Featured on PDR in the collection Through the First Antarctic Night (1900)

Memoirs of early Antarctic expeditions are, by necessity, meditations on disaster. Sea ice, frostbite, freezing winds, the compass-upsetting effects of the magnetic poles — everything in these frigid zones poses a threat to human life, and the threat is often carried out. The Worst Journey in the World (1922) by Apsley Cherry-Garrard — a surviving member of Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910–1913 — is probably the most famous of these memoirs. The first, at least of the modern era of exploration, was Frederick A. Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899, a remarkable journal in which he recounts the highs and (many) lows of his experience as part of the Belgica expedition.