To the Ends of the Earth
Page 6
In the end, deciding who was telling the truth—whose claim was plausible, Cook's or Perry's?—was left up to public opinion: it wasn't something that could be definitively proven or disproven. At the poles, belief was irrefutable. By adroitly cultivating a good public relations campaign and sticking to one's story, the shrewd explorer could turn legend into fact, failure into triumph (or, as in Scott's case, into martyrdom), and thus avoid the madness that could easily result when desires and the unyielding realities of the polar world collided. Of course, to be a prisoner of one's delusions is another form of insanity, but someone like Elisha Kent Kane probably never stayed awake late at night wrestling with demons. His chronic indifference to truth was not a liability but a means of empowerment.
That said, not all leaders of polar expeditions were possessed by the Old Testament megalomania of an Ahab, able to compel men, as under a spell, to do their bidding unquestioningly. Nor did all of them have the ability to hold unpleasant facts at bay indefinitely. To have their way, they had to engage with both their crews and the strange, protean world in which they found themselves. But in this regard, there were some cultural differences: the British class system and military tradition kept men and officers strictly separated—eating in different messes and performing different duties, whereas Americans and Scandinavians tended to deal with one another as equals. In these egalitarian environments, the men in charge were more subject to close scrutiny and criticism. They had to earn respect and uphold their leadership by making the right decisions. Otherwise, when things went wrong, they would get the blame. Open conflict with subordinates could threaten their status and undermine an entire expedition. So democratic-minded commanders had more reason to feel insecure and fear they would lose control.
For instance, on the Jeannette, Lieutenant De Long and the journalist-cum-meteorologist Jerome Collins could not stomach each either from the start. The Irishman's constant punning got on the commander's nerves. He had not wanted to bring a scientist along, saw no point in keeping weather records, and didn't think much of Collins's credentials.25 When the Herald reporter asked if he could try out the electric lights Thomas Edison had given the expedition to brighten the Arctic winter, De Long denied him permission, saying he worried that the men would be disappointed if they didn't work. (As it turned out, the lights weren't turned on because it would have taken too much precious coal to keep them glowing.26) Collins felt he was being treated like an “accessory,” since De Long pointedly assigned scientific tasks to others. After the Jeannette became stuck in the ice and started heeling over, tensions between the two men erupted into the open. De Long was then frustrated that his dream of reaching the Open Polar Sea had come to naught so prematurely. So when Collins flatly refused to take part in the crew's morning physical exercises, De Long accused him of disregarding a direct order and threatened severe consequences.
Meanwhile, battered by ice floes, the ship was taking on water at the rate of sixty gallons a minute, and the lieutenant's inexperienced crew was growing apprehensive. After looking at their faces and thinking of his own state of mind, De Long wrote in his journal that being so immobilized strained “man's temper or physical endurance” more than any other experience.27 On Christmas Day the men ate a wordless breakfast, with “with memories accumulating in the silence.” By mid-February, the once sanguine commander had to confess that “All our hoped-for explorations and perhaps discoveries…seem slipping away from us.” When De Long and his fellow officers stood watch at night they had nothing to say to each other. Still unable to move forward at the end of June 1880, he had to admit to himself that the Open Polar Sea was “a delusion and a snare.” Like Doyle's fictional captain of the Pole-Star, De Long could not accept that ice had prevented him from achieving his objective at only 77.19 degrees north latitude, still some seven hundred miles from the pole. The voyage he had envisioned through the Bering Strait had begun with high hopes but now would be consigned to the world's “dreary wastebasket.”
Coal was fast running out, and so was their time on the doomed ship. Living day after day with the fear that at any moment the hull could be smashed and the Jeannette sink, the men became morose; they withdrew into tight cliques and muttered their grievances out of earshot of the others. (Each group had its “pet” dog, and when these famine-crazed creatures lunged at each other, snapping, going for the jugular, these canine struggles seemingly acted out the crew's repressed hostility.28) Collins was more direct, dashing off a note to De Long complaining about his “contemptuous disregard” for the journalist's feelings and accusing him of not showing proper respect. De Long's response was to relieve Collins of all meteorological duties. It was as if this grating of nerves on board was mirroring the grinding and groaning of the ice against the sides of the ship, creating ever greater pressure. De Long tried to keep up discipline and daily routines so as to remind the men of their connection to the “normal” world they had left behind, but this did little to stop morale from breaking down. Life on the imprisoned Jeannette was turning into a form of psychological torture none of them had foreseen. What they were discovering on this voyage was not new territory, but their own inner selves. As Hampton Sides has put it in his book on the De Long expedition, “If they had not really gone anywhere, they had journeyed into regions of the psyche where few men had ever been, interior spaces that brought out aspects of themselves they'd never known existed.”29 De Long came to feel closer to his men in this increasingly desperate situation, but he also found out there was a plot brewing to take over the ship and relieve him of command. Crew members were agitated over the growing likelihood of having to abandon the ship and strike out for safety across a frozen sea. Late on the night of June 12, with the hull splintering and water pouring in, De Long finally gave the order to unload provisions and equipment and take to the ice. After they had hurriedly set up a temporary camp several hundred yards from the rapidly sinking Jeannette, De Long tried once more to look on the bright side, jotting in his journal, “All cheerful, with plenty to eat and wear.”30 (He neglected to mention that many of the men were doubled over with cramps caused by having eaten lead-contaminated food.31) Whether he really believed what he had written or was only trying to make himself believe it cannot be determined. What is clear from De Long's journal is that he oscillated, in a manic-depressive manner, between unrealistic hopes and frank despair, between candid acknowledgement of his desperate predicament and longings to have his wife, Emma, at his side so that they could gaze up at the beautiful Arctic night sky together.32 One moment, De Long would affirm his motto of “Hope On, Hope Ever,” and the next lapse into a lachrymose lament like this:
There can be no greater wear and tear on a man's mind and patience than this life in the pack…. The absolute monotony; the unchanging round of hours; the awakening to the same things and the same conditions that one saw just before losing one's self in sleep; the same faces; the same dogs; the same ice; the same conviction that to-morrow will be exactly the same as to-day, if not more disagreeable; the absolute impotence to do anything, to go anywhere, or to change one's situation an iota.33
Time and again, he would push such bleak thoughts away and grasp at another straw. One marker of this was his frequent use of the word “cheerful,” as if this served as a verbal talisman to ward off disaster, or keep him oblivious of it. (Soon after the coal heaver Nelse Iverson had tipped him off about the intended mutiny, De Long was dumbfounded to hear from the surgeon on board, James Ambler, that this man was “trembling on the border of insanity,” incoherent and hysterical: the lieutenant had always found Iverson “ bright and cheerful.”34 De Long's poor eyesight cannot excuse this obtuseness.) De Long evoked this bromide one final time in the Siberian wilderness, 120 days after leaving the Jeannette, with men dying daily around him, and the survivors reduced to chewing on deerskin scraps: “All hands weak and feeble, but cheerful. God help us.”35
The apparent divide in De Long's grasp of reality was not unique to him, but rat
her representative of a larger, cultural dichotomy. Nineteenth-century European and American decorum dictated that thoughts and feelings remain private. Middle-class and upper-class men ventured into the public arena wearing a well-fitting mask and interacted with others through it. What we today might regard as hypocrisy was, in their day, behaving properly. One had to be true to more than one's own self. Their other responsibility was to live up to expectations, regardless of what the extenuating circumstances might be. For polar explorers, this was an especially trying duty: their moral convictions warred against the life-or-death exigencies they faced. They could not survive in this unforgiving realm without, at times, violating their values, and yet if they disregarded these principles they would betray their code of honor and self-respect. It was a terrible choice they had to make. For expedition leaders, who were supposed to set an example for the other men, it was soul wrenching.
For some of them, like Robert Scott, the solution lay in retreating inward, keeping their own counsel, and turning challenges like crossing a glacier with almost no food or fuel left into tests of courage and perseverance. Passing these was the essence of manliness. As a commander, Scott was famously introspective, diffident, and secretive—formal and reserved to a fault. He signed off on his instructions to the heads of his Antarctic sledge parties with “Wishing you all success, Robt. Scott, Captain.” (In sticking to proprieties, he resembled the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had trekked for nine months across the frozen Arctic Ocean accompanied by a young coal stoker named Hjalmar Johansen before he felt comfortable enough to propose switching to the informal Du form in speaking to each other.36) Scott was also self-contained, melancholic, and unobtrusive, perhaps because of his modest family circumstances:37 he lacked upper-class savoir faire and confidence about his social status.38 He was also a bit of a dreamer, content to lose himself in poetry and other kinds of escape from the world around him. Since the age of thirteen, Scott had been in the Royal Navy, and over these many years the man and his identity as an officer had merged. He was not one to cultivate intimacy with his peers or underlings or bare his chest to them. Uncertain about how to proceed in the unfamiliar wasteland of Antarctica, Scott would periodically withdraw to his quarters, brood for a while, and then return to summarily announce his plans to his companions.
This standoffishness was compounded by a sentimental streak—preventing him at times from making sound, pragmatic decisions. Scott's affection for animals, for example, clouded his judgments about how to use them effectively. He became so attached to the dogs dragging their sledges that he would not allow Oates to kill them for food. In his dealings with his men, Scott was also inclined to let highly subjective assessments prevail over practical considerations. When he chose companions for his 1901 Discovery expedition, he picked—almost to a man—persons without any polar experience. In preparing for his disastrous 1910 expedition to Antarctica, he selected team members largely on his assessment of their characters (of which he was a poor judge) and overlooked significant shortcomings, such as Apsley Cherry-Garrard's nearsightedness. He allowed a dog handler named Cecil Meares to pick out the Siberian ponies for his trek to the South Pole even though the fun-loving Irishman had no knowledge about these animals and ended up buying ones that were weak and sickly. He allowed Edward Wilson, Cherry-Garrard, and “Birdie” Bowers to undertake an excursion across the Ross Ice Shelf in the middle of the Antarctic winter to retrieve some Emperor penguin eggs—an ill-conceived side trip that rapidly devolved into the “worst journey in the world,” weakening the health of the men he needed to have in good shape for the final march south. He left behind the person most skilled in operating motor sledges because his second-in-command, Lieutenant “Teddy” Evans was not comfortable having such a higher-ranking officer come along.39 None of these fateful decisions had anything to with “bad luck”—which Scott would blame for his failure to reach the pole ahead of Amundsen.
Good leaders must be dreamers in imagining grand destinies, but to turn these dreams into reality they have to be hard-nosed, clear-sighted persons who listen to advice, learn from experience, and adapt in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Scott's fatal flaw was his inability to focus exclusively on the most efficient means of carrying out his mission, and for this he paid a high price. His “madness” lay in believing that the human spirit alone could triumph over the natural world. But this was not the only reason why so many expedition leaders met with disaster at the ends of the earth. Many were simply overwhelmed by the physical and psychological barriers they faced. At the poles, failure was not just a possibility; it was what could be expected. During the mid-nineteenth century, of the dozens of ships that sailed forth looking for traces of the missing Franklin expedition, almost none of them succeeded in finding anything. (It was not until 2014 that one of Franklin's two vessels was discovered, largely intact, on the bottom of Victoria Strait. The other, Terror, was located two and a half years later, some distance to the south.) As was noted earlier, many of these “rescue” missions ran into serious trouble: ships were caught in the ice and sank; men suffered from scurvy, starvation, and extreme cold, and many of them died. Being imprisoned in the Arctic, with dwindling supplies of food and coal, living in cramped quarters with no guarantee of ever returning home, exacted a heavy toll. Because expedition leaders had no one in whom they could confide or from whom they could get advice, pressures on them intensified when the situation on board deteriorated. Few bore up well under this strain. Their relationships with their crews grew tense and volatile. Personality conflicts led to backstabbing, open dissension, defiance of authority, and even revolt. In this way, a leader's weaknesses undermined the esprit and resolve of the entire party.
Such conflicts were more apt to arise when the party was diverse in its make up or motives. As happened on the Belgica, competing objectives—geographical conquest versus scientific discovery, for example—could breed contempt and animosity. Fearful for their lives, men formed “tribal” bonds with those like them and turned their backs on the others. Estrangement could fragment a crew. During the ship's long stay in the Antarctic pack, curses in Polish, Norwegian, Flemish, French, Romanian, Russian, and English had peppered the dank quarters below deck and amplified feelings of alienation. On another multinational voyage to Antarctica, the British-financed sealer Southern Cross duly flew the Union Jack even though all but two in the party were Norwegian. The captain, a half-Norwegian, half-British ex-schoolmaster named Carsten Borchgrevink, clashed with the scientists on board even before leaving England, when he made them each sign a piece of paper granting him exclusive rights to publish their findings. Borchgrevink further angered these men by reaming them out for returning late to the ship during a stopover in Madeira. Anxious to be accepted as a peer, he claimed to be a scientist, although he had not been trained as one. (Borchgrevink had revealed his true reason for sailing south when he had leapt overboard during a previous, 1895 Antarctic expedition so that he could become the first person to set foot on that continent.40) After some of the scientists questioned his authority, an irate Borchgrevink accused them of fomenting mutiny. When the Southern Cross departed for New Zealand in March 1899, ten men stayed behind at Cape Adare—becoming the first to winter on the Antarctic continent. This small band soon grew even more cantankerous. Borchgrevink outraged the Belgian-born astronomer Louis Bernacchi by telling him to stop taking magnetic readings and photograph a seal instead. Repeatedly, Borchgrevink lashed out at the others to conceal his own feelings of inadequacy. As T. H. Baughman has summed up in his book on the Southern Cross expedition, the neophyte captain “never succeeded in establishing his moral right to lead.”41 This critical ability—which Ernest Shackleton would exemplify during his 1914–1917 Endurance expedition—could spell the difference between success and disaster.42
To some extent, a strong ego and vanity were essential traits for someone wishing to lead a polar expedition, but these qualities could also destroy the fragile bonds that kept c
rews focused on their mission and made their sacrifices seem worthwhile. If a leader was driven solely by selfish ambitions, his authority would always be suspect. This is what William Godfrey had concluded about Elisha Kent Kane after he had saved the latter's life in northern Greenland and Kane had then altered the facts in his book in order to glorify his own heroism. Likewise, the well-liked and much admired Frederick Cook, who had shown such solicitous concern for the health of his fellow crew members as physician on the Belgica, later revealed a dark and self-serving side of his character when he made up a story of having climbed to the top of Mount McKinley and went on to claim, without offering any proof, that he had reached the North Pole ahead of Peary.43 Even a highly respected Norwegian explorer like Fridtjof Nansen had lost much of his crew's respect when he abruptly announced he was abandoning them on the icebound Fram to proceed on foot to the North Pole—a decision that has been justly called “one of the most foolhardy in the history of polar exploration.”44 Up until that point Nansen had professed his only Arctic interest was scientific.45