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Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen, Explorers

Two men are on a race to the edge of the world but only one would return. English naval officer Robert Scott and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen are on a race to the South Pole, but Nature would aid only one and abandon the other to die in a frozen grave forever. With all other continents already conquered, there was but just one that was left untouched and this was reason enough to initiate a race to the bottom of the world. But this race to be the first man on the South Pole can have only one heroic winner. Two men, equally competent, fired by the passionate quest to reach the South Pole before any man would, but only one returns home to tell tales of endurance, resilience, survival, and success, the other lies buried under ice in a frozen grave to this day. What could have brought about this stark difference of fate? Where did one succeed and the other falter? Will Norway's flag flutter triumphantly over the South Pole, or is it the British flag?

Ernest Shackleton, Explorer

It was an ominous day. We were reduced to helpless trespassers in a forbidding world. Nature with all her might seemed to make ribaldry of our fragile attempts at survival. There were times when we thought we saw God and Death, and some moments when we realized that both were the one and the same. Standing atop the drifting ice, it felt as though a giant was heaving in his deep slumber. The slightest stir would suffice to awaken the odious beast, the harbinger of our doom. It was on occasions like these that I felt a thousand words in the English vocabulary is not enough to express the overwhelming roller-coaster of emotions one experiences in an odyssey to the edge of the world. It was nothing short of a tryst with death and yet it is incredulous that in the tug of war with death, we, the puny human souls have managed to grab our lives from the very mighty jaws of death. The ocean was livid and her humongous waves that could rise to 50 feet height were crashing against our tiny lifeboat, determined to tear us apart. The heaven seemed to be in cahoots with her, it seemed to split into two. Her wrath was so fearsome and deadly, it seemed hell-bent to crush us like crushing ice with a gigantic hammer. Life, the game of all games was now proving to be a reckoning force; maybe it was because we were not just fighting for our lives alone, but for the lives of 22 fellow men stranded in the Elephant Island, that we just couldn't be defeated. They would be counting on our arrival, for a semblance of hope that they can go back home, alive. When Ernest Shackleton, the great Anglo-Irish explorer embarked on Endurance in the year 1914 for a historic expedition to cross the Antarctic, he didn't know he was walking into the pages of history for reasons that he was unprepared for.

This book on Antarctica expeditions narrates the best survival stories of, polar expeditions. In the realm of Antarctic expeditions, the three names that are written in letters of fire are that of the great explorer Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and the one and only Ernest Shackleton. Insurmountable fear, the great possibility of death, unbearable starvation, relentless uncertainties, debilitating seasickness, umpteen failures, and inexplicable sacrifice, all for an iota of joy and triumph at the end of a grueling journey to the edge of the world. This is what these young men signed up for before embarking on a treacherous journey to the world's driest, coldest, windiest regions on the earth.