the Greeks had reasoned long before the arctic and antarctic wastes were reached by explorers, were inhuman in every sense—unfit even to travel through, much less to reside in for any length of time. So why, wondered Crozier, did a nation like England, blessed to be placed by God in one of the most gentle and verdant of the two temperate bands where mankind was meant to live, keep throwing its ships and its men into the ice of the northern and southern polar extremes where even fur-wearing savages refuse to go?
