In the darkness, plagued by a mysterious illness and besieged by monotony, they descended into madness. When the sun set on the magnificent polar landscape one last time, the ship’s occupants were condemned to months of endless night. De Gerlache sailed on, and soon the Belgica was stuck fast in the icy hold of the Bellingshausen Sea. After a series of costly setbacks, the commandant faced two bad options: turn back in defeat and spare his men the devastating Antarctic winter, or recklessly chase fame by sailing deeper into the freezing waters. His destination was the uncharted end of the earth: the icy continent of Antarctica.īut de Gerlache’s plans to be first to the magnetic South Pole would swiftly go awry. In August 1897, the young Belgian commandant Adrien de Gerlache set sail for a three-year expedition aboard the good ship Belgica with dreams of glory. Sancton has produced a thriller.”- The Wall Street Journal “The energy of the narrative never flags. The “exquisitely researched and deeply engrossing” ( The New York Times) true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry-with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter.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. “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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