Shackleton's Dream : Fuchs, Hillary and the Crossing of Antarctica

In November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton watched horrified as the grinding floes of the Weddell Sea squeezed the life from his ship, Endurance, before letting her slip silently down to her last resting place. Caught in the chaos of splintered wood, buckled metalwork and tangled rigging lay Shackleton's dream of being the first man to complete the crossing of Antarctica. Shackleton would not live to make a second attempt – but his dream lived on.Shackleton's Dream tells for the first time the story of the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Everest. Forty years after the loss of Endurance, they set out to succeed where Shackleton had so heroically failed. Using motor-sledges and converted farm tractors in place of Shackleton's man-hauled sledges, they faced a colossal challenge: a perilous 2,000-mile journey across the most demanding landscape on the the planet, where temperatures can plunge to a staggering -129°F and bitter katabatic winds rush down from the high Polar Plateau carrying dense clouds of drift snow, which blind and disorientate. This epic adventure saw two giants of twentieth century exploration pitted not only against Nature at her most hostile, but also against each other. From their coastal bases on opposite sides of Antarctica, the two leaders pushed south relentlessly, dodging bottomless crevasses and traversing vast, unexplored tracts of wind-sculpted ice. Planned as an historic (and scientific) continental crossing, the expedition would eventually develop into a dramatic 'Race to the South Pole' – a contest as controversial as that of Scott and Amundsen more than four decades earlier. In November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton watched horrified as the grinding ice floes of the Weddell Sea squeezed the life from his ship, Endurance . Caught in the chaos of splintered wood, buckled metalwork and tangled rigging lay Shackleton's dream of being the first man to complete the crossing of Antarctica. Shackleton would not live to make a second attempt – but his dream endured. Shackleton's Dream tells for the first time the story of the British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary. Forty years after the loss of Endurance , they set out to succeed where Shackleton had so heroically failed. Using tracked vehicles and converted farm tractors in place of Shackleton's man-hauled sledges, they faced a colossal challenge: a perilous 2,000-mile journey across the most demanding landscape on the planet. This epic adventure saw two giants of twentieth-century exploration pitted not only against Nature at her most hostile, but also against each other. Planned as a historic (and scientific) continental crossing, the expedition would eventually develop into a dramatic 'Race to the South Pole' – a contest as controversial as that of Scott and Amundsen more than four decades earlier. "In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton embarked on what he called 'The last great polar journey' - the crossing of Antarctica. His expedition ended in disaster, with the Endurance crushed and the frozen corpses of three explorers left on the Antarctic plateau. Forty years later Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hillary, the hero of Everest, set out to succeed where Shackleton had failed. Despite the passage of four decades, the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1955-58 encountered many of the obstacles that had so hindered Shackleton - a chronic shortage of funds, inadequate equipment and an early onset of pack-ice. Even more disastrously, it also suffered from a clash of personalities so severe that it came close to destroying the expedition from within. Based upon interviews with the survivors and upon contemporary diaries and letters, "Shackleton's Dream" tells for the first time the epic story of this last great expedition of the 'Heroic Age' of Antarctic exploration."--Publisher description.