Being blocked by such barriers suggested that the polar explorers were reaching a point beyond which their will, courage, and ingenuity could not take them. At its geographical extremes, the Other might still be seductively alluring, but fatally so. In attempting to press on, these modern-day adventurers were—like Icarus—vaingloriously reaching too far and thus destined to fail. The lesson recorded in their journals was a cautionary one: man was not superior to Nature. In devouring such Arctic stories, a typical English reader was at once compelled to follow these heroes as they trekked across virgin expanses of snow and made to recoil in horror at the consequences of this decision. In evoking both reactions, the polar narrative presented a new model of manliness. It subsumed defeat by elevating the effort alone to heroic stature. Hardship did build character, and it was this new truism that Alfred, Lord Tennyson celebrated when he was asked to write something for the memorial to Franklin in Westminster Abbey. Here Tennyson finessed the explorer's disappearance and arguably pointless death with these verses:
Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou,
Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now
Toward no earthly pole.
That a sorrowful British public could find comfort in these words indicates how much the spirit of Franklin had supplanted Franklin the less-than-superman in their hearts and minds. He was not to be found, the inscription stressed, in the “frozen ice,” but in the “realms of light,” where his faithful widow would be reunited with him. The cult that grew up around the search for him and his men evolved from being obsessed with the rescue of 129 living officers and sailors to wishing to be united with all that Franklin stood for: his “gallantry” and his almost Christ-like “passion” in suffering as he had. As with Jesus, dying assured the explorer's passage to a better world. In their longing to connect with a dead Franklin through a few of his “relics,” his devotees showed that the English romantic temper was still alive and well. Keats had captured this mood deftly in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” written in the spring of 1819. In it the poet confesses he has been “half in love with easeful Death,” tempted by a desire “to leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim,” to “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget…The weariness, the fever, and the fret / Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.” This concept of suffering and death as apotheosis would increasingly take hold of the English psyche, as visions of raising the Union Jack on sun-spangled shores gave way to ones of the frozen corpses of Robert Scott and his last two companions sprawled inside a tent in the Antarctic barrens.
However, the sanguine, nationalistic temper of the nineteenth century demanded that this tendency to bow down before “gallant losers” be held in check.42 This was, after all, an age of fierce competition among the nations of Western Europe, with each bent upon staking its claim to dominance. Social Darwinism was a self-fulfilling prophecy, akin to the Protestant ethic: nations “proved” their preordained superiority by their actions on the world stage just as Christians demonstrated that they belonged to God's “elect” by amassing wealth and power. In both contexts, individual character was the wellspring of national exceptionalism. Men—and it was only they, not women, who then counted—attested to the collective vitality and might of a people by passing tests of courage and forbearance. In a time when wars were few and far between, the conquest of new seas and lands provided the best chance for them to demonstrate masculine virtue and be acclaimed for doing so.
So ambitious young Englishmen sensed this opportunity and seized it. Robert Scott was not the first or the last naval officer to realize that being the first to reach one of the poles would assure his promotion and successful military career. Older men at the top encouraged this kind of thinking. Chief among them, Clements Markham, a former midshipman and long-time president of the Royal Geographical Society, summoned the ghost of King Alfred to exhort a new generation of naval officers to honor their seagoing heritage by planting the Union Jack at the top of the world: “To the people of this country it should have a peculiar charm; for maritime and especially Arctic enterprise, runs, like a bright silver thread, through the history of the English nation, lighting up its darkest and most discreditable periods; and even giving cause for just pride, at times when all other contemporary events would be sources only of shame and regret.”43 For this reason, intrepid explorers like John Franklin, William Parry, James Ross, Elisha Kent Kane, Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen, Charles Hall, Adolphus W. Greely, Adrien de Gerlache, Robert Peary, Frederick Cook, Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Scott took on larger-than-life importance. The adulation they received was mirrored by the American fascination with Elisha Kent Kane, and his glorification when he died so prematurely. On their success or failure much more was riding than personal ambition and vanity. The flags they carried in their knapsacks would mark the steady advance of nations toward their destinies.
Thus it was essential that the men departing for the Arctic and Antarctic be seen as heroes, regardless of whatever human imperfections they might possess. That was why “moral character” was the trait most desired in the men who volunteered by the thousands to go on these expeditions.44 Entrusted with the lives of their crews, as well as the hopes of their countrymen, leaders needed to have this quality in abundance and maintain their poise and good judgment under duress. They had to command respect and obedience, as well as admiration. They had to help their men adapt to prolonged isolation and hardship.45 They had to make split-second decisions that would decide the fate of the expedition. They had to look after the well-being of their men, show empathy, preserve order, and uphold some semblance of normalcy. They had to personify self-denial, calm forbearance, competence, and confidence. They had to keep their own fears and doubts to themselves and make light of near disasters, as when Ernest Shackleton danced a waltz with Frank Worsley on the deck of the Endurance after their ship had been nipped by floating ice off the Antarctic coast.46 If any in their parties showed signs of cowardice, they had to be weeded out before this “disease” could infect the others—as Lieutenant George Back had done on the shore of Lake Winnipeg, when a Canadian voyageur forester had revealed his “unmanly” and “pusillanimous weakness” by predicting they were all going to starve to death.47 And, perhaps most importantly of all, leaders had to persist—until it was impossible to go on. Only then would they have to let go of their dreams and turn back, as Franklin had had to do reluctantly in August 1826, with winter coming on early in northern Canada, with his men crippled by legs raw, red, and grotesquely swollen from wading through near-freezing water, and with little hope of finding food or firewood anywhere nearby.48 If a leader lacked these crucial traits, the other officers, the scientists, and the ordinary sailors and soldiers would lose faith. They would become disaffected and plot rebellion. They would turn sullen, lapse into despair, and even go mad. Then they would all be lost.
Only truly exceptional men could pass all these tests of polar leadership. Most fell short. Men who had the audacity—or foolhardiness—to leave their homes and families and go off on voyages lasting years in places where survival was doubtful at best were not perfect beings when they set out, and they became less so as time went on and conditions grew dire. Just as the huzzahs of thousands of well-wishers soon faded away, so did their self-confidence dissipate on board an icebound ship or adrift on a floe. The stresses and strains of living in close quarters for so long made crews irritable and despondent. Personal animosities intensified. Expedition leaders became frustrated by the agonizingly slow progress in reaching their goals. Responsible for the men under their command, they were also obligated to the governments and private benefactors who had paid for their voyages. Furthermore, they bore the heavy weight of public expectations on their shoulders. Commanders like Franklin felt pressure to become greater men than they actually were. Expedition leaders had self-serving reasons for living up to such an exalted image, as well. Many of them were monume
ntal egotists, whose entire lives had been dedicated to attaining fame and glory through exploration. When Roald Amundsen succeeded in sailing all the way through the Northwest Passage in 1906 he was fulfilling the “long, long dreams of his youth.”49 Doggedly fanatical in his twenty-year quest to reach the North Pole, Robert Peary regarded accomplishing this feat as his “final bid for immortality.”
Undoubtedly, having such unrelenting drive was the sine qua non of polar success. Unyielding determination could sustain some men through frightful ordeals so that they could set a new Farthest North record where others had to turn back. But intense focus and drive alone were not enough to achieve these triumphs. Explorers first had to pull off the equally daunting tasks of planning, organizing, equipping, supplying, and manning their expeditions—a huge logistical challenge. But before taking that on, they had to raise the funds to pay for their journey. That was even more of a headache. Polar trips were very expensive. For example, in drawing up a proposal for a trans-Antarctic land expedition in 1913, Ernest Shackleton estimated the entire enterprise would cost roughly £50 thousand—equal to £3.8 million, or $5.6 million in today's money. Perennially short of cash, Shackleton could only come up with this amount by attracting a donor who wanted to associate his name with this “last great Polar journey that can be made.”50 (Ultimately, a Scottish jute manufacturer named James Caird agreed to underwrite the expedition—gaining lasting renown when the twenty-three-foot lifeboat named for him brought Shackleton and five of his men safely across the treacherous southern Atlantic to South Georgia Island.) Unless their governments were willing to foot the bill, or they found such a generous private benefactor, polar explorers had to spend considerable time and energy raising money. In essence, they had to market themselves as worthwhile investments. So they had to engage in two kinds of campaigns at the same time—to set new geographical records and to capture the world's attention. The second was just as important as the first because projecting a positive, compelling image was vital to selling the books and giving the lectures that paid for their future expeditions.
To advertise their exploits, explorers often found willing partners in organizations like England's Royal Geographical Society (where Clements Markham almost singlehandedly made heroes out of naval officers like Robert Scott) and in newspaper owners, who promoted death-defying voyages to bolster sales. Foremost among the latter was the eccentric and scandal-ridden publisher of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jr., one of the wealthiest men in New York City. It was he who, having taken over this newspaper from his father when he was only in his mid-twenties, had devised a scheme to send a mild-mannered correspondent named Henry Morton Stanley halfway around the world to “find” the missionary David Livingstone in “darkest Africa.” Bennett's penchant for headline-grabbing escapades carried over to his bizarre personal life: he reportedly hired editors only if one of his beloved Pomeranians showed a fondness for them, breakfasted exclusively on plover eggs, and once showed up drunk at his fiancée's family mansion and urinated in the fireplace.51
Looking for “new worlds to conquer,” or, rather, new worlds to cash in on, the eccentric Bennett agreed in 1879 to pay for a naval expedition seeking a sea route to the North Pole, led by a dashing Annapolis graduate from New York City, George Washington De Long.52 This thirty-five-year-old lieutenant had shown a flair for the outlandish by, among other things, riding a horse in the Lisbon circus just to win a bet. De Long—who as a boy had become enamored of naval heroes like Admiral David (“Damn the torpedoes!”) Farragut and Frederick Marryat—had impressed Bennett with his courage during a previous voyage to Greenland, when the young officer had rammed an ironclad steam launch through two-foot-thick ice while trying to locate the missing crew of another ship, the Polaris.53 This episode had given De Long a bad case of “Arctic fever,” and—after skeptical navy brass had turned him down—he made a successful pitch to Bennett to finance a “dash” to the pole by ship through the usually ice-blocked Bering Strait. The Herald then drummed up interest in this long-shot expedition through a series of hyperbolic articles trumpeting this expedition as “the event of the century”—America's chance to be the first nation to reach this long-elusive goal.54
Cockily arrayed on the deck of the small, three-masted, and heavily laden USS Jeannette, De Long and his civilian party of thirty-two had sailed out of San Francisco Bay past a huge throng of well-wishers waving their hats and cheering them on as if they were newlyweds embarking on their honeymoon. To make sure the Herald kept readers abreast of their progress, Bennett had arranged for his paper's science editor, an Irishman named Jerome J. Collins, to tag along, take photographs, and send back periodic reports. But these were never written, for the Jeannette became trapped in the ice early in September and then, after drifting aimlessly for nearly two years, was crushed by ice and ignominiously sank. Collins was among the twenty men, including De Long, who starved to death in the Siberian tundra while making a desperate attempt to reach safety.
In dying, De Long—like other polar explorers before and since, including his countryman Elisha Kane—ascended to mythical status in the eyes of his admiring fellow Americans. Here was a daring young commander, full of promise, striving to bring lasting glory to his country. After his death, De Long was memorialized as a courageous leader, “superabundant in joyousness and activity” in emergencies, possessed with a “magnetic power which made him singularly successful in dealing with men and in carrying out the purposes which he conceived”; as an exemplary figure who kept his men in “excellent health and spirits” and sustained their morale on board ship by ordering them to carry out their daily chores with military precision.55 Even in the worst of situations, the crew had gladly and without becoming “disheartened” put their faith in him. De Long “belonged to the men who have cared for great things, not to bring themselves honor, but because doing great things could alone satisfy their natures, and he entered upon the work before him with a single-minded earnestness, and a brave trust in God.” Despite the unrelieved tedium of their long shipboard imprisonment and the crew's mounting despair, he had clung to his naïve belief that “all will come out right” in the end. Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, this sort of glorification of polar explorers was commonplace. In the words of one Canadian literary scholar, “The explorer in charge of such a noble undertaking took on the sheen of heroism, joining the cadre of what [one historian] terms the ‘secular hagiography’ of Arctic heroes.”56
Such was the sanitized public perception of Arctic and Antarctic explorers that girded their adventures. The explorers themselves contributed to this image-making by the stories they told, the books they wrote, and the one-dimensional personae they helped to construct. Shackleton, for instance, shrewdly chose to name his ship Endurance, adopting his family motto of Fortitudine Vincimus—“by endurance we conquer.” As a result, for all time his name and this manly virtue will remain inseparable. But these stories and images omitted much. The flaws, weaknesses, miscalculations, indecisiveness, selfish motives, self-aggrandizing, and blunders of expedition leaders were concealed to make them appear singularly heroic. For example, the fact that, during one of his Canadian expeditions, Franklin had not laid down caches of food, had brought along ineffectual shotguns instead of hunting rifles, and as a result had to rely on natives for food; that he had had no prior trekking experience and therefore frequently lost his way through the wilderness; and that when his situation was practically hopeless he looked to God and not his own ingenuity to save him and his men—all of these deficiencies were ignored so that the world could see him as a “gallant” and tragic martyr.57
In an age lacking in warfare and military conquest, polar explorers filled a void. Even if their quests were largely symbolic, the public did not care. The heroic spirit they exhibited was the same as the soldiers’, and this was what people in Europe and the United States badly needed to celebrate. Yet, beneath the surface, the disparity between heroic image and cowardly, sel
f-serving deeds continued to grow. As more and more expeditions failed to achieve their aims, as more and more ships were stuck in the ice, as more and more lives were lost, this incongruity would become increasingly difficult to conceal. Either the sordid reality of polar exploration would have to be revealed, or the concept of heroism altered to reflect the unprecedented challenges explorers were facing at the top of the world. In any event, the old definitions of “fame” and “glory” would have to go.
In the spring of 1880, Arthur Conan Doyle was in the midst of his medical studies at the storied University of Edinburgh when he got wind of an unusual opportunity. A local Greenland-bound whaling ship—one of the last still in operation, portentously named Hope—was badly in need of a physician, as the one that had been recruited, a fellow student of his, had abruptly bowed out. Without a moment's hesitation, Doyle agreed to interrupt his training and sign on.1 This may have appeared to be a snap decision, but it actually reflected a well-developed contrarian streak in his character. Raised in a strict Catholic family and educated by the Jesuits, Doyle had recently left the Church and become an agnostic. His urge to escape from organized religion and his starchy Scottish upbringing was a manifestation of a rebellious spirit that had been fomenting inside him for some time.
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