The Race to the White Continent: Voyages to the Antarctic

The race to the white continent...voyages to the antarctic. Alan Gurney. Did like the read. Gurney was good with the James Clark Ross discovery of the magic of the Ross Sea and Mount Erebus. I had the pleasure to live there. With the Royal Society Range for a backdrop, Minna Bluff to the south. A view of a lifetime. Of the coming storms... Great touch on that. I thought a little boring is the take of the Wilkes Expedition. A British viewpoint anyway...I did think the Gurney spill on Dumont D' Urville's was a plus...A good read...Next up try "Barrow's Boys"...by Fergus Fleming. 5 stars...easy.

This is Alan Gurney's second book on Antarctic exploration. His first, "Below the Convergence," covered the early era of Antarctic voyaging, up to the beginning of the 19th century. This book starts with a look at Pacific and Australian explorations to set the scene and bridge the gap, then pulls in to focus on two great Antarctic expeditions of the 1840s, and a third that was less impressive. The great expeditions were the French Navy expedition led by Dumont d'Urville in the Astrolabe and Zelee and the classic Royal Navy explorations of James Clark Ross with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. These two men and their crews of seamen and scientists were the first to begin to make Antarctica a real place, rather than a realm of conjecture, and the names of the ships, the men, and their families remain scattered around the Antarctic to this day, fastened to their discoveries - Adelie Land, the Ross Ice Shelf, Mt. Erebus, McMurdo Sound, to name only a few. Gurney ably tells the tales of these expeditions, from their inception to their return, and the sad fate of their leaders - d'Urville killed in a railway wreck with his wife and son, Ross dead before his time, probably of drink, after the early death of his wife and his unsuccessful search for the lost Franklin expedition in the Arctic. The third expedition is the US Navy expedition led by Lt. Charles Wilkes in USS Vincennes, and if anything Gurney is too kind to this somewhat fraught endeavor. Wilkes, who promptly promoted himself commodore and hoisted a distinguishing pennant as soon as he was out of reach of US Navy authority, treated both his officers and the scientists assigned to the expedition like dirt, discovered a vast amount of entirely imaginary territory, and was courtmartialed on his return (but unfortunately remained in the Navy to commit numerous stupidities during the Civil War). All in all, good reading for anyone interested in Antarctic exploration, and one wonders if Gurney will go for a trilogy with a third book about the Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration.