The quest for the North Pole has for long been one of the great adventure stories in the history of exploration, yet it is a strange target for an explorer to aim at, for there is nothing there. It is an imaginary point in the middle of an ice-covered ocean. Its significance, of course, is that it is the northern end of the axis on which the earth rotates, but ancient Greek astronomers worked that out long ago, without ever leaving home. The Pole has never needed to be 'discovered'; its location has never been in doubt.For travellers now, getting to the North Pole is just an irresistibly enticing, romantic but utterly pointless thing to do. For some of those explorers who vied with each other to get there first, risking and sometimes losing their lives, whose stories form the subject of this book, it was the most important thing in life. Read Less