Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night

Nature always claims what she's owed.

We have sailed heedlessly into a trap of our own making

Cook referred to the symptoms collectively as polar anemia. Researchers today use the term winter over-syndrome. But it's essentially the same thing. A prevailing theory suggests it's a form of hypothyroidism , which is associated with depression and atrial fibrillation and could thus account for the cerebral symptoms and the cardiac symptoms that most concerned Cook before scurvy took hold.

Among the greatest threats future travelers to Mars are likely to face is an interplanetary version of winter over-syndrome. The unknown icescapes around the earth poles, particularly Antarctica, seemed as remote and forbidding as 19th century explorers as Mars does to us now.

Scientists believe physiological factors tell only part of the story. Stress, due to confinement, isolation, boredom, unvaried food, and the psychosocial pressures that inevitably arise in small groups of people contributes in no small part to the psychological and cognitive symptoms experienced by Antarctic personnel.

The amount of work required of so few men in such a little time would rival the greatest construction projects in human history.

Never mind that travelling by kayak from Victoria Land to Australia was assured suicide, or that camping on an iceberg was at best ill-advised. Scrawling furiously in his cabin by candlelight, Amundsen was more focused than ever on writing his own legend. When, a few weeks later, an iceberg in a nearby clearing suddenly flipped on its side with a tremendous roar, Amundsen wrote, "I will not allow my plan to spend the winter on an iceberg to be influenced by this.

Amundsen had equated suffering with accomplishment, to the point where it didn’t feel like suffering anymore.

Cook is an exemplar of a quintessentially American spirit, which lies on the razor’s edge between optimism and delusion, between audacity and deceit, imagination and flimflammery.

gloom that all humans feel in darkness—what Victor

Amundsen continued in what Cook described as the language of the Belgica, a mix in this case of Flemish, German, and Norwegian: “There is a relation between the tongue and the harpoon. Both can inflict painful wounds. The cut of the lance heals. The cut of the tongue rots.

Then came the crew. The Belgian crew members de Gerlache was able to wrangle over the course of a year were far from the cream of the crop. They included a navy mechanic, Joseph Duvivier, whose superior officer wrote a letter of recommendation that read much more like a warning: “In summation, it is possible that Mr. Duvivier might figure out how to work a very simple engine, like the Belgica’s, but I cannot guarantee it.” De Gerlache hired him.

The human factor is three-quarters of any expedition.

But in emphasizing the likelihood of a connection between winter over-syndrome and what is now known as seasonal effective disorder, a variation in mood that correlates with a dwindling of daylight hours. Physicians today support Cook's belief that light plays an essential role in human welfare. His wild idea to have his ailing shipmates stand naked in front of a blazing fire is the first known application of light therapy. Used today to treat sleep disorders and depression among other things.

Note: Dr. Lawrence Polinkis who analyzed clinical data from American men and women at Antarctica's Mcmurdo station Amundsen Scott's South Pole station posits specifically that the memory loss and other cognitive impairments he observed were related to a decline in levels of the thyroid hormone T3, which helps determine how the body uses energy. Thyroid hormones help the body regulate temperature and set its circadian rhythms. It's not difficult to see how extreme cold and the prolonged absence of sunshine might throw a system off. This is just a hypothesis - the causes of the syndrome remain puzzling more the a century after Cook first described it.

Michotte would often mix the cans together into a nondescript stew, which was somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Henderson, Bruce. Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.

My Experiences with a Camera in the Antarctic.” Popular Photography, February 1938, 12–14, 90–92.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published