#Julian Sancton

[semper-legens]

156. Madhouse at the End of the Earth, by Julian Sancton

Owned: No, library Page count: 331 My summary: August 1897. A crew from Belgium is setting out on an ambitious journey - to reach the South Pole. But when the ship became stuck and was forced to winter in the ice, the crew were pushed to the brink of madness and starvation. Would they survive the Antarctic winter? And would they be able to escape when spring finally came? My rating: 5/5 My commentary:

Well. See. The thing is. I have a fascination with Things Going Wrong On Ships - survival cannibalism is a particular interest of mine, so you better believe I’m really into the tragedy of the Terror and the Erebus. This voyage didn’t go quite that wrong. In the end, they only lost two people. But still, this book is a fascinating look at the late Victorian exploration mindset, and a hugely interesting telling of a little-known tale.

The book is written in a narrative non-fiction style, drawing from contemporary sources such as the accounts of the voyage written by the crew after the fact. I cannot overstate how engaging the narrative of this book is. I got sucked in from the start, barely even suffering from the usual problem these sorts of narratives have for me where I can’t tell the main players apart. The book did a great job of characterising each person involved in the story well enough, and in particular de Gerlache, the leader, and Cook, the doctor who ended up saving everyone’s lives. I particularly liked how, though Sancton clearly had a lot of respect for Cook, he still pointed out when Cook’s recollections of events are dubious, clearly embellished, or hard to verify. It’s a balanced view of the events while still being coloured by Sancton’s own viewpoint.

However, while reading this book, the main question I had on my mind was...why? What drives people to put themselves through such arduous things, risk their lives, and risk the lives of others in order to...gain a record? It’s the mentality that has people climbing Mount Everest today. de Gerlache’s story is a mix of toxic masculinity, nationalism, the evils of capitalism, and the problem with ambition. He wanted to be a big man who survived an extreme situation, he wanted to have a good story to sell back home, he wanted to Uphold Belgian Pride, and he made some very bad decisions on the way. It’s absolutely fascinating, and I appreciate how the narrative does sympathise with him, while still criticising him when appropriate. It’s a nuanced view of a messed up situation!

Next up, more graphic novels and intrigue, with a young woman playing host to a dark secret.

[snapbookreviews]

Spring 2024 Behind-the-Scenes Reading

Have a gander of what I spent my spring reading. It's a lot of history and archives.

I swear I have had multiple posts eaten by websites in the past month. I had a whole bunch of Tweets scheduled and they disappeared and I had this post queued and it disappeared. I’m already so busy and scattered, websites losing my queued posts is literally the last thing I need. Anyway, a few weeks belatedly, here’s the quarterly Spring post. *shakes fist at the rapidly enshitifying…

[myhikari21things]

Read of Madhouse At The End Of The Earth by Julian Sancton (2021) (318pgs)

[irenydraws]

extremely silly belgica pacific rim AU drawn shortly after reading madhouse at the end of the earth for the first time aaallll the way back in early 2022. you can tell it was early days because i was still trying to get the hang of roald and he's way too hot here

'ireny is roald's and fred's jaeger just a cone' yeah it is

guys who are drift compatible: fred and roald, raco and artocho, danco and lecointe

guys who can't drift: melaerts

[monstrousdaughter]

begging all my followers who are not yet polarpilled to look up frederick cook. no I can't give you any context it's funnier if you go in blind enjoy ❤️

[oceancamp]

managed to finally hunt down madhouse at the end of earth at the library woohoo

[areyougonnabe]

ALFRED LANSING ENDURANCE YOU WILL ALWAYS BE FAMOUS

Listening to a non-fiction book about maritime disaster and the way this author is describing the ship sinking is so sexual

[jesslovesboats]

I guess it's time to start moving some content from twt over here! For those who don't know me, I'm a public librarian with a special interest in polar and nautical history, and I love nothing more than connecting readers with good books. I've managed to convert some friends to my way of thinking, and one of them coined the phrase "sad boat books" to describe the types of books that I'm always reading and recommending. Here is my first list of sad boat books-- I can personally vouch for all of them!

New to sad boat? Start here to see if it’s for you!

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton

The Worst Journey in the World- The Graphic Novel Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down adapted by Sarah Airriess from the book by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie and John Geiger

Terra Nova, A GREAT first expedition!

The Worst Journey in the World- The Graphic Novel Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down adapted by Sarah Airriess from the book by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

A First Rate Tragedy by Diana Preston

Robert Falcon Scott Journals- Captain Scott’s Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott

“I Love Ernest Shackleton” starter pack

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

Shackleton’s Boat Journey by Frank Worsley

The Endurance by Caroline Alexander

“I Hate Ernest Shackleton” starter pack

The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler-Lewis

Polar Castaways by Richard McElrea and David Harrowfield

Roald Roald Roald!

The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen by Stephen Bown

The South Pole by Roald Amundsen

The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford*

*DISCLAIMER: this guy hates Captain Scott and gets most of the Scott details wrong, read for Roald only!

The Franklin Expedition

Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie and John Geiger

Erebus by Michael Palin

May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth: Letters of the Lost Franklin Expedition edited by Russell A. Potter, Regina Koellner, Peter Carney, and Mary Williamson

Non-polar sad boats

The Bounty by Caroline Alexander

Batavia’s Graveyard by Mike Dash

The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger

In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick

Sometimes a sad balloon can be a sad boat

The Expedition by Bea Uusma

The Ice Balloon by Alec Wilkinson

Karluk/Wrangel Island, the expeditions of my heart

Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk by Buddy Levy

The Ice Master by Jennifer Niven

The Karluk’s Last Voyage by Robert A. Bartlett

The Last Voyage of the Karluk: A Survivor’s Memoir of Arctic Disaster by William Laird McKinlay

Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic by Jennifer Niven

Miscellaneous sad boat books that are well worth your time

The Ship Beneath the Ice: The Discovery of Shackleton’s Endurance by Mensun Bound

In The Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton

Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration by David Roberts

Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition by Buddy Levy

If you read and enjoy any of these, please let me know!

[fullcolorfright]

Sketch collage inspired by the 1897-1899 Belgian Antarctic Expedition, after reading Madhouse at the End of the Earth (Julian Sancton, 2021) and My Life as an Explorer (Roald Amundsen, 1927)

[jeyneofpoole]

hello as a resident franklin expedition person do you have any recommendations for further reading about it/polar history in general?

yes!!!!! for dipping your toes into the franklin expedition specifically i would start with erebus: the story of a ship by michael palin (yes, the guy from monty python. this book contains more anecdotes than hard facts but is a fun introductory read and it’s honestly really funny). probably the most well-known book about the franklin expedition is frozen in time by dr. owen beattie + john geiger, some of the information i believe has been disputed in the years since publication (published in the 80’s) but the descriptions of the exhumations of the beechey bodies are gorgeous and visceral and it’s by far one of the most ethical and humane exhumations/studies on gravesites that i’ve ever read about. THEN you can graduate to real freak territory and read may we be spared to meet on earth, a collection of all of the letters that the members of the expedition sent before and during the first portion of the journey. others to hit that i haven’t read yet are james fitzjames: the mystery man of the franklin expedition (again, some information like that concerning jfj’s birth has since been disproven, but it’s by far the most comprehensive biography of him that exists. battersby reallyyyyyy loved the guy), unraveling the franklin expedition: inuit testimony (this one is on my shelf! deals, obviously, with the widely disregarded testimony of the indigenous people of the region), and the man who ate his own boots.

now for miscellaneous polar books i would start with endurance by alfred lansing, it’s a classic and was written at a time when members of the endurance crew were still alive, so lansing had exclusive access to multiple firsthand accounts. the only nonfiction that’s ever made me cry. my most recent polar read was madhouse at the end of the earth by julian sancton and i can’t recommend it enough. about the dysfunctional belgica expedition, but also a great introduction to roald amundsen’s whole… thing. super fun. i’m also about to start the worst journey in the world by apsley cherry-garrard, which deals with the scott expedition from the point of view of someone who was actually there. it’s mostly a memoir. for a fun one i have a polar fiction rec that is NOT the terror. where the dead wait by ally wilkes was a super fun read and it’s obvious that they watched the terror and went down the same pipeline that i did. evil gay situationship in the arctic circle supplemented by cannibalism and psychosis is always very fun, they have a second book about antarctica i believe, it’s on my shelf but i haven’t gotten to it yet. thanks so much for asking ily 🫶🫶🫶

[heavenlyyshecomes]

misc reads pt. 11

The legend of the music tree, ellen rupell shell, smithsonian magazine

The depths she'll reach: freediving's alenka artnik, xan rice, longlead

Sufi Islam thrives humorous, eloquent and poetic as ever, nile green, aeon

Mars is a hellhole, sharon stirone, the atlantic

Obliterating the natural world, nathan j. robinson, current affairs

What lies beneath, julian sancton, vanityfair

A winelike sea, caroline alexander, lapham's quaterly

The centuries-long quest for the scent of god, john last, noema magazine

Hayao miyazaki and the art of being a woman, gabrielle bellot, the atlantic

The death of the ‘chic’ writer, barry pierce dazed digital

All about eve—and then some, lili anoulik, vanityfair

The archive of a vanishing world, grace linden, noema magazine

In the land of living skies, suzannah showler, harper's magazine

Daydreams and fragments: on how we retrieve images from the past, maël renouard, lithub

The haunted city, azania imtiaz khatri-patel, aeon

Princes of infinite space, kyle paoletta, baffler

Humans are overzealous whale morticians, ben goldfarb, nautilus

immortal by default, jared farmer, lapham's quaterly

Short fic:

Morning, Noon & Night, claire louise-bennett, the white review

Office hours, ling ma, the atlantic

Nights at the hotel splendido, sam munson, granta

shanghai murmur, te-ping chen, the atlantic

The hydraulic emperor, arkady martine, uncanny magazine

Goodnight, melancholy, xia jia, clarkesworld magazine

[snapbookreviews]

Fall 2022 Behind the Scenes Reading

History consumed much of my fall reading from #Hamilton to the Belgian Antarctic Expedition to the history Judaism in China.

We’re back to our normal sections of “In Progress” and “Finished,” though I’m still making a few tweaks to post structure. I think I’m going to include an ongoing “Partial” section going forward, for books that don’t necessarily get read cover to cover, such as D&D books or when you revisit a single chapter/essay/story in a book you’ve already read. That seems like a better way to handle books…

[areyougonnabe]

hi!! apologies if you’ve answered this before but do you have any good book recs for polar expeditions that aren’t the Franklin expedition? im very behind on the many other Polar Incidents and would love to catch up!

YES OF COURSE

the classic trifecta to start with is endurance by alfred lansing (endurance expedition), a first rate tragedy by diana preston (terra nova expedition), and madhouse at the end of the earth by julian sancton (belgica expedition). if you want help choosing one, try alice's quiz!

because i am so terra nova pilled i would also highly recommend the worst journey in the world by apsley cherry-garrard, either the full thing or the first volume of the graphic novel adaptation by @worstjourney :)

once you've read a few of these you will probably have a good idea of who your faves are/what topics you're most interested in and can chase that further down the rabbit hole, but they're all good starting points!

[spacecoffeeandcartoons]

I just took your uquiz (got Madhouse at the End of the World) and I'm obsessed - I think I might have found a new special interest!!! Please talk polar expeditions to me, I'm foaming at the mouth, absolutely feral. Just infodump like crazy please, I'm on my knees and begging

I'm so glad you liked the quiz!!

Apologies for turning this post into a larger primer!

I hope you enjoy Madhouse--secretly I think it's the best result on the quiz (though it's not my own result; that's A First-Rate Tragedy). Madhouse has a bit of everything & if you're looking for truly insane anecdotes to regale your friends with, it's your best bet. A smattering of what you'll find in Madhouse: an army of rats, toxic gases sickening the expedition leader, scientists drawing cartoons about poop and butts, a man being mistaken for a seal at the worst possible time, brutal disregard for cats by a man who would go on to co-found the International Astronomical Union, the invention of light therapy, really bad uses of petroleum jelly....& that's just scratching the surface! And it all takes place during the first overwintering in Antarctica. thisisfine.gif

The one downside (not a downside depending on your perspective) for Madhouse as a starter book is it has nothing to do with Shackleton or Scott, and you'll soon find the majority of the English-language books on the Heroic Age, for better or worse, relate to those two. Madhouse DOES have a young Roald Amundsen (later the first man to the South Pole), who is a FASCINATING figure, and his first trip to Antarctica was often overlooked before this book afaik.

So I chose my three books for the starter quiz very carefully. Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton, A First-Rate Tragedy by Diana Preston, and Endurance by Alfred Lansing are all accessible secondary sources. They are readable (not overly academic) & don't require background info, doing a good job introducing people and terms (polar exploration has a whole associated vocabulary). Just as importantly, they're all exciting & well-paced & gripping! Once you've found your bearings, there's a whole specialist literature of polar history for polar scholars and enthusiasts. Broadly, I break it down thusly:

- Primary source expedition narratives: firsthand accounts of expeditions by people who were there. Within this there are a few subcategories: books always intended to be written by explorers when they returned home (this was a significant source of income for expeditions), like Scott's The Voyage of the Discovery, Mawson's Home of the Blizzard, or Shackleton's The Heart of the Antarctic. There's books not-originally-intended but the author decided to write them years later (The Worst Journey in the World by Cherry-Garrard, Saga of the Discovery by Bernacchi). And then there's diaries that were never intended to be published--often, they were written for the explorer's family, or perhaps to help the expedition leader write the narrative. But they weren't meant to be published verbatim. Time, fame, tragedy, and general interest sometimes led to them eventually seeing publication--this is especially the case for a lot of the Terra Nova diaries, & was most famously done for Scott's own diary, which he had intended to edit into a book, but not to publish in raw form. Providence, of course, had different ideas.

- Secondary source expedition narratives: Madhouse and Endurance from my quiz both fit this category, for the Belgica and Imperial Trans-Antarctic (better known as the 'Endurance') expeditions, respectively. (First-Rate Tragedy I'd moreso call a Scott biography). These are accounts of expeditions written by authors/historians who were not on the expeditions in question. There's a LOT of these, and they vary widely in quality. Some offer new scholarship or cover something that hasn't been covered before; others are...less rigorous. Have a browse at your local thrift store/charity shop/secondhand bookstore. If you're lucky they'll have some polar books. Flip through and see if there's a robust citations section, or footnotes, and ideally in-text citations for quote attributions. This can give you some sense of the quality as you're wading into the sea of books!

- Biographies: Exactly what it says on the tin! Instead of picking an expedition to focus on, these books are about one explorer and his life (almost always "his", though there are a few exceptions like Ada Blackjack). There are, once again, a lot of these! Scott and Shackleton in particular have a lot of biographies. I personally didn't read many biographies before this obsession, and I find them a really interesting format in which the biographer is important too, not just the subject. I'm developing opinions about when and how biographers should include relevant cultural context, the amount of the author inserting their opinion that I prefer and how it should be indicated in the text, etc. Similarly for the secondary sources above, check the indices and citations. I'm constantly flipping back to check sources while reading, one of the reasons I prefer physical to e-books!

- Other: There's always another category, isn't there? There's tons more! Cultural histories like Spufford's I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (I recommend you get a few books under your belt before reading that to get the most out of it), travelogues mixed with history like Sarah Wheeler's Terra Incognita, Bea Uusma's The Expedition which flips back and forth between time periods, & more!

Like any taxonomy, there's flaws with the above, and things that don't fit, but that's broadly how I see the landscape!

Tips, tricks, & things to know:

- Polar books are most often found in the "Travel" or "Travel Literature" section. Sometimes you can find stuff in "History" "Biography" or even "Sports" lol. A parallel interest is Mountaineering, so if a place has Mountaineering books, they may well also have polar.

- It can be very helpful to familiarise yourself with the Edwardian era in general -- it's a fascinating cultural history in and of itself, and its the most modern era before the great global "end-of-innocence" of the First World War. Sometimes the things these guys are up to really ARE crazy, sometimes it's just that they're Edwardians and something is lost in the translation.

- Like many subjects historians have been writing about for over a century, polar exploration history authors have their biases. The most common one is whether or not the author likes Robert Falcon Scott. This goes back to a controversial book called Scott and Amundsen, published in 1979 by Roland Huntford. (It's also found under the title The Last Place on Earth, based on its TV show adaptation.) Huntford retells the "race to the South Pole" elevating Amundsen and in the process doing a very good job of destroying Scott's reputation by debunking him as an incompetent bungler. From what I've heard from others (I haven't read it yet, though will eventually for its historiographical value) it's a good source on Amundsen but everything he says on Scott should be ignored due to highly selective quotations and...well, active malice toward the guy. Basically, it's a callout-post/bombshell of a book that has had almost every subsequent historian touching on the topic going to great lengths to debunk in turn. Fwiw, I've also heard people say Huntford's Shackleton biography is good. Just. Don't listen to him about Scott.

- Imperialism motivated a lot of these expeditions, and frankly in my opinion this is something more of the literature NEEDS to talk about! A few that do a good job are Spufford mentioned above, & Larson's An Empire of Ice.

- I'd actually recommend don't start with diaries, bc they usually need some context to understand. Exception? Scott's final entries.

There you go! Happy reading! Also check out @areyougonnabe, she's got some great polar posts!!

[charlesdesvoeux]

you guys ever heard of something called gay sex

(from Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton)

[beardedmrbean]

A new class-action lawsuit accuses OpenAI and partner Microsoft of infringing on works by non-fiction authors, the latest in a string of legal actions against artificial intelligence companies.

It comes amid turmoil at OpenAI, where most of the startup’s nearly 800 employees have threatened to quit if ousted CEO Sam Altman doesn’t return to his role. He was fired by OpenAI’s board on Friday and announced Sunday that he would join Microsoft, whose CEO Satya Nadella told CNBC on Monday he is looking to partner with Altman in whatever form that takes.

The lawsuit against the two companies, filed Tuesday in federal court in the Southern District of New York, makes similar arguments to other allegations that AI companies used copyrighted works in massive training sets employed to build tools like ChatGPT.

The lead plaintiff in the suit, Julian Sancton, is the author of , which he spent five years and tens of thousands of dollars writing, according to the lawsuit, which hasn’t previously been reported.

“The commercial success of the ChatGPT products for OpenAI and Microsoft comes at the expense of non-fiction authors who haven’t seen a penny from either defendant,” said Susman Godfrey partner Justin Nelson, the lead attorney representing Sancton.

OpenAI doesn’t disclose what data it used to train GPT-4, its most advanced large language model, but lawyers for Sancton say ChatGPT divulged the secret. “In the early days after its release, however, ChatGPT, in response to an inquiry, confirmed: “Yes, Julian Sancton’s book ‘Madhouse at the End of the Earth’ is included in my training data,” the lawsuit reads.

One way that lawsuit is different from others is that it ropes in Microsoft, which did not decide what training data to use in OpenAI’s models or even design the models itself. Rather, Microsoft provided the infrastructure for training and running them.

The models are now core to Microsoft’s business, which has given it a boost in stock price, the suit points out.

“Microsoft would have known that OpenAI’s training data was scraped indiscriminately from the internet and included a massive quantity of pirated and copyrighted material, including a trove of copyrighted nonfiction works,” the suit alleges.

The companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Know More

Last week, Stability AI’s vice president of audio, Ed Newton-Rex, resigned in protest over the company’s stance on copyrighted work (It was ok with using them.)

Famous fiction authors like Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham sued OpenAI earlier this year for copyright infringement. Sarah Silverman and other authors are also suing Meta on the same grounds. Several other lawsuits are making their way through the courts.

AI companies have argued that using copyrighted works in training data constitutes “fair use” of the material. In essence, computers are “learning” from the copyrighted works, just like humans learn when they read.

Sancton’s attorneys argue it’s not the same thing. “While OpenAI’s anthropomorphizing of its models is up for debate, at a minimum, humans who learn from books buy them, or borrow them from libraries that buy them, providing at least some measure of compensation to authors and creators,” the lawsuit said.

It alleges that OpenAI deliberately conceals its training sets to hide the copyrighted works it uses. “Another reason to keep its training data and development of GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 secret: To keep rightsholders like Plaintiff and members of the Class in the dark about whether their works were being infringed and used to train OpenAI’s models,” the lawsuit argues.

Reed’s view

AI copyright law will surely make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The fundamental question: If an AI model is not actually reproducing a protected work, then is the fact that it learned from it a technical violation of copyright?

If AI companies pay for copyrighted works — say, buying a book — can they legally use it to train an AI model, or do they need to license the material from the owner of the copyright?

There’s also a purely moral question: Even if it turns out the AI companies are right, and training AI models with copyrighted material constitutes fair use, should they?

This is a very thorny one. I am the author of a non-fiction book that is almost surely in the training sets for these models and I don’t really have a problem with it. I don’t think large language models will ever really pose competition for books. A book is a lot more than a bunch of words.

What I find upsetting is that there are places people can pirate the book online and read it for free. Nobody seems outraged by that, though.

I also think that we have all contributed to this technology in one way or another; it’s trained on basically the entire internet.

Even if AI companies compensated me for the use of the book, what would it be worth? A few cents? I do, however, think that if AI companies use my book in their training data, they should at least be required to buy a copy. Otherwise, that’s just plain old pirating.

The third point is how technology is moving beyond the copyright issue already. As we’ve reported, the newest small models in generative AI are trained using synthetic data created by the larger models.

And companies like OpenAI are hiring other companies like Scale AI to create content from scratch, specifically to train new AI models.

At some point, there may be a proliferation of generative AI models that contain no problematic material at all.

Room for Disagreement

Ed Newton-Rex argues in this article that what AI companies are doing is wrong: “Setting aside the fair use argument for a moment — since ‘fair use’ wasn’t designed with generative AI in mind — training generative AI models in this way is, to me, wrong. Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright.”

Notable

There really is no clear answer on where the law comes down on the issue of copyright material, reports James Vincent of The Verge.