
Pourquoi-Pas (1908) - vinnyglennon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pourquoi-Pas_(1908)
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crubier
Amazing to see this here! The father of my grandma (she is turning 100 next
week!) was a sailor on these Antarctic missions.

She still lives in the same village where several of these sailors were from.
She recently told me that more than a year after the planned end of one of
these missions, they still had no news of the boat. Everyone in the village
fully expected all the crew to have been dead for a long time. But then one
day the great-grandpa just walked in into the village after 3 years away, like
it’s nothing! The boat had been stuck in the ice and had to spend one more
winter stuck in the Antarctic ice pack.

At one point during that winter, food was running low, my great-grandpa and a
few other pals had to row a small boat to an island 80km away to get food from
a stash they left there on a previous mission 8 years prior.

These days were... epic!

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JasonFruit
That disastrous Amundsen-Nobile-everyone else collective Arctic rescue failure
was a perfect illustration of how the human urge to do _something_ to fix a
bad situation often is worse than the seeming callousness of accepting that a
bad thing had happened and we can't make it better. It happens in the Arctic,
it happens in swamps, and it happens in economies.

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ptidhomme
This reminds me I still have to read "Le Pourquoi pas dans l'Antarctique" that
I bought some years ago.

I've always been quite fascinated by Antarctic exploration, and one of my all
times favourite books still is _The Worst journey in the world_ by Cherry-
Garrard, that relates Scott's last expedition and lost race to the Pole
(highly recommended if you're keen on adventure books).

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kreck
The interesting thing is that it literally translates to “why not?”, which I
find quite amusing, considering the mission

~~~
DoreenMichele
Came her to also offer the translation, which I do not see noted in the
article.

I'm guessing it's from the saying “There are those that look at things the way
they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

(Sources suggest George Bernard Shaw said this and he was born in 1856.)

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7047-there-are-those-
that-l...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7047-there-are-those-that-look-at-
things-the-way-they)

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vvoyer
Very relevant to an amazing book I am reading I wish will never finish: The
Terror, by Dan Simmons. A very descriptive novel about an antarctic expedition
in the 19th.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror_\(novel\))

~~~
JetSpiegel
The TV Show is also pretty nice.

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jpm_sd
Also the name of a modern research vessel:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=French_ship_Pou...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=French_ship_Pourquoi_Pas%3F_\(2005\)&_%282005%29=)

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mgnn
There are a few more photos of the ship in the French page.

