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Fuchs, Hillary and the Crossing of Antarctica
In November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton watched horrified as the grinding ice floes of the Weddell Sea squeezed the life from his ship, Endurance. Caught in the chaos of splintered wood, buckled metalwork and tangled rigging lay Shackleton’s dream of being the first man to complete the crossing of Antarctica. Shackleton would not live to make a second attempt – but his dream endured.
Shackleton’s Dream tells for the first time the story of the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary. Forty years after the loss of Endurance, they set out to succeed where Shackleton had so heroically failed. Using tracked vehicles and converted farm tractors in place of Shackleton’s man-hauled sledges, they faced a colossal challenge: a perilous 2,000-mile journey across the most demanding landscape on the planet.
This epic adventure saw two giants of twentieth-century exploration pitted not only against Nature at her most hostile, but also against each other. Planned as a historic (and scientific) continental crossing, the expedition would eventually develop into a dramatic ‘Race to the South Pole’ – a contest as controversial as that of Scott and Amundsen more than four decades earlier.
‘Extraordinary. A story that will prove to anyone who doubts it, that courage, determination, danger and disaster remain as much a part of Antarctic exploration in the Modern Age as in the Heroic Era’ -- Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Sir Ranulph Fiennes,
13th April, 2022 in History, Maritime, Natural World
The ‘Heroic Age’ of Polar Exploration extended from the late 19th century until World War I, a period of about 20 years. In the North Polar region, as in the South, the ultimate goal was the pole itself. However, because the North Pole was a hypothetical location in the mids…
16th March, 2018 in Biography & Memoir, History
When, on 29 March 1912, Captain Robert Falcon Scott wrote his last exhortation, ‘For God’s sake look after our people’, two members of his Polar Party, ‘Titus’ Oates and ‘Taff’ Evans, were already dead, and Scott, ‘Doc’ Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers had just a few hours left to…
14th December, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History
On 14 December 1911, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (who had already led the first expedition to traverse the North West Passage, and would go on to lead the first successful attempt to cross the Arctic by air) and his team became the first human beings to reach the South…
