Menu
Into the Great Emptiness: Peril and Survival on the Greenland Ice Cap
Next in the queue
62
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
33/100Critics
91/100Scholars
Author:
David Roberts
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
September 13, 2022
The story of one of the greatest but least-known sagas in the history of exploration from David Roberts, the âdean of adventure writing.â
What The Reviewers Say
... the story of Watkins’s short life, his uncanny ability as a leader and his mysterious death moves quickly, unfolding almost like a thriller.
... superb.
In March 1931, two men of the British Arctic Air Route Expedition (BAARE) in Greenland ventured out to relieve a fellow team member who had been manning a distant weather station solo for months, his supplies dwindling as extreme weather conditions further deteriorated...Roberts’ pulsating real-life thriller recalls the exciting and harrowing details of an expedition into the depths of the unexplored...Readers will be on pins and needles..
Polar explorers Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, and Ernest Shackleton are household names, but Henry George 'Gino' Watkins (1907-1932) rings few bells...In this fascinating biography, Roberts (1943-2021) points out that, unlike his predecessors, Watkins was neither a military man nor a seasoned traveler...Rather, he was a carefree Cambridge student fond of risky antics and mountain climbing but no expert explorer...he organized and led the British Arctic Air Route Expedition of 1930-1931, aiming to survey the obscure east coast of Greenland and gather climate data to plan a shorter air route to North America...Roberts devotes most of his book to a gripping account of this expedition, with equally fine asides on Greenland’s history and Indigenous inhabitants...An outstanding account of a great expedition led by 'a child prodigy who died before his full genius could flower'..
