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William Speirs Bruce: Forgotten polar hero Isobel P. Williams & John R. Dudeney Amberley Publishing, Stroud, 2018 ISBN 978-14-456-8081-1, 304 pp. £20
In the public eye, the Heroic Age of polar exploration is dominated by three very different individuals: Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen. In Australia, of course, Mawson rightly gets attention and in the Nordic countries so does Nansen. But one important figure is almost invisible: William Speirs Bruce. Bruce gets barely a mention in Edward Larson's history of Heroic Era science (An Empire of Ice, Yale University Press, 2013), though he does figure in Tony Fogg's thorough A History of Antarctic Science (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and was the subject of a recent biography by Peter Speak (National Museums of Scotland, 2003, now out of print). This new biography is by polar historian Isobel Williams and polar scientist John Dudeney, a combination of skills that is apposite, for it was through science that Bruce made his greatest contribution to our knowledge of Antarctica.
Bruce was born into relatively comfortable circumstances in London, though he was...