Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

And this week, my guest is the writer Julian Sancton,

whose extraordinary new book is called Madhouse at the end of the earth,

the Belgica's journey into the dark Antarctic night.

And it's one of those wonderfully resonant stories

in which people with beards get an awful lot of ice in them.

Julian, tell me the story about the Belgica,

because I had never heard of it,

and we know about the aerobus, and we know about the terror, about the northwest passage and this is it seems to have sort of slipped to one

side of exploring history isn't it yeah and uh it's surprising because it was the expedition that

kicked off the so-called heroic age of Antarctic exploration i think without the the

expedition of the belgica commanded by the Belgian

sailor and naval lieutenant Adrienne de Jalach, there might not have been, I mean, certainly

everybody was racing to the Antarctic, but the nature of Antarctic exploration would have been

different because there were a lot of lessons learned both of what to do and probably more crucially of what not to do. I was surprised also that it hadn't been written about

more extensively, which is why when I first heard about it, I thought that, you know, there

must be a book about this. I read an article in The New Yorker about NASA's plans for manned missions to Mars and how they

were studying the effects of confinement and isolation in extreme environments on astronauts. And this is how I

heard of the Belgica, because it began in classic New Yorker magazine fashion

by backing into the story and writing three paragraphs about the Belgic expedition, which,

as it happens, is still imparting lessons to people who are designing space travel because

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