In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships which sooner or later expired in the pincers of an ice floe while crewmen ate their shoes. These stories bear retelling for our own age, and Hampton Sides does well to identify the gruesome story of the USS Jeanette, which ended in the greatest American Arctic disaster ever.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £17 Tel: 08430 600033. Sara Wheeler has written about her travels in both the Arctic (The Magnetic North) and the Antarctic (Terra Incognita).
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