Expedice na severní pól – Payer Julius (2019)

The captivating story of the greatest Czech polar explorer, a great traveler, painter, topographer, and adventurer, commander of the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition, and discoverer of Franz Josef Land, as he himself wrote it. An adventure capturing the Austro-Hungarian expedition to the Arctic from 1872 to 1874. The fates of twenty-four men (including five Czechs) who discovered and explored the northernmost archipelago in the Eastern Hemisphere, Franz Josef Land, and who managed to escape death from hunger and cold only after an exhausting three-month journey through thawing seas. Not only lovers of polar travelogues will find joy in reading this book, thanks to the excellent illustrations by Payer. The Czech translation of his monumental work from 1876 includes a description of the expedition from 1872 to 1874, a number of the author's observations about the life of polar bears, and some interesting anecdotes from the German polar expedition of 1869-1870. The translator supplemented the author's text with descriptions of many previous and later expeditions to the areas around the North Pole, biographical, geographical, geological, and other natural science notes, and a detailed description of Franz Josef Land based on the sources available at the time.