The history of individual Polar expeditions has been told many times, but usually only as personal accounts of individual adventures. This misses the overall context of polar exploration - why the British depended on ponies - plant-eating animals - on the only continent where plants don't grow, why Franklin's men perished when the local Eskimos were eking out an existence around them (and finally reporting Franklin's demise), and why the Scandinavians were always better than anybody else.