Marooned for the second time a few years later, near Prince Regent Inlet—still some one thousand miles from the North Pole—Royal Navy Captain Francis Leopold McClintock and his fellow officers on the Fox rigged up a line on poles connecting the ship to their magnetic observatory and stumbled out there religiously in equally frigid temperatures, prevented only once by a howling “north-wester.”46 The self-discipline and perseverance shown in carrying out these tasks under such conditions is perhaps more impressive than anything else these explorers accomplished because they did this not for personal glory but for science. Like Cherry-Garrard and his two companions, who nearly died hauling a sledge sixty miles to Cape Crozier in the middle of the Antarctic winter to grab a few penguin eggs from a rookery, these “science-heroes” lent new meaning to the word “courage.” Accomplishing the work of science meant a lot to these explorers—if only for the satisfaction of having finished a job they had set out to do, no matter what the obstacles were.47 Cherry would later justify this grueling trek by contending that “Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.”48
All these efforts to quantify Nature revealed an underlying fear of the Unknown—what lay outside the bounds of human settlement and experience. More than any other places on the planet, the polar caps—featureless and practically devoid of life, gigantic in scale, unpredictable in movement, insensible to human actions and needs—presented intractable challenges. They called into question belief in steady, inevitable progress ending with the “subduing” of the entire planet. If these icy expanses did not admit the explorer's encroaching footsteps, if their frozen seas did not part before the ironclad bows of ships, if flags could not be raised at the poles, then humanity would have to acknowledge having reached the limits of its power. If its dominion over the earth could not be complete, then man's place in the universe would have to be rethought. Thus much more was riding on the fate of those elegant, tall-masted ships disappearing over the horizon to fading cheers than merely the setting of new geographical records and the discovering of new lands. The cheers were for the human race.
A Quaker raised in modest circumstances in rural Pennsylvania during the 1840s, Isaac Israel Hayes early on set his sights on broadening his horizons. He received a rigorous education at the local Friends school and did so well there that he became an instructor before graduating. Medicine was a career well suited to his outsized ambitions, and Hayes breezed through a three-year course of study at the University of Pennsylvania in only two years, eager to leverage this professional credential to pursue bigger adventures. John Franklin and his men had vanished into the Arctic mists while he was still a schoolboy, and more Americans had since become fascinated by the North Pole and its mysteries. In late 1852, Elisha Kent Kane was preparing to lead the second expedition underwritten by retired shipping merchant Henry Grinnell to hunt for signs of the missing Englishmen, and he was much in need of a surgeon for this party (the position held by Kane on his first voyage north). The twenty-one-year-old Hayes offered his services to the already famous explorer in a letter the following January. Kane—another Penn man and fellow Philadelphian—probably saw in the forthright Hayes a younger, less polished version of himself and immediately signed him on, even though Hayes had not yet earned his medical degree and had never been outside the United States. Still, Kane reasoned, his training in botany and geology would come in useful, and, if Hayes needed help dealing with the crew's health problems he could give him a hand.1
Things did not get off to a good start that spring. A nautical “greenhorn,” Hayes was violently sick in the heavy seas they ran into on the way to St. John's, Newfoundland, and wasn't of much help to anyone. Then, unexpectedly for that time of year—it was only August 20th—the Advance became hemmed in by ice off Littleton Island, near the western coast of Greenland. Worse, the ship's anchor line broke, and it started to drift dangerously close to several large floes, smashing its jib boom against one of them. Hayes, who had never experienced such a menacing environment, was terrified: he feared “the tossing, grinding, surging, of the broken, crushed and crumbling masses…riding on the billows” would splinter the hull at any moment.2 Totally at the mercy of strong currents, the Advance smacked into one floe, her bow driving up onto the ice and finally coming to a grinding halt. Then the stern was lifted up out of the water by another huge ice block, leaving the brig high and dry like a beached whale. So stranded, the ship was unable to get free—a major blow for Kane, who had hoped to navigate another hundred miles farther north before having to stop for the winter.
After this close call, Hayes took to the volatile polar world with boyish wonderment and delight. At first, he spent a few days on shore, hunting for game with another crew member. But what they found one evening was far more riveting—a glacier, “a sloping wall of pure whiteness,” which, “apparently boundless, stretched away toward the unknown east. It was the great mer de glace of the arctic [sic] continent.”3 As the two men moved cautiously toward this mesmerizing mass, now shrouded in darkness, a “brilliant meteor fell before us, and by its reflection up the glassy surface beneath, greatly heightened the effect of the scene; while loud reports, like distant thunder or the booming of artillery, broke at intervals from the heart of the frozen sea.” Hayes's enchantment with natural splendors inconceivable back in his Pennsylvania hometown is equally obvious in how he later described the landscape around the Danish outpost of Godhavn: “Never had my eyes beheld or my mind contemplated such unalloyed beauty as this little Eden was clothed in.”4
Like many Arctic newcomers, Hayes was overwhelmed by the magnificence and scale of its natural features. Safe on land, out of danger, he could admire them more dispassionately, with a discerning eye—much as a museum habitué will pause to admire a colossal landscape by Frederic Church or William Turner.5 Indeed, Hayes possessed the trained eye and talent of an artist, having purportedly once studied with Church.6 (Hayes would illustrate his book about his second Arctic expedition—The Open Polar Sea—with his own highly dramatized drawings.) So, by temperament as well as by training, he was highly susceptible to the ever-changing spectacle that greeted his eyes. His wonderment did not abate during his two stays in the North, despite the many harrowing experiences he had there. In fact, Hayes's ability to transmute what he was seeing into something more uplifting and comforting helped him survive these trials and tribulations. Imagination could keep horror and disaster at bay. Sent out to locate a lead to open water later that winter, he and several companions had to give up after they climbed a cliff and saw only ice stretching to the horizon in all directions: “All our bright dreams of succor and safety seemed to be ending,” Hayes lamented.7 Determined not to return to the Advance empty-handed, this small party continued along the coast by sea, hoping to find some Inuit outposts with food or reach the Danish settlement at Upernavik. But quickly their small boats became blocked by ice, and they feared they might have to spend the winter trapped there—far from their ship, holed up in a makeshift stone hut, forced to subsist on rock lichen, and with only buffalo robes to keep them from freezing to death.
Faith that Providence would look after them helped sustain Hayes and his motley party (“a German astronomer, a Baltimore seaman, a Pennsylvania farmer, a Greenland cooper, a Hull sailor, an East River boatsman, an Irish patriot, and a Philadelphia student of medicine”), but so did Hayes's positive responsiveness to his surroundings. He perceived the sea to be a “fertile plain, with walls, hedges and sunny fields…. Clusters of little hummocks suggested herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Larger masses were converted into trees; and a long bank of snow, whose vertical wall threw a dark shadow on the plain, was the margin of a dense forest. Farther away, a pinnacled berg became a church with spire and belfry; another wore the appearance of a ruined castle; while still farther to the southwest, where the stream seemed to discharge itself into the oceans, stood a giant fort, under whose bristling guns lay a fleet of stately ships.”8 On his return voyage to the Ar
ctic, this time as an expedition leader planning to push on to the pole, Hayes reacted to the mountainous coast of Greenland emerging out of the fog as if he had miraculously entered some Nordic fairyland, its magical spell transfixing him
as if we had been drawn by some unseen hand into a land of enchantment, rather than that we had come of our own free will into a region of stern realities, in pursuit of stern purposes—as if the elves of the North had, in sportive playfulness, thrown a veil about our eyes, and enticed us to the very “seat eternal of the gods.” Here was the Valhalla of the sturdy Vikings; here the city of the sun-god Freyer,—Alfheim, with its elfin caves,—and Glitner, with its walls of gold and roofs of silver, and Gimle, more brilliant than the sun,—the home of the happy; there, piercing the clouds, was Himiniborg, the Celestial Mount, where the bridge of the gods touches Heaven. It would be difficult to imagine a scene more solemnly impressive than that which was disclosed to us by the sudden change in the clouded atmosphere.9
In his diary, Hayes added that no other sight in the Arctic had moved him as much: “The bergs had wholly lost their chilly aspect, and, glittering in the blaze of the brilliant heavens, seemed, in the distance, like masses of burnished metal, or solid flame.”10 Some resembled blocks of marble—one the Coliseum, half submerged under a “line of blood-red waters…. Nothing indeed but the pencil of the artist could depict the wonderful richness of this sparking fragment of Nature.”
This ability to poetically gloss over reality kept Hayes from succumbing to despair—or madness. Earlier Arctic and Antarctic explorers had trusted in a higher, spiritual power to watch over them. They believed that the earth was governed by an omnipotent divine being, who had created it for the good of the human race. Nature's unpredictability, occasional violence, and even disasters at sea did not shake this faith. Even in the Arctic, God ruled. Standing on the deck of a ship approaching the misty outline of the Antarctic continent, explorers felt his presence acutely. Entering this pristine world, it seemed them that they had traveled back in time to the Dawn of Creation. Here was still the Garden of Eden—marvelous and enchanting and untouched by human hand. Now they were completing their God-given destiny by conquering the last frontier.
The poles were supposed to become the grand stage on which humankind would display its unrivalled stamina, character, resourcefulness, and intelligence by subduing this last bastion of unsubjugated Nature. This would complete its dominance over the earth. In more optimistic times, ambitious men and nations had turned their eyes northward and southward, welling with visions of being the first to reach these blank spots on the map, filled with a “capacity for wonder and…desire for challenge.”11 There, astride this alien ice, personal dreams for glory would be immortalized as testimony to the human spirit, or, more modestly, as Barry Lopez has argued, fulfill “the hope that one's own life will not have been lived for nothing.”12
But, over the years, explorers came to see the polar world in increasingly negative terms. In their eyes, a Nature that had first appeared as staggeringly beautiful and inviting slowly morphed into an obstructing, indifferent object, and finally into a malevolent force bent on destroying them. This change sprang from a larger shift in cultural attitudes, brought about by Darwin and midcentury thinkers who did not see the natural world as aligned with any benevolent spiritual presence. Centuries-old assumptions about God's ongoing involvement with a world he had created were gradually giving way to skepticism about any such higher guidance. Natural forces appeared to operate according to their own laws. This less sanguine outlook was succinctly articulated in Tennyson's 1850 poem In Memoriam A. H. H., in which he referred to Nature as “red in tooth and claw.” Toward the end of life, polar explorers no longer arrived in ships as emissaries of empire but as witnesses to their species’ failure to exercise its control over the planet.
As the young Parisian explorer Joseph René Bellot, who had joined the search for Franklin and then tragically disappeared through a cleft in the ice in the summer of 1853, wrote about this loss of security, “Moral nature seems to have abdicated, and nothing remains but a chaos without a purpose.”13 Estrangement from the polar environment deepened the explorers’ feelings of isolation and helplessness. The kingdom they had expected to rule over stubbornly refused to surrender. Even Isaac Hayes—after he and his party had managed to get back to the icebound Advance and from there reach the outpost of Upernavik—could not look back on what he had suffered in trying to find the Open Polar Sea without admitting that he had just been plain lucky to return alive. Nature had been arrayed against him, but he had prevailed. The popular image of the Arctic as hostile—not some twinkling fairyland—had been accurate. All one could expect there were “Vast seas covered with masses of ice rushing to and fro, threatening to crush the most skilful navigator—towering bergs ready to overwhelm him—dangerous land-journeys—cold, piercing to the very sources of life—savage beasts, and scarcely less savage men—isolation, disease, famine, and slow death.”14
Remote, inaccessible, and inhospitable lands still appealed so much because they demanded nothing less than supreme human effort—physical as well mental.15 The “irritatingly and uncharacteristically uncooperative” polar region, with its “unfamiliar rhythms” of relentless light followed by relentless darkness and solid ice giving way overnight to wildly marauding floes, was like no other place on the planet.16 Nature in this extreme guise took on more symbolic importance as Western Europe and the United States entered into an era of relative peace after the end of the American Civil War. The poles became an alternative arena for international competition, where bands of courageous young men could be tested to the limit, and where only the fittest would succeed and thus attest to their superiority. But men were drawn to the ends of the earth for a variety of reasons. The uniqueness of the ice kingdom was one of them. It possessed an otherworldly quality not found anywhere else. Restless souls like Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott could revel there in a majesty and purity that satisfied their yearnings for a place without definition or constraints. As Scott's sister Grace would later write of her martyred brother, he responded to “the call of the vast empty spaces; silence; the beauty of untrodden snow; liberal of thought and action; the wonder of the snow and seeming infinitude of its uninhabited regions whose secrets man had not then pierced, and the hoped-for conquest of raging elements.”17
Regardless of their motives (and these were really known only to themselves), explorers arrived brimming with confidence and with an aura of invincibility about them—a blithe, almost childish arrogance that was both a prerequisite for going to the poles and a fatal flaw in their ability to come back alive. While crews relied on cockiness and blind faith, their leaders put their trust in good planning. Men in charge of expeditions assayed their chances as generals surveyed a battlefield, learning as much as they could about circumstances on the ground before deploying their troops. Armed with the best knowledge—they thought—they could harness Nature to their purposes. They took note of temperatures, wind speed and direction, water currents, ice and snow conditions, and features of coastlines and interior terrain. Voyages and sledge journeys near the poles were planned with this information firmly in mind. Sound theories about how best to glide through ice-clogged waters and attain a new Farthest North arose from such detailed assessments of the environment.
But they did not always get it right. Nature did not always cooperate with their plans. Disasters could not be avoided. Early in the nineteenth century, several prominent Arctic explorers, including William Parry and John Franklin, had pegged their hopes of sailing through the Northwest Passage to the fabled Open Polar Sea on what was known about favorable currents and ice-free waters in the Bering Strait. (A brief spell of milder weather misled them about what they might expect.) Even though numerous attempts to traverse this narrow channel between Alaska and Russia had failed, some subsequent explorers continued to believe it was the best route to take.18 The crushing of the Jeannette in Siberian ice in Jun
e of 1881 finally laid this theory to rest. But new strategies soon emerged to supplant this debunked one. The canny Norwegian explorer Nansen—who also happened to be an experienced oceanographer—concocted a scheme for getting close to the North Pole by allowing his ship, the Fram, to drift on an ice floe, borne with the east-to-west current that was thought to be prevailing in Arctic waters. Ignoring many raised eyebrows from his contemporaries, Nansen set out in 1893 from the northern tip of his native country to test this notion. For a while, the currents cooperated. But then, hemmed in by dense pack ice, the Fram could only meander desultorily westward along the Siberian coast for three years without getting any farther north than 85.55 degrees. Calculating that it would take him another five years to reach the pole this way, Nansen decided to abandon the ship with a single companion to see if they could make better progress on foot, over the ice. In the end they did set a new latitude record—twenty-two miles beyond where the Fram would eventually arrive by drifting.
Repeated rebuffs by the elements caused explorers to reconsider their view of the polar world as a manifestation of God and as theirs to possess. Centuries of frustration, with so many grinding to a halt in intractable ice, with the explorers’ hopes crushed as ignominiously as the hulls of their ships, and with so many lives lost, altered perceptions of what could be realistically accomplished. Explorers’ relationship with Nature became acrimonious. In fact, failure after failure to push back the Arctic and Antarctic frontiers foreshadowed the costly, disastrous, and ultimately pointless battles of World War I, when charges across No Man's Land killed thousands and brought little or no gains. (Shackleton implicitly recognized this connection between the two life-and-death struggles by dedicating his book on his wartime Endurance expedition to “My comrades, who fell in the white warfare of the South and on the red fields of France and Flanders.”)
To the Ends of the Earth Page 10