Race for the South Pole: Some Background Info

The year was 1910 and the world had been thoroughly explored, with one glaring exception: The South Pole. The Pole was the goal and the first man to reach it was guaranteed fame, fortune, and honor. Two men set out in ships, within weeks of each other, to claim the pole and immortality via history books.

Neither knew the other's plans. So, one important point: As Huntford puts it - "It is difficult now to conceive of the isolation possible on the earth before time and space were annihilated by instant communication." As those ships left port they "might have been adrift out in the cosmos...more alone than any space capsule today."

Imagine their surprise when, in a place where there are literally no people for thousands of miles, one ship sailed into a bay and found another already anchored there.

A race!

This is a story about two men, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen, but behind their every move lies the ghostly presence of a third. A man who, two years before, had come within spitting distance of the pole. A man who proved it was possible. A man who found the way and drew the map. A man who became the first human being to see, and travel on, the South Polar Plateau. A man who came up just few miles short. The man. Ernest Shackleton.


THE EXPLORERS

Ernest Shackleton. Irish.

Farthest South: 88° 23′ S

Robert Falcon Scott. English.

Farthest South: 90° S

Roald Amundsen. Norwegian.

Farthest South: 90° S

Hey, guess who won.

Hey, guess who died.

Selection for March & April

First off, apologies for my lazy posting on the Lepore book. It's been busy here at the Library! Have you seen the new website? -- winpublib.org -- Lots of work, but now we'll move on to a different book and maybe I'll be better with the blog. I'll be better, probably!

So, I thought Story of America was pretty good and I learned a lot of interesting things. It definitely just felt like reading a bunch of New Yorker articles but that's exactly what it is.

ANYWAY

Goodbye Jill Lepore, hello Roland Huntford. This time we are visiting my all-time favorite genre which is "Heroic Accounts of South Pole Exploration." If you're going to know one author in the "Heroic Accounts of South Pole Exploration" genre it should probably be Roland Huntford. The man has written the standard biographies of all the great polar explorers from the early 1900s: Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and Nansen.  He is the authority. And he looks so nice:

I've read a bunch of these polar explorer books -- See list here -- but I haven't read this one yet. It's called "Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen." It is the epic story of 2 men who raced to be the first to stand at the south pole. Both made it out, but one didn't make it back. The book puts their diaries side by side.

Get stoked, y'all