I’m apparently not normally a reader of books about polar exploration. I cannot find a single one in my 12 years of book reviews. I know it’s an area that I watch documentaries about, but apparently not one I read (although I do occasionally read books about Mt. Everest). However, over the past few months I’ve added several to my to-read list. I’m not sure why, maybe it was my pleasant reading experience of Ghost Ship last summer that put books about exploration by boat on my mind, or just the magic of the timing of other people’s reviews, but here we are with my first one, and fittingly enough, it’s about the ship and crew that did the first overwinter stay in the pack ice surrounding Antarctica, the Belgica.
Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night is Julian Sancton’s incredibly well-researched account of all facets of the unlikely expedition which initially aimed to be the first to find the southern magnetic pole (a goal that would almost immediately become unattainable). Sancton uses a slew of primary sources to paint the picture of the ship, its crew, and the vagaries of the voyage it undertook just to get to the largely undocumented Antarctic coast in the first place. But the book’s title refers to the many months that the Belgica and her surviving crew spent trapped in the icepack, floating along the coast in the Bellingshausen Sea and their eventual daredevil escape from the ice. 
By focusing on a handful of the ship’s officers and scientists Sancton is able to make the story personal, never ignoring the sailors who are in the periphery of his story only because he had less access to their personal writings, not because they weren’t crucial to the story. But the Belgica is the meeting point of two of the most famous and infamous polar explorers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – Dr. Frederick Cook and Roald Amundsen, who was serving as the ship’s first mate. Their friendship and ability to embrace the polar regions and everything they threw at the crew helped keep this story from being as tragic as it could have been, and they also are interesting counterparts to the Belgian officers, Commandant de Gerlache and Captain Lecointe, as well as the scientists Henryk Arctowski, Antoni Dobrowolski, and Emil Racoviță.
This wasn’t a perfect book, but it was pretty darn close for a non-fiction work. There were places where additional maps or graphics would have helped ground the reader, and occasionally the pacing in introducing the suffering of the members of the crew would come in like whiplash, immediately cluing you in that this man’s fate would not be good. But it is an important look at how a few men’s obsession with exploring and scientifically documenting the poles led to their suffering, but also helped kick off the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.