Doyle's longing to move away from his roots had been spurred by reading books by his fellow Scot Winwood Reade—a well-to-do historian and explorer who in his youth had flunked out of Oxford and then impulsively sailed for Africa to do exciting things like look for the source of the Nile and then write about his exploits. He would make sense out of the “Dark Continent” as no European had ever done. Along the way he would reinvent himself, free of the stifling influences of British civilization, religion, and materialism.2 Reade did turn his travels into a series of extremely popular books, starting with The African Sketch-Book (1873). At his young and impressionable age, Doyle could easily imagine himself having similar adventures in the frozen North and retelling them in print as a second career. Already in medical school he had tried his hand at writing short stories.
As it turned out, there was little to keep a doctor busy on the SS Hope, and so Doyle spent most of the next seven months conversing with the grizzled captain, one John Gray III, who—because of his position and Victorian class proprieties—had to remain aloof from the crew and, as a result, was desperately in need of someone to talk to. A well-read and curious young doctor could certainly enliven the evenings. So the two of them would dine in Gray's cabin and converse about subjects ranging from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the likelihood of war with Russia, while the steam-powered Hope basked in the eerie, perpetual light of the Arctic summer.3 While Doyle enjoyed this sojourn at sea and—as he had hoped—wrote about it after he got home, the dark and unsettling aspect of his extended stay in this alien part of the world also left a lasting impression on his imagination. He had sensed the “melancholy” and feeling of helplessness that arose when the Hope came close to being stuck in the ice. But it was the strange plight of the skipper—how he endured such loneliness for so long, month after month—that haunted him most.
A few years after his return to Scotland, Doyle published a story entitled “The Captain of the Pole-Star.” It was a ghost story, clearly inspired by his stay off the coast of Greenland (and possibly by Melville's Moby-Dick). It told of a whaler surrounded by ice, unable to get near its prey, with food supplies running low, its crew restless and homesick, and its captain maniacally bent, like Ahab, about finishing the job he'd come to do. Suspended in limbo, the sailors on the Pole-Star begin to hear strange “plaintive cries and screams” astern. Two of them insist they have seen a ghostlike figure dressed in white, scurrying across the ice field. Growing fearful, their shipmates want to turn the ship around and head back, but the captain—Craigie—refuses to do so. Instead he “spends the greater part of the day at the crow's nest, sweeping the horizon with his glass.” The men are convinced he has gone mad and plot to put him in irons. The captain's obsession with finding whales only intensifies as the Pole-Star becomes firmly encircled by solid ice and caught in its death-like embrace: “No lapping of the waves now, no cries of seagulls or straining of sails, but one deep universal silence in which the murmurs of the seamen, and the creak of their boots upon the white shining deck, seem discordant and out of place.” Then the captain, too, falls under the spell of this apparition. After catching a better glimpse, he tells the men that this is no ghost, but a real woman. He paces up and down the deck like a caged animal, unable to shake himself of this obsession, which has “brought out all his latent lunacy in an exaggerated form.” When the crew realizes the ship can now break free, Craigie will not listen: he hears only the siren call of the sprite. After staring into the mist one day, he cries out “Coming lass, coming,” jumps over the side of the ship, and races off. When the men go out to look for him, they find the captain dead, lying face down encased in ice, with snow in the shape of a woman whirling around him, and a “bright smile upon his blue pinched features.” After he is buried at sea, the rest of the men return home, their captain's secret concealed with him deep beneath the sea.4
While Doyle's melodramatic portrayal of a sea captain driven insane by his inability to fulfill his ambitions is fictional, it does speak to what he sensed during his voyage with the whaler Hope—namely, how a widening gulf between hopes and intransigent reality could torment the soul. At the perilous and unpredictable poles, madness always hovered on the horizon, waiting for its moment to move in. It did so when this mental tension grew overpowering. Then anyone could succumb. A commander was particularly vulnerable to becoming unstable because—like Ahab—he was deeply committed to achieving his goal. He carried great responsibility, at a great personal cost. The captain was also the one person on whom all the other lives depended: if he broke down the entire crew would be endangered. Symbolically, his going mad implied the breakdown of reason and control. This was the risk inherent in testing the limits of human capabilities, far outside the pale of civilization. That is why literary treatment of the “commander gone amok”—first developed by Melville—resonated so powerfully. Ostensibly, leaders like John Franklin, Elisha Kent Kane, and George De Long were exploring the far reaches of the Arctic wastes to advance science, human curiosity, commercial interests, or territorial aspirations, but at heart they were also furthering their own ambitions. They had the most to gain, and the most to lose. Because of their position, they were also a law unto themselves. But commanders had to disguise such naked ambition, as Victorian mores required. The public would not admire a leader who spoke openly about his selfish motives. Their real reasons for going toward the polar caps could only be discerned by what they did once they got there. Being in charge of an Arctic or Antarctic expedition called for an exceptionally strong ego, able to dismiss these inconsistencies between words and deeds. Otherwise, like Doyle's Captain Craigie, they would go mad.
When the Franklin party did not reemerge from the Arctic long after they were supposed to, the fate of “so many good, gallant, and brave men” became a national obsession:5 newspapers bemoaned their fate, governments organized rescue missions, and dozens of prominent figures stepped forward offering to lead them. But all too often these volunteers were more interested in making a name for themselves than in finding Sir John Franklin or any of his companions. Some came up with truly harebrained schemes for doing so. A man named Shepherd wrote to the Admiralty proposing that he be given a ship to sail northward laden with explosives so that he could blow the ice to smithereens and thus reach the presumably beset English vessels, Erebus and Terror.6 A onetime actor and novice aeronaut, George Gale, offered to soar over the Arctic ice pack in a balloon to locate the missing men.7 (Turned down, he would plunge to his death less than a year later, at Bordeaux.) More experienced Arctic hands like the seventy-three-year-old John Ross also volunteered to lead search parties. Lady Franklin encouraged others to join the rescue effort in haste, without waiting for official backing.8 Although her interest was clearly selfless, those she implored to join the hunt for the missing sailors were not always so high-minded. Tellingly, as was revealed in their journals, many search-party leaders made only perfunctory attempts to discover traces of the Franklin party before turning their attention to finding new routes that might lead to the Open Polar Sea. One such adventurer was Robert Randolph Carter, a twenty-four-year-old Virginia blueblood and recent Annapolis graduate who would later gain notoriety as a Confederate blockade runner.
In 1850 Carter signed on as first officer and navigator on the aptly named Rescue, an American brig purchased and retrofitted for Arctic service by shipping tycoon Henry Grinnell, who was sparing no expense to relieve Lady Franklin's distress.9 Manned by navy crews and officers, this small brig and a larger companion vessel, Advance, were instructed to pick up where the unsuccessful British search had left off. Carter went along on this voyage not out of any compassion for his fellow seamen but because he wanted to play a role in discovering the Northwest Passage—still tantalizing to Arctic mariners long after its commercial potential had evaporated—and the so-called “Polynia,” or polar sea, which was believed to lie just north of it. Looking for Franklin gave him, and, more generally, the US Navy, an excuse to join this wider expl
oration: Americans were now eager to become “players” in a growing Arctic territorial competition. Carter had been warned by his friends against going (as months on a cramped ship under spartan conditions would not suit him well), but this chance to share in an “achievement most glorious that the annals of the earth could record” was not to be forsworn.10
However, Carter soon became “heartily disgusted” by the “discomforts and vexations” on board and spent most of his time on watch taking potshots at gulls and pining for his fiancée. There was no sign of open sea to the north and west, where the Rescue's captain, Samuel Griffin, had hoped to find it. The two American ships never got clear of ice in Lancaster Sound, located to the north of Baffin Island. Seasick and homesick, Carter made no mention of John Franklin in his journal until Rescue happened upon some British ships that had located three graves of Franklin's men. Even then, all Carter could think of was getting home as soon as possible.11 In his indifference he was only reflecting what Edwin De Haven, the commanding officer of the Advance, had made clear when the two American vessels had arrived in the Arctic: Franklin was not their priority; finding the Northwest Passage was.12 Published accounts of British voyages in search of the Franklin party similarly pay lip service to the official rationale, but they also reveal that their real purpose was to discover new routes and territory.13
Like Carter, Elisha Kent Kane had joined this first Grinnell-funded expedition, as its chief medical officer, scientist, and historian, for the sheer love of adventure—and the fame and fortune that would ensue. After he made it back to the States in 1851, Kane gave a series of lectures at the Smithsonian to win congressional backing for another Arctic expedition. At the podium he waxed eloquent about leading a party all the way to the polar sea to find Franklin, because the fate of the missing explorer was what his audience cared about. He kept quiet about what he really wanted to do—plant his foot farther north than any human had done before. Employing this same altruistic pitch, he persuaded Grinnell to again outfit the ice-tested Advance, and on May 30, 1853, the Philadelphia doctor strode confidently up a gangplank in New York harbor to set sail on his second trip to the Arctic, this time as commander—a position he had never before held. Friction between Kane's agenda and that of his motley crew—a “mish-mash of seasoned sailors, family friends, green volunteers, and the sweepings of New York's docks”14—became apparent soon after the Advance reached Smith Sound, in far northern Canada, that September. At first, Kane told his men that they would have to return home as the ship had been badly damaged by collisions with ice floes. But then he changed his mind: the party would stay for the winter so that he could use this outpost as a jumping-off point for sledge journeys further north once the weather had improved. The men howled in dismay, but to no avail. That spring, six men from the ship plodded some two hundred miles north across a Greenland glacier, through a “freezing purgatory,” until they reached the coast at Rensselaer Bay. There they beheld not the open, navigable sea Kane had expected but a “wilderness of ice and barren rocks” stretching to the northern horizon. Despite this bitter disappointment, Kane could claim some credit for this party's having attained a new Farthest North record of 82.30 degrees before, close to death, they had to turn back. Hallucinating, chanting, cursing, and waving their arms wildly, the men managed to stave off pain and cold and kept going, sleeping for twenty-seven nights on the ice without a fire to warm them, until they made it back to the snow-shrouded Advance.15
A fluent and dramatic storyteller, Kane turned this escapade and his subsequent ordeal in Greenland into the kind of book publishers drool over—a phenomenal, richly illustrated page-turner entitled Arctic Explorations. During its first year in print some sixty thousand copies were sold.16 Between its covers Americans found the hero they had been longing for—a frail, skinny young man with tremendous spunk and an unquenchable spirit, who had survived horrific Arctic conditions solely by dint of his willpower and refusal to quit. Once, when men on a sledging excursion fell ill and could not go on any further, Kane and a sailor named William Godfrey struck out for camp on their own to bring back food and water—an incredible journey that the Philadelphia doctor described thusly:
I cannot tell how long it took us to make the nine miles, for we were in a strange sort of stupor, and had little apprehension of time…. We kept ourselves awake by imposing on each other a continued articulation of words; they must have been incoherent enough. I recall these hours as among the most wretched I have ever gone through: we were neither of us in our right senses, and retained a very confused recollection of what preceded our arrival at the tent. We both of us, however, recall a bear, who walked leisurely before us and tore up as he went a jumper…into shreds and rolled it into a ball, but never offered to interfere with our progress. I remember this, and with it a confused sentiment that our tent and buffalo-robes might probably share the same fate. Godfrey…had a better eye than myself; and, looking some miles ahead, he could see that our tent was undergoing the same unceremonious treatment. I thought I saw it too, but we were so drunken with cold that we strode on steadily and, for aught I know, without quickening our pace.17
This was, indeed, a gripping tale, vividly conveying Kane's physical pain, life-threatening danger (the polar bear), and his exhausted and disoriented state of mind. A reader could imagine being there and feeling what Kane had, drawn into this strange environment to a degree that previous polar narratives, written mostly by naval officers with little literary flair, had not been able to do. It is easy to see how a book like this could transform a relatively inexperienced explorer, with only a modest record of accomplishment, into “Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas”—a larger-than-life figure embodying the storied American tradition of indomitable individual struggle against a hostile Nature—a Daniel Boone for the Industrial Age. Kane was also portrayed as a global Man of Science, in the mold of the famed German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, braving the polar snows to extend human knowledge.18 This popular image was, in fact, a carefully calculated creation: Kane invariably spent his polar nights hunkered down in a wind-lashed tent, scribbling in his journal with his eye keenly focused on eventual publication. Back in Philadelphia, his younger brother, Tom, advanced this goal by convincing magazines and newspapers to run excerpts from Elisha's accounts, with riveting headings such as “A Storm among the Bergs.” It was small wonder that the American public became more fascinated by this remote and mysterious region than ever before.19
But this bond with the explorer was built on a false premise. The persona Kane forged for himself was just that—a forgery. Its connection with reality was tenuous and, at times, nonexistent. In his writings, Kane exaggerated his accomplishments like a politician courting votes, not as a scientist objectively describing what he had actually seen and done. Inconvenient truths were kept out. As a general rule, Arctic and Antarctic explorers could get away with this deception because their adventures took place thousands of miles away, under conditions where hard facts were difficult to establish. On top of that, expedition leaders—or their financial backers—usually exercised exclusive control over what was published about their trips. But in the case of Kane's second Arctic expedition this was not the case. William Godfrey, the man who had tramped with Kane through deep snow and howling winds to rescue their comrades, had a tale of his own to tell, and a compelling reason for doing so. He and Kane had clashed several times during their stay in Greenland—most dramatically when the fiercely independent Yankee sailor had left the icebound Advance without permission, and Kane had threatened to shoot him as a mutineer. When Kane's book came out, Godfrey was incensed to find himself branded a “bad fellow” and his commander justifying an attempt to kill him simply because he had disobeyed an order. In the doctor's book, Godfrey also found many statements he considered false or misleading and vowed to set the record straight. In his own book, which came out a few months after Kane's death, Godfrey pointed out that, among other things, the doctor had gotten his facts wrong in descri
bing the incident with the polar bear. The two men hadn't been delirious, only Kane; there was no bear: that was “a creation of the doctor's fancy”; and they both hadn't stumbled back to the tent, only Godfrey, who was carrying an incoherent and helpless Kane.20
Exactly whose version of these events was more accurate is impossible to say, but there is no doubt that Elisha Kent Kane had a penchant for self-promotion (aided and abetted by his ambitious father and younger sibling Tom back in Philadelphia). Dramatically embellishing his accomplishments would ensure that his fame spread and his books sold. (Godfrey would go so far as to accuse Kane's brother of orchestrating an elaborate funeral in order to do just that.21) Frequently, in his lectures and books, Kane presented himself as the leader he wanted to be, an idealized projection.22 Whether or not he fell so much in love with this image that he could not see there was a difference between it and the person he really was we cannot know for sure. In any event, the self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing Kane could lord over this world he had created, with his own words virtually unchallenged, like an imperial monarch who brooked no naysayers. In his narratives, Kane achieved the unity and consistency that was missing in his actions. With the stroke of his pen, failures could be turned into triumphs and mistakes construed as events beyond his control.
In the undefined white expanses at the polar caps, amid wildly swirling snow and curtains of fog, what really happened remained, ultimately, subjective. One could easily convince himself that things had happened, which hadn't, and deny what had really taken place. Thus, men like Frederick Cook and Robert Peary could go on arguing until they died about which of them had first reached the North Pole. Character was supposed to be the arbiter of truth, but—like the sextant and the chronometer at high latitudes—it was not always reliable. Any explorer could be tempted to distort the truth for his own benefit. The British public may have wagged their fingers at Roald Amundsen for concealing his intent to make for the South Pole instead of heading northward in 1910, but their own heroes were not faultless in this regard: Scott and Shackleton squabbled like petulant schoolboys over who had the “right” to use McMurdo Sound as a base of operations, and Scott was not exactly “honorable” in purportedly encouraging the crippled and dying “poor soldier” Lawrence Oates to swallow a morphine pill so that the others could go on ahead faster without him.23 On the other hand, character in an existential vacuum—devoid of the gritty alloy of real-life experience—was a volatile and dangerous substance. The romantic British notion that superior moral fiber alone was sufficient to sustain days of manhauling eight-hundred-pound sledges up the steep slope of a glacier would prove, time and again, to be disastrous. (“Gentlemen don't practice,” was Scott's credo, although—in truth—one he didn't always abide by.24)
To the Ends of the Earth Page 5