The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford

He and his crew “were spending up to sixteen hours a day in their sleeping bags,” Huntford writes. “We’re not a very happy party,” one of Scott’s crew members recorded.Īmundsen, on the other hand, leaves the impression that his lifelong goal was to be the second human to the South Pole. With his insisting on a level of “inhuman exertion,” Scott’s guys were hampered along the way by frostbite, dehydration, malnutrition, scurvy, snowblindness, hypothermia, intermittent paralysis, leg and ankle sprains, a dislocated shoulder, and worse of all, low morale. Unless a crew member got sick or injured. Just as many and for as long as possible.

His plan was to push his crew to “keep up a steady grind hour after hour.” Scott set no particular number of miles or hours of travel per day. Scott’s working pattern reflected “his own dour, self-punishing temperament,” Huntford writes. In The Last Place on Earth, Roland Huntford details their diametrically opposed approaches. In November of that year, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott set out in a race to be first to reach the South Pole. This was the state of Polar exploration as two “rivals for the pole” found it in 1911. Franklin and a crew of 128 aimed to reach further south. Two years after Ross, Sir John Franklin took command of the Erebus and the Terror. At 78° 10’, Ross recorded that “we might with equal chance of success try to sail through the Cliffs of Dover, as penetrate such a mass,” and turned back. ¹

Six weeks in, Ross reached the Antarctic ice shelf-“The Great Icy Barrier,” as Ross described it in his journal. Ten years later, Royal Naval officer James Clark Ross set out on two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. And for the next eight decades, the great polar pioneers were trying for the pole. The Antarctic continent was discovered in 1820. Before 1911, no human had successfully reached the South Pole, 90° 45’.

The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford