Overview

The riveting story of one of the greatest but least-known sagas in the history of exploration from David Roberts, the dean of adventure writing By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed Gino), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the ice cap, 8,200 feet above sea level. The Ice Cap Station was to be the anchor of a transpolar route of air travel from Europe to North America. The weather on the ice cap was appalling. Fierce storms. Temperatures plunging lower than negative fifty degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. Watkins's scheme called for rotating teams of two men each to monitor the station for two months at a time. No one had ever tried to winter over in that hostile landscape, let alone manage a weather station through twelve continuous months. Watkins was younger than anyone under his command, but he had several daring trips to the Arctic under his belt and no one doubted his judgement. The first crisis came in the fall when a snowstorm stranded a resupply mission halfway to the top for many weeks. When they arrived at the ice cap, there were not enough provisions and fuel for another two-man shift, so the station would have to be abandoned. Then team member August Courtauld made an astonishing offer. To enable the mission to go forward, he would monitor the station solo through the winter. When a team went up in March to relieve Courtauld, after weeks of brutal effort to make the 130-mile journey, they could find no trace of him or the station. By the end of March, Courtauld's situation was desperate. He was buried under an immovable load of frozen snow and was disastrously short on supplies. On April 21, four months after Courtauld began his solitary vigil, Gino Watkins set out inland with two companions to find and rescue him. David Roberts draws on firsthand accounts and archival materials to tell the story of this daring expedition and of the epic survival ordeal that ensued.

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Reviews

A love song, bold and stirring and plangent, to what just might be our continent's most spellbinding wilderness. -- Hampton Sides, bestselling author, on The Bears Ears If you've run out of Saint-Exupery and miss the eloquent power of his work, then you are ready to read David Roberts. -- Laurence Gonzales, award-winning author, on Limits of the Known This is Roberts at his best, telling a little-known tale of adventure, tragedy, and endurance. -- Greg Child, author of Postcards from the Ledge, on Alone on the Ice

Into the Great Emptiness is a gripping saga--and one of Roberts's finest books. -- Jon Krakauer, #1 nationally bestselling author

Author Information

David Roberts (1943-2021) was the author of thirty books on mountaineering, exploration, and anthropology. His books have won the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition. British-born Julian Elfer is an award-winning New York City-based actor and audiobook narrator with over 100 titles to his credit. Hailed by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for his lead performance in the Mint Theatre Company's A Day by the Sea, Julian brings a unique facility for characterization in fiction and an empathy for the personalities and events of the past.

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