Their heartbeats were speeding up and slowing down, some had droopy bags of liquid gathering under their eyes, lethargy was rampant. Until, that is, a few weeks go by, and the men’s health begins to deteriorate. The first time they cooked up a slab of penguin meat, the only game in town (the town = huge glaciers of ice and nothing else), “it tasted somehow like both fish and fowl, with a gamey tang.” They decided never to eat it again. This is an unforgettable journey into the deep.All they had to look forward to, for six sunless months, was dinner.
Together, Cook and Amundsen would plan a last-ditch, desperate escape from the ice - one that would either etch their names into history or doom them to a terrible fate in the frozen ocean.ĭrawing on firsthand crew diaries and journals, and exclusive access to the ship's logbook, the result is equal parts maritime thriller and gothic horror.
As the crew teetered on the brink, the captain increasingly relied on two young officers whose friendship had blossomed in captivity - Dr Frederick Cook, the wild American whose later infamy would overshadow his brilliance on the Belgica and the ship's first mate, soon-to-be legendary Roald Amundsen, who later raced Captain Scott to the South Pole. In this epic tale, Julian Sancton unfolds a story of adventure gone horribly awry. In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness, their minds ravaged by the sound of dozens of rats teeming in the hold, they descended into madness. But the ship soon became stuck fast in the ice of the Bellinghausen sea, condemning the ship's crew to overwintering in Antarctica and months of endless polar night. The harrowing survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly wrong, with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless Antarctic winter.Īugust 1897: the Belgica set sail, eager to become the first scientific expedition to reach the white wilderness of the South Pole.
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