Madhouse at the End of the Earth
The set-up chapters read like an Avengers Assemble montage
I received an advanced reader copy of Madhouse at the End of the Earth from Netgalley.
This book is a narrative history of the ship, the Belgica, and the lives of the men aboard. The crew of this expedition sailed for Belgium (some very creative ship naming, there) and spent a year in Antarctic pack ice, which pushed them to their mental and physical limits. It is not important to the greater scope of the book, but it is very important to me, personally, that there was a cat named Nansen (named for Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen) aboard.
This book takes a few chapters to really get going, but it is absolutely worth it. The set-up chapters read like an Avengers Assemble montage and include some very famous names, such as Roald Amundsen, Adrien de Gerlach, and Dr. Frederick Cook. Julian Sancton goes into detail about their lives before the expedition and their personalities – this becomes very important in later chapters where the isolation causes personality clashes and the extreme weather and poor nutrition take their toll on the minds of the crew.
The actual story of the expedition reads like a cerebral domestic thriller rather than the "adventure" I was expecting, having read other accounts of Roald Amundsen's trek to the magnetic south pole. Upon reflection, I prefer the way this was written to a classic "adventure" narrative. It showed the expedition as important for science and harrowing for the crew, but did not frame their suffering as the stuff of "romantic heroes," that I think some narrative histories of expeditions like this have fallen into. In addition, Sancton goes out of his way to show us that the late nineteenth-century idea of the romantic hero was extremely unhealthy and how it negatively affected members of the crew, including the famous Roald Amundsen.
I appreciate that Sancton draws from a variety of firsthand accounts – including diaries previously un-cited – and acknowledges and points out the discrepancies between the accounts of different crew members (and also between accounts of single people, written at different times in their lives). I felt drawn into the history of this expedition – not something that usually interests me – and was curious as to how it turned out for them.
A final note about my weird feelings on explorers and expeditions: white Europeans have historically used science and exploration as a means to colonize other parts of the world and the history of exploration is therefore extremely problematic and complicated. I felt I could enjoy this narrative more than I usually "enjoy" nineteenth-century history because Antarctica does not have any indigenous populations to colonize or exploit. I did feel bad for some of the seals and penguins that met with untimely ends at the hands of the Belgica's crew, though. Sancton does bring up previous polar expeditions which depended on Inuit guides and sometimes treated them badly, so be aware of that going in.
