Background
Louise Arner Boyd was born on September 16, 1887, in San Rafael, California. She was the third child of John Franklin Boyd, a mining operator and investor, and Louise Cook Arner.
https://www.amazon.com/Countrysides-Photographs-Narrative-Stanislaw-Gorzuchowski/dp/B000WAEJ96?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000WAEJ96
(A bilingual reissue of Louise Arner Boyd's collection of ...)
A bilingual reissue of Louise Arner Boyd's collection of the interwar photographs of Kresy (Polish for "Borderlands"). Kresy was the Eastern part of the Second Polish Republic constituting nearly half of the territory of the state. Its population was multi-ethnic, primarily comprising Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and Belarusians. According to the official Polish statistics from interwar period, Poles formed the largest linguistic group in these regions, and were demographically the largest ethnic group in the cities. Other national minorities included Lithuanians and Karaites (in the north), Jews (scattered in cities and towns across the area), Czechs and Germans (in Wolyn and East Galicia), Armenians and Hungarians (in Lviv), and also Russians and Tartars. Louise Arner Boyd (1887-1972) was an American explorer of Greenland and the Arctic, who wrote extensively of her explorations, and in 1955 became the first woman to fly over the North Pole privately chartering a DC-4 and crew that included aviation pioneer Thor Solberg. In August 1934, after being elected as a delegate to the International Geographical Congress in Warsaw, Poland, Louise set out on a 3-month journey across the Polish countryside photographing and recording the customs, dress, economy and culture of the many ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians. The journey, by car, rail, boat and on foot took her first from Lviv to Kovel (contemporary Ukraine), and then to Kobrin, Pinsk, Kletsk, Nesvizh, Slonim (now, in Belarus). She finished the journey in Vilno. Her travel narrative was supplemented with over 500 photographs and published by the American Geographical Society in 1937 as Polish Countrysides.
https://www.amazon.com/Kresy-Fotografie-Z-1934-Roku/dp/8370060552?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=8370060552
(Additional Contributors Are Henry J. Oosting, Fred A Buhl...)
Additional Contributors Are Henry J. Oosting, Fred A Buhler, F. Eyolf Bronner, And Others. Foreword By Edward H. Smith. The Louise A. Boyd Arctic Expeditions Of 1937 And 1938. American Geographical Society, Special Publication No. 30.
https://www.amazon.com/Coast-Northeast-Greenland-Hydrographic-Studies/dp/1258292254?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1258292254
(Sm Quarto, Hardcover, Gilt Lettered Labels, Attractive Bo...)
Sm Quarto, Hardcover, Gilt Lettered Labels, Attractive Bookplate of Library Of Frederic King Butters, Plates Are In A Slipcase, 1935, PP.369 Plus Errata And Addendum,
https://www.amazon.com/Greenland-American-Geographical-Society-publication/dp/B00085KKCU?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00085KKCU
Louise Arner Boyd was born on September 16, 1887, in San Rafael, California. She was the third child of John Franklin Boyd, a mining operator and investor, and Louise Cook Arner.
Boyd was taught by a governess, then attended Miss Stewart's School in San Rafael and, later, Miss Murison's School in San Francisco. At an early age, she became a skilled marksman and equestrian. She did not attend college.
Shortly after the deaths of two of her brothers, both in their teens, Boyd was brought by her father into the family business, an investment company. After the death of her mother in 1919 and of her father a year later, she was heiress to a vast fortune, as well as the family's San Rafael estate, Maple Lawn.
Boyd toured Europe in 1928, keeping a record of her travels and a diary of her impressions. With curiosity aroused through reading about arctic exploration and polar travel, she returned to Europe in the summer of 1924 and cruised from Norway to Spitsbergen, a chain of islands located in the Arctic Ocean between Norway and East Greenland. On that trip, Boyd discovered the Arctic, "a land of extraordinary grandeur, " which became the guiding passion of her life.
She returned to the Arctic in 1926 and organized her own expedition aboard the MS Hobby, a Norwegian sealer, to hunt polar bears with friends in Franz Josef Land, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean north of Novaya Zemlya.
This expedition was the first of seven that Boyd personally organized, headed, and financed, and the one on which her lifelong interest in photography began. Boyd was reported to have shot and killed twenty-nine polar bears, a claim that she herself never made and one that she vigorously denied in later years. The trip did, however, yield many photographs of live bears.
Despite these obstacles to being taken seriously, she returned to the Arctic in 1928, her interest sparked by stories of the wild coast of East Greenland. About to set off on the Hobby when word came of the missing Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, Boyd placed ship, crew, and equipment at the service of the Norwegian government.
The Hobby set off from Troms, Norway, on what proved to be an unsuccessful search.
The 1931 expedition, aboard the Norwegian vessel SS Veslekari, laid the groundwork for in-depth research in the voyages of 1933, 1937, and 1938. More important, the scientific significance of this and subsequent expeditions became apparent.
Boyd photographed the Franz Josef and King Oscar fjord region extensively, using state-of-the-art equipment and the latest photogrammetric mapping techniques to correct earlier errors. Dr. Isaiah Bowman and others at the American Geographical Society (AGS) had introduced Boyd to the emerging scientific method that utilized an interdisciplinary approach.
With the 1931 trip, Boyd began a lifelong relationship with the AGS, which sponsored all subsequent expeditions and published her reports, photos, and maps. The Danish government honored her by naming the area around Greenland's De Geer glacier Miss Boyd Land, a designation that has remained to the present.
The second Veslekari expedition set out on June 28, 1933, to study botany, animal life, archaeology, and glacial features of the Franz Josef and King Oscar fjord region, utilizing the latest in ultrasonic depth-measuring tools. On the return from the interior of Franz Josef Fjord, the Veslekari ran aground.
With the approaching pack ice of winter, it became imperative to free the ship or risk wintering over. Boyd's diaries record the harrowing experience a passing iceberg was used to free the ship and the AGS published her observations as The Fiord Region of East Greenland (1935).
In August 1934, Boyd attended the International Geographical Congress in Warsaw; her travels through the Danzig Free State, East Prussia, and the Polish corridor were documented in Polish Countrysides (1937). The goal of Boyd's 1937 expedition was to travel as far up the East Greenland coast as the weather would permit. With a scientific team that included paleontologists, surveyors, a hydrographer, and a botanist, Boyd discovered a previously undocumented ocean bank.
The Veslekari escaped from a complex maze of ice floes by means of dynamite and ice anchors. The Boyd expedition of 1938 landed at a point on East Greenland farther north on that island than any ship had previously reached; it was the second highest latitude reached by any ship, and Boyd spent a few hours on shore, just south of Cape Montpensier, making observations and photographing the forbidding environment. For this undertaking, she received the AGS's Cullum Award, the first time it had been presented to a woman.
Publication of her study, The Coast of Northeast Greenland (1948), was delayed because of the important strategic information it might contain for the enemy during the approaching war.
During World War II, Boyd was a consultant to the National Bureau of Standards, conducting research concerning long-distance radio transmission. In 1941, she joined Captain Robert Abram Bartlett, who had accompanied Robert E. Peary on his 1897, North Pole expedition, for scientific research in the Canadian Arctic. Boyd made available to the War Department and other agencies her many photographs, maps, and scientific findings.
In her eighth and final expedition, on June 16, 1955, at the age of sixty-seven, she achieved a lifetime dream of flying over the North Pole and photographing the area.
Boyd died in a San Francisco convalescent home, her personal fortune depleted from her expeditions.
Louise Boyd was an American explorer of Greenland and the Arctic, and in 1955 became the first woman to fly over the North Pole. Boyd documented the journey extensively in photographs. For her efforts, Norway awarded her the Order of Saint Olaf. Still determined to explore the coast of East Greenland, Boyd meticulously planned a scientific journey for the summer of 1931 with the goal of further mapping the fjords there. One of her greatest achievements was organizing of the Boyd expedition of 1938 that landed at a point on East Greenland farther north on that island than any ship had previously reached; it was the second highest latitude reached by any ship. Boyd spent her trip making observations and photographing the forbidding environment. For this undertaking, she received the AGS's Cullum Award, the first time it had been presented to a woman. The knowledge she had gained about the east coast of Greenland became very valuable after World War II broke out. She was sent by the United States government at the head of an expedition to investigate magnetic and radio phenomena in the Arctic in 1940. Her book, The Coast of Northeast Greenland, was published in 1948, after the war had ended. During the remainder of the war Boyd worked on secret assignments for the United States Department of the Army. By the time the war was over, Boyd was almost 60 and she managed to chart a private plane to fly across the North Pole in 1955, becoming the first woman to do so. Boyd was also an avid gardener and a civic leader in the San Francisco area. She donated a portion of her estate to the city of San Rafael (now known as Boyd Park), and her library of arctic and Scandinavian books to the universities of California and Alaska. Her honors include election to the Council of Fellows of the American Geographical Society and being named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.
(Sm Quarto, Hardcover, Gilt Lettered Labels, Attractive Bo...)
(A bilingual reissue of Louise Arner Boyd's collection of ...)
(Additional Contributors Are Henry J. Oosting, Fred A Buhl...)
Quotations:
"I like the pleasant things most women enjoy, even if I do wear breeches and boots on an expedition, even sleep in them at times. but I powder my nose before going on deck, no matter how rough the sea is. "
“I have got the Arctic lure and will certainly go North again. ”
“I must say that the charm of the Arctic, its infinite diversity, its aloofness from the rest of the world, made it a field which gives its own reward. Only those who have seen the magnificent sunsets over the ice, who have…been buffeted by storms… can appreciate the spell which always draws us back there. ”
Louise Arner Boyd was a member of the American Geographical Society (AGS).
Boyd quickly became a celebrity in the tabloids and the subject of derision among scientists who considered the wealthy woman a nonscientist dabbling in what was then considered a man's field. Boyd dressed fashionably when she was not exploring the Arctic.
Quotes from others about the person
The Norwegian government awarded her the Chevalier Cross of the Order of Saint Olav. "She was the first American woman to receive the order and the third woman in the world to be so honored. "
Louise Arner Boyd was never married.
