Deadly Quests: Three Books Recount Perils of Exploration reviews Great Heart, Down the Great Unknown, and Cooper’s Creek, three books where “the cost of expanding human horizons was death”:
Short of traveling to another planet, no one alive today can truly comprehend what it meant to be an explorer a century ago.As late as 1860, parts of every continent remained blank on the world’s maps. Aside from widely scattered indigenous clans, most people avoided these harsh wildernesses like the plague: An accident, a misjudgment, the merest slip of a foot meant certain death.
To other men and women, however, uncharted territory was like a red cape to a bull. To plant the first non-native foot in terra incognita was considered a feat akin to winning a war. The difficult part was surviving to tell the tale.
You don’t have to be that far from civilization for even a twisted ankle to mean starvation and death.
I love this description of Australia:
By the mid-19th century, the coastline of Australia had been charted from the sea, but the continent’s interior was a “ghastly blank,” writes Alan Moorehead in “Cooper’s Creek.” The vast terrain had rebuffed numerous attempts to traverse it. It was a geography of violent extremes, where temperatures could rise to 157 degrees in the sun, and neither shade nor shelter could be found for hundreds of miles. Yet its very inaccessibility persuaded people that it must harbor gold mines, fertile farmland or an inland sea.