His destination was the uncharted end of the earth: the icy continent of Antarctica.īut de Gerlache’s plans to be first to the magnetic South Pole would swiftly go awry. In August 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail for a three-year expedition aboard the good ship Belgica with dreams of glory. Sancton has produced a thriller.”- The Wall Street Journal “The energy of the narrative never flags. The “exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing” ( The New York Times ) true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry-with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter.But the rest are outside the purview of this food publication, so you’ll just have to read the book to find out. Scurvy is one of a laundry list of nightmares encountered by the men on this big rat-infested ship in the middle of the Antarctic ice. They didn’t know then what we know now, that the meat contains vitamin C, which is crucial to creating collagen in the body. “Remarkably, after just a few days of guzzling down the cutlets, which had the consistency of fatty, uncooked chicken, Amundsen was almost back to normal,” Sancton writes. (Cook had spent time with the Inuit during a previous harrowing Arctic journey and observed that they survived the winter on meat and blubber, often raw.) Cook preferred his penguin steaks lightly seared, but recommended everyone eat them rare if possible. He convinces the Belgica boys to give penguin another try, along with seal meat. The ship’s first mate, Roald Amundsen, was getting especially sick.Ĭook recognizes their symptoms as scurvy, and without fresh fruit, vegetables, or meat, they could die of it. 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. All they had to look forward to, for six sunless months, was dinner.

Julian sancton madhouse