To the Ends of the Earth

by John V. H. Dippel

  With the right group of men, with shared values and backgrounds, an expedition could set sail with bonds already established. Later on, stuck in the ice for a year or more, officers and men could still feel connected—“at home” with one another. This reassuring connection could help offset the strangeness and perils of their situation. This was certainly the hope, at least. To achieve this effect, naval commanders from the days of Cook, Parry, Ross, and Franklin onward tried as much as possible to recreate on board the conditions under which their crews normally lived. Carrying on this way also enhanced morale. Maintaining routines created the illusion that life was continuing normally and tended to make the crew feel positive about their missions.

  But on military expeditions, strict adherence to hierarchy was obligatory, and this need divided crews into two camps—officers and men. This was, of course, accepted tradition. Below decks, officers had separate quarters from the sailors and soldiers, and the two groups had different amenities, diets, and off-duty pastimes. For example, on his ships Erebus and Terror, Franklin and his fellow officers enjoyed fresh eggs for breakfast and dined on beef tongue, as befitted their higher social (and military) status. The ordinary sailors ate well, but not as sumptuously. Officers and men did not socialize, except on special occasions, and they generally pursued their leisure activities in separate spaces like a proper Victorian couple. (They did come together now and then to compete in games on the snow, like soccer, when they were icebound.)

  Other suspensions of this shipboard segregation occurred on holidays such as Christmas and New Year's, when ordinary sailors were permitted to enter the officers’ quarters to extend their good wishes (but not to stay for dinner), or when theatrical skits or other frivolous entertainments were staged. But even though the responsibilities for these were allocated according to rank, the ship's company could strengthen their camaraderie during such special occasions. For example, when Erebus and Terror were under the command of Sir James Clark Ross in 1840 and became trapped in the ice together in the Antarctic pack around Christmas, the officers and men on both ships joined forces to stage an elaborate masquerade. The sailors constructed a mock tavern, while the twenty-two-year-old surgeon and naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker (son of the renowned botanist William Hooker) and the second master of Terror carved a statue of Venus de Medici out of ice. Captain Crozier of Terror entered this elaborately decorated space wearing his dress blues and escorting a bewigged “Miss Ross” on his arm. The couple was greeted with a loud volley of rifle shots. To resounding cheers the two officers then danced a quadrille. More dancing ensued, until an abundance of alcohol caused the festivities to deteriorate into hijinks, with some officers mischievously slipping ice cubes down the backs of “ladies fainting with cigars in their mouths,” and tipsy sailors staggering out on to the ice for a snowball fight.26 Raucous shipboard parties like these relieved the daily tedium, raised morale, and temporarily broke down the barriers between officers and men. Such bonding events prepared them for leaner times ahead, when it would become essential to share what little they had left.27

  On civilian expeditions, maintaining solidarity required other strategies. Men who had not spent their lives obeying orders without question had a harder time dealing with the dangers and deprivations of extended polar voyages and were less willing to put their lives in the hands of men just because they held a higher position. Some crew members were stubborn individualists, such as the Yankee sailor William Godfrey, who bedeviled Kane's 1853 Arctic expedition by defying orders and then deserting the ship. Kane himself despised military discipline, having witnessed seamen brutally flogged when he was a surgeon in the navy. Revulsion over these incidents prevented him from being as strict with his men as he might—and should—have been.28 Like his American contemporaries Charles Hall and Isaac Hayes, as well as Norwegians like Nansen and Amundsen, Kane wanted to establish an egalitarian attitude among members of his party, giving the men more leeway to think and act on their own. If they were shown respect, he reasoned, crew members would treat each other—and Kane—the same way, and thus the group as a whole would function better. Likewise, on the Fram, Nansen had men of all ranks share the same quarters. He thought that “living together in the one salon, with everything in common” improved morale. The men wore no insignia and performed the same duties.29 However, Nansen's interest in breaking down barriers had its cultural limits: as was pointed out, for most of their journey toward the North Pole he and his companion Johansen stuck to the formal “you” when addressing each other.

  Naïve expectations that shipmates would treat each other like brothers and thus enhance their odds of surviving ran afoul of the stubborn realities of Arctic navigation. Bent upon reaching the fabled Open Polar Sea in 1860, Isaac Israel Hayes had to sift through a horde of applicants—“enough to have fitted out a respectable squadron,” he complained—all eager to make history at his side. Unfortunately, few of the ones he selected had ever been to sea, let alone to the Far North. En route there, the Penn-trained physician, who had served under Kane during an earlier search for this fabled body of water, informed his crew that “mutual dependence” was the virtue that would sustain them in this quest. Living together on the recently renamed United States—what he called “our little world”—was remarkably harmonious, until the ship was driven onto an iceberg and trapped in encroaching ice. With temperatures plunging and no way out escaping their predicament, his crew complained loudly and bitterly. To mollify them, Hayes established daily routines that he hoped would “cultivate the social relations and usages of home,” convinced that such “little formal observances promote happiness and peace.” These included holding weekly inspections, printing a newspaper, and having the officers put on their gray dress uniforms and the men show up “very neat and creditable” for Sunday services. Sounding more like a preacher than a medical doctor, Hayes observed in his journal that “true politeness is so great a blessing.” But the deepening polar darkness took its toll: the newspaper and other “distractions” were forgotten, and the men on board the United States languished in a stupor, unable to muster the “cheerful laugh and the merry jest” of their sunny days. Only the dismal clanging of the ship's bell now denoted the passage of time. Against the interminable night and its silence, “pluck, and manly resolution, and mental resources” were as useless as masts without sails, or engines without fuel. When the first signs of spring appeared, Hayes impetuously took a sledge party out over freshly fallen snow, only to tire quickly after a winter without exercise and halt in their tracks, exhausted: “The men are completely used up, broken down, dejected, to the last degree,” Hayes had to admit. “Human nature cannot stand it.” In his growing despair, he blamed the extreme circumstances they were in, not his approach to it, complaining that “human beings were never before so beset with difficulties and so inextricably tangled in a wilderness…. They are brave and spirited men enough, lack not courage nor perseverance; but it does seem as if one must own that there are some difficulties that cannot be surmounted.” Ultimately, this party did reach what Hayes could proclaim as a new Farthest North—close to eighty-two degrees of latitude—providing him a great triumph, albeit not the one he had set out to attain.30 And even this accomplishment would not stand up to close scrutiny: Hayes apparently overestimated by about one hundred miles how close to the pole he had come—a mistake he never conceded. What he did acknowledge to himself was that treating his men decently and maintaining some semblance of normal, convivial life was no guarantee of success in the Arctic. Nature was the one who determined that.

  Charles Hall, a loner and outsider in the States, lived among the Inuit for four years, starting in the summer of 1864, and developed a deep affection for these “children of nature,” even though his original intent had been to befriend them only in order that they would reveal details about the missing Franklin party's fate. Spending New Year's 1865 in a Greenland igloo, at a time when his countrymen had been slaughtering each other during nearly f
our years of civil war, Hall dined with his neighbors on frozen venison at 62 degrees below zero and then made a speech, in their language, thanking the Inuit for treating him as “a brother.”31 (Later, however, he would grow disillusioned with these natives after finding out they had not deigned to bring food to some starving English sailors.32) When he was about to depart on his third Arctic expedition, in 1871, the deeply religious Hall once again allowed his faith in others to blind him to reality. In remarks before the American Geographical Society, at New York's Cooper Union, Hall praised the officers, scientists, and crew members who had signed up for this trip and predicted—ironically—that “Though we may be surrounded by innumerable icebergs, and though our vessel may be crushed like an egg-shell, I believe they will stand by me to the last.”33 In fact, almost from the start, the German scientists on board refused to bow to Hall's authority. His party was split into hostile factions, several men were chronically intoxicated, and the ship's physician was accused of having poisoned Hall with arsenic. The Polaris expedition ended in disaster, with the ship sinking and the survivors then being forced to drift on an ice floe for six months before they were brought to safety.

  In many cases, what an expedition leader professed to believe in dealing with his men conflicted with his own (hidden) ambitions. His focus was setting a new geographical record, and keeping his crew happy was only a means to that end. In the crunch, that could become all too apparent. On the Fram, Nansen made sure that all the men enjoyed the same healthy diet, exercised together, and had plenty of opportunities to amuse themselves: so “arranging things sensibly” made them genuinely happier.34 But his concern for his crew's well-being did not stop him from leaving them to their own devices when he and Johansen departed for the North Pole. Amundsen treated his companions with more consistent fairness during their march to the South Pole in 1911. When they finally reached it, he made sure that they planted their flag together. For, as Amundsen later wrote: “It was not for one man to do this; it was for all who had staked their lives in the struggle, and held together through thick and thin.”35 But this sensible philosophy did not stop him from keeping his plans a secret.

  Because their parties had to contend with a harsh and volatile climate and the ever-present threat of disaster, enlightened expedition leaders tried to make life at the ends of the earth as pleasant as possible. Establishing strong friendships was vital to sustaining a positive attitude and the will to live. But solidarity was not all that was needed. Like soldiers under fire, members of polar expeditions had to respect their leaders and obey their orders. Nor could leaders play favorites. Sequestered in an igloo or on a ship at forty below, explorers had to strike a balance between looking out for each other and doing what was necessary for the group as a whole, even if that meant neglecting a friend in desperate need. During the Terra Nova expedition, twenty-four-year-old Raymond E. Priestley, a veteran of Shackleton's record-breaking trip south a few years before, served as a geologist and meteorologist with the so-called Northern Party, which was given the task of mapping territory between Cape Evans and Cape Adare early in 1912.36 Due to unusual amounts of sea ice that winter, the Terra Nova was not able to pick up this party after the eight weeks allotted to geological research was over, and the six men had to spend the winter inside a twelve-by-nine-foot snow cave they had dug out by hand. All told, they endured nearly seven months in this makeshift shelter, surviving off their original supply of rations, supplemented by occasional penguin and seal meat. This “imprisonment” was trying physically—the men suffered chronically from gastrointestinal ailments—but also psychologically.

  Priestley, who published an account of this prolonged isolation a few years afterward, recalled that a “wave of depression” had swept over him and his fellow explorers early in their confinement, and that they had come close to going mad, packed into their tiny subterranean cubicles. They had grated on each other's nerves, tempers had flared like runaway rockets, and when the six of them were finally able to toss aside their sleeping bags and escape on sledges from this gloomy, fetid Antarctic igloo, they were as sullenly estranged from each other as spouses who have lost a child and blame each other for this tragedy. As the second of eight children and son of a Gloucestershire headmaster, Priestley all too well understood the claustrophobic and contradictory dynamics of tightly knit groups. He grasped that hibernating in the essentially static polar winter demanded a high degree of order, even though the intimate experience tended to efface all arbitrary distinctions between the men, putting officer and enlisted man on “common footing.” This leveling would undermine the social structure on which discipline depended.37

  As a rule, the job of reconciling order and fellowship fell, inevitably, to the party's leader. For better or for worse, his personality and decision-making skills shaped the group's mood and its cohesiveness and thus—up to a point—how well it would hold up. Military commanders should have had an advantage over their civilian counterparts because they were used to giving unilateral commands. But, in the unpredictable and unfamiliar polar domain, these officers were prone to making bad decisions, and these could easily lead to disaster. Military men were also wont to put too much emphasis on maintaining discipline and too little on attending to group morale. Enforcing rules could become self-defeating if the men came to regard such practices as hopelessly out of touch with reality and therefore absurd. Then they might rise up in rebellion.

  This had been the case at Fort Conger—trapped in total darkness and winter ice eleven hundred miles above the Arctic Circle—when Lieutenant Greely had asked several soldiers to wash the officers’ laundry. (They had flatly refused.) Greely had previously revealed his martinet tendencies when he had demanded that all crew members attend Sunday services even if they weren't Christians, banned card playing on the Sabbath, forced the men to undergo humiliating physical exams regularly, and chewed out two lieutenants for sleeping late. To many of the crew, it seemed that Greely's obsession with such trivial matters masked an underlying insecurity about what they should do next. When he suddenly announced that the party was going to abandon the relative safe and comfortable quarters and take to boats to reach food supplies further south, his fellow officers and many of the soldiers privately grumbled that he was leading them to their deaths. Greely antagonized the scientists in his party and could not prevent other relationships from souring. The physician Pavy considered him “full of vanity” and unfit to command.38 There were numerous threats of mutiny. Burdened by so much dissension and distrust, the small expedition party nearly fell apart. As it was, in the end only seven men survived. Well into the twentieth century, leaders who tried to uphold military discipline under extreme conditions similarly faced resistance. For instance, the leader of Scott's Northern Party, Lieutenant Victor Campbell, seemed incapable of easing naval regulations in light of the extraordinary deprivations his party faced during the Antarctic winter they spent in an ice cave. Like Greely, Campbell insisted on formally reprimanding men for the smallest infractions at a time when they had been reduced to living like animals.39

  On the other hand, a leader like Robert Scott could not hide his misgivings and mood swings; his Sphinx-like aloofness, brooding secrecy, and unpredictable actions created an unsettling atmosphere. Scott had a soft, “feminine” side to his character, which somewhat offset his Royal Navy “stiffness.”40 But his go-by-the-book mentality inclined him to stick to timeworn procedures, and this tendency did not serve him well in the Antarctic, where one had to improvise or perish. At times Scott could be kindly, solicitous, and charming, like an older brother: Cherry remarked that he had “never known anybody, man or woman, who could be so attractive when he chose.”41 But more often he chose to be otherwise—shy, morose, introspective, and seemingly content in the evenings at Cape Evans to read novels by Galsworthy and Hardy or scribble in his journal. He was not the sort of man who would cheerfully make the rounds, stopping by bunks with an impish grin on his face to ask how the others were doing. (H
e was certainly not an Ernest Shackleton, who inspired genuine love and devotion among his men. When his thoroughly exhausted party had finally reached Elephant Island after seven hellish days in open boats, he remained the indefatigable cheerleader. As the geologist James Wordie noted, “The Boss is wonderful, cheering everyone and far more active than any other person in the camp.”42) According to Cherry, Scott cried easily—over the deaths of ponies as well as other misfortunes. Inexplicably he would also lapse into a melancholic funk for weeks on end. His mercurial moodiness made for a dark, impenetrable enigma at the heart of the Terra Nova party. Most of his men came to care for him, but from a distance. At his core, they sensed Scott was intellectually dishonest—evident in his refusal to admit he was in a race with Amundsen.

  A civilian expedition leader started out with his status ill-defined. He had to solidify it early on, when the men were receptive to his guidance and positively disposed toward him. He had to woo and win over his charges as adroitly and ardently as a suitor. He had to cement his authority when the sun was shining, when food was still plentiful, and when his crew did not yet pine for home. For when the situation worsened—when rations had to be cut, or after a vessel had been icebound for many months—the men responded to their leaders based on the judgement they had already formed. If there were no reservoir of trust, they would rebel. The wise commanders cultivated loyalty from the start. Amundsen selected his team members largely on the basis of that one trait. So did Peary. When he made his “successful” dash to the North Pole in the spring of 1909, the nearly toeless naval engineer traveled with four support parties. One by one they were ordered to turn back, denying them any share in the glory of this historic achievement—ostensibly to save time, but really to turn this into Peary's triumph. Even the veteran Arctic explorer and loyal friend Robert Bartlett, who had carefully steered the Roosevelt far into the ice and then broken trail for the handicapped lieutenant to within one-hundred-and-fifty miles of his goal, was curtly told to turn back. Yet, except for Bartlett, these men did not feel Peary had destroyed their trust in him. Only his longtime African-American companion Matthew Henson, who did make it to the pole (or thereabouts) with him, would later castigate Peary as a “selfish man” who thought only about his “own glory and that of nobody else.”43 As the eminently self-satisfied explorer saw it, his subordinates had been as “perfect beyond my most sanguine dreams…as loyal and responsive to my will as the fingers of my right hand.”44