To the Ends of the Earth
Page 14
Kane's enormously popular books persuaded some other explorers—eager to learn how to survive in the Arctic—to also learn from the Inuit. (The fact that Franklin and 128 of his fellow Englishmen had presumably died of starvation while nearby Inuit continued to survive had not been lost on them.) Before his first northern expedition, Charles Francis Hall—a Cincinnati newspaper publisher who had become obsessed with the Arctic—read all the explorers’ written accounts he could get his hands on, including Kane's, and when he joined the search for Franklin in 1860 he announced that he intended to “go native” when he reached the Far North. Hall told a reporter from the New York Times that he was prepared to eat “cheerfully” seal blubber and meat, along with standard explorer fare of pemmican (canned dried meat mixed with fat—a diet borrowed from the Cree). He also said he planned to “identify himself in a measure with the Esquimaux”—a startling admission for an American in that racially charged era.24
In need of a sailing master familiar with Arctic waters, Hall chose Sidney O. Budington, a whaler who also happened to be fluent in the Inuit language and sparked Hall's interest in it. Believing they knew details about the fate of the Franklin party, the devoutly Christian newcomer to the Arctic spent three years living with the Inuit, gaining their trust, and observing and mastering many of their skills. To Hall, the Inuit were not “savages,” but honest, solicitous, good-natured human beings—“glorious good fellows,” who had been badly maligned by previous explorers. He encountered many of them who had already embraced Christianity and translated the Lord's Prayer into their language to encourage more conversions. Hall was convinced his efforts would succeed: “Plant among them a colony of men and women having right-minded principles, and, after some patient toil, glorious fruits must follow.”25 Intermarriage with Danish immigrants would hasten the Inuit's cultural and religious development. Hall was fulsome in his praise of these natives: their women were attractive and exquisitely adorned, their villages “beautiful,” their customs more genuinely freedom loving than those back in the United States. He even admired their penchant for swallowing raw whale meat whole and drinking seal blood. At times, Hall sounded like a religious convert. Once, during a sledge journey, he ate some putrid whale meat even his Inuit companions could not stomach.26 After sleeping for forty-two consecutive nights in an igloo, he found life back on his ship too comfortable and was unable to sleep there.27 In short, the man from Cincinnati was besotted.28 Hall was essentially a Christian humanist, who saw in all people and in all places the handiwork of the Almighty and felt his all-encompassing faith could unite them. He was also a pioneer of modern anthropology, taking the position that “One has to make up his mind, if he would live among that people, to submit to their customs, and be entirely one of them.”29
Hall's willingness to go to great lengths to enter into Inuit society and absorb its lessons marked a radical change in how American and European explorers thought about distant, “backward” regions of the world and the people who inhabited them. Before Hall's day, Western explorers had generally remained aloof from them. Inuit and other indigenous peoples stood so low on the evolutionary ladder that no self-respecting European or American officer would want to associate with them any more than he would wish to dine with his servants, dance with his slaves, or share a cigar with his wife. Hall's change in attitude called the Great Chain of Being into question. Readers of his books began to wonder if their assumptions about other peoples were really valid. Perhaps no one race had a monopoly on knowledge and skill: perhaps these were only relative advantages, grounded in particular circumstances. Using a sextant to plot a course or knowing how to operate a steam engine might be important skills for getting to the Far North, but they were of little use when trying to survive there. There the Inuit was the wise master, and the explorer only an ignorant and helpless fool.
This relativistic outlook was most readily adopted in those Western nations where social stratification was not deeply entrenched, where individualism was valued, and, where there was little or no imperialistic history—namely, in the United States and Scandinavia. Like Hall, the Norwegian explorer Nansen lived with Greenland Inuit for one winter, learning their language and survival skills, and this sojourn made him appreciate how these “hardy children of Nature” had triumphed over the polar environment, thanks to their “ingenious implements” and hunting prowess. Echoing Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the “noble savage,” Nansen concluded that the coming of the white race and its “civilizing” imperative had brought ruin to the Inuit, causing them to sink “lower and lower” under the “iron heel” of these Western invaders.30 By preaching Christianity, some explorers and missionaries had discredited the myths and legends that had explained the past to Inuit for thousands of years. It would have been wiser, Nansen wrote, never to have introduced a Western belief system that was so strange and bewildering to them.31 In making statements like this, a renowned figure like Nansen was tapping into a growing disillusionment with modern, industrialized European society. Confidence that the future was always going to be better—a belief symbolized by London's Crystal Palace—was no longer as strong as it had been at midcentury. The loss of community, intimacy, individuality, freedom, and independence was now keenly felt. The Inuit and other less “advanced” peoples seemed to be holdovers from a simpler age, and getting to know them fueled a nostalgic longing to return to it.
This turnaround in Western attitudes toward “primitive” Arctic peoples reached a high with the arrival of a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian anthropologist named Vilhjalmur Stefansson (born William Stephenson) in 1906. Of Icelandic extraction, Stefansson had done graduate work and taught at Harvard after earning a bachelor's degree at the University of Iowa. He was recruited as a scientist for the Anglo-American Polar Expedition, to study various tribes on the northern Canadian and Alaskan coastline. During his stay in that Arctic region, Stefansson became fascinated stories of a race of “Blond Eskimos”—believed to be descendants of intermarriage between early Scandinavian voyagers from Iceland and native women. After a brief interlude, Stefansson returned to the Arctic, this time as head of an expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, to locate and learn more about Inuit bands that some thought were living on remote islands in the Beaufort Sea. Upon reaching the delta of the Mackenzie River, where it emptied into the Arctic Sea, he was delighted by the warm reception given him by Inuit he had gotten to know a few years before. For these natives he had only the highest praise. “Under their communistic system of living, the Eskimos have developed the social virtues to a higher degree than we have; they are therefore people easy to live with,” he would later write in My Life with the Eskimo.32 Stefansson was also delighted to learn of the wholesale conversion of Inuit in this part of Canada to Christianity, as well as their appetite for imported Western foodstuffs, such as flour and canned meats and vegetables. These developments suggested to him that the Inuit were far more educable and capable of “advancing” than other Native American peoples.
Stefansson expressed this Pollyannaish view of the Inuit and his confidence that “a white man can live on the country wherever an Eskimo can do so”33 in his later, 1921 book, The Friendly Arctic—the product of five years spent mapping previously unexplored territory in northern Canada. Here he argued that lush grasslands, moderate temperatures, and abundant game could be found close to the North Pole, and thus humans could survive there as well; months without sunlight did not make this impossible. In Stefansson's view, the Arctic was not a place to be dreaded, as predecessors like Parry and Ross had reported. And the people who thrived in this challenging environment—the Inuit—were to be envied. Their lives were not, in fact, “wretched,” but contented and carefree, with plenty of “wholesome” food readily available to them. Although they wore skins, ate raw meat, and resembled “cave men,” the Inuit were, according to Stefansson, “the kindliest, friendliest, gentlest people, whose equals are difficult to find in any grade of our own civiliz
ation.”34
Scandinavian visitors like Stefansson envisioned the Far North as an outpost of their ancestral homelands and its people as kindred spirits. This connection generated a positive response to this hitherto little regarded part of the world. But explorers from other countries remained unpersuaded. They did not feel at home in the frozen expanses above the Arctic Circle, among a strange people with such strange ways. They did not have a long history of hunting for seals or living in perpetual snow. Nor could they easily discard their own cultural habits, even if these did prove to be woefully inadequate there. Unlike Hall, Stefansson, Nansen, and Amundsen, these explorers refrained from fraternizing with the locals. They wanted to preserve the line between them and “the Other.” Their organizational structure encouraged this separation. Military parties were less willing to adapt in the Arctic than civilian ones. As a result, they tended to have more disastrous outcomes. A 2005 study by a business professor at the University of Washington examined the fate of some ninety-two polar expeditions between 1818 and 1909 and found that privately (less-well) funded, civilian parties fared better than ones made up of men in uniform. While nearly half of the men on government-sponsored expeditions suffered from scurvy, only thirteen percent of those on private expeditions did. Nearly nine percent of crew members on government ships died, compared with just six percent on civilian-financed voyages. Private expeditions lost 0.24 ships out of an average fleet size of 1.15, whereas government-backed fleets averaged 0.53 ships sunk or destroyed out of 1.63 deployed.35 The author of this survey concluded that “poor leadership structures, slow adaptation to new information, and perverse incentives” were harmful to the military expeditions. Their structures of command, rigid routines, and lower pay scales did not serve this group well. (Private funding and military organization were not always mutually exclusive: for instance, on the Jeannette expedition of 1879, financing came from the newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., but the officers and crew were naval personnel.)
The British paid the highest price for sticking to their military ways. Having ruled the seas for centuries, the illustrious Royal Navy had set what the maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham has termed an “imperishable example…of courage, improvisation, and skill for others to follow.”36 But, over time, tradition and success became a straitjacket, particularly under polar conditions. Just because James Cook had rounded the Pacific wearing tight wool pants in the 1770s did not mean that this garb would be appropriate for all future British explorers in the northern Arctic or Antarctic. (In fact, these pants caused the men's legs to sweat and moisture to freeze on them.) Likewise, William Parry's faith in “bluejackets on foot” made little sense when it came to hauling thousand-pound sledges over nearly vertical ice hummocks. It took him three voyages in quest of the Northwest Passage to admit that his crew's wool clothing was not keeping them very warm.37 As late as the 1880s, military expeditions like Adolphus Greely's to northern Greenland were still unwilling to switch to furs and skins.38 Once sailors and soldiers had to abandon sinking ships and make their way over the ice, the orderliness of life on deck tended to break down. Many such parties lost their cohesiveness and their bearings. Lieutenant Adolphus Greely had carefully chosen experienced soldiers and officers for his Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, believing that the loyalty, obedience, and group solidarity they had learned on the Western frontier would stand them in good stead in the Far North. But, faced with baffling new challenges for which they were not at all prepared—long-term isolation and the prospect of starvation—some of them lost all self-control and turned on each other.
Then as now, the mindset and manner of a military leader was decision-oriented. Taking his own counsel, he weighed options, reached decisions, gave orders, and expected them to be carried out without question. He relied mainly on his past experiences, his judgment, and his hunches to make the right choices. A commander was not supposed to doubt or second guess himself. But in the Arctic and Antarctic unforeseen circumstances could turn his decisions into disastrous mistakes. In the polar world, the unexpected was what had to be expected, and expedition leaders had to be prepared to change their course of action. But such flexibility did not come easily to officers who had spent their careers following well-established protocols. During the second half of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, heads of British expeditions could not escape the long shadow of Clements Markham, whose notions of the Arctic and how to deal with it had been set fast back in the 1850s, when he was a young midshipman. (Scott, handpicked by Markham for the dash to the pole, had made sure one of his mentor's books found its place in the hastily thrown-together Terra Nova shipboard library some sixty years later.39) In his old age, Markham was obsessed with making sure the British conquered Antarctica first, convinced that accomplishing this feat would revitalize his country's heroic spirit and attest to “its manhood and superiority to a slightly disbelieving world.”40 Sticking to an old-fashioned, but arduous method like “manhauling” was essential: the greater the hardship overcome, the greater the triumph. To his way of thinking, using dogs in Antarctica would be cheating—and unmanly. (In 1904 Scott would similarly write that using dogs “robs sledge-travelling of much of its glory…. In my mind no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is reached when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts.”41) Markham's determination to have a British naval officer lead the Antarctic expeditions caused him to give short shrift to amply qualified candidates. For example, he brushed off an offer from William Speirs Bruce—a fervent Scottish nationalist and a naturalist considered the finest polar scientist of his day—to accompany Scott on the 1901 Discovery expedition for fear of Bruce's usurping Scott's (English) leadership role.42 (Scott knew no science and had had no prior Antarctic experience.)
This British inclination to regard polar exploration and conquest as exemplifying certain ideals discouraged experiential learning on the fly. Setting aside time to practice skiing (as Scott at first refused to do) or studying the mistakes of other parties (as Amundsen did almost religiously) was not a high priority.43 Generally speaking, British explorers remained incurious about the people they encountered and did not bother to learn their languages. This reluctance to reach out only widened the gap between them and the native peoples like the Inuit, deepening suspicions that they were deceitful, thieving, and untrustworthy. Too often uncooperative reality was kept out of sight, like an unruly child whose cries were best ignored for the sake of strengthening its character. Although Markham had anticipated British explorers acquiring a store of knowledge about these races in order to better understand human evolution, in practice most English explorers did not bother to do this.44 Early arrivals like Parry had not taken the time to query Inuit he had come into contact with. Sir John Richardson, a naturalist, was the only member of Franklin's overland parties to pick up some of their language and on later British expeditions to the Arctic, very few officers or sailors attempted to converse with the locals in their own tongue. By contrast, Americans such as Isaac Hayes, Charles Hall, Sidney Budington, and—later—Frederick Cook, Robert Peary, and his African American companion Matthew Henson were able to communicate with them, as were Norwegians like Nansen, Amundsen, and Stefansson.
Expedition leaders as varied as Franklin, Kane, De Long, Hall, Greely, Shackleton, and Scott felt that the inner qualities they and their men possessed would make the difference in this icy kingdom. Character was not something that could be taught, let alone learned from Native Americans and Inuit. Among expedition members it was valued far above physical strength and youth. As Elisha Kane wrote to his benefactor Henry Grinnell when he was putting together a team to hunt for signs of the Franklin party in the spring of 1852, “I am convinced that the plan proposed by me could be carried out, without feeling the absence of an artificial discipline. All that is needed is a crew of proper moral material, controlled by prudence and decision, and ma
de aware beforehand of what they had to endure.”45 The problem was that it was not easy to discern moral fiber in the course of a fifteen-minute interview, or to predict how it would hold up under great and prolonged stress. On shifting and treacherous polar ice, situations arose that baffled the moral compass because there was no precedent for dealing with them. Furthermore, surviving and “doing the right thing” could be at odds. On the fringes of the world, this lesson was learned time and again, and not only at the poles. The newspaperman Henry Morton Stanley went off to unmapped Africa with a keen moral sense firmly in mind, even though he himself was not wholly free of sin. (In New Orleans Stanley had frequented a brothel but then denounced the whores “wicked” because of how they had touched him.) He believed in the superiority of the white race as strongly as he believed in his Christian God. His conscience was clear about the mission later entrusted to him—to spread his religion throughout this “dark” continent. Like Livingstone before him, he was motivated by a vision. In the words of a German biographer, “his breast was animated by an heroic ideal, for whose realisation he was ready to make any sacrifice.”46 But Stanley, the English conquistador, committed horrible crimes during his crusade. In fact, he killed more Africans than any other explorer, before or since, all in the name of bringing spiritual enlightenment and the blessings of Western civilization. For the “nigger” people he met and treated brutally during this quest he showed not the slightest interest, dismissing both their religion and ancient culture as lacking in any redeeming value. Toward the end of his life, Stanley repudiated what he and others of his generation had done in the name of “progress” and even developed a hankering for some of the “barbarism” that he had tried to destroy. He had by then soured on his ideal of “civilization,” having seen how it had relied on the sword to do its bidding.