Polar Exploration: The Royal Geographical Society - Tapa dura

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, explorers from around the world conquered nature's last closely guarded bastions. Between them they navigated the Northwest and Northeast Passages, attained the North and South Poles, crossed the Arctic Basin and first flew airships and airplanes in the Arctic and Antarctic. "Polar Exploration" recounts the famous adventures of Ernest Shackleton, Douglas Mawson, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen but also narrates stories far less well known to tell of poisonings, cannibalism, false claims, near misses and the feared killer of the polar regions - scurvy. Facsimile memorabilia will include: Scott's final diary entry; pages from Amundsen's 1911 diary describing how he reached the South Pole; and, a letter from Shackleton before he set off on his expedition aboard the Endurance.

Beau Riffenburgh specializes in polar exploration. He earned his doctorate degree at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge and was editor of Polar Record, the world's oldest journal of polar research, the head of the Polar History Group at the Scott Polar Research Institute and a lecturer in the history faculty of the University of Cambridge. He has written several books on exploration and for Andre Deutsch he wrote the Royal Geographical Society Exploration Experience (2007) and The Titanic Experience (2008).