Ninety Degrees North by Fergus Fleming, Granta, £20, ISBN
1862074496
THERE is something hugely comic about tales of European explorers losing
toes, feet and often their lives in the frozen wastes of the Arctic, while all
around them native Inuit, complete with full sets of fingers and toes, go about
their lives apparently insulated from the polar perils. Did it never occur to
these intrepid adventurers that maybe they could learn a thing or two from the
locals? Nor did they think to ask whether it was true, as they imagined, that
there was a vast open ice-free ocean just…
