“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. Sancton, an American journalist who visited Antarctica for his research, structures his tale around three main characters: Adrien de Gerlache, a Belgian naval officer and the expedition’s leader Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian polar explorer who served as the Belgica’s first mate and Frederick Cook, the voyage’s “lone Yankee,” a New York doctor with a “peninsula of a nose.All they had to look forward to, for six sunless months, was dinner. “Madhouse at the End of the Earth” tells the story of the Belgian Antarctic expedition. Belgium had declared independence from Holland only 67 years earlier, and with the voyage of the Belgica, writes Julian Sancton, the young nation “was staking a claim to the next frontier of human exploration.” She was departing for Antarctica, still a land of fable in the last years of the 19th century.
16, 1897, 20,000 Belgians lined the wharves of Antwerp to wave off the Belgica, a 113-foot three-masted steam whaler. Photo: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images The Belgica anchored at Antarctica’s Mount William.
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