ICY GRAVES: EXPLORATION & DEATH IN THE ANTARCTIC
Ever since Captain Cook
first sailed into the Great Southern Ocean in 1773, mankind has sought to push
back the boundaries of Antarctic exploration. The first expeditions tried to
demark Antarctica’s coastline, but then the Sixth International Geographical
Conference of 1895 posed a new challenge: conquest of the South Pole. Following
Amundsen’s success in 1911, yet more objectives were defined, some
geographical, some scientific, and some territorial.
Though the loss of
Captain Scott’s Polar Party remains the most famous, many of these expeditions
suffered fatalities. Men drowned when the sea ice beneath their feet
disintegrated; others fell into bottomless crevasses; yet more froze to death.
The advent of new technologies did much to speed the pace of exploration, but
aeroplanes and motor vehicles introduced new dangers, with whole groups of men
killed in a single event.
Each
of the fatalities described in this book is dramatic and its background story
compelling, from the suicide of Arthur Farrant on Deception Island in 1953 to
the drowning of an international party of explorers whose tracked vehicle
plunged over the edge of the ice face during a blinding ‘whiteout’; from the
deaths of Scott’s polar party from malnutrition and cold to the catastrophic crash
of a US Navy flying boat on Thurston Island in December 1946; from the death by
fire of eight soviet scientists when their base burned to the ground to the
loss of three British sledgers when a storm smashed the sea ice on which they
were travelling.
For the first time, Icy Graves uses a selection of these
tragic losses to plot the forward progress of Antarctic exploration and to
tell, often in their own words, the stories of the men and women who have
fallen in what Sir Ernest Shackleton called the ‘White Warfare of the South’.
ICY GRAVES will be published by The History Press in June 2018
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