Icy Graves: Exploration and Death in the Antarctic

by Stephen Haddelsey

EVER since Captain Cook first sailed into the Great Southern Ocean in 1773, mankind has sought to push back the boundaries of Antarctic exploration. The first expeditions tried simply to chart Antarctica’s coastline, but then the Sixth International Geographical Congress of 1895 posed a greater the conquest of the continent itself. Though the loss of Captain Scott’s Polar Party remains the most famous, many of the resulting expeditions suffered fatalities. Some men drowned; others fell into bottomless crevasses; many died in catastrophic fires; a few went mad; and yet more froze to death. Modern technology increased the pace of exploration, but aircraft and motor vehicles introduced entirely new dangers.For the first time, Icy Graves uses the tragic tales not only of famous explorers like Robert Falcon Scott and Aeneas Mackintosh but also of many lesser-known figures, both British and international, to plot the forward progress of Antarctic exploration. It tells, often in their own words, the compelling stories of the brave men and women who have fallen in what Sir Ernest Shackleton called the ‘White Warfare of the South’.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Adventure, Survival

304 pages, Hardcover

Published June 11, 2018

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit of a plodding slog. This author is more prone to detail the history of motorized transport in the Antarctic than to explore title themes. Perhaps the publisher retitled the book to lure in readers. Index is lacking. There are many references to Weasels and even a Wessel but neither warrants a mention in the index. The footnotes reveal content that should have been in the text of a book with a title such as this one, for example, an icy grave swept away and buried by volcanic activity. But this author seems afraid of morbid details.
The result is an Antarctic book which underwhelms.

[user8364891664 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book isn’t sure what it wants to be. The scope is so wide that the author doesn’t dig deep enough into most of the incidents described. However, he does say quite a bit about mechanized transport, to the point that I wonder if he would have rather written a book on the history of mechanized transport in Antarctica. It would be an interesting read, so go ahead and write that book! I don’t know anything about the post-heroic age expeditions, so can’t comment on the quality of those bits. But I found the heroic age incidents to be mostly underdone.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting but grim read about fatalities and their causes in the Arctic. I found some sections fascinating such as the disappearance of Mackintosh and Hayward during the Ross Sea Party portion of Shackleton's Trans Antarctic expedition.

Some passages were a bit of a slog and quite frankly bored me. There is also quite a bit of graphic detail relating to deaths but this is to be expected in a book such as this.

[ben c]

bit grim reading alright but interesting enough - another travel book that you can take up and put down at any time with any loss. the reviews in the press at the time likened those earlier voyages as analogous to a mission to mars. due to the isolation....so you can strike that off the bucket list straight away...

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting and informative book about Antarctic exploration and the perils it entails.