To the Ends of the Earth

by John V. H. Dippel

  But just two weeks later Nansen changed his mind: “It [a polar dash] might almost be called an easy expedition for two men,” he would recall in his aptly named 1897 book Farthest North—a plan that he had actually been weighing for months. As he added, in a moment of awkward psychological justification: “Is the soul of man nothing but a succession of moods and feelings, shifting as incalculably as the changing winds?”31 So on to the Pole it would be, with the prospect of achieving an historic “first” ending all his prevarication and high-minded pretense about the vital importance of science.32 Science could now wait. For descendants of adventuresome Norsemen like Nansen and Amundsen, this was an inescapable choice. The Far North was their birthright—and where destiny beckoned them. No matter how “rational” they might sound about their motives and plans, in the crunch being the first to stand at the top of the world was what they dreamed about before falling asleep and the first thing they thought about when they woke up.

  If an emphasis on scientific research can be gauged by how frequently expedition findings were put to practical use, then it was the British, and not the Scandinavians, who paid the least heed. English polar parties seemed almost constitutionally incapable of changing their methods in light of what their predecessors had learned. To some degree, this clinging to old ways spoke to their steadfast belief that mind was superior to matter: British sailors and their officers possessed sufficient character, wisdom, and time-tested tradition to deal with whatever obstacles they happen upon while crossing the polar ice. In their role of explorers, they would change the world, not let the world change them. For example, nearly a century after James Cook and his men espied the continent of Antarctica for the first time, in 1774, British naval crews were still wearing virtually the same uniforms—blue woolen jackets and flannel pants. Even the likelihood that many in the Franklin party had frozen to death did not persuade the Admiralty to switch to the fur-lined parkas favored by local Inuit.

  When Captain Francis Leopold McClintock accepted Lady Franklin's invitation to head an expedition to find “relics” of her presumed dead husband in 1857, he went to great lengths to refit the yacht Fox for Arctic service, but he took no steps to provide his men with clothing and provisions more suited to the Far North than those his missing predecessor had taken along. Winter coats and other garments were, instead, selected from “an ample supply…which had remained in store from former expeditions.” The food staple McClintock had procured for the Fox—some 6,682 pounds of pemmican—was essentially the same as what the Royal Navy had been requisitioning from the same vendor for the past dozen years.33 However, McClintock and his men did show some innovative thought in putting out nets to catch seals and whales. They also shot and killed bears. After the Fox became stuck on an ice floe in mid-November and the crew settled into their winter quarters, the lieutenant had them experiment (successfully) with hauling sledges over the ice—an exhausting, back-breaking practice that would subsequently remain de rigueur for the British Navy up until Scott's day.34 It was left to Norwegian and some American polar explorers to study Inuit ways and adopt their dress, diet, shelters, and means of transportation so that they would have a better chance of surviving in this brutal environment. Tradition-minded commanders like McClintock did conduct scientific experiments: the observant leader of the Fox expedition would go so far as to measure the smile of an Inuit man he had met in Greenland. McClintock also tested the level of ozone in the Arctic atmosphere and learned to use instruments purchased by the Royal Society to help him locate the North Magnetic Pole. But such pursuits were subordinate to his primary objective—to find any signs of the vanished Franklin party and learn what had happened to them. Yet, as much as scientific curiosity and investigation were part of his nature, McClintock was also compelled to penetrate the northern mists by ambitions that had little to do with better understanding the natural world. Charles Darwin he was not.

  While they made a point of publicly emphasizing their commitment to science, in private polar explorers were often disparaging or dismissive of what they considered unnecessary “distractions.” The British, the Americans, and the Scandinavians were equally culpable of this hypocrisy. In seeking funds for his Arctic expedition between 1907 and 1909, Roald Amundsen shrewdly tailored his appeals to the Royal Geographical Society and the Norwegian government so that they stressed his planned magnetic and anthropological research and made no mention of his intention to get to the North Pole first. Around the same time, Ernest Shackleton made known his interest in reaching the South Magnetic Pole—a major objective of British Antarctic science since the 1830s. But Shackleton brought only two scientists on the Nimrod and declined to take Mawson along as a geologist, worried that the Australian's interest in exploring the Antarctic coast would only take away resources Shackleton needed for his planned dash to the pole.35 It was only after he had failed to reach this goal in 1907 that the Irish explorer pursued the magnetic pole with anything approaching ardor: he had decided to garner whatever acclaim that might come with achieving this “first.” When Shackleton had sailed south with Scott a few years before, on the Discovery, both men found the scientific observations they were supposed to make en route a waste of precious time, as they were anxious get to Antarctic before the winter season set in. Shackleton vented his disdain for these tasks in these mocking verses inserted in the ship's journal:

  To be aroused from slumber from the deadest of the night,

  To take an observation, gives us all a morbid blight,

  How in the name of all that's blank, can temperatures down here,

  Concern these scientific men at home from year to year?

  To us alone they matter, for it's cold enough, Alas!

  To freeze the tail and fingers off of a monkey made of brass.36

  Shackleton's candor here contrasts sharply with his deception when he insisted to Scott, in a February 21, 1910, letter that his proposed Antarctic expedition was going to be “purely scientific.”37 Not all polar explorers may have been so disingenuous, but the ones in charge usually were. And often there were good reasons for being so. Planning, organizing, promoting, and financing an expedition to the top or bottom of the world was a complex logistical—and political—process, which required leaders to pull off a tricky balancing act between their personal aspirations and their scientific and governmental sponsors’ interest in getting a good return on their investment.38 At times, this inherent conflict forced explorers like Greely, Amundsen, Nansen, Shackleton, and Scott to make compromises that undermined their effectiveness. The most prominent example of this was Scott's agreeing to let Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard set out for Cape Crozier when he really needed them in top shape for the grueling trek to the South Pole and back that lay just a few months ahead.39 Scott could not bring himself to veto this excursion, for several reasons.

  First of all, he felt obligated to carry out scientific tasks with which he had been entrusted. For a navy officer, orders were, after all, orders. (Members of his party had already made two geological outings in 1911, to survey glaciers to the west of their base camp and bring back mineral samples.) Scott may have regarded these side trips as a means of alleviating the interminable boredom of an Antarctic winter and therefore worthwhile. (Most of his men did not think very highly of science per se. According to one historian, “The philosophy of the tenement dwellers [in the hut] was ‘Down with Science, Sentiment and the Fair Sex.’”40) Secondly, he did not have the heart to turn Wilson down: he respected him too much. He envied Wilson's innocence, passion, and focus in carrying out tasks that mattered so much to him, without having to deal with competing demands as he did. Furthermore, Scott admired the selfless dedication of men like “Uncle Bill,” who meticulously applied the scientific method to solve practical problems and took a “keen avocational interest” in their work.41 Unlike Wilson, he considered research to be an important, if secondary, aspect of his mission.42 Lastly, Scott may have seen in Wilson's seemingly absurd quest to bring back
penguin eggs from Cape Crozier parallels with his own romantic impulse to “go for broke” in order to beat Amundsen to the pole.

  Devastated by finding the Norwegians’ tent at the South Pole, Scott quickly shifted gears and made science his new top priority, with hopes of salvaging some small triumph on the way back after this crushing defeat. Taking time to gather rocks containing fossils millions of years old and haul them back to Cape Evans was his way of giving his companions a goal they could accomplish. The fossils’ scientific value was not the issue: he wanted to show his men were not defeated and could still muster the courage and forbearance that a watching world had expected of them.43 When the news of the deaths of Scott, Bowers, and Wilson reached England, newspapers there were quick to grasp this saving grace. An editorial in the Times published after their memorial service praised Scott and his men for gallantly withstanding the “remorseless forces of Nature, clinging in ever increasing peril and weakness to the scientific records and geological specimens that it was the primary object of their expedition to secure. It is thus that they snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat.” Through the explorers’ sacrifice for this higher cause, the English people had regained their “emotional birthright” and could offer up a “song of thankfulness” to these lost men, who had demonstrated that “the unconquerable will can carry them through, loyal to the last to the charge they have undertaken.”44

  This glorifying of science following the Scott tragedy was an ironic twist in the longstanding clash between territorial and scientific reasons for exploring the Arctic and Antarctic. Science carried the day, but only by default. The reality, that these two missions had so often been at loggerheads, was quietly overlooked. But it was still true that trying to accomplish two conflicting objectives at the same time could be highly problematic. For many of the men who served on these expeditions, similar tension between their leaders’ declared (scientific) purpose and concealed (territorial) ambitions could be equally debilitating. They could easily lose confidence in commanders who were not forthright with them or who needlessly endangered their lives. Any perceived breach of trust could destroy morale. For instance, when Nansen declared his intention to quit the Fram and strike out for the North Pole, his crew was shocked because he had always treated them as equals and openly discussed his plans. Now they could see that there were two sides to his personality: Nansen could be either withdrawn or gregarious. And they weren't sure what kind of man he really was. Officers noted in their diaries how glad they were to be getting rid of such an unpredictable, mercurial leader. Many men on board resented his self-serving abandonment.45

  Elisha Kane evoked the same hostile reaction when he arbitrarily reversed his position and decided he was not going to turn his ship around and head south—as he had promised his homesick men he would—when ice was building up around the Advance in late August of 1853. Instead they would stay where they were for the winter so that he would be in a better position to launch a sledge excursion toward the pole when spring arrived. A chronically malcontented William Godfrey might not be the most reliable source, but his observation that “chance or Providence seldom favors those who expose themselves to unnecessary hazards for unattainable objects” expresses his disdain for a commander who had put his ambitiousness ahead of the well-being of his men.46 Likewise, when Adrien de Gerlache deliberately steered the Belgica further south into the Antarctic pack in February 1898, without first telling his crew that he had intended all along to winter in the ice so that he could set a new Farthest South record, his men gave in to “melancholy and depression,” and some of them temporarily lost their reason. To give them something to do, de Gerlache promptly ordered that hourly weather observations be carried out, and that hundreds of marine creatures and plants be collected.47 But these tasks were only busy work, and the men knew that. Afterward, de Gerlache would try to justify his decision to spend the winter locked in the ice as stemming from an irresistible impulse to “wrest a few of its jealously guarded secrets from the pristine Antarctic” and praised his voyage's scientific achievements as an inspiration to the Belgian people. These statements didn't fool anyone.48

  Although some deception may have been necessary to recruit crews for long and dangerous voyages to the Far North or Far South, such dishonesty would invariably emerge and weaken a leader's standing. Men who signed up under one set of assumptions and then found out they had been misled could be forgiven for feeling betrayed. They had been tricked into risking their lives for another man's glory, and now there was no turning back.

  There is no way of telling if Richard Evelyn Byrd entitled his book about the five lonely winter months he had spent in a prefabricated hut near Antarctica's Ross Ice Barrier in 1934 Alone as a sly, veiled reference to Charles Lindbergh's better known We, which chronicled the aviator's historic solo flight across the Atlantic. If he did, this would have been Byrd's subtle way of linking his extraordinary feat to what the world's most famous and admired man had accomplished seven years earlier. A highly experienced naval aviator, Byrd had competed against Lindbergh in the race to become the first to reach Paris by air, but while landing after a test flight his plane had flipped over, injuring Byrd and his copilot Floyd Bennett and taking them temporarily out of the running. Byrd could thus only glance up as Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis soared into the early morning sky over Long Island's Roosevelt Field. (With Bennett and another companion, he would make his own successful transatlantic flight just over a month later, ditching his plane in the ocean near the Normandy coast.) Lindbergh had chosen the plural pronoun to pay tribute to his plane. Man and machine—melded together like horse and rider—had pulled this off. The factory workers who had built it had etched the words “We are all with you” on the propeller spinner, so the young, shy hero was implicitly giving them credit, too. But Lindbergh didn't really believe in “we.” At heart he was a loner. Flying was a way for him to get away from everyone else. In a much later book of his, The Spirit of St. Louis, the aviator would recall, “What advantages there are in flying alone!…By flying alone I've gained in range, in time, in flexibility; and above all, I've gained in freedom. I haven't had to keep a crew member acquainted with my plans. My movements weren't restricted by someone else's temperament, health, or knowledge. My decisions aren't weighted by responsibility for another's life.”1 Indeed, “Lucky Lindy” had been all alone during his harrowing flight, but it had lasted only thirty-three-and-a-half hours, whereas Byrd had been by himself at the bottom of the world, with the next closest person 123 miles away, for nearly half a year. Few have ever experienced such isolation—and loneliness—before or since. In the modern era, the most well-known instance was that of the shipwrecked Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who had survived for four years on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, becoming the putative model for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. But for sheer length of solitude, few have surpassed the Native American woman Juana Maria, who lived without any human company on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California for eighteen years before being rescued.

  The thought of being so completely cut off from companionship triggers a primal anxiety. Humans are social creatures, and prolonged aloneness can be the most depressing fate one can suffer, as prisoners in solitary confinement can well attest. So it seemed, in particular, during the Age of Discovery, when adventure-seeking Europeans and Americans found themselves utterly alone in an untrodden wilderness, or washed up on a tropical island, with no one else anywhere near. Over time, the fictional Crusoe came to feel that he was “as one whom Heaven thought not worthy to be number'd among the living, or to appear among the rest of His creatures.”2 Life without fellowship was a kind of death, and the only way Crusoe could escape from this existential funk and truly be alive again was to find a companion, as he eventually did in Friday. To choose to be all alone, even for a short while, struck most of Defoe's contemporaries as inviting madness. And yet, as nineteenth-century explorers ventured further into the unknown, they inevitabl
y became isolated from civilization—if not completely by themselves, then in small groups. For those daring to enter the remote and uninhabited polar regions, these journeys involved experiencing profound loneliness. Staying there for long was courting not only great physical peril, but also psychological trauma.

  Byrd later claimed his solitary sojourn in the Antarctic interior had been the unintended consequence of a spur-of-the-moment change of plans: the plane bringing him from Little America had been delayed in taking off so there hadn't enough time left, with winter coming on fast, for it to go back and pick up enough supplies for three men. So he impulsively opted to remain at “Advance Base” by himself, angering his wife, who was dismayed by his cable abruptly announcing this decision. But it is hard to not to conclude that Byrd had intended this all along: a career naval officer, he was not used to taking spontaneous actions. Indeed, he admitted in Alone that choosing to live by himself in the one-room shack was not a “reckless whim.”3 A proud and strong-willed descendant of one of Virginia's first families, he had never shied away from daunting challenges, in the air or on the ice. At this point in his life, at the age of forty six, having been named the youngest admiral in US Navy history some five years before, Byrd may have wanted to tackle one more physical challenge before he became too old for such grueling tests. Fed up—like Lindbergh—with the constant “hullabaloo” of modern life, the highly decorated Byrd likely thought of Advance Base as a welcome retreat—much as medieval monks had withdrawn into caves to enjoy a state of pure repose and contemplation. Byrd, too, was undisturbed by external obligations—his only link to the outside world being three radio calls each week.