| Summary: | Frederick Kislingbury knelt on a rocky cliff off of the serrated coast of Disko Island, Greenland, wind cutting into his face like knives, sun hugging the horizon. Below him was an expanse of blinding masses of ice, their fractures immersed by the deep blue sea. All he could hear, feel, and taste was the blowing wind; no trees or traces of life were in sight. He was about to depart on an expedition to the High Canadian Arctic, and so he wrote a letter to his son, Douglas, ending with “Do not worry the slightest about me, I know that all will go well.”1 Yet, within a week, he found himself in the middle of a predicament lasting three years, which only six of twenty-five men would survive. In Range 3 of Mt. Hope Cemetery, beneath a nineteenth century granite stone with shallow inscriptions, lays a 700 pound iron casket (Figure 1). The ordinary look of the stone does not give justice to the extraordinary feats and heart-wrenching decisions of the man buried there. He was Frederick Kislingbury, Rochester’s first Arctic explorer. Kislingbury was born in Berkshire, England around 1846 and moved to the United States with his family when he was about ten, residing in Rochester. Next to nothing is known about his years as a child or a young adult, except that he enlisted in the Eleventh Infantry of the Unites States Army in the 1860’s.2 In 1866, he married Agnes Bullock from Windsor, Canada and together, they had two sons. The first, Harry, was born in 1867, while Walter was born in 1869. Frederick received word in the early 1870’s that he was to move to Fort Concho in western Texas to help build a 1 Figure 1: Kislingbury’s grave stone in Range 3, Plot
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