When, as a teenager, I read the classic books of polar exploration—like Robert Falcon Scott’s diary of his fatal trip to the south pole or the various books about Ernest Shackleton’s heroic expedition when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in the ice off Antarctica and sank—I was taken aback by a recurrent theme: those guys were sure they’d been born too late. By 1900, there was no western frontier left to explore, uninhabited by anybody except Indians; no island in the South Pacific waiting to be discovered by a Captain Cook; no source of the Nile still lost in the blank spaces on the map of Africa. Scott and Shackle-ton and their rivals wondered at times whether trying to reach the poles was too arbitrary a goal. After all, the south pole was simply a spot on an empty, windswept glacial plateau, defined not by a wilderness that could be tamed and settled but by a unique latitude: ninety degrees south. Nobody who ever read Scott’s diary can forget his entry on finally arriving there: “Great God!
