I collect books on exploration
These books range from horrific stories of suffering, disaster and death in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic to lighthearted tales of people driving taxis across the Sahara in the 1950s, tragic episodes in the exploration of Australia to tedious, dated ramblngs by posh brits searching for the source of the Nile.
I guess I am most interested in the poles, Greenland and Alaska, and anything involving a desert and I know why. As a kid I was fascinated by the film “Scott of the Antarctic” and I had an uncle who was a Desert Rat in North Africa during the second world war, who often told tales of his exploits which held me enthralled. Some years ago now I bought a book by Ranulph Fiennes called “Mind over Matter“, his account of an attempt to pull a sledge across Antarctica from one side to the other. Throughout the book he referred to other polar expeditions and the apalling conditions they underwent and from the bibliography I began to build up a library of related books.
The last two books I have read were “Mirage in the arctic” by Ejnar Mikkelsen and “Three Deserts” By Major CS Jarvis”. Strangely enough it is not the exploration content of these two books that fascinated me but rather their descriptions of events suronding them at the time (1909 and the 1920s respectively). Mikkelsen related a sledge journey through the goldfields of Alaska describing the peoples attitudes to life when gripped by gold fever, many walked to their deaths in subzero temperatures wearing no more than the clothes they would wear around the house. He also wrote vividly about the way men would in a few hours, blow the gold they had accumulated over years of toil and about the women who preyed on these men. Jarvis however wrote surprising comments about the existence of Paedophiles and what should be done to control them, attitudes to fox hunting and other types of country activities all of which reflect current issues which are discussed today as if they were something new.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed these books because what I REALLY like to read about are the tragedies. I know, I’m a sick man but did you know:
- Scott intended to leave a huge dump of fuel and food at 80 degrees south but due to the weather and failure of his tractors had to leave the supplies (One ton depot) many miles further North. If he had succeeded in his plan, on his return from the pole he and his two remaining companions would have reached the depot before they starved and froze to death.
- Burke & Wills left a message on a tree at Coopers Creek telling potential rescue parties to “dig down” and find notes saying where they had gone. The rescue parties saw this and did not dig down, did not find the note. If they had done so they could well have found Burke & Wills in time to save their lives. Instead they both died of thirst with help only a few miles away.
- Ejnar Mikkelsen, when searching for lost diaries of a previous Greenland explorer (Milius Erichsen) who had died a few years previously, had a dream about a Polar Bear breaking open a cache of documents on a rock ourcrop in a frozen river. He found that rock and the missing documents a few days later. Spooky!
- Sven Anders Hedin lost several travelling companions when crossing a stretch of the Takla Makan Desert. He had told his “camp manager” (for want of a better description) to make sure they had a months supply of water but the manager, beleiving it should only take ten days brought only enough to last that long. Hedin only just survived because he found a small pool of water in a massive dry river bed the other side of the desert.
- Douglas Mawson, sledging in the Antarctic turned around one day to find one of his companions had disappeared down a crevasse along with his sledge and vital equipment. They then had a race for survival, back to their base, during which they ate dogs livers which poisoned them with excessive vitamin D. His companion died, Mawson fell in to crevasses himself but somehow managed to pull himself out and, due to the vitamin D the soles of Mawsons feet came away but he just managed to stagger back to safety.
It is a while since I read some of these books so there may well be innacuracies in what I have written above. Why not read about them for yourself? These are my references..
Scotts Last Expedition, Robert Falcon Scott
Coopers Creek, Alan Moorhead
Two Against the Ice, Ejnar Mikkelsen
My Life as an Explorer, Sven Anders Hedin
The Home of the Blizzard, Douglas Mawson
Other books I highly recommend reading include, The Worst Journey in the world by Apsley Cherry Garrard, Beyond the last Oasis by Ted Edwards, Shackleton’s Forgotten Men by Lennard Bickel.
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