At the end of his life Scott could not stop himself from deploying well-chosen words for ulterior motives. Nor had he lost his elevating eloquence in the blackness of that tent. In his “Message to the Public,” penciled on the back of his last notebook, he again stressed the example that he and the others had set, by demonstrating that modern-day Englishmen “can endure hardship, help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.” These sentences alone were sufficient to guarantee him a prominent niche in the pantheon of his country's heroes.17 The inspirational power of his larger opus was recognized immediately by his contemporaries. In The Independent Weekly, for instance, Scott's last journal was lauded for adding “an imperishable page to English literature, more valuable than any of the manuscripts of poetry and fiction treasured in the British Museum, for it reveals the very heart of a noble man, written in his dire extremity and defeat, yet courageous, patriotic, uncomplaining, unselfish, sincere.”18
Not that Scott was alone among explorers in using the written word to sing his own praises and thereby enshrine his reputation. Writing and publishing a hagiographical book about a polar expedition was the leader's prerogative and his testament. It was practically a sure-fire way to acquire fame and considerable income—vital, in cases where outside funding was lacking or insufficient, for financing future expeditions.19 Scott had certainly had that goal firmly in mind. His first book, The Voyage of Discovery, published in 1905, had earned a chronically penurious Scott nearly eight times what the Royal Navy paid him in a year—and made him a household name.20 Yet when he was organizing his Terra Nova expedition five years later, during an economic downturn in England when the Admiralty was no longer in a position to fund polar expeditions, he had to solicit donations of products from manufacturers and even shilling contributions from schoolboys (to help pay for dogs and equipment).21 Even with this help, Scott was still so short of cash that he could not afford to spend two years in Antarctica and therefore had to head south from New Zealand in November 1910 even though it was then already late in the season.22 For him, reaching the South Pole first was a huge roll of the dice: if he succeeded he would be “made for life,” but if he failed, he would not likely get funding for another expedition.23
Anticipating that he would be the first to get there (still unaware of Amundsen's plans when the Terra Nova left London in June of that year), Scott could see his book becoming a huge bestseller, and he started keeping his journal with that eventuality in mind. It did turn out that way, but, of course, Scott did not live to reap the benefits. After Kathleen Scott received the three notebooks her husband had beside him in Antarctica at the time of his death, she first sold the serial rights to Strand magazine for £2 thousand (roughly £170 thousand or $250 thousand today) and then negotiated a contract with the London publisher Smith, Elder, giving her the bulk of the proceeds from book sales. The two-volume Scott's Last Expedition came out toward the end of 1913. Within two months the profits exceeded £9 thousand (approximately $1 million today). Several other editions subsequently came out, with sales remaining steady until the 1950s. So by the time she died, in July of 1947, Kathleen Scott, an accomplished sculptor whose second husband was a baron, could rightly be considered a wealthy woman.24 Robert Falcon Scott had done his duty by her.
He thus joined a long line of explorers who had turned ill fortune in the Arctic and Antarctic into good fortune at the bank. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, British navigators William Parry and John Ross had capitalized on the public's insatiable appetite for tales of heroic adventure and discovery by publishing accounts of their quests for the Northwest Passage. Even though these were plainly written (as befitted reports originally intended for the Admiralty), they sold well and made their authors famous. (The young Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily, were so enamored of these two dashing naval officers that they renamed a pair of toy soldiers for them.) Because Parry and other naval commanders of that day had exclusive rights to publish narratives about their expeditions, they were assured of the profits. Parry, for example, negotiated a contract with the eminent London publisher John Murray giving him a thousand guineas for the rights to Parry's journal about his second Arctic voyage—an amount more than ten times his yearly lieutenant's salary. Later on, well-known British polar explorers like John Franklin could make a tidy sum from their stories even if—as in Franklin's case—they did not include glowing successes. After coming back to England and being celebrated as the “man who ate his boots,” Franklin signed a lucrative deal with Murray to write a book detailing his harrowing ordeal in the Canadian wilderness. This was a huge success, turning Franklin—despite his blunders and the expedition's calamities—into a national hero. The book's descriptions of near starvation and hints of cannibalism doubtless drove up sales: this first book of Franklin's—over eight hundred pages long, in two volumes—went into four British editions in the year and a half after it first came out, while the narrative of his second, far less gripping overland expedition only came out in one edition.25
The huge popularity of books about polar explorers did not escape the notice of an “anxious, driven, sickly, brilliant, adventurous, and insecure young man” named Elisha Kent Kane.26 As his biographers have pointed out and his letters reveal, Kane epitomized the “culture of fame” in midcentury America. With the help of his brother, Tom, Kane created a persona that was tailor-made to fit the needs of his countrymen for a resourceful hero who, struggling gamely against an implacable Nature, triumphed over great odds, and brought them great glory. To captivate his readers, Kane embellished his improbable tales with grand language and a heightened, Romantic sensibility. It helped that Kane had not previously read any books about the Arctic, so that his imagination was not constrained by the more realistic style of storytelling then practiced: instead, he could write about it de novo, with an artist's framing eye and a novelist's flair for drama.27
Mailed back to his brother and father in Philadelphia, Kane's vivid, on-the-spot impressions during the first Grinnell expedition were given a “final polish” and his “pretty fancies” reshaped for publication, giving Tom confidence that Elisha's forthcoming book would “make more sensation than any thing written by a Navy man in our day.”28 Its success was all but guaranteed since articles of Elisha's had already appeared in print, putting the “public mind…in beautiful order for its reception.” Tom Kane was dead-right: his brother's second book—the massive, two-volume Arctic Explorations—was reportedly read by as many as three million people. Its author's grasp of the melodramatic style was on full display. For instance, in describing what he considered to be the “continent” of Greenland, Kane wrote:
Imagine, now, the centre of such a continent, occupied through nearly its whole extent by a deep, unbroken sea of ice, that gathers perennial increase from the water-shed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of the atmosphere upon its own surface. Imagine this, moving onward like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fjord and valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland seas; and having at last reached the northern limit of the land that has borne it up, pouring out a mighty frozen torrent into unknown Arctic space.29
These two publications made the Kane family rich.30 (His second—and last—book alone netted $75 thousand in royalties—or $2.2 million in today's terms.) Like other expedition leaders, Kane left out the mistakes he had made and their tragic consequences, including the avoidable deaths (due to hypothermia) of three of the two dozen men who had gone with him. After his party finally returned to New York Harbor in the fall of 1854, Kane was relieved that, during the welcoming reception, no crew members uttered a single word that contradicted his version of a harmonious, well-led expedition. In constructing his narratives with an eye to fulfilling his armchair audience's hunger for vicarious adventure, adversity, danger, suffering, forbearance, and heroism, Elisha Kane created a model for polar books that would be imitated—not always successfully—by man
y later explorers, up to Scott and beyond. What Kane had astutely sensed was that Americans were in desperate need of heroes.
In the decade before the Civil War, the United States was virtually bereft of living great men. The nation had not been at war since 1814, and the opportunities for young men to demonstrate courage and fortitude had since diminished. For a time, adventures in the Western wilderness filled the void that had been created by a lasting peace. Early settlement of the Ohio Valley had given rise to mythical figures like Daniel Boone, but once the empty spaces on the map were filled in and Native American tribes driven out, the potential for conquest and glory there evaporated. The remote, exotic, and forbidding Far North then presented itself as the next frontier for the restless and expansive national spirit. As the United States was transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial nation, a longing to return to this earlier era, to escape the confines of civilization, became evident—the urge captured in Huck Finn's eagerness to “light out for the Territory.” If settled Americans were unable or unwilling to do this, they could at least satisfy their curiosity by reading about what others had done. As the literary critic William E. Lenz has written (in regard to Antarctica), nineteenth-century exploration furthered cultural renewal and affirmation—a process in which many Americans took great pride. Books by explorers reinforced belief in the country's initiative, determination, scientific know-how, and manly virtues.31 At the same time, greater affluence, combined with the mass production of books, was turning the United States into a nation of readers. The number and circulation of major newspapers were growing exponentially, spearheaded by publishers like James Gordon Bennett Sr., Horace Greeley, and Henry Jarvis Raymond (founder of the New York Times in 1851). National readership more than doubled between 1828 and 1840, from 60 million to 168 million. As part of this trend, the monetary value of books that sold well was apparent: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter sold four thousand copies in its first ten days, but two years later, in 1852, a million persons purchased Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So what Kane tapped into was a newly discovered goldmine. In England, the commercializing of explorers as carriers of national values and aspirations had a longer history. As early as the 1820s John Franklin had sensed he could make a fortune by turning humdrum naval journals into bestsellers: therefore he refined the narrative style and language of his second book to attract a general audience.32 The popularity of his Canadian narratives convinced later British explorers to write as compellingly so that they, too, could appeal to this burgeoning market. Then the mysterious disappearance of the Franklin party created intense interest in the search to find traces of the missing men. After Francis Leopold McClintock had returned to England with sensational news about the fate of these sailors, he could count on his book selling well—as it did. Copies of the first edition sold out within a few weeks.33 Press barons and government officials seeking to promote polar exploration also fueled public fascination with stories of heroic achievement at the ends of the earth.
A leading player in this effort was Clements Markham, the personification of British imperial aspirations at the poles. As a scarcely twenty-year-old Royal Navy cadet, Markham had participated in one of the Franklin search missions and contracted a bad case of Arctic fever. In his forties he had returned, rekindling a love for voyages of discovery, courageous young explorers, and the patriotic glory that attended them. While serving as president of the Royal Geographical Society he had almost single-handedly revived British interest in polar expeditions. Markham marshalled his formidable personality and writing talents to convince his countrymen that England should once again rule the Arctic seas. He publicized the lure of polar adventure and discovery most effectively in The Threshold of the Unknown Region, published in 1873. In his introduction to this book, Markham declared his purpose was to “recall the stories of earlier adventurers, to narrate the recent efforts of gallant adventurers of various nationalities to cross the threshold [into the unknown], to set forth the arguments in favour of a renewal of Arctic exploration by England, and to enumerate, in detail, the valuable and important results to be derived from North Polar discovery.” True to his word, Markham larded his descriptions of earlier expeditions with homage to Franklin's “gallant crews,” the “remarkable success” of Charles Hall's Polaris expedition, the “steady determination” and “pluck” of Leigh Smith (another pioneering Arctic voyager), and Kane's important discoveries and selfless care of his crew members when they were stricken by scurvy. So enumerating this “glorious roll of Arctic worthies” gave latter-day British officers and men illustrious examples to emulate, so that their country could complete the conquest of the still-uncharted Far North.34
Books like The Threshold of the Unknown and Kane's Arctic Explorations raised the bar for future accounts of polar adventures. The enormous commercial success of such volumes convinced other explorers they needed to write equally dramatic and self-aggrandizing narratives. (Publishers, naturally, encouraged them.) But telling their stories compellingly could be an even greater challenge than trekking for weeks through ice and snow. (A recent biographer of Frederick Cook's has speculated that the Brooklyn physician “may have reasoned that to be able to write the account of such a journey [to the North Pole] without actually having done it…would be a greater accomplishment than the journey itself.”35) Explorers felt pressures to exaggerate or even fabricate what they had accomplished in order to make their books more exciting. The public's craving for sensationalism—to ratchet up polar narratives as Kane had done—pushed them in that direction. Each new tale had to deliver on these greater expectations or else disappoint readers. In this hyperbolic climate, there was a temptation for explorers to claim feats they had not actually accomplished. The telling of the story became detached from the actual truth. But so falsifying their stories put these explorer-writers in a morally dubious position: they had to live with the awareness that they had not been completely honest. Usually they were protected from having their distortions or lies revealed by agreements that no other versions of their expeditions could be published. Thus the explorer's story became the official account, but often at the expense of his integrity. There was still always a chance that someday he would be found out. But many found the risk well worth taking. The rewards were simply too enticing to resist.
This tendency to subjectify historical writing and infuse it with hortatory messages became common during the second half of the nineteenth century, when nations like England and the United States sought to revitalize patriotic values as they competed for prestige and stature around the world. To celebrate masculine virtues of courage and self-sacrifice, they needed books that captured not only the great deeds of the past but also the enduring national spirit that made these so admirable. Charles Kingsley's 1855 novel Westward Ho! or the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the Reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth illustrates this trend in England, where an infatuation with medieval and Renaissance chivalry acted as an antidote for what was seen as a morally depleted and materialistic modern world. In his dedication to this tale of storied victories over the Spanish, a chauvinistic Kingsley extolled “that type of English virtue, at once manful and godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing” that was exemplified by his characters.36 For nineteenth-century readers, Arctic and Antarctic explorers filled a void formerly occupied by saints, Arthurian knights, and other legendary figures of the distant past. They were regarded in equally reverent and adoring terms well into the next century. For instance, in his 1910 Heroes of the Polar Seas, J. Kennedy Maclean hailed the superior virtue of these “lion-hearts,” and the “fortitude and heroism” that have distinguished their efforts to reach the poles. No other human endeavor could claim “the same glamour and romance” or match the “wonderful heroism” of those men who have “laid their all upon the altar of duty.”37 Private organizations and governments that sponsored polar expeditions simi
larly glorified their participants in order to justify the investments made in them. The medals handed out by organizations like the Royal Geographical Society elevated what might appear to some to be rather modest accomplishments.38 Because they had so much riding on a successful outcome, sponsors like the Explorers Club were loath to question the claims of historic firsts made by expeditions they had financed, such as Robert Peary's assertion in 1909 that he had reached the North Pole.39
During this period, there was a gradual shift away from celebrating genuine geographical milestones to acknowledging noble, self-sacrificing effort. This change came in light of the dismal record of disappointment, disaster, and defeat compiled by expedition after expedition attempting to blaze new routes through the ice or conquer the poles. This litany of failure dated back to the lost Franklin party and the dozens of relief and search vessels that had been dispatched to find survivors. In death, Franklin was deified for his “gallantry,” even though it was not clear what he had done to deserve this honor. After it was confirmed that he and all of his 128 officers and men had perished—from cold, scurvy, disease, starvation, lead poisoning, or despair—without having sailed through the fabled Northwest Passage, some members of the British public were perplexed: how could the leader of such a disastrous voyage be considered heroic? The best answer Alfred, Lord Tennyson, could come up with when he was composing an epitaph for Franklin in Westminster Abbey was to contrast the explorer's earthly failure with his heavenly “success”:
To the Ends of the Earth Page 27