Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night

by Julian Sancton

expedition’s commandant, thirty-one-year-old Adrien de Gerlache de Gomery.

Lagrange suggested that the discovery of the South Magnetic Pole, which had eluded Ross in 1841, would “make history.”

“In our short acquaintance with polar aborigines, we learned to discount civilized intelligence in exchange for the more useful perspective of the primitive,” Cook wrote. “If one must live in the Arctic, the sooner he reverts to habits of the wilderness folk, the better.”

“Strangely enough the thing in Sir John’s narrative that appealed to me most strongly was the sufferings he and his men endured,” Amundsen wrote. “A strange ambition burned within me to endure those same sufferings.”

“The endeavor had barely begun and already we’d left a body on our path. Who would be next to go among the eighteen that remained to struggle against the menacing unknown?…Nature always claims what she’s owed.”

The vision was known as a Fata Morgana, caused when a layer of uniformly cold air rests beneath a warmer layer, bending and distorting the light from distant objects.

In Michotte’s inexpert hands, the meat was perhaps even more offensive. It tasted somehow like both fish and fowl, with a gamey tang. “If it is possible to imagine a piece of beef, an odoriferous codfish, and a canvas-back duck, roasted in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce,”

Most of the Belgica’s men vowed that their first morsel of penguin would be their last.

If suffering was tantamount to accomplishment, then pleasure was a form of complacency.

Cook’s intervention is the first known instance of light therapy, regularly used today to treat seasonal affective disorder and other conditions.

The doctor was shocked to discover that the Belgica was in the grip of scurvy.

“There is a relation between the tongue and the harpoon. Both can inflict painful wounds. The cut of the lance heals. The cut of the tongue rots.”

Cook is an exemplar of a quintessentially American spirit, which lies on the razor’s edge between optimism and delusion, between audacity and deceit, imagination and flimflammery.

If neither Cook, nor Peary, nor Byrd reached the Pole—as is the overwhelming consensus—then the prize belongs to Amundsen.