So when Cook and his men came upon a mass of ice the size of the largest cathedral in the British Empire, his first reaction was not to stare spellbound but to ask his men to scrape off some snow so that he might have a closer look at it. Ice floes he labelled “floating rocks,” while apologizing for this pedestrian metaphor.4 Cook's plain style was unwittingly imitated more than a century later by the first man who would claim (erroneously) to have been the first to set foot on the Antarctic continent, Carsten Borchgrevink. His eagerness to record this feat far surpassed any wish to depict it memorably.5 He, too, stuck to the plain facts, thus recalling the events leading up to this historic event: “Very little drift-ice was to be seen towards the south-west of the bay and in the immediate vicinity of the actual cape. A strong tidal wave passed near the cape north-westwards toward the western side of Robertson Bay.”6 A wind-hollowed sweep of snow bank he saw as a “kind of fence” near a “sort of gallery” next to a mountain. The mist that draped his vessel like a shroud inspired no romantic reveries: it merely prevented Borchgrevink from observing the moons of Jupiter. At the top of the world, John Franklin had likewise not made any effort to capture in glowing phrases the astonishing panorama that was sprawled across the Western horizon when he and his thoroughly drenched and exhausted band reached the upper falls of the Mackenzie in late August of 1825, noting only that the refracted light from the sun transformed these dwarfing mountains into the “most extraordinary shapes.”7 William Parry, whose ship Hecla was trapped by Arctic ice and steadily encroaching darkness at about the same time—becoming the first vessel to winter this far north—welcomed a dazzling aurora borealis one November afternoon as an interruption of shipboard tedium, but failed to say what made this heavenly sight so “remarkable.”8 Readers simply had to accept that Parry had witnessed a natural marvel they would never have a chance to see—and that words could never capture, like the dark side of the moon.
Most polar explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were so bent on moving quickly ahead—going further than anyone else before them and discovering new land—that the extraordinary terrain they came upon held little intrinsic interest for them. Struggling just to stay alive at temperatures well below zero, with gales whipping across snow-encrusted decks and crews weakened by scurvy and rations almost gone, ship captains had no time to admire the dazzling natural beauty around them. Strangers in a strange land, they first saw what they had to see and then what their preconceptions allowed them to take in.9 Often these first impressions were misleading: things did not always turn out to be what they had appeared to be. A mountain peak estimated to be ten miles away might actually be much closer, and ghostly human figures approaching through the mist prove to be only mirages. With few books on the poles available in the early nineteenth century, commanding officers like Cook, Franklin, and Parry were as poorly prepared mentally for the Arctic and Antarctic as their woolen naval jackets and sterling silver knives engraved with family crests were appropriate for the environment. To make sense of this bizarre, intimating realm, explorers needed a new frame of reference, a new vocabulary, and a new sensibility.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, several such frameworks were available to them. The most common was religious. Almost all Europeans and Americans believed that the world was created and guided by the omniscient and benign hand of a Christian God. The natural world was his creation, and its unity, diversity, and beauty expressed his limitless power and wisdom. Humans could not fully understand the Almighty's plan, as their reasoning ability was insufficient for this task. The best they could do was to explore and study the world around them for evidence of it. Accurate measurement and classification of natural phenomena could help reveal the underlying scheme. As children of the Enlightenment, Western explorers brought with them a belief that the world was “an orderly and perfect place where everything fit neatly into the Great Chain of Being.”10 Expeditions to the poles could witness God's glory in a pristine state, untainted by civilization or the passage of time. Goethe, for instance, considered glaciers to be prehistoric evidence of divine handiwork, offering insights into how the oceans and continents were formed.11 In its purity, the polar realm was closer to God. Most early Arctic explorers who traveled far north or south trusted that Providence would watch over them there. Faith provided them both a way of understanding this ice kingdom and protection against its perils. During Sunday services on the North-Pole-bound Hecla in 1827, a deeply devout William Parry was wont to utter this prayer:
Oh, Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens and rulest the raging sea…we thy unworthy servants humble desire to go forth in this, our enterprize…save us in every danger…help us to overcome every obstacle and grant…that having faithfully performed our duty to our country, we may return in safety, health, and honor to enjoy the blessings of the Lord, with the fruits of our labours…[We offer thanks for Your] gracious and fatherly protection . . Keep us from all evil, lead us aright in the way which Thou seest to be the best for us…be our guide, our guard, and our Almighty Friend.12
The stunning beauty beheld by polar explorers somewhat compensated for the hardship they had to face in voyaging so far into this untrammeled domain. It seemed to attest that God had left his mark on this remote part of the world, and thus confirmed his omnipresence. When the land party led by Lieutenant George Back was trekking toward the mouth of the Great Fish River, at the edge of Canadian territory, in 1833, they emerged from thick woods and swarms of mosquitoes to behold below them a “sylvan landscape…in all the wild luxuriance of its summer clothing.”13 As Back wrote in his journal, “Even the most jaded of the party…seemed to forget his weariness, and halted involuntarily with his burden, to gaze for a moment, with a sort of wondering admiration, on a spectacle so novel and magnificent.” Such occasional glimpses of a tranquil, Wordsworthian landscape temporarily lifted the spirits of these Englishmen, worn down by storms, rapids, and diminishing supplies, exhausted from endless river portages, and dispirited by the prospect of many more “horrors” ahead. Shortly after being bitten so badly by black clouds of sand flies that their faces swelled beyond recognition, driving them “almost to madness,” Back would offer up thanks to the Almighty “for the mercies which had been already vouchsafed to us.” Confidence in their success was renewed by such moments of prayerful communion.
Explorers could sense that a higher, spiritual power was operating in Nature. American polar novice Charles F. Hall, setting out on the whaler George Henry to look for the Franklin party in the spring of 1860, suffered through twelve straight days of seasickness and then a ferocious gale but still managed to discern through his afflictions the awesome power of God at work: “It seemed to me as if no one could…appreciate the beauty, the grandeur, the greatness of God's creation but in experiencing a storm at sea.”14 Half a century later, Edward (“Uncle Bill”) Wilson, a saintly Anglican to his fingertips, would take up his watercolor brushes to sketch the Antarctic terrain for the benefit of future explorers, but also to convey his sheer delight at this enchanting manifestation of the divine. As one British historian has observed, Wilson “worshipped God by observing the natural world, in the tradition of Turner and Ruskin.”15 Looking up at a clear midnight sky in the Antarctic pack made him feel closer to his maker than he had at any other place on the planet.16 When expeditions narrowly escaped disaster, such as happened in January 1910 to the crew of the French three-masted barque Pourquoi-Pas?, this was attributed to divine grace. After his vessel had slipped unscathed between icebergs to open water off an Antarctic peninsula, the leader, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, likened this good fortune to a resurrection: “All of a sudden before me the black gulf turns brilliant and golden, dazzling with light, adding to the fantastic strangeness of the scene, but giving the impression of an entry into paradise after leaving hell.”17
Even without such overtones, the beauty of the polar regions could still be deeply inspiring and salubrious. After the flowering of English
romanticism early in the nineteenth century, many explorers began to see this world more poetically than predecessors like Captain Cook had. Instead of recording only facts, they dwelled upon the emotional impact of what they had seen. This literary temper offered explorers a way of creatively imagining the polar environment. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Wilson's companion on Robert Scott's 1910 expedition to Antarctica, evoked the continent's beauty with nuanced, almost painterly language. From the rolling deck of the Terra Nova Cherry-Garrard, a twenty-four-year-old newcomer to these choppy waters, looked up in amazement at the heavenly spectacle that was taking place before his eyes: “The northern sky was gloriously rosy and reflected in the calm sea between the ice, which varied from burnished copper to salmon pink; bergs and packs to the north had a pale greenish hue with deep purple shadows, the sky shaded to saffron and pale green.”18 Half a century earlier, the multihued Arctic sky had cast a similar spell over British naval surgeon Alexander Armstrong, sailing on HMS Investigator with hopes of locating Sir John Franklin: “the sunset was peculiarly beautiful, tinting the western horizon with colours no effort of art could pourtray [sic]—the most brilliant scarlet and crimson, stratified on a rich neutral ground, formed by a harmonious blending of all the elementary colours of the rainbow, a picture of pure Arctic scenery, stillness and beauty, which cast an auspicious halo around this new land.”19 Sometimes words failed to do justice to the effect of these almost surreal sights, but that did not stop explorers from trying to capture it. Traveling for the first time north, also in search of Franklin, Elisha Kane reacted to the first icebergs he saw with this somewhat overwrought language: “There was something about them so slumberous and so pure, so massive yet so evanescent, so majestic in their cheerless beauty, without, after all, any of the salient points which give character to description, that they almost seemed to me the material for a dream, rather than things to be definitely painted in words.”20 For introspective men like Wilson and Cherry, the protean nature of the polar realm acted as a springboard for quiet contemplation. A Cambridge-educated zoologist, Wilson spent hours aloft in the crow's nest of Discovery scanning the vast horizon and finding in this splendid Antarctic isolation “a peace which passes all understanding.”21 Similarly, the turn-of-the-century English alpinist and Arctic explorer Martin Conway felt himself drawn out of himself into a primal union with Nature as he gazed down on a setting sun and fog-shrouded slopes from high atop a snow saddle in Spitsbergen, Norway:
At such times Nature gathers a man into herself, transforming his self-consciousness into a consciousness of her. All the forms and colours of the landscape sink into his heart like the expression of a great personality, whereof he himself is a portion. Ceasing to think, while Nature addresses him through every sense, he receives direct impressions from her. In this kind of nirvana the passage of time is forgotten, and as near an approach to bliss is experiences as this world is capable of supplying.22
The pleasure derived from being directly in touch with the natural world, unsullied by human footprints, grew greater toward the end of the nineteenth century, as Western Europe and the United States were evolving into industrialized, urban societies. Longing to go back to a simpler way of life heightened the appeal of journeys to the Arctic and Antarctic: there, English Romantics like Scott could travel back in time and experience a more elemental and seemingly more vital existence than what they had previously known. The frequency with which explorers used the word “pure” to describe what they saw suggests what they valued most when they were so far from the civilized world. As polar travel writer Sara Wheeler has written of Scott, “The Antarctic possessed a virginity in his mind that provided an alternative to the spoiled and messy world.”23 The psychic impact of this exposure was often more memorable than the physical challenges they had overcome. Ernest Shackleton, justly admired for his ability to lead men out of seemingly unsurmountable predicaments, was keenly aware of how the Antarctic had changed him inwardly as well as outwardly. He conceived of the continent more as a mental and emotional construct than as an actual, physical place, and it was for the unique feelings it aroused in him that he longed for it. During his Farthest South sledge journey, in December 1902, Shackleton scribbled these verses, which were later published (anonymously) under the title “L'Envoi,” in the shipboard South Polar Times:
With regret we shall close the story, yet ever in thought go back…Though the grip of the frost may be cruel, and relentless its icy hold, Yet it knit our hearts together in that darkness stern and cold.24
For Cherry, too, “the response of the spirit” was what mattered in the long run.25 In the frozen wastes, one came close to death, experienced something life-changing—and was born again in a higher form.
Many explorers found glimpses of divine grandeur in the vivid displays of celestial fireworks near the poles—streaking comets, astonishingly vivid stars and planets, multi-tinted solar halos, blinding moonlight, rainbow-hued auroras, bursting meteor showers. Elisha Kane observed these marvels from his spartan winter outpost near the Arctic Circle:
…the last days of January you have the magnificent chance, at noon, of seeing the tops of the high mountains, surrounding the fiord in the color of purple extending with every day more and more over the snows of the highland, and descending gradually until his beams are reflected from the fiord and the frozen fields of ice. The dark season is not felt, oppressively, except when combined with unsteady and stormy weather, a hazy atmosphere and a fall of snow. With a clear atmosphere and good weather the inhabitants miss at no time 2 or 3 hours of daylight for going out of doors and seeking substinence [sic] of the ice or the sea…. On clear days, you see at noon, besides the light of the sun in the South, a gloriously colored atmosphere at the North, or, the opposite sides of the heavens appear like a more or less intense red light in the form of an arc, which forms the limits between the lowest dark-blue part, darkened by the earth, and the uppermost part of the heavens brightened by the sun.26
For Kane and others, these awe-inspiring signs of God's presence helped to sustain them through their darkest hours. In the depths of a particularly miserable Greenland winter in 1855, hunkered down below decks on the Advance, reduced to eating the “overlooked godsend” of a frozen bear's head (raw) and jelly made from boiling its claws, and with many of his men bedridden due to scurvy, Kane took heart from the first glimmers of light returning after fifty-two days of total darkness. He experienced an almost pagan exuberance as the amount of sunshine increased each day, until finally the full orb of the sun rose above the horizon, vindicating his faith in Providence. Like a man possessed by angels Kane ran across the ice toward it, his arms flung wide, shouting to the “Great Author of Light,” as he would have greeted Christ arising from the grave.27 Indeed, the disappearance and miraculous return of the sun at this high latitude seemed to reenact the Easter story of death and resurrection, culminating with the same rapture. The sharp elemental contrasts of the polar cycle—unending light yielding slowly to blackness and then back again to light—touched their souls.
Even if these natural phenomena did not conjure up a sense of the divine, they still left an indelible impression. At the polar caps Nature seemed to have pulled out all the stops, far exceeding—in scale, dramatic energy, and color—what Europeans and Americans were familiar with. Peering through veils of fog and snow into this secretive kingdom, officers and ordinary sailors alike felt that they were entering a truly otherworldly realm. Its strangeness led them to see it as surreal and magical. In 1850, William Parker Snow, an English writer based in New-York, convinced Lady Franklin he had had a vision showing him where her missing husband was to be found and abruptly booked passage on the Prince Albert, bound for Greenland, so that he could prove he was right. Off its coast, his ship ran into a blinding snowstorm, transmuting the view ahead into a fantastical vision: “At times, these mountains were enveloped in a thick haze; then again looming through, and presenting the most curious and fantastic forms, pyramids upon pyram
ids displaying their sides to view. The valleys…appeared to be filled with snow and…seemed to convey the idea of our being in an icy and barren region. It was more like a misty picture produced upon the stage of a theatre than a semblance of reality.”28 The Australian scientist Louis Bernacchi had sailed with Borchgrevink on the Southern Cross, intent on wintering for the first time in Antarctica. Soon he found his attention drawn away from the magnetic field he was supposed to be measuring to the glorious scene that greeted him every day: “In all Nature's realm there are few sights more impressive than a vast field of magnificent glittering ice-floes on a beautifully calm morning with the deep blue Antarctic sky overhead. Lonesome, and unspeakably desolate it is, but with a character and a fascination all its own.”29
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