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Broadened horizons
A Review by Tom Chesshyre

Men dying of thirst drinking horse's blood; vicious polar bear attacks; swarms of flying cockroaches; cannibalism; body parts dropping off from frostbite; poison-arrow assaults -- there is enough gory detail in Fergus Fleming's excellent Tales of Endurance to captivate the most resistant teenager. With brevity and wit, Fleming covers the daredevil exploits of more than fifty of the world's great explorers, starting with Marco Polo -- whose thirteenth-century book on his travels through Asia Fleming regards as the "bedrock upon which European exploration was built" -- through to Umberto Nobile, an Italian who attempted, but failed, to reach the North Pole by airship in 1928. After this, says Fleming, explaining why he ended his book at this date, pure "human endeavour" was replaced by a reliance on the "combustion engine".

His policy is not necessarily to choose the most important explorers, but simply to pick the ones he "likes best". He takes a penetrating look at Christopher Columbus, who had hoped to find China. He not only failed in this as in "almost every task he set himself", but also in the process introduced slavery to the West Indies, and instigated the "annihilation of the indigenous Caribbean population", which declined from 300,000 in 1492 to 40,000 fifteen years later. Ferdinand Magellan, who discovered the southern passage to the Pacific, also had a dark streak, having served in the Portuguese navy in the Orient, where officers made an example of Arabs by "cutting off the men's right hands and the ears and noses of the women". His comeuppance came when he was clubbed to death by natives in the Philippines in 1521. Likewise James Cook, whose achievements Fleming also believes are overrated, was an "inconsiderate, sometimes brutal, ambassador for European civilization". He suffered a similar end to Magellan in Hawaii in 1779, with a "frenzy of warriors stabbing and clubbing his corpse". Later these warriors "showed their buttocks" to the redcoats, who reacted by storming the land, shooting everyone they saw and "decapitating several men and hoisting their heads on poles". Several harrowing tales of attempts to find a north-west passage above Canada to the spice markets of the East are told, including that of John Franklin's famous 1820 voyage in which he recorded in his log: "We drank tea and ate some of our shoes for supper". Fleming deals with Scott and Amundsen's race for the South Pole, and Shackleton's transantarctic expedition, including Winston Churchill's description of Shackleton's party as "penguins" playing about with sleds as war in Europe raged. Mallory and Irvine's doomed attempt of 1924 to conquer Everest is chronicled, and Fleming poses the question of whether they had in fact arrived at the summit; the eventual discovery of Mallory's missing Kodak camera might provide the answer. Fergus Fleming believes that European wanderlust was crucial to the development of that continent, which before the fifteenth century was a "crude and impoverished outpost of the known world". The wealth that resulted from travel changed all of that and by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans were "no longer the ignoramuses of the world".

Tom Chesshyre works on the travel desk of The Times.