Where the Earth Ends

At the end of the 20th century, John Harrison travelled through one of the most hostile environments on Earth. From the Argentine plains, he journeyed ever south, searching out the stories of natives and settlers, through Patagonia, the land where Magellan and Drake walked with giants, to Tierra del Fuego. On the tip of South America - the last continental land on earth colonized by man.;One morning a sign went up advertising trips on a Russian research vessel, so he tore up a year's lanning and added Antartica to the journey. Within days he was sailing through towering grey seas where in real life Coleridge's poetic albatross was shot. Then began an attempt to break through the ice and stand on the edge of the continent.;Returning round Cape Horn, he went north, through Chile's remote, wild fjords, where real journeys began to merge with fiction. He sailed through the mists where Byron's grandfather was wrecked, and walked on the bright Pacific isle where the real Robinson Crusoe taught his cats to dance.