Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of H.M.S. <i>Investigator</i> and the McClure Expedition, by Glenn M. Stein
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of all the explorers who sailed from Europe in search of the Northwest Passage, the least admirable was probably Robert McClure.He is remembered today because in 1855, the British government awarded him a knighthood and 10 000 pounds (today worth roughly $1.3 million), with half going to his men for having become "the first to have passed by water from sea to sea."By returning alive to England, they had provided "a living evidence of the existence of a North-west Passage" (p.240).Originally the reward had been offered, as author Glenn M. Stein notes, "for the first person who should complete the North-west Passage, by actually sailing with his ship from one ocean to the other" (p.240).But the government, saddled with the expenses of the Crimean War, was desperate to staunch the spending on Arctic search expeditions.And so it recognized McClure's tortured logic, turning a blind eye to the fact that, as Stein writes, "the Investigators had walked through portions of the route" (p.240).In Discovering the North-West Passage, author Stein details the difficult human story behind McClure's dubious achievement.This is the definitive account of the last voyage of HMS Investigator-a tale of how a Machiavellian captain, obsessive and ruthless, turned his ship into a frozen hell of unjust floggings, imprisonments, starvation, scurvy, and even, for a few, miserable deaths.Stein takes a scholarly, detached approach to this material, documenting the story, adding appendices, and leaving
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".