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Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898-1899: A Narrative of the Voyage of the "Belgica" Among Newly Discovered Lands and Over an Unknown Sea about the South Pole
Frederick Albert Cook (1865 – 1940) was an American explorer, physician, and ethnographer, noted for his disputed claims of having been the first to reach the North Pole in 1908. Cook is also noted for his disputed claim of being the first to ascend Mt. McKinley. Before all this controversy, in 1898 Cook participated in a ground-breaking Belgian expedition to the Antarctica, which Cook narrates in this book.
In 1897, it had been known for over a hundred years that there was a great body of land in the Antarctic region. Belgium was the first country to send an expedition to it, with trained men and proper equipment. The expedition was organised by Lieutenant Adrien de Gerlache, and left Antwerp at the end of August, 1897, in the Belgica, a Norwegian sealer of about 250 tons burden, which had been secured for the purpose. The members of the expedition included seven officers and twelve seamen.
The Belgica, in which the nineteen men belonging to the expedition sailed, was a strong vessel of about two hundred and fifty tons. The sole American belonging to the party, Cook was already known as an Arctic explorer. He shipped as surgeon, anthropologist, and photographer. To these titles he added that of historian, upon publishing this book, "Through the First Antarctic Night."
With various researches and various accidents to delay them, the party did not cross the south polar circle until late in the season, when all the signs of approaching winter suggested a retreat to the North unless the explorers were to exceed their programme and winter in the ice. The Commandant, against the wishes of all his comrades, thrust the ship into the freezing pack, but naturally failed to make a high latitude. From the last week of February 1898 to the middle of March 1899 the “ Belgica” drifted helplessly, fast in the frozen ice-floes during a whole year of misery, in the course of which there was much illness and one death.
These men were the first of all mankind to face a South polar winter, which is a far more serious matter than a winter in the Arctic regions, where fresh animal food is comparatively abundant, and whence escape is possible even if the ship be lost. In the South, separated by a vast breadth of stormy ocean from the nearest inhabited land, an accident to the ship or the failure of the stores means certain death; and moreover no one could tell to what degree the rigours of an unknown climate might extend. They found the Antarctic climate much severer than the same latitude in the north. It was so intensely cold that if they were exposed for a short time ice caps formed over the metal pegs on the inner side of the soles of their shoes.
Fog and storm made up most of weather during the Belgica's fourteen months' imprisonment. The only sport to be had was hunting for penguins and seals. The absence of light began to tell upon their health as well as upon their spirits. Danco, who had a weak heart, after a lingering illness, died, and one of the sailors became insane.
The Belgica sounded the seas, between the southern end of South America and the Antarctic land. Another result of the expedition was the finding of a sea where there was thought to be land, and a submarine bank like the bank off the coast of Newfoundland. The explorers brought back hundreds of specimens of odd looking animals preserved in alcohol. At Terra del Fuego Dr. Cook studied the Onas, a race of giants, and other American races that were fast disappearing before the march of civilization.
The story of the “Belgica” as told by her American surgeon fascinates the reader, and may serve the wholesome purpose of disabusing the mind of any enthusiast for Antarctic exploration of the notion that an expedition south of sixty degrees will be a long picnic.
In 1897, it had been known for over a hundred years that there was a great body of land in the Antarctic region. Belgium was the first country to send an expedition to it, with trained men and proper equipment. The expedition was organised by Lieutenant Adrien de Gerlache, and left Antwerp at the end of August, 1897, in the Belgica, a Norwegian sealer of about 250 tons burden, which had been secured for the purpose. The members of the expedition included seven officers and twelve seamen.
The Belgica, in which the nineteen men belonging to the expedition sailed, was a strong vessel of about two hundred and fifty tons. The sole American belonging to the party, Cook was already known as an Arctic explorer. He shipped as surgeon, anthropologist, and photographer. To these titles he added that of historian, upon publishing this book, "Through the First Antarctic Night."
With various researches and various accidents to delay them, the party did not cross the south polar circle until late in the season, when all the signs of approaching winter suggested a retreat to the North unless the explorers were to exceed their programme and winter in the ice. The Commandant, against the wishes of all his comrades, thrust the ship into the freezing pack, but naturally failed to make a high latitude. From the last week of February 1898 to the middle of March 1899 the “ Belgica” drifted helplessly, fast in the frozen ice-floes during a whole year of misery, in the course of which there was much illness and one death.
These men were the first of all mankind to face a South polar winter, which is a far more serious matter than a winter in the Arctic regions, where fresh animal food is comparatively abundant, and whence escape is possible even if the ship be lost. In the South, separated by a vast breadth of stormy ocean from the nearest inhabited land, an accident to the ship or the failure of the stores means certain death; and moreover no one could tell to what degree the rigours of an unknown climate might extend. They found the Antarctic climate much severer than the same latitude in the north. It was so intensely cold that if they were exposed for a short time ice caps formed over the metal pegs on the inner side of the soles of their shoes.
Fog and storm made up most of weather during the Belgica's fourteen months' imprisonment. The only sport to be had was hunting for penguins and seals. The absence of light began to tell upon their health as well as upon their spirits. Danco, who had a weak heart, after a lingering illness, died, and one of the sailors became insane.
The Belgica sounded the seas, between the southern end of South America and the Antarctic land. Another result of the expedition was the finding of a sea where there was thought to be land, and a submarine bank like the bank off the coast of Newfoundland. The explorers brought back hundreds of specimens of odd looking animals preserved in alcohol. At Terra del Fuego Dr. Cook studied the Onas, a race of giants, and other American races that were fast disappearing before the march of civilization.
The story of the “Belgica” as told by her American surgeon fascinates the reader, and may serve the wholesome purpose of disabusing the mind of any enthusiast for Antarctic exploration of the notion that an expedition south of sixty degrees will be a long picnic.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
280 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1900
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117 people want to read
About the author
Frederick Albert Cook
15 booksFrederick Albert Cook (1865–1940) was an American physician and explorer. He served as physician on both Robert Peary's 1891–1892 Arctic expedition and Adrien de Gerlache's Antarctic expedition of 1897–1899. His claims to have been the first to reach the summit of Denali (aka Mount McKinley) in 1906 and the first to reach the North Pole in 1907 were rejected.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 31, 2013
Non-Fiction. In 1898-9, the members of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition became the first to winter over in the Antarctic region. Whether this was by accident or the result of secret maneuvering by Commandant Adrien de Gerlache, we can't know for sure, but Robert M. Bryce has suggested that de Gerlache had intended all along to drift, locked in the pack ice, to a new Farthest South, mimicking Nansen's attempt with the Fram in the Arctic.
There were nineteen men on the Belgica, including first mate Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who would go on to be the first to navigate the Northwest Passage in 1906, the first to reach the South Pole in 1911, and the first to undisputedly reach the North Pole (in a repurposed Italian dirigible) in 1926. Also aboard was Frederick A. Cook, American physician, author of this account, and famous confabulist.
If we know anything about Cook, it's that he had a habit of self-aggrandizement. Cook manufactured accomplishments like his "climbing" of Mt. McKinley and "attainment" of the North Pole, and even smaller things, like supposedly diagnosing Robert E. Peary with pernicious anemia (the disease that did finally kill him) long before it would have been detectable. The Belgian Antarctic Expedition took place before Cook was known as a shady character, and Through the First Antarctic Night was published in fall of 1900, nearly a decade before his honesty would be brought into doubt, but I still wonder if Cook got his start early and even parts of this were fudged.
After a brief introduction, the narrative starts out in Rio de Janeiro where Cook is late to join the expedition, a last-minute replacement for the ship's original surgeon. The Belgica travels south along the east coast of South America, making stops along the way for supplies and opportunities for Cook's special brand of amateur anthropology. This portion is easy to read, with fine details about the land and people. It's also funny, though it's entirely possible that what I took as dry wit was actually humorless judgment. It's almost impossible to tell. Cook had a keen interest in native peoples and their traditions that, compared to others of his time, made him seem sympathetic, but it's clear he still considered them savages. His dismissal of the Fuegians' near extinction is high-handed, as is his assumption of American and European superiority. He has moments of enlightenment, but his sympathies are still heavily weighted towards white colonialists. That—and the constant use of stereotypes in referring to the people of Rio, Chile, and Patagonia—makes this section less easy to read.
Next up: The Antarctic.
Cook's observations on ship life are interesting, but his endless descriptions of snow and ice are less so. I struggled through the pages and pages of what color the sky was, and what shape the aurorae. There's very little description of his duties as ship's surgeon, and only glancing references to the general health of his charges. Any time he gets into something that requires a detailed or technical description, he does this thing like he thinks he's writing a novel and says, but I will not go into that any further lest it bore you or something of the sort. They were down there for more than a year, and mostly what we get out of him are weather reports. Despite a tendency towards purple prose (mostly in the weather reports) and an odd habit of occasionally referring to himself as "the doctor," Cook's still in fine humor, making jokes about penguins, and engaging in some clever word play (zeugmata!) that makes me think his dry wit was just that.
Their return to Punta Arenas on March 28, 1899, marks the return of Cook's lively prose, including a wonderful passage describing how he and his fellow shipmates had forgotten how to walk on land and lurched about town as if inebriated, frightening the residents: "We spread our legs, dragged our feet, braced and balanced our bodies with every step, and altogether our gait was ridiculous. It may all be imagination, but we felt unnatural, as, indeed, we must have looked."
I enjoyed his more serious take on the subject as well: "The sensation of having real earth under our feet was new to us. For more than a year we had roamed about over the moving frozen waters of the antarctic sea, with no sight of land, and no feeling of stability. When we mount the first hill we shall sit down and watch and wait to see if it, too, does not move like the hills of ice upon which we have rested so long."
I love that sense of peace that solid ground gives them, but still it comes with a lingering distrust, that these hills, too, might start shifting around under their feet. Cook definitely had his moments.
The text itself is in the public domain, and the copy I got my hands on is actually a reproduction by Nabu Press, who took an original copy out of the University of California library (it still has the stamps) and scanned it page for page. A disclaimer at the beginning warns that the book may have "occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages." And sure enough, page 54 is missing all but its last four lines. I assume Nabu sold this book for money, so maybe they should have done something about these imperfections "introduced by the scanning process" and stop acting like they're performing a public service by "preserving" culturally important works with pages missing.
And, something that isn't Nabu's fault—I don't think—but I expected this to have more of Cook's photographs in it. He took hundreds of plates during the expedition, but the book includes less than a dozen. The janky digital copy I downloaded from Google had almost twelve times that amount.
The appendices contain materials that came out of the expedition, articles written by Cook; Èmile Racovitza, Romanian naturalist; Henryk Arctowski, Russian geologist, oceanographer, and meteorologist; and Roald Amundsen. Of these, Amundsen's short piece is the most readable and made me curious to read more of his writing. The appendices also include various measurements, such as tables of nautical positions, magnetic deductions, soundings, temperature, wind direction and duration, barometric pressure, all of which were notable because they were the first sets of year-round data for this region. The book also has an index.
Two and a half stars. I wanted more from this, but maybe that's just because it didn't offer me anything I hadn't already read in secondary sources. Like watching the movie and then reading the book, I was spoiled, and despite all its talk of snow and ice, I didn't feel immersed in its environment. I enjoyed parts of it, but I can't see this book being of much interest to anyone but Cook fans. Or, whatever the opposite of fans are. Cook trolls.
There were nineteen men on the Belgica, including first mate Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who would go on to be the first to navigate the Northwest Passage in 1906, the first to reach the South Pole in 1911, and the first to undisputedly reach the North Pole (in a repurposed Italian dirigible) in 1926. Also aboard was Frederick A. Cook, American physician, author of this account, and famous confabulist.
If we know anything about Cook, it's that he had a habit of self-aggrandizement. Cook manufactured accomplishments like his "climbing" of Mt. McKinley and "attainment" of the North Pole, and even smaller things, like supposedly diagnosing Robert E. Peary with pernicious anemia (the disease that did finally kill him) long before it would have been detectable. The Belgian Antarctic Expedition took place before Cook was known as a shady character, and Through the First Antarctic Night was published in fall of 1900, nearly a decade before his honesty would be brought into doubt, but I still wonder if Cook got his start early and even parts of this were fudged.
After a brief introduction, the narrative starts out in Rio de Janeiro where Cook is late to join the expedition, a last-minute replacement for the ship's original surgeon. The Belgica travels south along the east coast of South America, making stops along the way for supplies and opportunities for Cook's special brand of amateur anthropology. This portion is easy to read, with fine details about the land and people. It's also funny, though it's entirely possible that what I took as dry wit was actually humorless judgment. It's almost impossible to tell. Cook had a keen interest in native peoples and their traditions that, compared to others of his time, made him seem sympathetic, but it's clear he still considered them savages. His dismissal of the Fuegians' near extinction is high-handed, as is his assumption of American and European superiority. He has moments of enlightenment, but his sympathies are still heavily weighted towards white colonialists. That—and the constant use of stereotypes in referring to the people of Rio, Chile, and Patagonia—makes this section less easy to read.
Next up: The Antarctic.
Cook's observations on ship life are interesting, but his endless descriptions of snow and ice are less so. I struggled through the pages and pages of what color the sky was, and what shape the aurorae. There's very little description of his duties as ship's surgeon, and only glancing references to the general health of his charges. Any time he gets into something that requires a detailed or technical description, he does this thing like he thinks he's writing a novel and says, but I will not go into that any further lest it bore you or something of the sort. They were down there for more than a year, and mostly what we get out of him are weather reports. Despite a tendency towards purple prose (mostly in the weather reports) and an odd habit of occasionally referring to himself as "the doctor," Cook's still in fine humor, making jokes about penguins, and engaging in some clever word play (zeugmata!) that makes me think his dry wit was just that.
Their return to Punta Arenas on March 28, 1899, marks the return of Cook's lively prose, including a wonderful passage describing how he and his fellow shipmates had forgotten how to walk on land and lurched about town as if inebriated, frightening the residents: "We spread our legs, dragged our feet, braced and balanced our bodies with every step, and altogether our gait was ridiculous. It may all be imagination, but we felt unnatural, as, indeed, we must have looked."
I enjoyed his more serious take on the subject as well: "The sensation of having real earth under our feet was new to us. For more than a year we had roamed about over the moving frozen waters of the antarctic sea, with no sight of land, and no feeling of stability. When we mount the first hill we shall sit down and watch and wait to see if it, too, does not move like the hills of ice upon which we have rested so long."
I love that sense of peace that solid ground gives them, but still it comes with a lingering distrust, that these hills, too, might start shifting around under their feet. Cook definitely had his moments.
The text itself is in the public domain, and the copy I got my hands on is actually a reproduction by Nabu Press, who took an original copy out of the University of California library (it still has the stamps) and scanned it page for page. A disclaimer at the beginning warns that the book may have "occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages." And sure enough, page 54 is missing all but its last four lines. I assume Nabu sold this book for money, so maybe they should have done something about these imperfections "introduced by the scanning process" and stop acting like they're performing a public service by "preserving" culturally important works with pages missing.
And, something that isn't Nabu's fault—I don't think—but I expected this to have more of Cook's photographs in it. He took hundreds of plates during the expedition, but the book includes less than a dozen. The janky digital copy I downloaded from Google had almost twelve times that amount.
The appendices contain materials that came out of the expedition, articles written by Cook; Èmile Racovitza, Romanian naturalist; Henryk Arctowski, Russian geologist, oceanographer, and meteorologist; and Roald Amundsen. Of these, Amundsen's short piece is the most readable and made me curious to read more of his writing. The appendices also include various measurements, such as tables of nautical positions, magnetic deductions, soundings, temperature, wind direction and duration, barometric pressure, all of which were notable because they were the first sets of year-round data for this region. The book also has an index.
Two and a half stars. I wanted more from this, but maybe that's just because it didn't offer me anything I hadn't already read in secondary sources. Like watching the movie and then reading the book, I was spoiled, and despite all its talk of snow and ice, I didn't feel immersed in its environment. I enjoyed parts of it, but I can't see this book being of much interest to anyone but Cook fans. Or, whatever the opposite of fans are. Cook trolls.
July 31, 2025
What can I say, this man sure knows how to use many words. I know this was his official publication so it's all very neat and official but I liked the bits about life on the boat the most. And of course the sentences such as (when the deck was slippery): "Just then the cook came along, and finding it more easy to stand on his head than on his feet, the soup was spread over the ice-" and "In one corner there a sailor on hands and knees was trying to keep from being used as a baseball;" amazing stuff
June 7, 2019
Um livro sobre a primeira invernagem Antártica começa com uma deliciosa descrição … isso , do Rio de Janeiro na virada para o século XX. Mas apesar disso e de iguais descrições de Montevideo e da terra do fogo à época , o relato da invernagem é muito descritivo e monótono . Não vale a pena para aqueles que não são MUITO fã de expedições antárticas .
May 27, 2025
This is the first primary source that I feel like has not appreciably added to my understanding of Antarctic exploration, in that, between Sancton's Madhouse at the End of the Earth and Guly's papers, particularly "'Polar anaemia': cardiac failure during the heroic age of Antarctic exploration", I'd already read the good bits, and better contextualized than in Cook's direct account. What's left is a fairly uninspired narration with repetitious but, worse, often ineffective meditations on the Antarctic atmosphere. There's not much insight into the human factor even as regards Cook himself, the fascinating period medical understandings are better analyzed elsewhere, and while it's a glimpse into Cook's narrative style, that style is scattershot and unreliable. Eminently skippable, but given that accessible Belgica resources are thin on the ground, I'm not mad I read it.
(FWIW, Arçtowski's narratives are more spread out and obviously weighted towards science, but I still liked them more: that bias and brevity makes the peeks of a distinctive sarcastic voice, the foibles of the expedition, and the polar atmosphere all feel better chosen and more valuable.)
(FWIW, Arçtowski's narratives are more spread out and obviously weighted towards science, but I still liked them more: that bias and brevity makes the peeks of a distinctive sarcastic voice, the foibles of the expedition, and the polar atmosphere all feel better chosen and more valuable.)
February 19, 2021
Read to augment research for a writing project. A fascinating record of Cook's explorative endeavors and discoveries aboard the Belgica's trek - which commenced in August of 1897. A beset ship, death, storms, head winds, and other unfortunate occurrences ("When an area equal to one sixth of the known land surface of the globe still remains unexplored, it is easy to formulate plans for journeys of discovery; but to secure the money for their execution is quite another matter") highlight this work's picturesque descriptions of the areas encompassing the frozen continent of Antarctica. These descriptions, clothed with historic content, paint vivid landscapes of times present and of times past. Illustrations from photographs also grace the pages of this record.
"There is a glitter in the sea, a sparkle on the ice, and a stillness in the atmosphere, which fascinates the soul but overpowers the mind."
"There is a glitter in the sea, a sparkle on the ice, and a stillness in the atmosphere, which fascinates the soul but overpowers the mind."
June 21, 2024
Belgica
This book is almost a daily record of a years expedition in the Anarcti. It is well written and provides an insjte into the challenges of living in a very unfavorable climate .. constant temperature below zero, three months of almost total darkness, and the shear will of each person just to get up each day to perform required tasks. Makes me feel greatfull for the life I have.
This book is almost a daily record of a years expedition in the Anarcti. It is well written and provides an insjte into the challenges of living in a very unfavorable climate .. constant temperature below zero, three months of almost total darkness, and the shear will of each person just to get up each day to perform required tasks. Makes me feel greatfull for the life I have.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews