| Summary: | With the filling of the large space on the map that was Tibet and High Asia, explorers turned to smaller spaces or else they turned to those untouched extremities where there was no map—the Arctic and the Antarctic. ‘To the ends of the earth ’ first describes the search for the North Pole in the Arctic. It was Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary who laid their competing claims to 90° north, but the race to the South Pole was between Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen. It was Amundsen who succeeded. The two next terrestrial prizes were the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest, and Rub' al Khali, the “Empty Quarter” of southeastern Arabia.
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