The Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration by its very name promises a lot. Our popular conception of it seems to deliver, too - frozen heroes in big coats frozen stiff as they trudge through a blizzard, some stiff-lipped soldier making a heroic sacrifice to save his fellows, and flags planted in places that are generally hard to reach. All of that is true... but there's a whole other side to the story that never gets told, names you won't recognise from any history class. Today, we begin with one of the least prepared expeditions of all time from a place that generally doesn't produce Polar explorers...

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