Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898-1899: A Narrative of the Voyage of the "Belgica" Among Newly Discovered Lands and Over an Unknown Sea About the South Pole

In August 1897, a Norwegian sealer called the Belgica leaves Antwerp with nineteen men aboard. Their destination: Antarctica, a continent no organized expedition has ever reached. Their goal: to explore what lies at the bottom of the world. No one has ever tried to winter there. No one knows what awaits them in the polar dark. Frederick Cook, a young American physician and Arctic veteran, serves as surgeon, anthropologist, and photographer. When the Belgica becomes trapped in the ice pack in February 1898, he becomes something else: witness to an ordeal no human has survived. For thirteen months the ship drifts, locked in frozen sea, while the crew battles scurvy, despair, and a darkness that stretches for weeks. One man dies. The rest endure. Cook records everything he sees: the strange creatures of the southern ocean, the formations of ice that dwarf the ship, the fragile mathematics of survival. His photographs and notes become the first scientific record of a frozen world. This is the raw, urgent account of the expedition that changed Antarctica forever, written by the man who was there.