To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration

From Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Edward J. Larson comes an entwined narrative of the most adventurous year of all time, when three expeditions simultaneously raced to the top, bottom, and heights of the world

As 1909 dawned, the greatest jewels of exploration lay unclaimed: the North and South Poles and the so-called Third Pole, “the Pole of Altitude,” located in the unexplored heights of the Himalayas. Before the calendar turned, three expeditions had faced death, mutiny, and the harshest conditions on the planet to raise flags at the farthest edges of the earth.

In the course of one extraordinary year, Americans Robert Peary and Matthew Henson were hailed worldwide as the discoverers of the North Pole; Britain’s Ernest Shackleton had set a new geographic farthest-south record, while his expedition mate Australian Douglas Mawson had reached the south magnetic pole; and at the roof of the world, Italy’s Duke of the Abruzzi had attained an altitude record that would stand for a generation, the result of the first major mountaineering expedition to the Himalayas’ eastern Karakoram, where the daring aristocrat attempted K2 and established the standard route up the most notorious mountain on the planet.

Drawing on extensive archival and on-the-ground research to the Arctic, Antarctic, and Himalaya, Edward J. Larson illuminates one of the great overlooked tales of exploration, revealing the astonishing human achievement at the heart of these journeys.