The climate is very healthy although inclined to be cold… *
In 1910, a British Army officer writes these words to reassure his mother about the place where he will soon be traveling. Because the officer is Captain Lawrence Oates and the place is Antarctica, this may rank as one of the great understatements of all time. Oates froze to death on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1912 South Pole expedition. Knowing that he was a burden to his comrades, he heroically walked away from their tent in a blizzard with another epic understatement: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
A glance at the titles in the list below gives a more accurate idea of the polar climate than Oates’s balmy report. The words doom, tragedy and ice, ice, ice occur again and again in accounts of polar exploration. The title of a book by John Maxtone-Graham could have been a watchword for would-be polar adventurers: Safe Return Doubtful. Some day when you feel that the weather is too hot, read one of these thrilling true stories of adventure and survival in the high north or high south latitudes—bearing in mind that the polar ice is not as fearsome as it once was.
- The Worst Journey in the World, Antarctic 1910-1913, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
- Endurance: Shackleton’s incredible voyage, by Alfred Lansing
- Ice Blink: The tragic fate of Sir John Franklin’s lost polar expedition, by Scott Cookman
- Race to the Polar Sea: The heroic adventures of Elisha Kent Kane, by Ken McGoogan
- Ice: Stories of survival from polar exploration, edited by Clint Willis
- The Ice Master: The doomed 1913 voyage of the Karluk, by Jennifer Niven
- Ada Blackjack: A true story of survival in the Arctic, by Jennifer Niven
- Scott of the Antarctic: A life of courage and tragedy, by David Crane
- Death on the barrens: a true story of courage and tragedy in the Canadian Arctic, by George James Grinnell
- South: The Endurance expedition, by Ernest Shackleton
- Fatal Journey: the final expedition of Henry Hudson–a tale of mutiny and murder in the Arctic, by Peter C. Mancall
- Shackleton, by Roland Huntford
- The Man Who Ate His Boots: the history of the search for the Northwest Passage, by Anthony Brandt
*Quoted in I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, by Francis Spufford
