When put like this, it makes it all too easy to see how Scott could have been allowed to botch his journey to the South Pole quite so catastrophically. He doesn't get lost in endless minutiae that distract from the narrative, but he never fails to remind us of the surrealism of British 19th-century exploration-cocked hats and reindeer-drawn sledges in the Arctic, frock coats in the Sahara. In between he courted triumph and tragedy Ross discovered Antarctica, Parry opened up the Arctic with his attempt on the Pole, and Captain Bremer failed to establish northern Australia as the new Singapore.įleming has a great feel for the telling detail. He started inauspiciously by sending Captain James Tuckey off on an ill-fated jaunt up the Congo in search of "Timbuctoo," which was at that time imagined as some African El Dorado, and he ended in failure with the loss of Franklin's expedition to find the Northwest Passage.
Barrow was only the Second Secretary at the Admiralty-not normally a position of great influence-yet he was a skilled politician, and he managed to carve out a niche for himself by organizing expedition after expedition. Charting the unmapped areas of the world seemed as good an idea as any. Officers were laid off and advancement was slow, so the Navy needed to find itself a role. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, the British Navy was too large for its peacetime needs. It wasn't some high-minded idealism or wacky sense of adventure, as is often suggested, that placed Britain at the forefront of discovery, but economics and self-interest. Fleming is a historian first and foremost, so he begins by placing exploration in its context. In Barrow's Boys Fergus Fleming takes us on an incisive and witty journey through the landmark years of British exploration from 1816 to 1850, marveling at both the bravery and the stupidity involved. This all changed in the 1970s with the publication of Roland Huntford's magnificent biography of Scott and Amundsen, now called The Last Place on Earth, in which he systematically and methodically revealed the levels of incompetence and arrogance with which Scott's expedition was riddled.
It is easy to see how for a long time the lives of the polar explorers were shrouded in quasi-mystical and heroic terms. They are the most powerful symbols we have left of a world where human-made laws and values count for nothing no one conquers the frozen wastelands-they merely learn to live by the rules nature dictates. There's something about the overwhelming emptiness and terrifying beauty of the polar regions that never fails to attract.
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