Joshua StorieAuthors: Officers on the HMS Hecla and HMS Griper
Collection: Arctic and Northern Regions Research Collection
Year: 1821
Call Number: G 650 1819 P26 1821
In 1819, British officers travelled the waters of the arctic in search of a sea trade route to Asia. Stranded for the winter, the officers aboard Admiral William Parry’s ships began publishing a weekly newspaper that included jokes, poems, letters to the editor, and an obituary for an adopted pet gull named John Gull.
The North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle is part of the Arctic and Northern Regions Research Collection, which began when the university acquired Alexander Rutherford’s books on the topic. Although this book did not come from Rutherford’s collections, it is a prized part of the collection.
“One of the things they would frequently do is they had an ongoing mock court case between the editor and what they called the ‘non-contributors’ … It was just them tearing each other apart and taunting them to responding in their newsletter. And because they all used pseudonyms, they could be pretty brutal to each other.”
— Jesse Carson, Bruce Peel Public Service Assistant
