To the Ends of the Earth

by John V. H. Dippel

  NOT here! the white North has thy bones; and thou

  Heroic sailor-soul,

  Art passing on thine happier voyage now

  Toward no earthly pole.

  To the left of these verses and a marble bust of Franklin in the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist was placed an inscription commemorating him and his “gallant crews” for “completing the discovery of the North-West Passage.” But here, too, a flowery phrase was stretching the truth. One of Franklin's ships had, indeed, entered a passage that would have taken them in a northwesterly direction to the Arctic Ocean, but had gotten stuck there, on the vestibule of that journey. After Franklin's death, surviving crew members had pushed ahead over the ice and established that a channel ran further westward, but to call this “completing the discovery” of a route to Asia overstates what they actually achieved (even in light of what we know since Terror was located in 2016). But the British public back then was not particularly interested in getting the facts right: they wanted something to cheer.

  In fact, Franklin was declared a hero merely because he had tried to accomplish something grand and noble. Later polar explorers whose lives also came to a tragic end were similarly exalted. George De Long and his men on the Jeannette and—to a lesser degree—Charles Hall on the Polaris were notable examples of explorers whose death in the frozen Far North led to their apotheosis. The premature death of Elisha Kent Kane—in Cuba, only in his thirties—had brought him a similar veneration. But Robert Falcon Scott would surpass them all, thanks to the stirring words he left behind in his tent—sanctifying words that put him out of reach, “beyond our poor power to add or detract,” as Lincoln had said about the dead at Gettysburg. Those who survived their expeditions would face a more arduous path to immortality—one littered with the inconsistencies and imperfections of long, complicated lives. As they aged, once idolized explorers would not always measure up to their own graven images, no matter how hard they and their admirers sought to merge them. In lasting so long they displaced their own legends. If Scott had somehow made it back to Hut Point and then spent the rest of his life explaining why he had gotten to the pole after Amundsen, his contemporaries would have thought of him as an indecisive, inadequate, and deeply flawed leader. If his unexpurgated journals had been published during his lifetime, the halo over his head might have been removed a long time ago. But in early death he found a sheltering shroud. No one was going to parse Scott's own epitaph. He would have the last word.

  In Edwardian England, printing the legend took priority over revealing the bald facts. After Scott's death, some of his companions who did return home recalled him as a kind of demigod. They were already cementing his heroic, self-deprecating image. In his book on the Terra Nova expedition, the photographer Herbert Ponting recalled asking Scott, at the outset of their voyage south, what kind of reception he expected he would receive if he returned to England as the conqueror of the South Pole: “He replied that he cared nothing for this sort of thing; that he would willingly forgo all acclamation both now and later; that all he desired was to complete the work begun on our first expedition seven years ago, reach the goal of his hopes, and get back to his work in the Navy again. This reply was characteristic of the man. Ambitious, yet modest and assuming, he was disdainful of the plaudits of the crowd, and show and ostentation were foreign to his nature.”40 Writing about “our Leader” later in this book, Ponting curiously described him a man of “splendid physique,” whose face was a “faithful index to the resolution and courage that dominated his soul,” a man who was “Sound in his judgment, and just in his criticisms…always quick to appreciate and generous in praise.” Scott's one admitted defect—his occasional moody silence—was justified by his “sense of obligation to his country to push the venture to success.”

  Such elevation of polar explorers was representative of their times: biographies of great men and women were supposed to highlight their admirable qualities, not dwell upon the warts and other blemishes that fascinate our own, more skeptical and inquisitive age. But romanticizing the deeds of figures like Scott also modeled the courage and selflessness that countries like England, Norway, Italy, Germany, France, and the United States wanted revived to spur national regeneration. Not long after Scott's death, the London Times opined that his sacrifice showed that “in an age of depressing materialism men can still be found to face unknown hardship, heavy risk, and even death, in pursuit of an idea, and that the unconquerable will can carry them through, loyal to the last to the charge they have undertaken.” Scott and his men had snatched “victory out of the jaws of death” by upholding the “temper of men who build empires.”41 This was a nationalist cause Scott had consciously made his own, and one that he repeatedly called attention to in his journal—particularly when he was close to death and could perceive that his importance as a living, breathing human being was giving way to symbolic value.

  For Arctic and Antarctic explorers who lacked Scott's literary gifts or who did not regard their expeditions as having such emblematic meaning, telling and selling their stories had more pragmatic consequences: they paid the bills and made future expeditions possible. Charles Hall, for one, was able to finance his second voyage north in 1864 with a boost from the publicity and profits generated by a book on his first expedition, Arctic Researches and Life among the Esquimaux. During his disastrous last voyage, on the Polaris, Hall had planned on confiscating all the diaries, journals, and similar records written by his officers and crew members so that he could cannibalize them in putting together his own account to fund future trips. For Roald Amundsen, who could not count on backing from the Norwegian government, producing books was an essential component of his fundraising. Unfortunately, he wasn't very good at this. He was hamstrung by his disinterest in writing, as well as by his innate, Scandinavian modesty. So his books failed to deliver what readers wanted from polar narratives. In his diary of the Belgica voyage, Amundsen stuck to recounting the facts, shying away from the psychological insights that would make Frederick Cook's account of this expedition so absorbing.

  His Canadian biographer, Stephen Bown, has put a positive spin on this understated approach: “Amundsen wrote about his exploits with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour free of the nationalist bombast and pedantic cereal-box philosophy, the fake moralizing and shallow introspection, that was so common in the pronouncements of many other explorers of the era.”42 The ultimate pragmatist, Amundsen had no interest in exaggerating his accomplishments: they could speak for themselves. It wasn't until he found himself some seventy thousand kroner (roughly $10 thousand) short when about to leave for the Northwest Passage in the spring of 1903 that Amundsen was convinced by a Norwegian chemist and part-time journalist to write a newspaper article outlining his plans. This front-page spread caught the eye of two wealthy ship owners, whose generous donations then enabled Amundsen to set sail. Henceforth, he never again neglected publicity.43 Even still, the Norwegian never really warmed to what he considered a necessary evil. After he and his men made it to the South Pole in 1911, newspaper editors and publishers besieged Amundsen with lucrative offers.44 But the winner in this bidding war—John Murray in England—ended up with a less-than-scintillating book:45 Amundsen made this thrilling adventure sound like “an amusing ski outing,” undertaken by a “jolly group going about their tasks without a care in the world.”46 His description of their arrival at their goal could not have been more leaden, or more unlike Scott's: “We reckoned now that we were at the Pole.”47 Reviews of The South Pole were generally unfavorable and sales poor.48

  In sum, writing about the poles could be as demanding as going there: one set out into uncharted territory with grand hopes—for fame and fortune. As authors as well as explorers, some possessed the skills required for success, had some good luck along the way, and afterward accomplished what they had set out to do, becoming rich and famous. Others did not fare as well. The urge to conquer new frontiers and the urge to write about these polar adventures
could go hand in hand: one could sustain the other. The ability to tell their stories well could enhance their reputations and make them rich. Pressures to perform both “journeys” successfully were enormous, for much was riding on these outcomes. In writing their stories, explorers could easily succumb to the temptation to embellish here and there in order to make their deeds appear more heroic and make their books more popular. For no one could dispute what they asserted. Over time, as the goal of Arctic and Antarctic exploration narrowed to making it first to the poles, the men undertaking these grueling treks would be likewise tempted to lie about what they had accomplished. Cheating—altering entries in a logbook or putting down the wrong coordinates on a map—was also fairly easy and almost impossible to detect. Truth at the poles was highly subjective—it was what the explorer said it was. In the frozen wastes at the ends of the earth, as on the written page, he exercised the unchallenged dominion of a god, and it was solely up to him to determine how he would use this. Whether to falsely claim a triumph or openly admit a defeat was often the choice that had to be made. He could choose to live with fame, or with himself. Only he would know for sure what kind of man he was.

  Throughout most of the Victorian era, determined young men headed north and south in ships looking for validation. True, they were hoping to make geographical discoveries like the Northwest Passage, the Open Polar Sea, and the two poles, but their voyages into the vast, blinding whiteness at the top and bottom of the world were really tests of who they were and what they could achieve when the odds were hopelessly stacked against them. Aside from the battlefield, there were no other places that provided such proving grounds. But progress was frustratingly slow: expeditions had to hole up for months if not years in the darkness, inside makeshift huts or ice-shrouded ships, to await the day when they could finally move on, and often it never came. Too often they were pushed back by relentlessly advancing ice like soldiers under an overwhelming counterattack. Too often the heavy wooden hulls were crumpled like orange crates, lifted high and groaning like beasts in great pain into the vast twinkling vault of the polar night and then released to slowly slip back and then slide beneath the inky surface, leaving the men utterly helpless, thousands of miles from home, with only a few blankets, cans of pemmican, and bags of biscuits—and no idea which way to go.

  Because they could not win this war against the polar elements, it was hard to say what counted as success. At times, the best they could do was to pile up stones on a windswept promontory, plant a flag on some previously unknown coastline, or take a reading with a sextant to document that they had come farther north or south than any other human beings. Thus they left their marks. But these too would quickly disappear: the snow would cover everything over, and it would look as if they had never been there. So their last moments staring silently up at the stars before turning around and pointing their strides toward home were bittersweet. It was not at all like winning a race and then shouting and throwing their hats into the air. It felt more like leaving a church after the last hymn had been sung, and there was nothing more to be said. There was no feeling of exuberance. They were deeply humbled. The ice kingdom had worn them down, day after day, month after month, making them feel they were just some intrusive feature of the landscape that had had the impudence to stand out above the rest, and now the wind and the ice and the snow were conspiring to wipe away all their traces. If the cold and bad food, the scurvy and the loneliness, hadn't killed them, or driven them mad, or reduced them to a shivering bundle of rags with frostbitten toes and hundred-yard stares, then one could call that a victory, perhaps. But the men didn't use words like that. Mostly they were just glad to be getting out of there alive.

  Over time, the point of going so far for so little gain was lost on most of these men, but others kept coming, raw recruits ignorant of what lay in store for them. They, too, had their tests to pass and journeys to complete. There were always more men who longed to find out how well they would hold up. But fewer came now, since the Franklin disaster had shown the folly of sending large groups far into the Arctic and Antarctic. Too many might become trapped and die, all together at one place, and governments didn't want that on their consciences or in the newspapers. Those who still arrived, on stately tall ships with iron-sheathed bows, had added reason for believing that what they were trying to do was important. Here, in this frozen wasteland, they were not only showing their own mettle, but their country's, too. They were competing against men from other countries, battling the same elements, suffering the same deprivations, vying to set new records, to show the world who was best. It was like fighting a war. Only one could emerge the victor. As this century was drawing to a close, a nation's prowess was measured more by the extent of its territorial reach than by the might of its armies. Acquiring new land was a symbolic stand-in for triumphing on the battlefield. But in this land grab, there were only a precious few prizes left to be claimed.

  The two poles—deep within the icy, forbidding lands at the ends of the earth—were the ultimate ones. They had no intrinsic value: these were not places to establish colonies or extract resources. They, too, were only symbols. The poles were earthly oddities, geographically precise locations without any physical reality. They were merely abstractions on a map. As Robert Peary would put it, the North Pole was “a theoretical point, without length, breadth or thickness.”1 The author of a recent book on the Cook-Peary controversy has defined it more philosophically as “a spot in the mind of man where even the concepts of the mind—time and direction—are no longer valid…a place whose location can be determined only by other concepts of the mind—numbers and letters manipulated in abstract formulae.”2 In short, it was an illusion. The North Pole only mattered, as George Leigh Mallory would say of Everest, because it was there.3 But, even for only that reason, these two dots where all longitudinal lines came together had taken on great significance.

  The country whose emissaries first set foot there would attest to its supremacy, just as, in the twentieth century, landing on the moon first would. Having rebuffed human advances for so long, the poles had become even more irresistible, like a woman who has spurned unwanted suitors for years. Getting there had become a grim obsession, for nothing less would do. The world's attention was riveted by the expeditions dispatched there. Millions of ordinary citizens avidly followed the explorers’ every step in the newspapers—cheered on these small bands of fur-clad, shivering men carrying their tiny, tattered flags, realizing that their progress through ice floes and blizzards lent meaning to their own lives. For it was their struggle, too, and they badly wanted their share of the spoils.

  In a larger sense, the race to the poles was a test for the entire species. In the ice, it might be Englishmen against Norwegians, expedition against expedition, as they gamely plodded on, but subliminally at least what was driving these intrepid bands forward was their belief that finally reaching these two imaginary places—the last terrestrial frontiers—would prove something important to all of them. They were suffering to show what humans were still capable of doing, in an age dominated by machines, in which Homo sapiens seemed diminished. They were going to affirm that no goal was out of reach, so long as one tried hard enough and long enough to reach it. They would prove that humankind held sway over the entire planet, even in its most remote corners. Like the explorers’ courage, the march of civilization would not accept any limits.

  For their leaders, it was about something else. Their ambitions were monomaniacal and self-centered. Becoming the first to plant a foot at the poles would be the fulfillment of their lives, what they had striven for all these years. It would bring them the fame and adulation they had sought since childhood and enshrine their names in the annals of human endeavor forever. Their pursuit of the poles, while couched in language that might appear self-effacing, was anything but: it was all about them. And they would go to any lengths to prevail. However, the abstract nature of the poles made “discovering” them fiendishly complicated. Explor
ers could approach these locations with the help of compasses, sextants, and dead reckoning—the latter highly inaccurate because of the uneven polar terrain. But in the end, as they got very close, it came down to guesswork. There were no maps to guide them, no landmarks, no tracks in the snow pointing the way, no striped barber pole rising above the pressure ridges to tell them where to stop. Making it to ninety degrees north or south and knowing when that had been accomplished presented extraordinary challenges, particularly after enduring the most arduous trekking in the world. Expeditions aiming for the North Pole had to travel for over two weeks from their northernmost depot or staging area, covering between fifteen and twenty-five miles a day with little food and less sleep, and in temperatures that rarely rose above minus thirty degrees, even in midsummer. In Antarctica, the journey across the Great Ice Barrier (also known as the Ross Ice Shelf), up the steep side of the Beardsmore Glacier, and then over the high-altitude polar plateau, in even more brutal conditions, took longer—over three weeks for Scott's and Amundsen's parties in 1911 and 1912.

  Moreover, because the sites of the poles were not obvious, explorers had to take great pains to determine their positions so that they could substantiate their claims to having reached them. In their attempting to do so, the earth's magnetic fields and polar topography worked against them. At the top and bottom of the earth, compasses aren't of much use: they continue to point toward the magnetic—not geographical—poles, and near the North Pole that means to the south. Taking accurate sextant readings requires a true horizon—something nearly impossible to find with jutting ice blocking the line of sight. The sun also has to be visible—at least briefly—so that the exact angle of its elevation can be measured. But at the poles the sky is rarely clear. Furthering complicating this task was the fact that the North Pole is not situated at a fixed location but sits atop a frozen sea made up of constantly moving ice: where the pole is one day is not where it will be the next.4 On the stationary Antarctic continent, locating the pole was thus somewhat easier, especially for Scott and his men, as the Norwegians had left their tent standing, along with its deflating greeting (“Welcome to 90 Degrees”), to mark the spot or, as Amundsen realistically put it, “as near the pole as humanly possible with the instruments at our disposal.”5 Knowing the British were hot on his heels, the Norwegian had hastily done his level best to confirm he had reached the right place, first with a jury-rigged sextant, then by having his men fan out for twelve miles in all four directions like prospectors stacking out a claim so large that they would never have to worry about anyone challenging it. When Scott's party came upon this forlorn campsite thirty three days later they were so despondent that they gave no thought to contesting what their rivals had apparently achieved. Besides, English gentlemen did not accuse other gentlemen of lying. They brooded and stared disconsolately at the camera and let that image do the talking for them.6