Professor Dan Breen kicked off his “Polar Explorations” lecture series on March 13 with a behind-the-scenes look into the quest for the Northwest Passage, the route through the Arctic which sailors had been seeking for hundreds of years to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
If you missed the talk on Sunday, there are three more lectures in the series: March, 20, April 3, and April 10 at 2 p.m. in the Bedford Free Public Library meeting room (limited to 40 attendees) and via Zoom. If you’d like to attend in person, please register on the Library website, where you will also find the Zoom link. https://www.bedfordlibrary.net/events/event/lecture-series-2022/. The first lecture will also be available soon on the Library’s YouTube channel. The Breen lectures are made possible with support from the Friends of the Library.
If you’ve been a Dan Breen enthusiast for years, you know that his talks are always engaging and filled with nuggets of information you may never have known about. In his first “Northwest Passage” lecture, Breen brought to life a collection of intrepid British Royal Navy explorers who bravely made voyages to the Arctic in the early to mid-1800s. It’s hard to imagine how difficult it would be to ‘winter over’ with your sailing vessel encased in ice, but that is what happened to several explorers and amazingly, most survived.
What prompted the interest of the British Admiralty? Breen explained that after the Napoleonic wars ended, the British Navy had a surplus of officers who literally had no work to do. There were no wars on the horizon, so the second Lord of the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow, promoted the idea of Arctic exploration. This week’s lecture ended on a cliffhanger with the fate of the 1845 expedition led by Sir John Franklin hanging in the balance. To find out what happened, tune in on March 20!
For those attending by Zoom, the Library has acquired an OWL camera system that captures everything with a 360-degree camera and microphone.
Prof. Breen has given an annual spring series since 2006 on a wide range of topics-everything from the “Great Depression” to last year’s “Five Real-Life Murder Cases.” It’s been said that Breen could give a talk on the most mundane topic and it would be fascinating, guaranteed to hold your interest. Even if you are knowledgeable on a particular subject, you can be sure Prof. Breen will come up with details you’ve never known—in a word, he’s a charismatic speaker.
This year’s theme is especially timely, as Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s boat “Endurance,” has recently been found off the coast of Antarctica. The discovery came just over 100 years after Shackleton’s death. The boat is said to be almost completely intact on the sea floor.
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