The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
The corpse was frozen and bleached by the sun. It lay face down in the snow, fully extended and pointing uphill. The upper body was welded to the scree with ice. The arms, still muscular, were outstretched above the head. Mountaineer George Mallory had last been...
Nicholas Crane, welcome to Aspects of History. Many congratulations on the book. We had a few questions for you. Why did you decide to write Latitude now? It’s an irresistible mix of human fortitude, science and exploration, a story for our times. To what extent could...
First let’s deal with the elelphant in the room. Nicholas Crane’s Latitude will inevitably draw comparison with Dava Sobel’s surprise runaway best-seller Longitude, which was published over a quarter of a century ago in 1993 and has remained in print ever since. Sobel...
The Search for Latitude Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiral lay unconscious on the mountainside. ‘I fell down’, he wrote later, ‘and remained a long time without sense or motion; and, as I was told, with all the appearances of death.’ The year was 1737 and the...
The Desert and the Sown: Travels in Palestine and Syria by Gertrude Bell
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada by Clarence King
David Livingstone: The Great Victorian Explorer by Thomas Hughes
At exactly 2.30 p.m. on 11 July 1897, a gigantic silk balloon could be seen rising into the Arctic sky above Spitsbergen. Inside the basket were three hardy adventurers, all Swedish, who were taking part in an extraordinary voyage. Salomon Andrée was the instigator of...
