At the start of the twentieth century, the North and South Poles remain the only unmapped regions on Earth, and this film tracks the explorers who raced to claim them. Robert Peary pushes toward the North Pole across Arctic ice in 1909, while in the south Roald Amundsen, Robert Scott, and Ernest Shackleton compete for a goal that turns fatal for some of them: Scott's party reaches the South Pole in 1912 only to find Amundsen's Norwegian flag already there, and dies on the return march. The film follows each expedition's route across crevasses and pack ice, weighing the nationalistic rivalries between Britain, Norway, and the United States that funded these journeys against the explorers' own diaries and letters, which record cold, starvation, and isolation in plain terms. It is a straightforward account of a specific historical contest, four names and two poles, told through the outcomes each expedition actually reached.