To the Ends of the Earth

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To the Ends of the Earth Page 11

by John V. H. Dippel


  From the outset, dying and exploring went hand in hand at the top of the world: the toll was grim. Franklin's party was not the first to die in this harsh, unforgiving realm: it was only the one with the single most casualties. In 1777, some 350 British seamen whose whaling vessels had become icebound off the coast of Greenland set out to find a safe haven: only 140 of them made it to land. Half a century later, a dozen ships were likewise beset, and half sank to the bottom squeezed in the ice's relentless grip, with most of the crew on board two vessels drowning.19 The honor roll of the dead grew longer and longer, and still the ships kept coming. It is not at all surprising that these clashes between man and the elements soon came to be viewed as hopeless warfare. Only here the enemy was the battleground itself. Nature was anthropomorphized into a malevolent force determined to thwart any human inroads. The French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot described ice battering the keel of his ship, the Pourquoi-Pas?, near Wandel Island on the Antarctic Peninsula as if it were an infantry attack: “Happily there is no damage done, but it is with difficulty that we drive off the aggressor with poles.”20 The American Anthony Fiala—awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism during the Spanish-American War—entitled his account of commanding a 1903–1905 Arctic expedition Fighting the Polar Ice. In it, he described the north wind as an “active enemy” that stopped his party from moving forward as tenaciously as a line of riflemen. (His crew included several former cavalrymen.) Fiala, who had gone north with the intent of fulfilling God's command to Adam that he “subdue the earth,” considered his polar assignment a military operation, emulating Nansen's “splendid march” toward the pole. Blocked from reaching his planned winter quarters by the worst ice that seasoned sealers had seen in years, Fiala had his ship, the America, reverse engines, retreat a thousand yards, and then charge the pack with its engines at full throttle, but to no avail. Caught in a fierce storm off the Franz Joseph Archipelago, the America was pinioned by floes and met the same fate that had befallen so many vessels: it broke apart and soon disappeared beneath the ice, taking with it most of their provisions and coal. Fiala led most of his men southward to safety, but he came away from this Arctic misadventure with a sobering sense of human limitations in the face of such natural resistance. The proud American spirit of John Paul Jones—“I have not yet begun to fight”—was badly bent, if not broken, by experiences like these.21

  Once thought to be a primordial paradise, the polar world now seemed to more closely resemble a torture chamber, like Dante's ninth circle of hell, where traitors were stuck for eternity. The battering ice, the relentless cold, and even the flesh-eating animals were fiendishly arrayed against those who dared to venture there. To some, it appeared that a sly, evil intelligence lay in wait to “repel the explorers who would invade the secret places it guards.”22 Fearful of being marooned any longer in the Arctic with his band of “scurvy-riddled, broken-down men” in 1854, Elisha Kane saw it that way: winter had it in for them. “We are,” he would later write, “ten men in a casemate, with all our energies concentrated against the enemy outside.”23 Hayes, beset by heavy Greenland snow during the winter of 1860–1861, could only curse the frigid weather as “the torment of my life and the enemy of my plans…. the veriest [sic] flirt that ever owned Dame Nature for a mother.”24

  For other explorers, darkness was the most dreaded foe: prolonged lack of light caused them to lose their grasp on reality and their imaginations to conjure up perils worse than those they actually faced. Once the sun had vanished below the horizon in early November 1880, George De Long sensed how its disappearance made the men with him on the paralyzed Jeannette more fearful: “…the horrible yelling and screeching of the ice, and its piling up around us and squeezing and crushing, make darkness a more terrible enemy than the cold.”25 He worried most about his first officer, Lieutenant Charles Danenhower, who had experienced spells of mental instability in the past and was thus more prone to what the writer Hampton Sides has termed the “melancholy of the polar darkness, the claustrophobic dread that could set in while one was living under conditions of near imprisonment.”26 Because of how it preyed on the mind, “the whole Arctic experience was a perfect incubator for insanity.” Perpetual blackness—an extreme form of what is now known as “seasonal affective disorder”—confounded the explorers’ sense of time and space, leaving them disoriented and subject to depression—what Kane termed “constant and oppressing gloom”27—as well as diseases like scurvy and mishaps like falling into a crevasse. The absence of sunlight for months was a deeply demoralizing aspect of polar life, against which human will power and ingenuity were virtually helpless. Darkness was a kind of living death. It frustrated human expectations about the rhythms of life and left the crews irritable and disoriented. Even a sanguine adventurer like Isaac Hayes was not immune from this malaise: “The grandeur of Nature ceases to give delight to the dulled sympathies…. The dark and dreary solitude oppresses the understanding; the desolation which everywhere reigns haunts the imagination; the silence—dark, dreary, and profound—becomes a terror.”28 Craving for light reduced human beings to a primal level of existence. From it there was no escape. All they could do was shriek with joy like little children on Christmas morning when the sun finally returned.

  So, too, was the balance of power between man and beast overturned in this elemental environment. Even armed with rifles, explorers were not always confident that they were the predator and not the prey. Polar bears stalked them, as they hunted these monstrous creatures. The “poor bruin” that Lieutenant George Back had lamented having to shoot for scientific purposes while HMS Terror was caught in Arctic pack ice in the fall of 1836; the marauding white hulks that officers would take potshots at so that could bring back their hides as gifts for their wives—this exotic animal could turn in an instant into a crazed, bare-fanged, roaring killer, unstoppable by half a dozen bullets.29 This elemental struggle between bear and explorer grew more desperate as the human invaders pressed closer to the poles, where food was scarce and ravenous bears dug up long-buried caches in a wild frenzy, raided tents, boarded ships, slashed dogs, and pursued human scent in the snow with the single-minded ferocity of the starving. Under these dire circumstances, the line between man and beast became blurred, and the ultimate winner in this Hobbesian struggle could not be confidently predicted. This disconcerting role reversal was dramatically captured in Edwin Henry Landseer's 1864 painting Man Proposes, God Disposes, which depicts polar bears gnawing lasciviously on human ribs and blood-red sails amidst the strewn wreckage of a ship—hinting at the likely fate of the lost Franklin expedition.

  If all these predators—bears, walruses, orcas—had not existed near the poles, explorers might have been safer, but much more alone. While they were grim adversaries, man and beast at least afforded each other a kind of grotesque companionship. This peculiar bond was especially important in a region that was otherwise completely barren. To be in sight of another species—even a murderous one—was to remain part of a larger living presence. But the brutal winter at the top and bottom of the world was inimical to many other creatures, and one of the saddest occasions for explorers facing long months of darkness and cold was watching the remaining migratory birds silently flap their way southward—the last nonhuman “companions” (aside from fish) they were apt to see until spring. This exodus could start as early as the beginning of October, not long after the first snowflakes and frost dusted the explorers’ huts. This departure, as sobering and depressing as the vanishing sun, severed an elemental tie: now the men were truly alone. Conversely, the return of these animals and birds was cause for rejoicing—here was a sign that life was being renewed. Thus, Elisha Kane would hail the first dovekies spotted over Baffin Bay as “welcome visitors” and stay his hand from reaching for his rifle.30 At times, explorers closely identified with these other living beings—thinking of them as fellow voyagers and survivors. Observing flocks of ducks, geese, black guillemots, and auks pass overhead, Kane could not help but sen
se that they, too, were “seeking the mysterious north” and wonder, “What is there at this unreached pole to attract and sustain such hordes?”31 For centuries, birds had assumed a richly symbolic significance for mariners. Superstition held that a storm petrel—the smallest species of seabird—protected ships from storms, and if a sailor were to kill one it would spell disaster. (Isaac Hayes wrote a story about just such an incident, telling of a seaman who shot and wounded a petrel and who could then only redeem himself by nursing it back to health.32)

  For carefree company, explorers turned to the dogs that traveled with them across the seas, toiled tirelessly and loyally on the ice, and suffered silently and stoically by their side. They admired their distinctive personalities and traits and mourned their deaths. British explorers tended to be the most affectionate toward these canine companions: Scott was notorious for projecting human emotions onto his dogs and could not bring himself to kill them for food. When they were all gone, explorers felt keen pangs of loneliness. This sense of abandonment could also arise when other creatures went away. Sailing as a naturalist with the Erebus to Antarctica in 1839, Joseph Dalton Hooker—a man without any religious convictions—had happily sketched penguins and other marine life under sail, and he was dismayed when these creatures disappeared when his ship came upon an erupting volcano: “This was a sight so surpassing everything that can be conceived and so heightened by the consciousness that we had penetrated to regions far beyond what had been deemed practicable before, that it caused a feeling of awe to steal over us at the contemplation of our comparatively utter insignificance and helplessness.”33

  Antagonism between humankind and Nature was acutely felt in the polar regions, but, by the 1860s, explorers reaching other remote corners of the planet experienced it there as well. In the heart of Africa, Henry Morton Stanley—the intrepid Welsh journalist (and veteran of both the Union and Confederate armies) dispatched in 1869 to locate the missing missionary David Livingstone—soon came to recognize that “Nature herself in her most savage manifestations…[was] an unceasing and ever-vigilant enemy.”34 Not giving up in the face of such hostility was a hallmark of his character, but not all adventurers had the same unshakable confidence that the devout Stanley did. Without such faith, would-be conquerors came to accept that often all that stood between them and disaster was sheer luck—the last-minute change of course an errant ice floe barreling toward their ship might take, or how soon winter arrived. Having almost no knowledge of the ice-clogged waters they were exploring or of what obstacles might lie ahead made the first polar excursions truly frightening undertakings. As Jeannette Mirsky wrote in her 1934 book To the Arctic! “Men were as fearful of the dangers of the Arctic as they were of the terrors of hell.”35 Neither realm offered them much hope of salvation. And the further the explorers advanced, the greater the hazards they faced and the greater the chances of their dying. But still they were drawn there by a fatal, ineluctable attraction, by an “emotional intangible” that defies understanding in our age of more complex, carefully calculated risk-taking. Theirs was a quest like those of medieval knights (whose sagas resonated in Victorian England and inspired explorers like Robert Scott) in search of the Holy Grail.36

  An alluring seductress leading men on to their doom was a motif introduced in medieval ballads and then revived during the Romantic era to dramatize the hold of the unattainable on the human imagination. The recurring theme of “death and the maiden” linked sex and death and revealed a male anxiety over assertive female sexuality. But the same nexus of emotions could also be projected onto a “virgin” landscape, its mists concealing lurking dangers. Conquering it also required a treacherous dance with death. The English poet John Keats's immortalizing of “la belle dame sans merci” (“the beautiful lady without pity”) in his 1819 ballad by the same name made the parallel explicit—and uncannily relevant to the polar explorers who would set out after it first appeared in print. Keats places his nameless knight-errant in a dreary setting that men like John Franklin would have found familiar:

  O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  so haggard and so woe-begone?

  The squirrel's granary is full,

  and the harvest's done.

  The damsel he has met in the meadow is beautiful, and the knight has paid homage to her by weaving flowers through her hair and around her wrists, but “her eyes were wild”—a telltale sign of danger. Despite his attempts to “tame” her through love, it is the knight who is “lulled” to sleep, only to dream of finding himself in the company of lost, noble souls:

  I saw pale kings and princes too,

  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

  They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci

  Hath thee in thrall!”

  I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

  With horrid warning gapèd wide,

  And I awoke and found me here,

  On the cold hill's side.

  For a celebrated Romantic like Keats, “La Belle Dame” was a cautionary tale—a warning flag on the path to total infatuation. It might have served the explorers well to heed the poet's implicit advice, but in their treks to the poles there were no such markers along the way—nothing to slow the explorer's stride but his own mounting fatigue and despair. Thus, the march continued, in spite of setbacks, disappointments, agonies, defeats, retreats, and deaths—in spite of a gnawing awareness that the odds were so stacked against these intemperate trespassers that they were bound to fail in this bid to assail Mother Nature in her most jealously guarded lair.

  In fact, the more the explorers advanced, the more defiant Nature became. There was no long lost paradise at the end of their journeys, no tropical waters gently lapping palm trees at the poles, as men like George De Long and Elisha Kane had once believed (and, as we now know, had actually existed there some fifty-five million years ago), only more snow and ice to greet them. At its geographical extremes, the earth offered no rewards for those strong or lucky enough to get that far. It simply was what it was. The dreams of explorers about finding God in the snowy outlines ahead, of extracting deeper meaning from the ice kingdom, of charting new routes across the globe, of discovering vast riches, and unlocking great secrets—all these ambitions fell away in the end, and all that was left was the conquest itself. All that could be accomplished was to make a symbolic statement by raising a flag in a blinding swirl of snow, on a spot no one was likely ever to see again. The explorers—and their entranced followers—could not admit this to themselves. Instead, they transformed an absurd quest into something greater—a triumph of the human will. But in doing so, they created a chasm between the reality of their so-often-futile efforts and how these deeds would be celebrated. As in war, the image and the facts of polar heroism made for strange bedfellows. These contradictions weighed heavily on the explorers’ minds. It was hard for some not to feel, in the agony of the moment, that the ultimate goal was not really worth it. It really was insane to go on. But this they could not admit either. Too much was invested in them—like Keats's anonymous knight—to drop out of the race. And so they teetered toward another kind of insanity—living with contradictions but pretending they did not exist.

  In the history of polar exploration no expedition better illustrates the foolish notion that the human mind could best Nature than the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–1913, led by Robert Falcon Scott. The fact that this Terra Nova trip to the South Pole was plagued by ill-conceived plans and egregious blunders from start to finish was often overlooked in posterity's eagerness to embrace Scott and his men as gallant “martyrs” in an ennobling cause—as victims of “bad luck” whose “pluck” otherwise would have gotten them to the pole and guided them back safe and sound. In the popular telling of their tale, Nature comes across as an irascible bully, rudely butting in
and spoiling what would otherwise have been a splendid display of manliness and grace under pressure. But the truth is less kind to the Final Five, who were desperately trying to reach Hut Point before their food and energy ran out. And the truth also is that, toward the end, it became apparent to Scott and at least some of his companions that they had been living a lie. Mind was not mightier than matter. Nature was uncaring and unforgiving. They had overestimated their fortitude. The Antarctic did not respect this. They were going to die.

  Here, it should be noted, Edward Wilson stands apart, with his unwavering faith in God's plan—even if that entailed freezing to death in this unyielding wasteland. This belief had enabled him to respond to Antarctica with the same feeling of awe that the first travelers to the continent had experienced. When the Terra Nova arrived on the coast, “Uncle Bill,” its resident artist, recorded in his journal:

  Now and again one hears a penguin cry out in the stillness near at hand or far away, and then perhaps he appears in his dress tail coat and white waistcoat suddenly upon an ice-floe from the water…crying out in his amazement as he comes from time to time, but only intensifying the wonderful stillness and beauty of the whole fairylike scene as the golden glaring sun in the South just touches the horizon and begins again to rise gradually without ever having set at all. We have now broad daylight night and day, but the beauty of the day with its lovely blues and greens amongst the bergs and ice-floes is eclipsed altogether by the marvellous beauty of the midnight, when white ice becomes deepest purple and golden rose and the sky is lemon green without a cloud. No scene in the whole world was ever more beautiful than a clear midnight in the pack.37

  We have every reason to think that this gentle soul—this throwback to a simpler and more naïve age—would have written with the same unabashed affection as he was dying, if he had had the strength to do so.

 

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