Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole

By Fergus Fleming



So I have actually read a real book this month. And it has taken me about a month to finish Ninety Degrees North. Mostly because I haven’t had much free time to read and because I bought the book in hardback. It’s a little to big to fit in my suitcase.

That said, I loved this book. It was comforting to get back to reading about the explorers who risked everything in their push for the North Pole. Was there land at the top of the world? Were the poles really holes in the Earth that led to a world within a world as proposed by John Cleves Symmes? The book is divided into numerous chapters that each tell about a different explorers attempt at the pole. Most of the names I had never heard of. After a while most of the stories started to blend together. Struggle to raise the funds necessary to undertake the attempt. Set sail. Get frozen in by the ice. Struggle towards the pole. Get frostbite and die. Limp back to civilization, if you’re still alive.

Most of the men tried to reach the pole by way of Greenland. They had wild (to us today) theories. There was an Open Polar Sea, from whence all the ice flowed south, or maybe the pole was kept ice free by the warm currents of water that flowed up from the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps there is a continent at the North Pole that is warm and inhabited?

The biggest struggle in the book is between Peary and Cook who both claimed to have reached the pole but Fleming shows how neither probably reached the pole and despite their claims there is evidence(hearsay at best) that both knew that they hadn’t reached the pole.

Unlike the quests for the South Pole, there is not much talk about artifacts that are left to present day that show the routes of the explorers. They spent much of their time on boats and on the ice. One explorer, Sweden’s Salomon August Andre tried to reach the pole by airship. He tried for two years. The second year he made it into the air, but suffered mishaps on launch and during the flight they lost altitude due to the accumulation of ice. He disappeared never to be seen again. Then in the mid 1900’s debris was found that included pieces of the airship and diaries from the expedition.

The book ends with the first team to reach the North Pole (by air only) for certain. That was accomplished by the Amundsen-Ellsworth expedition from the airship Norge. Roald Amundsen was also the first to conquer the South Pole. Though disputed, the Russians are credited with being the first to set foot of the North Pole in 1948.

An enjoyable book that takes you into the psyche of the Polar Explorer. But be warned if you decide to follow in their footsteps. Many of the explorers dedicated their lives towards their goal. Once they had tried and failed or in the case of Peary and Cook succeeded (sort of) their lives were pretty empty. They had given their all and really had no reserves left for anything else. They often talked about other expeditions but none ever came to fruition. A sad ending to some of the world’s bravest/most determined/foolhardy men.