Sir Ernest Shackleton returns to Antarctica, this time in the Weddell Sea, where the two preceding voyages got stuck.  Guess what happens.  Go on, guess.

Present day geologists offer their perspectives on the Antarctic Peninsula and I record lots of the bow pushing through loose pack because it's mesmerising.

The Ross Ice Barrier claims its final victim of the Heroic Age as Joyce, Richards and Wild struggle to get the depot party back to safety, then McMurdo Sound takes two more lives when a gamble on the weather goes against Mackintosh and Hayward.

Shackleton's depot laying party head to the Ross Sea and fight to get food and fuel to the foot of the Beardmore. 
Part one of a two parter recounting one of the most harrowing chapters to arise in the heroic era.

Hubert Wilkins makes his first appearance in the Ice Coffee narrative, albeit as a supporting character in someone else's nightmare in the Arctic, and I give you the good oil on sticking to tablets and behavioural responses to motion mediated nausea. 
The first episode recorded in Antarctica.  Muy excitamento.  Many spanglish. 

I've got a few tidbits left to add about the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, and Mawson will be back in the narrative before you know it, but this ties up some loose ends and resolves the cliff hanger from the end of episode 050.

The Cape Denison denizens get their science on and prepare for the spring sledging carnival.
The brown stuff gets closer to the whizzy-bladey thing.

Douglas Mawson gets a lot done in just twelve months.

I've been offered work in Antarctica and urgently need to renew some certs and get my teeth fixed and get a seafarer's medical and plane tickets and some coffee.
If you've paid all your bills and put some money aside for a rainy day and donated to some charities and had your fill of the caviar and lobster, please consider flicking a few bucks my way. 
Music, soundscapes and broad horizons lie in the offing, so take care and appreciate your coffee.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/falling-southward-fund#/

Prussian Army lieutenant Wilhelm Filchner led Germany's second expedition in the early 20th century.  While the government stayed largely hands off the expedition committee put their oar in enough to see der Deutschland sail under a syphilitic commander whose antics placed everyone's lives in danger and gave us a really good example of the sort of problems split leadership can cause in a high latitudes project. 
Suspected suicide, suspected fake appendicitis and very definite mania and toastiness characterised Filchner's time in the south.

In April 2017 I reprised my take on William Speirs Bruce's role in our present day understanding of Antarctica at the Spotted Mallard.  The audience were teh awesomes so I let them eat cake.

Dogs make all the difference in getting to the South Pole and back.  With Amundsen's triumph, no-one would ever bother going to the Pole agai...
Hey.
Wait.
Why are people still heading overland to the pole?
Have they not heard of aircraft?
Do they not heed the reports that the pole is cold and that the view is boring?
Turns out being first at the pole was only the first in a long string of polar firsts to follow in the next century, and I'm expecting a pogo-stick based expedition to be announced at any second.

Roald Amundsen returns to the narrative and takes pole position, showing the world what you can achieve if you don't give a stuff about science or people. 

What's this?
Three episodes in quick succession?
Blame the hosting service download counter.  I'm now obsessed with topping last month's total downloads.  This was easy when I only had two and a dog listening but now I have to release more episodes to scratch that itch.  Expect shorter and shorter episodes until I'm editing single words and releasing them.

Anyhoo, this one explains some clothing terms and concepts which warranted more attention than I was giving them.

Japan comes in out of the cold and heads back out into the cold again.
Nobu Shirase - an explorer of honour and determination, now available in ship form. 

Pemmican and sledging biscuit have received several mentions in the series and it's high time I let you in on what I'm on about.

The Eastern Party make their dogged way back to Cape Evans while Atkinson led teams onto the barrier to look for evidence of the pole party. 
The Terra Nova arrives and the BAE heads home.

Scott's 3IC, Lt. Victor Campbell, fares poorly on every front except the important one.  Little came of the BAE's Eastern Party's efforts in terms of geology, geography, biology, but everyone survived the challenging circumstances that British decorum and crook weather placed them in. 
Oops.  Spoilers.
Don't read this until you've listened to episode 040.

Dammit - it happened again.
This story always ends the same way.
All of the driving forces behind Scott's polar ambition push him to his death.
Poor weather, broken tractors, crap ponies, leaky fuel cans, crevasse fields - lots of things contributed to the tragedy in the physical sense but the expectations placed on Captain Robert Falcon Scott by his nation, his mentors and his peers did their part, too.

Scott leads his team south while Amundsen and Mawson keep his clockwork wound up tight. Stormy seas, pack ice and a four way split in the transport preparations frustrate efforts to meld scientific, geographic and historical goals.

I'm sick of 2016.  A friend just died for stupid reasons and my extended family and many friends are facing life in the USA under president Donald Trump and his cabinet of elite racists.
I really have not been in the mood to read about noble suffering under the Victorian model of manliness and my notes about Scott's death on his return from the pole came to a grinding halt about two weeks ago. 
Here's a Frankenstein's episode stop gap comprising essays from the past about ice diving and contrasting Scott Base and McMurdo Station.
I'll get back to the history in time for Christmas but in the mean time 2016 can fuck right off.

A dark clockwork comprising duty, ambition and hurt pride winds up Captain Scott and sets him on his path back to Antarctica.

At the start of the twentieth century whaling in the Southern Ocean was on the uptick.  The players and mechanisms in play held considerable sway in geographic outcomes, with claims and counter claims taking on a new urgency once the parties operating in the south had some oil in the game.

With just seven minutes up my data storage sleeve and some expeditions featuring weird relationships between officers and men in the offing, this seems an opportune time to map the boundary between the commissioned and the other ranks in the Victorian era and its immediate aftermath.

Charcot leads his second Antarctic expedition aboard a new ship with a new engine.  What could possibly go wrong?
More groundings, more whimsy and more coastline explored.
Well done those Frenchmen.

Ernest Shackleton heads south in a dodgy ship, short on funds and with a flea in his ear from Scott, but manages to get a lot done and get everyone home safely. 
Lots of firsts but the south pole remains unclaimed and, with two teams alleging they made it to the north pole, becomes even more alluring.

Douglas Mawson, Aenaes Mackintosh and John King Davis make their Antarctic entrances while Frank Wild and Ernest Joyce make their second forays south. 

Professor Philip Samartzis of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology becomes the first artist interviewed for the series and discusses why and how he headed south for the sake of his art. 

Jean Baptiste Charcot heads south, in yet another ship named after a place, looking for adventure, science and Swedes.
Good food, good wine and inadequate heating and propulsion characterised life aboard the Francais but the French got a lot done, showed their mettle in a miserable display of hard as nailsness, and came home with all hands.

Professor Craig Franklin first came on my radar in an interview with Richard Fidler.  His range of research interests includes but is far from limited to the physiology of ice fish.  He spoke to me about his work below the circle and I look forward to getting my hands on the “Antarctic Cruising Guide” he wrote with Peter Carey.  The author combination of a scientist and a national laureate could make this the Australasian “The Log of the Sea of Cortez.”  The appended link leads to a review of the 2006 first edition but the book is now in its third iteration.  Guess who it’s published by.

Robert Falcon Scott makes his first but far from his last appearance in the series and a two year voyage to McMurdo Sound. 
Much sledging.  Very scurvy.
Sir Clements Markham continues to kick downhill to have his way but the back of his bullying breaks when someone take his prophecies of doom at face value.
Wilson, Shackleton, Crean, Frank Wild, Taffy Evans, Lashly and Joyce make their Ice Coffee debuts appearances while Louis Bernacchi is back for an encore. 

I struggled to keep this episode to a reasonable time, as I knew I would.  So much has been written about Scott and his story looms so large in my early understanding of the continent that I really had to work to keep this as concise as I did, which isn't very. 
I see a shadow on the horizon in the form of Scott's second voyage south.  I don't think I can keep that to one episode no matter how many reefs I put in my script.

Among others we've got Charcot's efforts and the return of Shackleton to navigate before we get to the Terra Nova expedition, though, so set stunsails and topgallants and we'll make what way we can before 1912 and the five concurrent expeditions of that year catch us up.

The addendum appended to the episode refers to this crew.

William Spiers Bruce showed the world what a team could achieve if they ignored the south pole and got on with some science.  Under his guidance the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition established the longest continually occupied meteorological station and discovered large numbers of Antarctic marine species but what I like most about the Scot is how much he got on Sir Clements Markhams' nerves.

Never heard of Nordenskjold?
You have now, and he's pretty darn spiffy.
Likely the reason Nordenskjold isn't better known is that Shackleton and Mawson's later tales of survival against stacked odds drew attention away from the challenges faced and bettered by the Swedes who sailed to the Antarctic aboard the Antarctic. 
Carl Anton Larsen makes a repeat appearance, reprising his role as competent Norwegian ice pilot.
I'm all outta coffee and counting down the minutes until resupp.

Germans winter in fast pack ice, make some geographic discoveries, fly, sledge, and science as much as they can, but it's the diving that sets the voyage of the Gauss apart, in my eyes. 
Willy Heinrich - die Achtung!

Carsten Borchgrevink adds to his track record as a git and gets on everyone's nerves in the first winter spent ashore in Antarctica.

British pride is a'stirring and Germany hankers for some long, hard sciencing but it's the Belgians out in front, showing everyone how it's done if getting trapped in the pack and going mad is the goal.
Some notes about navigation notes presage some future episodes about spurious claims on fruitless firsts but the real appeal of episode 023 is the interview with Peter Cleary, who discusses leopard seals and dog teams.

The interview is another outing from the non-event that was Radio Tuna.  Recorded in 2004, not 2005 as noted in the episode.  I can tell, because it features Dr Paul Brewin in the Scott Base ambience.
Again the Minidisc recorder adds its clicks and whirs but je ne regrette rien, only with better French pronunciation than I can bring to the table.

More Norwegians head south seeking whales.  A kerfuffle over who's on first marks the start of the Heroic Age.

In 2005 I recorded an interview with Rob Robbins, head of the USAP diving programme.  This was slated for a New Zealand radio programme that never came about, itself a rip off of RRR's "Radio Marinara" in Australia, and was captured using a badly battered Mini-Disc unit.  It's not the best audio but I could have been using sticky tape and iron filings as a recording medium, for all I cared.  Rob Robbins is legend among my circle and I was stoked to have his time and attention.
With "Radio Tuna" failing to launch, this is the material's first outing.

Little Antarctic exploration occurred in the decades immediately after the French, American and British race south that rounded out the 1830s. 
American, German, British, Scottish and Norwegian visitors did turn up looking for whales and in the course of the invention of oceanography. 
This episode takes the series up to the 1890s and sets the scene for the voyage that would kick off the Heroic Age of antarctic exploration in all its capitalised glory. 

With many Arctic winters and more Arctic summers under their belts, Ross and Crozier got a lot done and brought their crews home safely.  Gongs all round.

It's just a word sometimes employed by people pretending to be pirates to most modern ears but until recently scurvy stood as a perplexing and deadly problem for mariners and polar explorers.  In this episode I discuss how sailors and scientists solved the scurvy riddle, screw up an attempt to say "very low levels," and make myself sad. 

For my money, Charles Wilkes is the first of the Antarctic matinets.  Drawn south by the opportunity to lead a large expedition and little else, his attempts to coordinate six poorly fitted out and ill matched ships crewed by people who largely thought little of him went every bit as well as that sentence presages.

First out of the blocks in the three way race south, Dumont d'Urville does a fair job with the resources France can throw at the project after much war and revolution and war and blockades and war. 

Often described as a nineteenth century analogue to the Space Race, I think of this period in Antarctic history as the nineteenth century race southward, of which the Space Race was a twentieth century analogue, because causality.

Reynolds returns to the narrative but his efforts at getting the US a toehold in the cold see him get an even colder shoulder than his last outing.
Ross earns his ice chops in the north.
Dumont d'Urville, after wowing the crowds with an armless display of Greek marbility, languishes in Cholera riddled Toulon, until his big chance beckons.
Balleny fulfills Enderby funded duties and adds information to the growing polynya of knowledge.
I came here to podcast and to drink coffee, and I'm all out of coffee.  The shakes are setting in.

Peter Kemp isn't well recorded, so there's little to tell about him other than he sailed on the Magnet and saw a coast that's now named after him.

Jason Kimberley traveled to Antarctica in 2005 and did the hauling and the crevasse fields that make up much of my nightmare material.  On his return, in addition to writing one of the most accessible recent books about life on the ice, Jason established "Cool Australia," an online science education resource for school children.
 
Finally, I give a brief account of getting toasty, which is, in addition to snaws, a thing.

The last gasps of British sealing efforts in the South and a brief profile of a dynasty of ship owners who paid for a lot of the exploitation of marine resources in the sealing and whaling boom times. 

Morrell was a liar, Symmes was a looper and Reynolds was a bona-fide genuine slick talker.  Running to catch up in the claims stakes, US politics gets in the way and Morrell adds confusion.  More on Reynolds later.

Sue Haliwell, Antarcticartican makes what is hope will be the first of many appearances between her northern exposures.

After switching to a new hosting plan to free up money for a second podcast series, this, the longest episode to date, ate up the space allocation for this month.  An episode about Biscoe and the Enderby's is recorded but won't reach the feed for some weeks. 

Hear me mix and match pronunciations as my brain fights it out between what it knows is correct and what it's accustomed to.
James Weddell - the explorer who went sealing in an age of sealers going exploring.  New record holders for southernmost expedition, the Beaufoy and the Jane sail into what we now know as the Weddell Sea and find vast expanses of no ice, leading to incredulity and ridicule.  James Weddell didn't sign up for the standard early death in poverty deal, but that's what he got.

Powell sets a new benchmark for "Who?"
Sealer, navigator, measurer and cartographer, that's who.

Connnecticut sealer sails a tiny tender, finds fame.

Smith - the competent, dutiful sealer who got the job done and got no reward, plaudits or even much of a mention in the history books.  He should have taken the money and ran, but hindsight's not a lot of use without a time machine.

An overview of the state of the art in maritime extraction industries at the start of the ice rush.

The chronology gets thrown out early in the piece, as the case of the empty H4n case unravels and some temporal anomalies are narrowly prevented from becoming time travel paradoxes.  Karl, I need the Delorean back last week.

The Bellingshausen episode is in the editing suite as I type, and should be available last Sunday.

Hard as nails Russian sea-dog braves the southern ocean in inadequate ships and after a rushed preparation and without biologists and...  You get the picture.  Up against it, Bellingshausen shone when the sun refused to do so, and it's not his fault most people haven't heard of him.

One of the most iconic names in maritime history does his empirical bit to show the world where Antarctica isn't.

A brief look at what was going on around the world as the exploration of the Southern Ocean began.

Imagining, seeking, and then shrinking Terra Australis Incognita to manageable proportions.  Philosophers, geographers, clergy and sailors vie for the final word on what and where Antarctica is, and who lives there.

Only one more preliminary episode to go and we'll get into some history.

A quick study of the setting of the series, covering the geology, climate, glaciology and biology of the Antarctic.

Only two more preliminary episodes and we'll get to the history the series is supposed to be about, I promise.

There's more to brewing up in Antarctica than just switching the kettle on.  Feel free to brew along to the chorus.