why must i work to earn a living? why cant i just read polar books and write yaoi?
crozier enjoyer
@laissezferre.bsky.social
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!["We Were All Reasonably Good-Looking When We Embarked, but Were Otherwise When We Returned" (from Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899)
----- [from the Public Domain Review] -----
Memoirs of early Antarctic expeditions are, by necessity, meditations on disaster. Sea ice, frostbite, freezing winds, the compass-upsetting effects of the magnetic poles — everything in these frigid zones poses a threat to human life, and the threat is often carried out. Frederick A. Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899 is a remarkable journal in which he recounts the highs and (many) lows of his experience as part of the Belgica expedition.
Often considered the first proper expedition of the so-called "Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration", it would set a precedent for hardship, endurance, and disaster in the exploration of such climes. Cook and his fellow explorers — including Roald Amundsen, who'd years later go on to beat Scott to first reach the South Pole — became the first to spend winter on Antarctica, when their ship became trapped in the ice for more than a year, from February 1898 to March 1899. For two months — from 17th May 1898 until 23rd July — they were plunged into a sunless world, an ordeal of great physical and mental toil wonderfully captured in the journal of Cook — the American-born anthropologist, surgeon, and leader of the expedition.
Although he was later the subject of controversy — accused of bogusly claiming, in 1906, to have scaled Mount McKinley, and, in 1908, to have been the first to reach the North Pole — he shows himself to be reasonably modest and a charming writer of prose. He is especially good at evoking the “soul-despairing” darkness of the polar night, which had never previously been experienced at that latitude.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ewb37o2ftablnrgx3ma45l3b/bafkreiajchsrt5fgpzprpehwahnkvgfiro4kma56ynwyx4uyyzs63hhkfq)
