Sir Albert Hastings Markham

Born in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, France, in 1841, he entered the Royal Navy as a teenager and built a long naval career that eventually brought him to the rank of admiral. He is especially remembered for his work as an Arctic explorer and for the close ties between his sea service and his writing.

In the 1870s he joined the British Arctic Expedition aboard HMS Alert and led a sledge party that reached a then-record northern latitude for the British. Experiences like these fed directly into his books, which include travel and exploration writing such as The Great Frozen Sea and Life in the Arctic.

He was knighted in 1903 and died in London in 1918. For readers today, his work offers a firsthand view of nineteenth-century exploration: ambitious, demanding, and shaped by the realities of naval life in some of the harshest environments on earth.