Through the First Antarctic Night

Rating:
Summary: Rediscovering a classic
Review: It is a treat to see this work available again to the general reading public for a number of reasons. First, the book remains as fresh, exciting, and stylistically pleasing as it did when first appearing many years ago. Also, the book helps clarify and confirm the skills of the remarkable Frederick Cook as a writer of great merit, a photographer of immense talent, an intrepid and resourceful explorer, and perhaps above all as a kind and helpful human being both toward his fellow travellers and toward the indigenous peoples through whose lands he travelled over his long exploring career.

These talents of Cook's have been too often obscured by the intense and often acrimonious debates that have raged for nearly a century over whether he really achieved his claims of having been the first man to climb Alaska's Mount Mckinley and the first man to reach the North Pole. Whether he achieved those claims or not, his achievements on the expedition to Antartica recounted in this book cannot be denied as he played a vital role in keeping the crew as physically and psychologically sound as was possible during the long Antarctic night while their ship, THE BELGICA, lay trapped in the grinding ice. Cook was ahead of his time in realizing that raw penguin meat would protect the crew from scurvy and that sitting in front of a hot bright fire would help counteract symptoms of what we now call "seasonal affective disorders" that include depression, withdrawal, and other emotional problems. Cook was also instrumental in devising a system of digging and blasting out canals through the ice that allowed the ship to eventually escape into open water many months earlier than would otherwise have been possible. During their many months of confinement, Cook and his companions were pioneers in being the first to travel out onto the continent and experiment with Cook's novel ideas of sleds (they used a sail when the wind was favorable) and tents (Cook's design became a lightweight and sturdy standard for many future espeditions.)

But Cook is generous with praise for the other members of this international crew that included the Captain, Adrian de Gerlache who, though first forbidding Cook to serve raw penguin, was in general an enlightened leader who was instrumental in helping Cook in the planning and execution of their strategy for digging out of their predicament. We meet, too, the young Roald Amundsen who would become a lifelong friend of Cook's and who would later become famous for being the first man to reach the South Pole in his famous race against the ill-fated Scott expedition.

Cook's extraordinary photographic gift is amply shown in his famous moonlight picture of THE BELGICA as it sits trapped, its deck and rigging glittering in a sheath of ice. This picture, and others, astound when we consider the primitive equipment in use at the end of the Nineteenth century.

Cook brings home the excitement, the beauty, and the tragedy of this remarkable tale with a wonderfully descriptive writing style that will win over those readers with a yen for adventures of exploration, not only of a place but of the human heart and mind.