"One of the last remaining frontiers, there are few places as forbidding, or as intriguing, as Antarctica. This collection of self-contained excerpts from journals and memoirs chronicles the journeys of fourteen daring adventurers in the highest, driest, windiest, coldest, and most remote of the seven continents. Blizzards, frostbite, snow blindness, scurvy, food shortages and shipwrecks were common occurrences. Faced with terrifying isolation and the world's harshest conditions, not everyone survived.

These harrowing firsthand narratives stand as tributes to the limitless ambition and pioneering spirit of man."--BOOK JACKET.