Product Description

As Scott and his two companions lay dying in their tent, elsewhere on the polar ice-cap six members of his ill-fated expedition, the Northern Party, were fighting for their lives. Led by Dr Murray, this title is based on his prevoiously unpublished diaries, monographs, photographs and sketches.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #612889 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Hell with a Capital H is a wonderful book and the result of painstaking research.

Col John Blashford-Snell OBE of the Scientific Exploration Society
This book should be read by every expeditioner and armchair traveller.

From the Author
‘Hell with a capital H’ is an adventure story, pure and simple. That it was not better known at the time – and in fact has been relegated in all books about Scott’s Last Expedition to a mere footnote – is pure bad luck. If Scott and his companions had survived, I believe that the officers and men of the Northern Party would have felt free to tell their story to their contemporaries in all its harrowing detail, and they might in their lifetimes have been folk heroes. As it was, they kept quiet or glossed over the horrors they had endured. Then, as the First World War unfolded, their adventures must have seemed paltry by comparison with the overwhelming tide of death and mutilation.

But looking back from a distance of some 90 years, their story still stands as a triumph of survival. Here were six men of very different rank, class and background. When they opted to join a polar expedition, they were already laying themselves open to experiences that would be wildly removed from their normal home and service lives. What they actually experienced in Antarctica was light years away even from that. Take diet for example – food at base camp or on sledging trips was inevitably monotonous, often unpalatable. Food in the igloo was always disgusting and occasionally life-threatening. Ditto hygiene, ditto exercise, ditto ‘social life’. All polar explorers of the period expected bouts of discomfort, pain and danger. The Northern Party experienced prolonged bouts of all three.

One recent example of incarceration and survival bears comparison. Peter Shaw has just made a dramatic escape from his Georgian captors. He had been kept, in truly appalling circumstances, for five months in a hole in the ground measuring 8 feet by 5 feet. Campbell, Levick, Priestley, Abbott, Browning and Dickason spent nearly seven months in an underground room measuring 9 ft by 12 (roughly the size of a billiard table). Although Shaw’s captivity was infinitely more brutal and brutalising, men with lesser reserves of mental toughness than those of the Northern Party might have been driven to madness, suicide or murder. At the end of it all they had to stagger 230miles back to a base camp they might very well have found abandoned. Scott’s strengths and weaknesses have been discussed endlessly since his death, but if six of the apparently perfectly ordinary men he was instrumental in picking could display such astonishing mental and physical reserves, it does vindicate at least one vital aspect of his leadership.

Customer Reviews

Flawed
A great story, indeed, but this account of it is marred by a quite a few silly errors (which a competent editor / proof reader should perhaps have weeded out) and some very peculiar assertions by the author. Anyone familiar with the bare bones of the `Terra Nova' story (and surely anyone reading this will already have read a good number of other accounts of the 1910-1913 expedition) may soon feel some disquiet, and perhaps begin to wonder about the veracity of the less well-known aspects of the `Terra Nova' expedition which this book concentrates on.

It gets off to a bad start with the unjustified branding of Cherry-Garrard as a "prime example" of one of "life's suckers", ostensibly because he was willing to muck in and get his hands dirty. There are repeated references to "Shackleton's hut" at Hut Point (the `Discovery hut' might be a more apt term). The book suggests that Bowers was "in his thirties" (he wasn't)... most troubling of all is the revelation that Oates' body was found (it wasn't).... So are we to believe what we read about the hitherto somewhat overshadowed `Northern Party'? It could well be that the answer to this question is 'yes' because the author has clearly approached her 'core subject' with gusto and understanding. It's a real shame that she was so casual when dealing with basic facts about the rest of the expedition.

True adventure
If Andy McNab wrote this you would say he was off his trolley but this is true heroism from real people. This is the story of part of Captain Scotts final expedition to the south pole who had to overwinter in a ice hole on the antartic ice. It is an almost unbelieveable tale of endurance and how people react in difficult situations. I would recommend it as a management text book on how true leaders work and manage teams.

The narrative is very clear and when the author has made her own conclusions this is made clear.