Artfully constructed, written with evenly-paced poise and with a kind of dread-filled assurance, it grips from first sentence to last"
"As harrowing an account of a voyage of exploration as I've read in years. – Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Witches and Cleopatra Madhouse at the End of the Earth has it all: Idealism, ingenuity, ambition, explosives, flimflammery, a colourful cast, a blank map, a three-month-long night, penguins (and medicinal penguin meat). He sets us down directly amid the polychromatic ice when a man goes overboard, so do we. Julian Sancton reminds us why, while sending us on an extraordinary expedition, one that left its crew in the deadly grip of the Antarctic pack for more than a year. "Polar exploration was the space travel of its day. A mixture of chaos and great courage part Monty Python sketch, part real-life heroics" In Julian Sancton's case it has been absorbed into a thrilling and perfectly judged account of what is in some ways a deep-frozen prequel to Apollo 13 and the notion of successful failure" "There's always a danger of writers becoming icebound by the thoroughness of their research. "Exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing" "A "grade-A classic" that's feverishly compelling thrillingly disastrous this story has everything It is a model of how to write a polar expedition history" This is an unforgettable journey into the deep. Together, Cook and Amundsen would plan a last-ditch, desperate escape from the ice-one that would either etch their names into history or doom them to a terrible fate in the frozen ocean.ĭrawing on first-hand crew diaries and journals, and exclusive access to the ship's logbook, the result is equal parts maritime thriller and gothic horror.
Frederick Cook, the wild American whose later infamy would overshadow his brilliance on the Belgica and the ship's first mate, soon-to-be legendary Roald Amundsen, who later raced Captain Scott to the South Pole. As the crew teetered on the brink, the Captain increasingly relied on two young officers whose friendship had blossomed in captivity – Dr. In this epic tale, Julian Sancton unfolds a story of adventure gone horribly awry. In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness, their minds ravaged by the sound of dozens of rats teeming in the hold, they descended into madness. But the ship soon became stuck fast in the ice of the Bellinghausen sea, condemning the ship's crew to overwintering in Antarctica and months of endless polar night.
The harrowing, survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly wrong, with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter.Īugust 1897: The Belgica set sail, eager to become the first scientific expedition to reach the white wilderness of the South Pole.
0 kommentar(er)
