Antarctica

"the many stories detailing the torturous lives of the ponies"

you get more of a sense of the character of Weary Willie than the humans at times, he's the only one sensibly saying fuck this nonsense, albeit through passive resistance. The passages from other fellow expeditionists journals definitely enhance the story. I can't remember whose journal it was, but there was a bit that made me chuckle that was butthurt at the positive advance of Amundsen's expedition party, and commenting that they have brought a good supply of potatoes with them he noted: "there must be a renegade Irishman amongst them".

ac-g’s slow boil fury at bureaucracy in his egg delivery to british museum or whatever showed v some amusing restraint, eh.

at least back the 1910's the explorer classes viewed orcas as the deadly predators they are, none of this anthropomorphic hippy shit about swimming with them, they knew that at times it only took one fateful misstep onto some fragile sea ice and they were lunch.

Vance’s recitation of this parody poem really is a delight:

THE PROTOPLASMIC CYCLE
Big floes have little floes all around about ’em, And all the yellow diatoms couldn’t do without ’em.
Forty million shrimplets feed upon the latter, And they make the penguin and the seals and whales
Much fatter.
Along comes the Orca and kills these down below, While up above the Afterguard attack them on the floe:
And if a sailor tumbles in and stoves the mushy pack in, He’s crumpled up between the floes, and so they get their whack in.
Then there’s no doubt he soon becomes a patent fertilizer, invigorating diatoms, although they’re none the wiser,
So the protoplasm passes on its never-ceasing round, Like a huge recurring decimal … to which no end is found.

From “The Antarctic Exploration Anthology: The Personal Accounts of the Great Antarctic Explorers (Bybliotech Discovery Book 1)” by Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Douglas Mawson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard)