Northern Travel

In December 1856 Bayard Taylor landed at Stockholm and within a week started north by sleigh. His route crossed Norrland and the Arctic Circle and carried him into Lapland by reindeer, on a winter trip that ran two months. Coming back south he spent seventeen hours exposed at 47 degrees below zero, and one morning the mercury froze outright at 49. A later season took him through Copenhagen and on to Christiania, which fills out the summer half of the book. Taylor’s aim, he wrote, was to give photographs rather than diagrams or tables of figures, and the preference shows: the Finns and Lapps he lodged with, the manners and morals of Stockholm, the sunless day at Kautokeino. First published in 1857.