Snow, William Parker, 1817-1895

Epithet: Arctic explorer

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001304.0x00025e

Epithet: author

British Library Archives and Manuscripts Catalogue : Person : Description : ark:/81055/vdc_100000001304.0x00025f

William Parker Snow was born on 27 November 1817 at Poole. He was educated at the Royal Naval School in Greenwich and was apprenticed in a merchant vessel at the age of thirteen. After travelling in Australia and the South Seas, he returned to Britain where he joined the Royal Navy, later obtaining a discharge after saving a companion from a shark. He then embarked on several unsuccessful business ventures, including managing a hotel in Australia and a club in Italy, before becoming more involved in literary pursuits, transcribing the first two volumes of History of England for W B Macaulay.

On his return from a year in America, Snow was appointed clerk in the schooner Prince Albert on the British Franklin Search Expedition (leader Charles Forsyth) in 1850, sponsored by Lady Jane Franklin and by public subscription to search for Franklin's missing expedition in the region of Boothia Peninsula and Prince Regent Inlet. His account of the expedition was published in 1851.

In 1854, Snow was placed in command of the Patagonian Missionary Society's tender Allen Gardiner, employed in carrying missionaries and their stores between Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands and different mission stations on the mainland, but was later dismissed for not following the Society's instructions. On his return to Britain, he published A two years cruise off Tierra del Fuego...A narrative of life in the Southern Seas, but the profits from his book were wasted in an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Society which left him penniless. Travelling to America where he declined a commission in the Confederate Navy, he worked for several years for booksellers in New York, publishing and editing several books. On his return to Britain, he spent the rest of his life engaged in literary projects, compiling volumes of indexes of Arctic voyages and biographical records of Arctic explorers. He died on 12 March 1895.

From the guide to the William Parker Snow collection, 1850-1891, (Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge)