The story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s desperate rush to the South Pole and of the death of the polar team through cold and starvation on the return journey is well known. Clive Powell-Willians’ Cold Burial recounts an equally ill-calculated journey at the other end of the earth.

Edgar Christian was eighteen years old when he accompanied his cousin, Jack Hornby, and Hornby’s moody friend, Harold Adlard, on an ill-prepared venture into the frozen Canadian north.

They had learned nothing from Scott’s failure, and, like Scott failed to take the essential dogs. With wild idealism, they based their hope of survival on the chance of encountering the migrating caribou herds and living off their meat.

The gruesome story of their failure is told in the journal Edgar Christian, a document that survived their death and was found, with their three bodies, in a log cabin two years later. The document was kept in the archives of Dover College and came into the hands of Clive Powell-Williams who has used it to construct a beautifully written narrative illustrated with original photographs.

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