Mention of cannibalism was kept out of accounts of polar expeditions for decades, deemed incompatible with the image of courageous, self-sacrificing heroes that the public wanted to read. This was particularly so in England, where “tragic” but noble failures were preferred to tawdry successes. For example, in his 1910 homage to the Heroes of the Polar Age, J. Kennedy MacLean did not mention members of the Franklin party resorting to eating fellow crew members. Instead, he glossed over the expedition's final stages thusly: “Grim, indeed, is the tragedy that was at length revealed—the wary imprisonment amid the ice during the long winters of endless darkness and the short summers of unfailing light, the hope of relief that never came, the merciful passing away of the gallant old commander before the final catastrophe with its relentless doom fell upon his brave men.”34 For, when Kennedy was writing, the “heroic age” of polar exploration was in full swing, with giants like Ernest Shackleton and Robert F. Scott boldly striding across the Antarctic continent in search of greater glory—for themselves and their country. Thus the time was not propitious for any revelations about a dark, morally reprehensible aspect of their adventures.
Still, the stain on the Franklin party lingered—a grim, ghostly reminder that all that transpired at the poles was not as admirable and uplifting as the carefully edited memoirs and polished stone monuments would have people believe. Even though the fate of some crew members of Terror and Erebus was rarely discussed, it could not be erased from public consciousness. Since cannibalism had been practiced on this expedition, it could happen again: it was not limited to “primitive” tribes; it was part of human reality. The awareness that members of the Royal Navy had committed such deeds affected how many people in England and elsewhere thought of themselves—not as advanced human beings, but akin to those who had lived centuries before them. John Rae had been one of the first to grasp this link between primordial past and progressive present, between the poor and the well-bred. As a recent biographer of his has pointed out, the Scottish doctor “simply did not believe that Royal Navy officers and sailors, no matter how well-educated, how devoutly Christian, were superior to all other human beings and so exempt, under extreme conditions, from normal behaviour. The Arctic had taught him otherwise.”35
The lessons about human nature gleaned at the ends of the earth were sobering and startling. They cast aspersions on the romantic temperament, as Rae's report had. What explorers might have to do in life-and-death situations became an accepted part of human existence, for better or for worse. Explorers may have accomplished amazing deeds and demonstrated incredible courage and fortitude, but they had done so, at times, at a horrendous cost—in lives and to their own image. As the polar historian Beau Riffenburgh has put it, the gruesome fate of members of the Franklin party had “eliminated the sublimity” surrounding their adventure.36 To conquer the poles called for stretching the limits of what humans were capable of, but this was not always something to be proud of. The paradox was all too apparent: the pursuit of greatness by means of exploration could entail the loss of something even more precious—the mantle of godliness in which “civilized” man liked to wrap himself. Just as Adam and Eve had had to defy God and bite the apple of knowledge so that they could go forth and rule the earth, so did modern humans have to abandon their righteous high ground to complete the task of subduing Nature.
There were other, practical consequences of the Franklin disaster. The great loss of life—the most ever on a single polar expedition—caused many to oppose future voyages to the Arctic, certainly any involving large groups of men. The Admiralty, for one, became disinclined to send out more parties, fearful of another blot on its reputation. After the search for traces of Franklin's party was over, England essentially ceded hegemony in the Far North to the United States and the Scandinavian countries. The inability of ships to penetrate Arctic pack ice made overland expeditions to reach the pole seem more promising, and in this new race to the top, the seagoing British were literally out of their element, even if they had chosen to compete. Secondly, the fact that so many men on Terror and Erebus had apparently starved to death focused attention on the matter of provisions: large crews required tremendous amounts of food, and transporting so much weight over long distances could slow an expedition's advance and increase the likelihood of being caught in the ice. Furthermore, dependence on supplies brought all the way from Europe or the United States meant that expeditions were doomed if these stores ran out, as had happened on the Franklin voyage. For these reasons, when he was planning to navigate the Northwest Passage in 1903, Amundsen decided to take only six other men on the Gjøa with him and to emulate the Inuit people by living off the land as much as possible—if and when his five-year-supply of canned goods ran out. Other explorers, such as Nansen, similarly sought to solve the food problem by slaughtering seals and polar bears on their way toward the North Pole. Unlike many of their British navy predecessors, who—being sailors—were generally poor marksmen and had to rely on native hunters, they counted on their expertise with rifles. Realizing there would be no game available during the Arctic winter, northbound expeditions often laid down a chain of food caches—a practice Franklin had dismissed as “an absurdity.”37
The Franklin tragedy taught explorers the wisdom of adopting local customs and living like Arctic peoples as much as possible. But there were dangers, too, in “going native.” One had to be careful not to commit criminal acts—a gross betrayal of the civilizing rationale that had brought Europeans and North Americans to these icy frontiers in the first place. The lingering shame and revulsion surrounding the Franklin party called for expiation, a reaffirming of the differences separating savages from Christians. Starvation could never fully justify what these sailors had done, nor could it ever do so in the future. So the best solution to the quandary the Franklin party had faced was to never end up in that kind of situation again. Jumping ahead in time half a century, we can see in Robert Scott's approach to his race to the South Pole this continuing need to preserve standards of decency no matter what happened. Cannibalism was never part of his vocabulary, and it is highly unlikely that he or any of the other gentlemen on the Southern Party would have ever entertained that option. Throughout his naval career, Scott had adhered slavishly to all rules and regulations, his actions guided—as a recent biographer has summed up—by “Conformity, obedience, centralisation, abstract reasoning, unthinking bravery, chivalric idealism, unswerving duty in the narrowest sense of the word.”38 When, as a young cadet, he had first heard about the fate of the Franklin party, Scott must have been appalled. He must have vowed that this would never happen when he was in command, the sheer barbarity of these acts viscerally abhorrent to a sensitive officer who pitied the plight of his stumbling ponies on the Terra Nova so much he lay sleepless in bed worrying about them, and who later felt “awful” when two of these animals had to be killed with pickaxes.39
As Scott, Bowers, Oates, Evans, and Wilson grew weaker and weaker, lifting their ice-smothered boots one agonizing step after another during their dispirited and dismal return from the pole, making it back was not their sole preoccupation—how they would do so mattered as much. As it became apparent that they were not destined to survive, how they would face death became paramount. This was evident in their refusal to abandon Oates—“The Soldier” who had scoffed at surrendering as a twenty-one-year-old army officer in the Second Boer War—who was then incapacitated by gangrene and frostbite, so that the rest of them could get back sooner. (Still, Scott did grouse that Titus was a “terrible hindrance” and had Wilson distribute opium tablets so that Oates could choose to end his suffering.40) In his journal Scott could not help but congratulate himself and the others for lingering, recording with a schoolboy's unabashed pride, “I take this opportunity of saying that we have stuck to our sick companions to the last.”41 Doing the right thing was what motivated Oates to take the unilateral decision to slip outside and disappear into the snow with this Etonian understatement: “I am
just going outside and may be some time.”42 And it was plain to see inside the snow-carpeted, half-collapsed tent, where Cherry-Garrard and the other searchers found the bodies of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers eight months later—not scarred with knife cuts, or befouled by shreds of flesh lying beside them, or disgraced by blood-stained knives still clasped in their yellowed fingers, but serenely, miraculously, almost virginally intact, already welcomed into immortality—the frozen Scott lying face up in the middle, the flaps of his sleeping bag thrust apart, his coat wide open, as if inviting surrender to the death that he must have welcomed at the end—an end without disgrace, as he would wish it remembered. With these final, heartbreaking gestures, which would be immortalized in the hearts of millions, the stain of John Franklin's men had finally been expunged. The honor of England had been restored.
Karl Weyprecht was an unlikely pioneer of polar science. Born in the picturesque, landlocked Hessian city of Michelstadt, Germany, in 1838, he enlisted as a cadet in the Austrian Navy at the age of seventeen, hoping to make a career at sea. Within a few years he saw limited action in the Austro-Sardinian War and then served in the Mediterranean under the command of Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, a towering figure in his country's military. Weyprecht seemed destined to rise through the ranks to help Austria achieve greater prominence in the eyes of the world. But in July 1865 he happened to attend a lecture in Frankfurt that changed the direction of his short life—and of polar exploration. This took place during an inaugural gathering of German geographers. The man giving the talk was August Petermann, his country's leading light in this emerging field—a man obsessed by the mysterious disappearance of the Franklin party and a staunch believer in the existence of the Open Polar Sea, which the missing English sailors had been trying to reach. The forty-two-year-old Petermann spoke at length with compelling enthusiasm about this supposedly navigable body of water at the top of the world, making a case for Germany to dispatch ships explore it. Like many other geographers, Petermann was convinced that the warm waters borne northward by the Gulf Stream eventually pooled in the Arctic and thereby created a temperate girdle around the North Pole. Because of its high salt content, this expanse of water never froze over.1 Access to this unexplored sea thus could be of great military, commercial, and scientific importance, and Petermann wanted his country to take the lead in capitalizing on these opportunities. With Germany recently unified, the moment was now opportune for it to assume a more active role in exploring this part of the world. He proposed that a vessel be outfitted and sent north as soon as possible.
Weyprecht was enthralled by this idea. After the lecture, he spoke with Petermann, and the headstrong and impatient cartographer impulsively asked the young navy lieutenant if he would be willing to lead this proposed “reconnaissance voyage.” Weyprecht just as unhesitatingly agreed. But the Austro-Prussian War then broke out, and the attention of Germans and their leaders turned away from the Arctic. Weyprecht served with distinction and was decorated for the courage displayed in assuming command of his ship during the Battle of Lissa, in the Adriatic, after its captain had been decapitated by a shell. Once this conflict had ended, he resumed his peacetime career. But Weyprecht's dream of being a polar explorer did not go away. In January of 1868, he and Petermann met again, in Croatia, to discuss the voyage they had been planning. This time, however, it was his health that got in Weyprecht's way: he had contracted a chronic, debilitating fever while on duty in Mexico, and this forced him to take a leave of absence. Still, his passion for going to the Far North would not die. Finally, in June 1872, after a successful preliminary cruise during which he was delighted to find warm, ice-free water near Siberia, Weyprecht sailed from Bremerhaven, in northern Germany, as captain of the three-masted schooner Tegetthoff, with the goal of navigating the entire Northeast Passage—which ran north of Norway and Russia—and then going on from there to reach the Polar Sea, if not the pole itself. His ship didn't get very far, as these waters turned out to be clogged by ice. As far as he and his crew could see, there was no Open Polar Sea ahead of them. During the two winters the vessel drifted helplessly, Weyprecht and the Austro-Hungarian expedition's land leader, Julius von Payer, did discover a mountainous archipelago in the Barents Sea, which they named Franz Josef Land in honor of the reigning Austrian monarch. But, in terms of his declared objective, the voyage was a deflating failure.
By not getting anywhere near the North Pole and by showing that Petermann's theory about a warm polar sea was dead wrong, this voyage effectively ended the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire's bid to be an Arctic power. On top of this, the Tegetthoff was split apart by ice pressure and had to be abandoned. Weyprecht and his men dragged three small boats, weighing four thousand pounds each, on sledges over the ice for three months before they reached open water, where they were eventually spotted and picked up by two passing Russian whalers. Despite all these setbacks, Weyprecht was welcomed home as a great national hero and awarded a gold medal by England's Royal Geographical Society.2 But then, somewhat mysteriously, he had a complete change of mind, denouncing the obsession with discovery for its own sake that he had advocated for years. He now spoke out in favor of another rationale for going toward the poles—the scientific knowledge to be acquired there. Having seen firsthand how much time and money were wasted when countries carried out similar explorations on their own, Weyprecht proposed that they now collaborate in gathering data about the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
In suggesting this, Weyprecht was out of step with his time—scientifically as well as politically. He first broached this idea during a speech before the Vienna Academy of Sciences in January 1875—just a few years after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, a conflict that had humiliated the French, emboldened the Germans, upset the balance of power on the Continent, and sowed the seeds for World War I four decades later. This was hardly a propitious time to call for international cooperation. If anything, national rivalries were intensifying as Europe's major powers were busy carving out colonial empires in Africa and Asia. Science, too, was caught up in this chauvinistic fervor. Some looked at discoveries about the natural world as a worthy substitute for war—a way to “flex imperial muscle” and show superiority without bloodshed.3 Even Weyprecht himself had argued as much in seeking funds for his North Polar exploration: wasn't Austria—an empire several hundred years old—the equal of an upstart Germany? Why, then, should it not compete with the Prussians in demonstrating its “scientific” prowess? (In the parlance of his day, “science” meant practical knowledge about natural phenomena, put to use to improve the world.) In reporting on his polar discoveries to a whipped-up gathering of scientists in Vienna, Weyprecht had declared: “Gentlemen! This year for the first time we have hoisted the flag in the Arctic region, and will bring to life again the faint hopes of finally reaching the pole! The Austrians have…successfully entered the contest.”4
Whatever had changed Weyprecht's mind, his call for international scientific cooperation found a receptive audience in that hall and almost overnight revolutionized the rationale for sending government-sponsored expeditions toward the poles. European meteorologists bought the Austrian officer's argument that persisting in an “international steeplechase” to plant a flag a few miles further north or south was exceedingly costly and yielded little of value.5 They also concurred that only acquiring more information about this remote realm, and sharing it for the good of all, made this exploratory pursuit worthwhile. As Weyprecht outlined his vision, comprehensive magnetic, weather-related, and astronomical data could be amassed by teams from different countries based at permanent outposts forming a ring around the North Pole and in Antarctica. Encountering remarkably little resistance, these scientists convinced their governments to finance the setting up of these on-site laboratories.6 By 1881, seven nations—Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States—had agreed to participate in this first international polar collaboration. (Adolphus Greely's disastrous Lady Franklin Bay
Expedition would be the American contingent.) Sadly, Weyprecht died in March of that year—a victim of tuberculosis—before any of these stations were set up.7
To the Ends of the Earth Page 17