Item Type: JAS Known Contents
Creator: Elisha Kent Kane
Publisher: Childs & Peterson
Issued: 1856 or 1857 (reprint)
Edition: 2 volumes
Language: English
Illustrations: Illustrated by upwards of three hundred engravings, from sketches by the author; the steel plates executed under the superintendence of J. M. Butler, the wood engravings by Van Ingen & Snyder.
Author of this Entry: Kathryn H. Stutz
EVIDENCE SET
Evidence Type: Letter
Volume: Page (Letter): 1:97 (32)
Date: March 8, 1857
Addressed To?: Charlotte Symonds
Importance?: Leisure read
Owned?: Yes
Evidence: "I have been reading Dr Kane's Arctic Expedition lately & like it very much although the interest certainly falls off toward the end of the second volume."
Context: Dr. Elisha Kent Kane had recently died in Havana, and at the time John Addington Symonds was composing this letter in March of 1857, Kane's body was being transported on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad back to his hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Only two days after this letter, on March 10th, Kane received an elaborate funeral in Baltimore, where he was eulogized by John Pendleton Kennedy, who has served as the United States Secretary of the Navy. (See William Elder's Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (1858): 343, 350-357, and David Chapin's "Science Weeps, Humanity Weeps, the World Weeps: America Mourns Elisha Kent Kane" published in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1999) 123(4): 275-301, for further discussion of Kane's international celebrity and the global mourning precipitated by his funeral processions in cities along the American east coast.)
Source Contributor: Kathryn H. Stutz