Posted by Jonathan Labaree on March 28, 2002 at 19:30:35 from 207.5.198.231:
In Reply to: Shackleton; (was: Colonialism in S&As) posted by Bob Hollis on March 27, 2002 at 02:55:39:
I just finished reading "Shackleton's Forgotten Men: The Untold Tale of an Antarctic Tragedy" by Lennard Bickel. It's the story of the expedition to lay supplies on the Ross Sea ice shelf for Shackleton to use upon arriving on the other side of Antarctica. They left supplies at 60 mile intervals across the shelf.
It's a fascinating and harrowing tale. Unfortunately, they met with disaster. Three men died, one of scurvy, two of recklessness. These guys spent two years on the ice shelf with minimal supplies (their ship, the Aurora, broke from its moorings before all the sledging supplies could be landed). They survived off excess stores left by Scott, ten or so years previous. In the process, they broke all records for sledging, traveling almost 2,000 miles (they had to make a number of round trips) across the ice and surviving two Antarctic winters when blizzards routinely last two weeks.
In a side note, and referring to the other discussion from this thread, the author uses the word "niggardly" a few times. He’s not quoting the men from that period, he uses it himself. According to the book's fly leaf, the author "lives in Australia" (not sure if that means he's Australian). In all honesty, not trying to put any of our Australian colleagues on the defensive: Is this word acceptable in Australia? It certainly isn’t here in the US. It's hard to imagine an American writer using that word.