To the Ends of the Earth
Page 31
Of the twenty-one officers and men who had accompanied Greely (seated, center) to Lady Franklin Bay in 1881, only five eventually returned with him. While hailed as heroes when they arrived at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, rumors of cannibalism dogged them for the rest of their lives. This disastrous outcome made the American public and government wary of sending other expeditions to the Far North. Survivors of the Greely Expedition; photo by A. W. Anderson.
Fridtjof Nansen (center) and his companions observing a solar eclipse beside their ship Fram in 1894. Although Nansen had a doctoral degree in zoology, his professed interest in exploring the Arctic for scientific purposes masked his real ambition of becoming the first person to reach the North Pole. National Library of Norway.
With Frederick Cook and Robert Peary making rival, unsubstantiated claims to have reached the North Pole first, the winner of this race was largely decided in the court of public opinion, with Cook gaining an initial advantage thanks to sensational headlines like this one. The Chicago Daily News hails Cook's reaching the North Pole.
His single-minded focus on getting to the pole first, undistracted by scientific objectives, gave Roald Amundsen a clear edge over his British rival Scott. The Norwegian also treated his men as his equals and thus avoided the resentment and bickering that plagued the British expedition on its way south in 1911. Amundsen photographing at the South Pole.
A poor planner, wont to remain aloof from his men, Robert Scott achieved his greatest triumph in the written record he left behind—journals that glossed over his shortcomings and idealized the companions who finally reached the South Pole with him in 1912. Robert Scott writing in his journal; photo by Herbert George Ponting.
The final page from Scott's journal, written March 29, 1912: “We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people.” British Library.
Scott's reluctance to disappoint his friend Edward Wilson led him to allow members of his Southern Party—Wilson, “Birdie” Bowers, and Apsley Cherry-Garrard—to venture forth into the appallingly cold Antarctic winter to retrieve some Emperor penguin eggs. This ordeal left the three explorers exhausted and not in the best shape for the trek to the pole. Cape Crozier party returns; photo by Herbert George Ponting.
Like so many explorers before him, Ernest Shackleton (right) found that the frigid polar environment presented insurmountable barriers. His plan to bring ashore supplies for a proposed trans-Antarctic land expedition collapsed when the Endurance became beset in the Weddell Sea in February 1915. The vessel drifted and was slowly crushed by ice, until it sank the following fall, forcing Shackleton and his men to undertake their incredible sea voyage to South Georgia Island. Wreck of the Endurance; photo by Frank Hurley.
While he was less wedded to “manhauling” than his contemporary Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton found he had to resort to such back-breaking measures when the Endurance became stuck in Antarctic ice in 1915. These harsh realities confounded the romantic temper and self-confidence that many British explorers brought with them to the poles. Shackleton's crew hauling the James Caird; photo by Frank Hurley.
Shackleton realized that in order to survive extreme conditions at the poles, he and his men had to form unbreakable bonds, trusting that each would stand by the others to the end. Even when he and five others had to leave the rest of his party behind on Elephant Island in April 1916, members of the Endurance party never lost this faith in each other. Waving goodbye to the Caird on Elephant Island; photo by Frank Hurley.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd unilaterally decided to spend half a year all by himself in the interior of Antarctica during the winter of 1934, but this complete isolation nearly drove him mad. He had to be rescued after five months, and was never completely the same again. US Navy, National Science Foundation.
Researching a book on polar explorers is another kind of expedition—a long, hard slog through archives and libraries instead of around ice floes and across expanses of windswept snow. While this journey of mine has been far less perilous and far more comfortable, it has had its own share of challenges, which might have proved more daunting without the help I received along the way. I have been fortunate in receiving gracious guidance and good tips from a number of librarians and archivists in tracking down important books and documents I might otherwise have missed. In particular, I would like to thank Naomi Boneham, archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, England; Lacey Flint, archivist and curator of Research Collections at the Explorers Club in New York City; Susan Kaplan, director of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and the Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College; Morgan Swan, outreach librarian at the Rauner Library, Dartmouth College; staff at the Archival Center of the Newburyport (Massachusetts) Public Library; and librarians at the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia, as well as the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.
In addition, I would like to thank Beau Riffenburgh, for advice and encouragement along the way; Steven Mitchell and his production staff at Prometheus Books, for shepherding my manuscript into its present form; and my agent, Eric Myers, for being daring enough to take on this work and patient enough to see it through to publication.
Salisbury, Connecticut
March 2018
INTRODUCTION
1. “Into the Land of Mystery,” Boston Transcript, August 7, 1897.
2. Adrien de Gerlache, Fifteen Months in the Antarctic, trans. Maurice Raraty (Norfolk: Bluntisham, 1998), p. 68.
3. Frederick A. Cook, Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898–1899: A Narrative of the Voyage of the “Belgica” among Newly Discovered Lands and over an Unknown Sea about the South Pole (London: Heinemann, 1900), p. 50.
4. Hugo Decleir, introduction to Roald Amundsen's “Belgica” Diary: The First Scientific Expedition to the Antarctic, ed. Hugo Decleir (Norfolk: Bluntisham, 1999), p. 7.
5. For a sampling of Racoviță's humorous drawings of other scientists acting like buffoons, see Geir O. Klover, ed., Antarctic Pioneers: The Voyage of the “Belgica,”1897–99 (Oslo: Fram Museum, 2010), pp. 62–72.
6. The Belgian government awarded the expedition subsidies that covered a third of the total cost of outfitting it. The rest was raised from private donors. Adrien de Gerlache, The Belgian Antarctic Expedition under the Command of A. de Gerlache de Gomery (Brussels: Hayez, 1904), p. 7.
7. Henryk Arctowski, “The Antarctic Voyage of the Belgica during the Years 1897, 1898, and 1899,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute, 1901 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902), p. 378.
8. Maurice Raraty, introduction to Fifteen Months in the Antarctic, by de Gerlache, p. xvi.
9. All told, five members of the Belgica crew were fired for not obeying orders or displaying incompetence. Four others quit at various points, for reasons of their own. Even though some of these men were replaced, the ship was undermanned during its voyage to Antarctica.
10. De Gerlache, Fifteen Months, pp. 42, 81–82. Cook, First Antarctic Night, pp. 65–66, 125.
11. Sarah Moss, Scott's Last Biscuit: The Literature of Polar Travel (Oxford: Signal Books, 2006), p. 18.
12. Cook, First Antarctic Night, pp. 131, 172–73.
13. De Gerlache, Fifteen Months, p.108.
14. De Gerlache, Belgian Antarctic Expedition, p. 29.
15. Ibid., p. 30.
16. Cook, First Antarctic Night, pp. 250, 252.
17. Ibid., p. 282.
CHAPTER ONE: TRAILING CLOUDS OF GLORY
1. William Elder, Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1859), p. 301.
2. David Chapin, “‘Science Weeps, America Weeps, the World Weeps’: America Mourns Elisha Kent Kane,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 123, no. 4 (October 1999): 281.
3. Remarks of Andrew J. Holman, Philadelphia Common Council, February 26, 1
859, quoted in Elder, Elisha Kent Kane, p. 290.
4. E. W. Andrews, Memoir and Eulogy of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane (New York: Masonic Grand Lodge, 1857), p. 52.
5. Use of the plural form continued even after the Civil War. Adopted in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment read as follows: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their [italics added] jurisdiction.”
6. Even as late as the 1840s, the idea that the top and bottom of the earth enjoyed warm temperatures still enjoyed some credence. Edgar Allan Poe described such a tropical island paradise in the Antarctic in his 1838 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. This novella was so convincing that some readers felt world maps should be revised to reflect this “discovery.”
7. In peacetime, the British navy's fleet was reduced from 700 to 120 vessels. The number of ordinary seamen on active duty dropped from 140,000 to 20,000.
8. Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 20.
9. It turned out that this thaw was only a temporary aberration, indirectly caused by a huge volcanic eruption in present-day Indonesia in 1815.
10. Anonymous, “Continental Travelling and Residence Abroad,” Quarterly Review 38 (July/October 1828): 152.
11. John Barrow, A Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions (London: John Murray, 1818), p. 379. For a discussion of this pattern of glorifying explorers, see Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (London: Belhaven, 1993).
12. Quoted in Frances Trevelyan Miller, Byrd's Great Adventure: The Fight to Conquer the Ends of the Earth (Chicago: Winston, 1930), p. 124.
13. William E. Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (London: John Murray, 1821), p. xiv.
14. Riffenburgh, Myth of the Explorer, p. 16.
15. See Gillen D'Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 148.
16. Erika Behrisch Elce, introduction to As Affecting the Fate of My Absent Husband: Selected Letters of Lady Franklin Concerning the Search for the Lost Franklin Expedition, 1848–1860, ed. Erika Behrisch Elce (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009), p. 17.
17. “At an early point, public fascination with the polar quest became untethered from any worldly measure of success. Instead, the enterprise took on the characteristics of a neo-Arthurian cult, to which Britain's finest knights would naturally be sacrificed in search of the elusive grail” (Wood, Tambora, p. 148).
18. Quoted in Sarah Knowles Bolton, Famous Voyagers and Explorers (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1893), p. 247.
19. Stefan Petrow, “Public Opinion, Private Remonstrance, and the Law: Protecting Animals in Australia, 1803–1914,” in Past Law, Present Histories, ed. Diane Kirkby (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2012), p. 64.
20. Bolton, Famous Voyagers, p. 268.
21. George Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 180.
22. See “Progress of the Land Arctic Expedition, under Lieut. John Franklin, RN,” Times (London), November 21, 1821; Franklin, journal, June 1820–April 1821, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge; Paul Nanton, Arctic Breakthrough: Franklin's Expeditions, 1818–1847 (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1970), p. 115.
23. Midshipman George Back, in charge of a separate party to map territory near Hudson's Bay in 1822, lost half of his twenty two men to hunger. Afterward he composed these haunting lines:
Fell famine then with pestilential breath
Rudely assaulted our too feeble crew—
some weep—some rave—and meet immediate death—
Whilst some prepare fresh horrors to review—
See Back, “Recollections of our Unfortunate Voyage to Discover the Country between the Mouth of the Coppermine River and Hudson's Bay,” quoted in George Back, Arctic Artist: The Journals and Paintings of George Back, Midshipman, with Franklin, 1819-1822, ed. C. Stuart Houston (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994), p. 321.
24. Nanton, Arctic Breakthrough, p. 220.
25. Berton, Arctic Grail, p. 336.
26. Elce, introduction, p. 18.
27. “Arrival of the ‘Caledonia’ Fourteen Days Later from London,” Gloucester Telegram (Gloucester, MA), September 6, 1845.
28. See, for example, “By the ‘Britannia.’ Thirteen Days Later from England,” Commercial Advertiser (New York), November 22, 1845.
29. “Foreign: The Arctic Expedition,” New Hampshire Sentinel, June 11, 1845.
30. “The Arctic Expedition,” Boston Recorder, July 29, 1847.
31. Elce, introduction, p. 12.
32. Nanton, Arctic Breakthrough, p. 235.
33. Ibid., pp.231–33. Nanton points out, “Never before or since have the Arctic wastes seen such a variety of ships.”
34. Chauncey C. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), p. 21. During their second winter, the Franklin party encountered the most ice to clog Arctic waters in seven hundred years.
35. John Cleves Symmes, an infantry officer and veteran of the War of 1812, had revived the theory that the earth was hollow and “habitable within.” A proposal to send an expedition to test this hypothesis was tabled after Andrew Jackson became president. This notion had been largely met with ridicule and questions about Symmes's sanity. For more details on his theory, see Duane A. Griffin, “Hollow and Habitable Within: Symmes's Theory of Earth's Internal Structure and Polar Geography,” Physical Geography 25, no. 5 (2004): 382–97.
36. When he was president, Lincoln noted that the Bible, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, and Riley's book had contributed the most to shaping his political views.
37. John Franklin, Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827(London: John Murray, 1828), p. 36.
38. Quoted in Bolton, Famous Voyagers, p. 264.
39. Quoted in Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 87.
40. William E. Parry, Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (London: Cassel, 1889), p. 32.
41. Iain McCalman, Darwin's Armada: Four Voyagers to the Southern Oceans and Their Battle for the Theory of Evolution (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2009), p. 134.
42. Berton, Arctic Grail, p. 334.
43. Clements Markham, The Threshold of the Unknown Region (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Seale, 1873), pp. 1–2.
44. Franklin preferred to have “quiet steady persons” of “exceptional character” travel with him. (Letter of Franklin to William McDonald, March 29, 1824; “Franklin, John” folder, Bassett Jones Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.) Similarly, the American Arctic explorer Lieutenant George Washington De Long selected his crew for the Jeannette on the basis of character as well as health and marital status (single) (Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS “Jeannette” [New York: Random House, 2014], p. 80). It is interesting to note that having a “bad character” is apparently not always a liability under conditions of great deprivation. So found the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim during his stay in Nazi concentration camps. (See Wilfrid Noyce, They Survived: A Study of the Will to Live [New York: Dutton, 1963], p. 4.)
45. For a study of how leaders can help others stay alive in situations like those regularly encountered in the polar regions, see John Leach, Survival Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1994).
46. Caroline Alexander, The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 68.
47. Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land E
xpedition, p. 42.
48. Franklin, Narrative of a Second Expedition, p. 162.
49. J. Kennedy Maclean, Heroes of the Polar Seas: A Record of Exploration in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas (London: W. and R. Chambers, 1910), pp. 263, 9.
50. Ernest Shackleton, “Proposed Trans-Antarctic Expedition,” undated typescript, pp. 8, 1. North Star Rare Book Store, Great Barrington, MA. Previously, Shackleton had earned some £20 thousand by charging visitors to go on board his ship Nimrod, after its return from Antarctica in 1909 (Roland Huntford, Shackleton [London: Atheneum, 1986], p. 316).
51. Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice, p. 32. Sides claims that Bennett's target had been a grand piano in the living room, but other sources insist it was the fireplace.
52. Raymond Lee Newcomb, Our Lost Explorers: The Narrative of the Jeannette Arctic Expedition: As Related by the Survivors, and in the Records and Last Journals of Lieutenant De Long (Hartford: American Publishing, 1883), p. 17.
53. George W. De Long, The Voyage of the Jeannette: The Ship and Ice Journals of George W. De Long, ed. Emma De Long, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), pp. 24, 39.
54. Leonard F. Guttridge, Icebound: The Jeannette Expedition's Quest for the North Pole (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), pp. 3–4. This quotation is from the Watertown Times, July 7, 1879.
55. De Long, Voyage of the Jeannette, vol. 1, pp. 38, 57, 74, 153, 378, 382, 404. Some of these comments are from De Long's widow, Emma, who edited his journal. This document was retrieved from the ice by a rescue party.
56. Elce, introduction, p. 18.
57. Nanton, Arctic Breakthrough, p. 110.
CHAPTER TWO: HAIL THE CONQUERED HERO!
1. Arthur Conan Doyle, “Life on a Greenland Whaler,” Strand Magazine, March 1897, Project Gutenberg Australia, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1306971h.html (accessed April 5, 2015).