5 Adventure Books That Plunge You Into Frozen Frontiers

The Belgica’s story is what Elizabeth Leane, a professor of Antarctic studies at the University of Tasmania, calls “the dark cousin” of Ernest Shackleton’s oft-retold Endurance adventure. Both ships wound up trapped in Antarctic sea ice, but what happened to the people aboard couldn’t have been more different. Instead of revisiting Shackleton's or Robert Falcon Scott's well-worn exploits, Leane urges readers to dive into “this compelling account of the first people to live through a sunless Antarctic winter.” 

Julian Sancton pieces together the 1897 Belgian Antarctic expedition using crew diaries, journals and exclusive access to the ship’s logbook. What he reconstructs is a harrowing drift into madness and survival—near-mutiny, meals of raw penguin and seal meat and an unlikely partnership of two men who would become giants of polar history: Roald Amundsen, the ship’s Norwegian first mate, and Frederick Cook, its American doctor. “Sancton's exploration of the strange bond between these two men is one of the highlights of his excellent account of an undersung episode in Antarctic history,” says Leane.

BUY HERE: Madhouse at the End of the Earth

Leather snow goggles from Roald Amundsen’s 1910–12 expedition. A pair of mittens knitted by Edith “Jackie” Ronne, one of the first two women to winter in Antarctica in 1946–48. A swastika stake, a bust of Lenin and even a spacesuit. Through 100 varied and striking objects drawn from collections around the world, Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects offers a visual survey of the events that have formed the human story of the far south. “For a continent with no indigenous population, which was only discovered a couple of centuries ago, these 100 diverse (and sometimes surprising) objects tell the tale of Antarctica perfectly,” says David Waterhouse, curator of the Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge.

BUY HERE: Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects

Hampton Sides, master of the high-stakes historical thriller (Ghost Soldiers, Hellhound on His Trail), resurrects one of America’s boldest—and strangest—Arctic quests. In 1879, bankrolled by flamboyant newspaper tycoon James Gordon Bennett Jr., naval officer George Washington De Long set off from San Francisco aboard  the USS Jeannette. He was chasing the era’s seductive but misguided theory of a “Thermometric Gateway to the Pole,” essentially a “slushy portal” that would deliver them straight into the shallow, warm waters of the “Open Polar Sea.”

Instead, two years later, pack ice crushed the ship's hull, leaving 33 men marooned a thousand miles north of Siberia. “Their only hope was a place with a reputation for hopelessness,” Sides writes. The ordeal that follows, from gangrene to grizzly amputations, ranks among the bleakest sagas in polar exploration. “This is one of the lesser known, but really important, expeditions—and a tremendous story as well,” says Walter Meier, senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

BUY HERE: In the Kingdom of Ice

In July 1881, Lieutenant Adolphus Greely led 24 scientists and explorers to the high Arctic, charged with reaching the “explorer’s holy grail” of “Farthest North.” In May 1882, they shattered Britain’s three-century record (83°20′26″N), proudly planting an American flag at what was then the northernmost known point in North Greenland. But when their resupply ships failed to arrive, Greely faced an agonizing choice: stay put and starve or gamble everything on a desperate retreat south across drifting ice floes. Drawing heavily on Greely’s own writings, Levy turns the expedition’s unraveling into a gripping slow-burn thriller, complete with vicious wolf attacks, a crew member’s execution—and persistent whispers of cannibalism.

BUY NOW: Labyrinth of Ice

For his attempted Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–1917), Ernest Shackleton sought recruits who embodied what he viewed as the essential qualities for polar exploration: “First, optimism; second, patience; third, physical endurance; fourth, idealism; fifth and last, courage.” Few fit that ideal better, in his view, than Frank Worsley, whom he tapped to captain the expedition’s ship, the Endurance.

A century later, a distant relative of Worsley—Henry Worsley, a retired British Army officer—set out to honor that legacy with an unprecedented challenge: an unaided, solo crossing of Antarctica, dragging behind him  a sled that, at the outset, weighed nearly twice as much as he did. David Grann, staff writer at The New Yorker, recounts this extraordinary undertaking—a feat never before attempted—with striking power and poignancy.

BUY NOW: The White Darkness