The twenty-five-man American party, known as the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (for its location some six hundred miles from the North Pole, along the northern Greenland coast), and commanded by Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely of the US Army Signal Corps, set about its scientific mission starting in the late summer of 1881 with military doggedness and discipline. By so honoring this commitment, they were demonstrating how seriously the United States took science—a sign that it was on a par with the major European powers. Before the Arctic winter arrived at their Fort Conger base camp, and before the last rays of the sun disappeared, soldiers and scientists took turns going regularly out to their observatories to write down the temperature, wind speed, barometric pressure, tidal rise and fall, movement of the stars, and tilt of the magnetometer—filling notebooks with thousands of notations.35 (Only in the depths of winter did their record-keeping become more lax.36) Greely's small band also jotted down descriptions of the aurora and other cosmic phenomena, gathered marine, mammalian, plant, bird, and fossil specimens, and made anthropological observations about Inuit who lived near the fort.37 These Civil War veterans stuck to their routines in spite of the intense cold, their increasingly depressed and irritable mood, and the risks involved. After no relief ships had reached them, and with supplies running low, the Greely party abandoned its lonely outpost in August 1883 and made its way south to Cape Sabine, where food caches had been left by previous voyagers. It was only at this point that the men stopped keeping meteorological records.38 Greely had copies made of these and other findings, sealed them in water-tight tin boxes, and carried this heavy (over fifty pounds) load with him throughout this grueling, two-month-long, two-hundred-mile retreat, first by boat and then drifting on the ice. After being rescued the following June and making it back to New York, the six surviving soldiers (plus Greely) were praised for their “enlargement of scientific survey” and given promotions, despite the whispers about cannibalism that had accompanied them.39
The need for scientific breakthroughs and new national heroes was so great because those who had gone to the Arctic strictly because of territorial ambitions—what Charles Daly, longtime president of the American Geographical Society, had called “wild discovery”—had accomplished very little.40 Memories of the Franklin and Jeannette fiascos were hard to shake. Wealthy patrons of later polar expeditions like Daly and Grinnell helped the public get over these disasters by trumpeting another kind of achievement in which they could take pride. And, by and large, the public bought into this new exploratory objective because it called for the same manly heroics they longed for. Adding to human knowledge was also another justification for territorial aggrandizement and cause for chauvinistic celebration. Just as Clements Markham was determined that newly discovered locations in the Arctic have only British names, so were many of his contemporaries eager to have only their scientists receive the credit for important scientific discoveries. Karl Weyprecht may have believed that learning more about the polar regions would benefit all of humanity, but others saw this undertaking as another form of international competition, in which there would always be winners and also-rans.
Yet some explorer-scientists toiling in the Arctic and Antarctic were indifferent to this quasi-Darwinian aspect of their research. They seemed to have taken to heart the idea that what they were responding to was a higher calling. Perhaps not coincidentally, several leading polar scientists around the turn of the century were deracinated individuals, largely devoid of patriotic fervor. Carsten Borchgrevink, for example, was a native of Oslo, who had begun his polar career in 1894, as a member of a Norwegian whaling voyage to the Arctic. But a few years later he took command of the British-financed Southern Cross expedition after having convinced Sir George Newnes, wealthy publisher of the Strand Magazine, to back him for that position (over the vehement objections of British chauvinists like Markham). In deference to Newnes, Borchgrevink brought with him five hundred tiny Union Jacks, attached to bamboo poles, so that he could visibly mark any new extensions of the British Empire his party might claim. Although in retirement he returned to Norway, his loyalties remained divided between these two countries. Likewise, Louis Bernacchi—the chief “magnetician” and meteorologist on Borchgrevink's expedition—had been born in Belgium, to Italian parents, and then, at the age of eight, moved with them to Tasmania. He took his university degree in Australia and became fully assimilated there. During the Southern Cross and the Discovery expeditions to Antarctica, Bernacchi dedicated himself to studying magnetism: he was convinced the real value of the continent lay in the scientific secrets it concealed. During World War I, he served in both the American and the British navies. Bernacchi lived the rest of his life in England and died in London in 1942. Similarly, Douglas Mawson—respected as the only true scientist on the Antarctic continent during the age of Scott and Shackleton—was a native of England who spent almost his entire life (when not at the bottom of the world) in Australia. For transnational men like these it was easier to separate “science” from “state” and advance one without having to worry about betraying the other.
But even deeply loyal subjects of the British Empire could devote themselves wholeheartedly to “pure” science. The best-known examples of such dedication were the members of Scott's two expeditions who chose to carry out projects in conflict with their quests to reach the South Pole. From the start, these two Antarctic journeys—the first undertaken by Englishmen since the days of Sir James Ross—had been riven by incongruent missions. During the planning for the 1901–1904 Discovery expedition, polar enthusiasts like the Royal Geographical Society's president, Markham, had opposed any distraction from traversing unexplored territory near the Ross Ice Shelf and insisted that navy men should run the show, whereas top officials at the co-sponsoring Royal Society—Britain's preeminent scientific body—argued for glacial geologist John Walter Gregory to be put in charge. In the end, Markham got his way, Scott—his protégé—was given command, and Gregory withdrew from the expedition, saying that he could not countenance scientific study being subordinated to “naval adventure.”41 Only one member of the remaining scientific team—Bernacchi—had had any prior experience in the Antarctic. Nonetheless, Scott's was instructed to give equal weight to “meteorological, oceanographic, geological, biological and physical investigations and researches” during his travels.
It was during Scott's dash to the South Pole eight years later that the tensions between scientific and territorial aspirations came to a head. Reflecting his personal inclination and his sponsors’ wishes, this Terra Nova party sought to strike a balance between these two purposes—a fateful compromise since they proved to be detrimental to each other, especially when the English expedition discovered it was in a tight race with the Norwegians. Whereas Amundsen, “unfettered by science,” could keep his gaze riveted like a laser on getting to the pole first, Scott's party was delayed going south by a commitment to collect information about the Antarctic environment. The chief scientist, Edward Wilson, in particular, took this work very seriously: he was eager to complete his study of Emperor penguins and carry out geological, magnetic, and meteorological studies, convinced that this research should be the main focus of the expedition. In a letter to his father, Wilson made his priorities crystal-clear: “No one can say that it will have only been a Pole-hunt, though that of course is a sine qua non. We must get to the Pole, but we shall get more too…. We want the scientific work to make the bagging of the Pole merely an item in the results.”42 He and some of the others, including Scott, saw themselves exemplifying a twentieth-century ideal of manliness that combined physical courage with scientific expertise and brains. At one point, while waiting for Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard to return from Cape Crozier, Scott jotted in his diary: “Science cannot be served by ‘dilettante’ methods, but demands a mind spurred by ambition or the satisfaction of ideals.”43
Wilson's resolve to set out into the howling Antarctic winter (something no one had dared to do before) to c
ollect a few penguin eggs so that he could confirm an evolutionary theory tapped into the romantic side of Scott's nature: he envisioned this proposed excursion as a grand expression of the human spirit—soaring to great heights over extreme adversity for the sake of a selfless purpose.44 What some might belittle as a foolish and dangerous side trip, Scott saw as the kind of manhood test that Clements Markham expected British naval officers to pass while they were in the Arctic and Antarctic.45 He knew full well how much Wilson yearned to do this, for his own reasons. Before departing, one spring evening at Cape Evans, the Cambridge-educated ornithologist had presented a talk on penguins and spelled out what he hoped to learn from their eggs. His passion for this subject was infectious. Scott admired Wilson so much that turning down his request would have been like hiding a birthday present from his young son. When the trio of Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard returned from their “worst journey in the world” five weeks later, looking more like long-trapped Welsh coal miners than English gentlemen, with three of the precious eggs nestled in a bundle, Scott could only admire their extraordinary courage (“It makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling”46) even if the eggs meant little to him, and even if he realized how terrible a physical toll this ordeal had taken on men he planned to take south to the pole in three months’ time. (Wilson would afterward disparage their side trip to Cape Crozier as “useless” because they had had only a day in which to forage for eggs.47)
In accomplishing this incredible feat, the three Englishmen had remained true to the devil-may-care abandonment that bound them together, like schoolboys in a rugby scrum, even in the face of death. As Scott would reflect in his journal on the eve of his departure for the pole, “We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild things in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do.”48 For Wilson and Cherry-Garrard, this “winter journey” was an act of faith—faith that someday what they accomplished would make a difference. Cherry admitted in his memoir that the immediate importance of scooping up Emperor penguin eggs under these harrowing circumstances had not been apparent to him. Still, with no thought of “personal gain,” they had struggled like trusting acolytes to bring back some scientific evidence, leaving it to others to sort out what it might mean.49
The trip to Crozier had been simply “ghastly.” Insanely cold temperatures, three-day blizzards, frozen clothes, stomach cramps, frostbite, near misses with crevasses—all these ills had plagued the three explorers like some polar parody of the Book of Job. Despite it all, Bowers kept detailed meteorological records, and they had trudged on. Having only a faintly shining Jupiter to guide their steps, their faith in this mission was literally as well as figuratively blind. It was as if they had crossed over into another realm of existence, in which pain and purpose and plausibility no longer impinged upon their consciousness: “We were quite intelligent people,” Cherry wrote, “and we must all have known that we were not going to see the penguins and that it was folly to go forward. And yet with quiet perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men led on. I just did what I was told.” By the time the trio—tied together with ropes in the dark in case one of them should slip into a crevasse—finally staggered into the midst of a hundred or so nesting penguins near the Great Ice Barrier—possibly the most inhospitable spot on the entire planet—their task appeared more hopeless but, at the same time, more worthwhile. Cherry now felt it was of the “utmost importance” to science that they snatch some eggs and bring them back. And that they did, wrenching away five from underneath irate but helpless parents. After the men escaped from this rookery and returned to the relative safety of a nearby ledge, they discovered that Cherry had dropped two of them along the way, and they had been lost.50 The remaining ones would eventually find their way safely back to Cape Evans, from there, by ship to England, and then, finally in 1913, to the Natural History Museum in London, where they would remain unexamined for some twenty-one years. When this did happen, in 1934, it was determined that the eggs revealed little about penguin embryology and provided no support for the theory that birds had descended from dinosaurs.
In some ways, this “worst journey in the world” foreshadowed Scott's dash to the South Pole a few months later. In both instances, historic milestones were achieved—at great personal sacrifice and under horrific conditions. Yet both “triumphs” had ironic, deflating consequences: just as the arrival of Scott and his men at the pole after the Norwegians had left them deeply dispirited and then—because they died on the way back—turned them into martyrs, so did collecting penguin eggs on Cape Crozier (and then hauling them back to England) demonstrate English fortitude and “pluck,” but, at the same time, the ultimate pointlessness of what they had achieved. Results like this did not encourage more efforts but sowed seeds of disenchantment. Two years after the Terra Nova tragedy, Shackleton's Endurance expedition—which was to be the last of the “Heroic Age” explorations—took place, but it, too, ended in failure, even if it was enshrined in memory as one of the greatest survival stories in human history. After it, English boots rarely touched the Antarctic continent again.51 Future scientific work there was largely turned over to other nations.
In large part, this rapid waning of interest stemmed from disillusionment with gallantry on battlefields like the Somme, but even before World War I the apparent futility of gaining glory at the ends of the earth had soured the British public on such expeditions—much as the loss of the Franklin party had half a century before. When, in his obituary for Scott, Clements Markham saluted him as a “martyr in the cause of science,” he was sadly bidding farewell not only to his protégé but also to the national mood that had elevated Scott to such a lofty stature.52 After Scott's death, a sacrifice like his could not shake its association with pointlessness and disappointment. So tarnished by defeat, the endeavors of scientist-explorers at the poles, once deemed “heroic,” no longer glittered as brightly as they once had. Three dusty penguin eggs, languishing on a London museum shelf for decades, were a fitting epitaph to this era of extravagant hopes, heroic struggles, and elusive fulfillment.
When thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant John C. Colwell of the US Navy reached the partially collapsed tent on rock-strewn Cape Sabine, he took out a knife and slit the canvas so he could peer inside. Probing the darkness, his eyes alighted on a scene from a charnel house. One man lay dead on his back, with glassy eyes staring into eternity. Another, motionless, but still alive, apparently had neither hands nor feet. A third, sprawled forward on his knees, as if caught crawling, stared up in disbelief, a red skullcap plastered on his head, a long, thick beard obscuring his face, his frail body sheathed in a ragged dressing gown. “Greely, is this you?” Colwell blurted out. “Yes,” the man whispered, almost inaudibly. Then, after a pause, he added, in the labored rasp of someone who had not spoken in a long time, “Yes, seven of us left. Here we are, dying—like men. Did what I came to do—beat the best record.”1 Then he collapsed.
In morte, veritas. With death seemingly near, Adolphus Greely wanted to make sure the world knew what his party had managed to do—reach a new Farthest North of 83.23 degrees, besting the British mark set eight years before. This was the goal he had come to achieve, the feat that really mattered, the accomplishment that would earn him the adulation of a world that not heard from his expedition in three years. Colwell must have been taken aback as much by Greely's assertion as by the pitiful condition of these survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition he had just rescued. For the American government had not sent these soldiers so far into the Arctic barrens—on the first federally funded polar expedition—to strive for some dramatic territorial milestone like reaching the North Pole.2 Instead, as participants in the First International Polar Year, they were supposed to collect data on the weather, magnetic field, and celestial events from their base in far northern Greenland. But Greely had said nothing about that. It was as if he had forgotten what he had come for.
In fact, the
Greely party had not stuck to the task it had been assigned. Quietly, and as early as their first winter on Ellesmere Island, the task of accumulating “scientific knowledge instead of expanding mere geography had been largely shelved.”3 Despite Greely's later protestations that scientific study had been the expedition's “main” task, his focus from the outset had been on gaining fame as an explorer and discoverer of new lands. (In an 1882 letter to his mother, Sergeant David Brainard had explained, more candidly, that their purpose was “exploration and observation.”4) The US government had tacitly approved this shift in emphasis, realizing that it needed to sell the Lady Franklin Bay mission to an American public hungry for glorious deeds. Having previously overseen the stringing of military telegraph lines across the West, Greely had set his sights on leading an Arctic expedition after listening to a fellow officer (and his closest friend), William Henry Howgate, describe his dream of colonizing the region around the North Pole, and then devouring all the books by earlier explorers he could lay his hands on. Captain Howgate had been in line to command the American contingent during the International Polar Year but had had to abruptly resign his commission after it became known that he had embezzled several hundred thousand dollars in government funds. Respected for his steady leadership under trying circumstances, Greely had then been chosen by President Rutherford B. Hayes to take Howgate's place, although he was totally lacking in Arctic experience. Knowledgeable about meteorology and well versed in signal technology, Greely seized at this opportunity to test these skills in the Far North. But he also realized that lasting renown went to those who accomplished dramatic “firsts” there.
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