Polar Exploration and Explorers

In A Fabulous Kingdom, a strong addition to that library, engineering scholar Charles Officer and science writer Jake Page trace the history of Arctic exploration to its origins in antiquity, when Greek and Roman travelers returned home with tales of a "monster-bearing Ocean" full of ice islands, strange animals, and terrifying astronomical phenomena. Those tales were often dismissed, even then, as fabrications of the first order, but they remained current centuries later, when European explorers sought to chart the earth on spherical maps that would point a course to Asia by way of the fabled Northwest Passage. Armed with modern scientific equipment but not much more solid information than their ancient counterparts, 19th-century explorers such as Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (who is little known outside his native Sweden but, Officer and Page write, was the John Glenn of his day) and the ill-fated Charles Francis Hall (whose Polaris expedition is the subject of two recent books but is more effectively summarized here) helped effect the discovery of that sea route, but at the cost of hundreds of lives.

Das ist erstaunlich, denn eigentlich stehen Wissenschaftsbücher nicht gerade in dem Ruf, Leser in ihren Bann zu ziehen. Und dass es sich um ein wissenschaftliches Werk handelt, bleibt ohne Zweifel. Dafür sprechen die seitenlangen Literaturhinweise am Ende des Buches, die umfassende und sachlich differenzierte Darstellung der diversen Entdeckungen und Forschungsunternehmen sowie der Fokus auf die geografischen, geologischen und klimatischen Bedingungen der Arktis. Den Text begleiten Karten und Zeichnungen, die vornehmlich aus der Zeit der großen Polarexpeditionen zwischen 1880 und 1930 stammen.

The expedition got off to a rocky start, underprovisioned and manned with soldiers who had never been to the Arctic. Still, once established at Lady Franklin Bay, the team performed its scientific studies and even made a foray north, breaking the British record. Personality conflicts between Lieutenant Adolphus Greely and several of his men were intensified by the fact that the ships supposed to resupply and, after two years, relieve them, never came. Dangerously low on food and supplies, the party was forced to attempt to retreat on its own. After weeks of travel, much of it spent drifting on the ice pack in Kane Basin, the party arrived at Cape Sabine and made camp. As the weeks passed and the food ran out, the men subsisted on leather from their boots, miniscule shrimp, bits of moss scraped from the rocks, and--as the days grew longer and the party grew smaller--the bodies of their fallen comrades. "In the wan light of an unsetting sun during those early Arctic summer weeks, one or more of the desperate men at Cape Sabine had been up on the ridge of the dead, busy with scalpel or hunting knife."