Before Roald Amundsen sailed through the Northwest Passage in 1906, British expeditions had been struggling, dying and failing to find a navigable way from the northern Atlantic to the Pacific ocean for over 300 years. Martin Frobisher made the first attempt in 1576, but even by 1600, when the East India Company was set up and sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India and the spice islands, the Northwest Passage was no longer an essential trade route for British merchants. Nevertheless, the discovery of a northern passage became a quest  it was "an object peculiarly British", said John Barrow, second secretary to the Admiralty for most of the first half of the 19th century. The persistent search for the Northwest Passage was due to Barrow's longevity at the Admiralty, his unshakeable belief in the need for the British navy to find it, as well as a lifelong and incorrect conviction that the polar sea, if it could only be reached through the labyrinthine Canadian archipelago, never froze, because there was no such thing as sea ice. Anthony Brandt's exhaustive, elegant history of the quest is as much concerned with Barrow and British delusion as it is with the earlier explorers, Sir John Franklin's complete disappearance in the 1840s, and the 10 long years spent looking for him.

Brandt's detailing of centuries of expeditions is necessarily repetitious, but reading it with attention has the advantage of giving the armchair explorer a faint sense of the dogged endurance required to make an actual journey. This is hardly Brandt's fault. Though ice has many forms and the names of the heroes change somewhat from year to year, in the end, every expedition sails through icy seas, looks out on desolate, heart-sinking isolation, drags ships by hand through opening-then-closing leads in the frozen water, hauls 200lb sledges over great hummocks and pointy shards of ice that make feet bleed. Each hero and his crew, time after time, suffer from scurvy, frostbite and hunger. And they are all always very cold indeed. In 1819, when a man in Edward Parry's expedition turned up with frozen hands, the ship's surgeon, who plunged them into water to defrost them, succeeded only in freezing the water in the bowl.

Reading about stoic men suffering in appalling conditions while searching for a pole or the source of a river or a lost missionary is a favourite British pastime. Tell us how cold it was (-56 degrees; fish froze as they were brought to the surface) and how hungry they were (pounded fat and Indian hair was "thought to be a great luxury after three days of starvation"; Franklin boiled and ate his leather boots), and we settle down happily with a shiver of empathy and a virtuous sense of having endured a little of the dreadfulness ourselves. Having spent a night in a tent (unwillingly) at -40C, during which every miserable moment was filled with a sense of outrage at how cold I was and wishing I wasn't where I was, I know that reading about physical suffering is good exercise for the imagination, but no substitute for the misery. However much I read of these explorers, I will never understand how it is that, having starved and frozen for two or three years for nothing very much  a mark on a map, a lost foot  they get home, half-dead, and then agree to go back again: for honour, glory or plain Britishness.

Brandt describes Franklin as "having the emotional depth of a puddle", and it may be that sheer lack of imagination is one answer. My bafflement is an admission of my complete lack of resilience; other people seem to find their staggering sense of duty perfectly reasonable. I'd do better to take Franklin's wife, Lady Jane, a passionate, compulsive traveller, as my study. She roamed freely, embodying an indefatigable desire to know the world for what it was far better than most of the upright naval gentlemen who fulfilled their duty. But even she, like virtually everyone else, continued to deny all the evidence that eventually turned up of necessitous cannibalism among Franklin's starving crew. Englishmen simply didn't do that, she insisted, and the Times and the Athenaeum rumbled, even though sawn human bones made it clear that, entirely reasonably, they had.

Five years after becoming the first to sail the Northwest Passage, Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole. He succeeded where so many British attempts had failed because he knew and respected the terrain, and did not overburden his expeditions with grandeur and a sense of righteous entitlement, as did the British, who refused to consider learning about Arctic survival from the Inuit, whom they mostly berated for bad table manners.

Yet although Amundsen got there first, north and south, with little fuss and no fatalities, it was those who failed and died who have been acclaimed heroes and exemplars. Scott, latterly, has had his detractors, but Franklin, lost along with all 126 of his crew, despite a dozen or more fruitless rescue expeditions costing vast amounts of money, has remained England's own role model. Perhaps this is changing. Brandt finishes his book on a surprisingly reproachful note: "We can admire the courage, even the persistence of the quest. But if we respect history at all we must temper whatever admiration we may feel with the image of pieces of human arms and legs cooking in a kettle while starving men stare with deadened eyes at the ultimate consequences of this spectacular piece of folly."

Jenny Diski's What I Don't Know About Animals is published by Virago.