered the popular imagination in Britain and America: these advertisers used it to sell cocoa (Graphic, 19 September 1896)
4. The author pays homage at one of the most sacred sites of polar science: the borehole on the Greenland ice cap that in 1993 alerted the world to the speed of contemporary climate change (Author photograph)
5. An unfriendly encounter between Elizabethan buccaneer Sir Martin Frobisher and the residents of Baffin Island, circa 1577 (British Museum)
6. A woodcut of a reindeer herder in the Russian Arctic, circa 1860 (The Voyage of the Vega, A.E. Nordenskiöld, 1881)
7. Anadyr (Author photograph)
8. A Chukchi carrying a walrus head home, circa 1940 (Les Rites de Chasse, Eveline Lot-Falck, Paris, 1953)
9. The Anadyr supermarket: bringing Arctic Roll to the far north (Private collection)
10. A Siberian herder and his reindeer (© Chris Linder/Mountain Light)
11. An advertisement in the New York Times, 1862. The exotic Arctic was all the rage in America (Arctic Spectacles, Russell A. Potter, Washington, 2007)
12. Hudson Stuck, preaching to the flock on a bank of Alaska’s Chandalar River (Ten Thousand Miles with a Dogsled, Hudson Stuck, 1914)
13. The Trans-Alaska pipeline consortium engages the public. One of the two statements on this poster is true (Alyeska Pipeline Services Company)
14. The author prepares to cross Alaska’s Arctic Divide (Author photograph)
15. Fridtjof Nansen (Getty)
16. The author’s first polar bears (Andrew Kerr)
17. Hairstyle of the Year, circa 1925 (Private collection)
18. Nee-A-Kood-Loo of Southampton Island goes out fishing on an inflated whale bladder, circa 1820 (from an engraving by Edward Finden)
19. Eating fish, circa 1950 (Under Narssak-fjeldet, Niels Fenger, Copenhagen, 1954)
20. The caribou that flow across Canada’s Barrens were once a bulwark against starvation (Getty)
21. ‘A floating pageant’ (Andrew Kerr)
22. Greenlanders fishing, circa 1930 (Getty)
23. Tété-Michel Kpomassie arrives at Julianehåb, (now Qaqortoq), 1965 (Tété-Michel Kpomassie)
24. Captains John Ross and Edward Parry meet the hunters of north-west Greenland in 1818. The artist, known as John Sacheuse, was an Inuit interpreter
25. Rockwell Kent’s Greenlandic lover Salamina (from a woodcut by Rockwell Kent)
26. Gino Watkins and team in the east Greenland base hut, with Inuit friends (The Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)
27. A sixteenth-century etching of the Svalbard whaling grounds
28. The author in front of spits bergens (Amit Lennon)
29. The Swedish Ornen crashlands on pack ice at almost 80° N in 1897. The three balloonists died marching to safety; this ice-damaged roll of film lay undiscovered for thirty-three years (The Andrée Diaries, S.A. Andrée, Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel, 1931)
30. The airship Norge leaves its hangar on Spitsbergen before making the first flight between Europe and North America, 1926 (The Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)
31. Barentsburg (Amit Lennon)
32. A seventeenth-century etching of a Lapp at prayer (Lapponia, Johann Scheffer, 1673)
33. Sámi (Lapp) herder, with child (Fotograf/Jamtli Bildbyrå)
34. The ski is older than the wheel in Lapland (Photo: Ludvig Wästfelt. Copyright: Ájtte museum, Jokkmokk)
35. Lone herder (Getty)
36. A Reg on a Sledge. The author and her son, Swedish Lapland (Martina Hoogland Ivanow)
37. A berg off the east coast of Greenland (Andrew Kerr)
38. Wilf adrift off Franz-Josef Land, with the Kapitan Khlebnikov in the background (Author photograph)
39. The Kapitan Khlebnikov cutting ice in the Greenland Sea (Author photograph)
40. ‘By Jove!’ Nansen bumps into Jackson on Franz-Josef Land in 1896 (Mary Evans Picture Library/Illustrated London News Ltd.)
41. A plaque marks the burial site of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition (Getty)
42. The Solovki monastery in the White Sea (The Journals of a White Sea Wolf, Mariusz Wilk, 2003. Photograph Tomasz Kizny)
43. A detail from Boyarynya Morozova by Vasily Surikov (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
44. The Solovki monastery (The Journals of a White Sea Wolf, Mariusz Wilk, 2003. Photograph Tomasz Kizny)