To the Ends of the Earth

by John V. H. Dippel

  2. Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 93, 103–104.

  3. Arthur Conan Doyle, Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, ed. Jon Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 236.

  4. Doyle, “Captain of the Pole-Star,” in Dangerous Work, pp. 340, 341, 345, 350.

  5. “Sir John Franklin's Expedition,” Daily News (London), November 10, 1849.

  6. “Rescue of Sir John Franklin,” Morning Post (London), November 10, 1849.

  7. “Novel Proposition for the Discovery of Sir John Franklin,” The Era (London), October 28, 1849.

  8. Letter of Lady Jane Franklin to Frederick W. Beechey, November 14, 1849, Box 1, Franklin, Jane folder, Bassett Jones Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

  9. Writing to Lady Franklin, Grinnell noted that all the “pounds sterling of olde [sic] England, the dollars of this country, including the gold dust of California, would be nothing” compared with finding Franklin's men alive. Letter of Grinnell to Jane Franklin, October 25, 1850, MS 248/412/2-112, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge.

  10. Robert Randolph Carter, Searching for the Franklin Expedition; The Arctic Journal of Robert Randolph Carter, ed. Harold B. Gill Jr. and Joanne Young (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1998), p. 26.

  11. Ibid., pp. 20, 21, 28–29, 35, 46, 57.

  12. Mark M. Sawin, Raising Kane: Elisha Kent Kane and the Culture of Fame in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), p. 75.

  13. See, for example, Sherard Osborn, Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; or, Eighteen Months in the Polar Regions in Search of Sir John Franklin's Expedition, in the Years 1850–51 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852). For details on the debate in British naval circles about which route they should take, see John Brown, The North-West Passage and the Plans for the Search for Sir John Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  14. Fergus Fleming, Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole (London: Granta, 2001), p. 11.

  15. William C. Godfrey, Godfrey's Narrative of the Last Grinnell Arctic Exploring Party in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853-4-5 (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1857), pp. 74, 77, 79, 94, 96, 99, 100.

  16. “Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition, in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55,” New London Daily Star (CT), March 16, 1857.

  17. Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1857), p. 196.

  18. David Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), pp. 56, 59.

  19. Sawin, Raising Kane, pp. 80, 83, 86, 92, 93, 96.

  20. Godfrey, Godfrey's Narrative, pp. 134, 139, 197, 201, 204, 216, 228, 229, 134.

  Interestingly, another published account of the Second Grinnell Expedition makes no mention of this incident or any other controversial episode. Purportedly written by the expedition's astronomer, this book—August Sonntag, Professor Sonntag's Thrilling Narrative of the Grinnell Exploring Expedition to the Arctic Ocean 1853–1855, In Search of Sir John Franklin (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1857)—was actually fabricated by an unknown writer and published together with Godfrey's critical account of Kane's behavior, to undercut what the sailor had maintained (Sawin, Raising Kane, p. 338).

  21. Godfrey, Godfrey's Narrative, p. 21.

  22. Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, p. 197.

  23. While Scott recorded in his journal that Oates had left the tent willingly, saying “I am going outside and may be some time,” Edward Wilson, who was also keeping a journal, did not record that this comment had ever been made. Scott had given the other three men with him morphine doses, noting that it might be better for Oates—a “terrible hindrance”—to commit suicide. For a discussion of this incident, see Sarah Moss, The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration (New York: Blue Book, 2006), pp. 210–11.

  24. In a 1999 review of Roland Huntford's book The Last Place on Earth, author Caroline Alexander claimed this statement came from Scott, citing as her source the “explorer father” of a friend of hers, but it does not appear in any other published work by or about Scott. Nonetheless, it contains more than a grain of truth. (See Alexander, “The Race to the Bottom,” New York Times, October 31, 1999.) However, during his fateful last expedition, Scott did have his men practice skiing and manhauling prior to starting their push to the South Pole.

  25. 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), p. 92. See also Leonard F. Guttridge, Icebound: The Jeannette Expedition's Quest for the North Pole (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), p. 85.

  26. Richard W. Bliss, ed., 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. 180.

  27. Guttridge, Icebound, pp. 120, 122, 129, 147, 149.

  28. Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (New York: Random House, 2014), p. 191.

  29. Ibid., p. 188.

  30. Guttridge, Icebound, pp. 112, 122, 129, 147, 149, 151, 157, 179.

  31. John W. Danenhower, “Lieutenant Danenhower's Narrative (Cont.),” Our Lost Explorers, p. 207.

  32. Guttridge, Icebound, p. 109.

  33. De Long, Voyage of the Jeannette, p. 383.

  34. Ibid., p. 374.

  35. “Lieutenant De Long's Diary,” entry for October 10, 1881, Our Lost Explorers, p. 390.

  36. Hjalmar Johansen, With Nansen in the North: A Record of the Fram Expedition in 1893–96, trans. H. L. Braekstad (New York: Ward, Lock, 1886), p. 290. When they finally got back to civilization, Nansen reverted to using the formal form of address.

  37. Diana Preston, A First Rate Tragedy: Captain Scott's Antarctic Expeditions (London; Constable, 1997), p. 21. His Antarctic companion Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote that Scott was afflicted by bouts of depression that sometimes lasted for week. (Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World [1922; New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989], p. 206).

  38. For the impact of Scott's upbringing on his personality and naval career, see David Crane, Scott of Antarctica: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 16–54 passim.

  39. Michael Smith, I Am Just Going Outside: Captain Oates—Antarctic Tragedy (Staplehurst, UK: Spellmount, 2002), p. 116; Crane, Scott of Antarctica, p. 468.

  40. Michael Smith, Shackleton: By Endurance We Conquer (London: Collins Press, 2014), p. 43.

  41. T. H. Baughman, Before the Heroes Came: Antarctica in the 1890s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 94–5, 105, 111, 113.

  42. Despite all this corrosive dissension during the Southern Cross expedition, it did produce important scientific findings and set a new Farthest South mark of 78.50 degrees south. All but one man returned home safely.

  43. Cook made a lifelong friend of Roald Amundsen as a result of his kindness and life-saving actions on the Belgica. Years later, the famed Norwegian explorer visited Cook several times in prison in the United States (where he was serving a seven-year sentence for mail fraud), demonstrating that this youthful bond remained strong.

  44. Fleming, Ninety Degrees North, p. 246.

  45. Nansen had vacillated between staying on the ship and striking out for the North Pole, even though “his conscience tugged at him” for considering the latter course of action. Charles W. Johnson, Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer “Fram” (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), p. 69.

  46. It was felt that the expedition had enough provisions to last more than three years, but this prov
ed not to be the case. See US Congress, Proceedings of the “Proteus” Court of Inquiry on the Greely Relief Expedition of 1883 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 281.

  47. Leonard F. Guttridge, Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The Harrowing True Story of the Greely Expedition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2000), p. 54.

  48. The two men had previously wintered together in Greenland, and Clay had come to despise the doctor. Ibid., p. 6.

  49. Adolphus W. Greely, Three Years of Arctic Service: An Account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881–1884 and the Attainment of the Farthest North, vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1886), p. 63.

  50. See, for example, “Proceedings of a Board of Survey, convened at Ft. Conger, Jan. 10th, 1882,” Folder 3:12, Series V, Collection of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 1881–1884, Research Collections, Explorers Club, New York.

  51. David L. Brainard, The Outpost of the Lost: An Arctic Adventure (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1929), pp. 16, 17.

  52. Ibid., pp. 20, 21.

  53. Journal of C. B. Henry, December 26, 1881–August 8, 1882, Folder 3:5, Series V, Collection of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition.

  54. Greely, Three Years of Arctic Service, p. 312.

  55. Guttridge, Ghosts of Sabine, p. 106.

  56. Brainard, Outpost of the Lost, p. 42.

  57. Guttridge, Ghosts of Sabine, pp. 163, 198.

  58. Greeley, Three Years of Arctic Service, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1886), p. 684.

  59. Several others were observed taking extra portions of food, tobacco, tea, or alcohol, but none of them suffered any consequences other than being banned from preparing meals. (See diary of David L. Brainard, March 1–June 21, 1884, Folder 6, Box 2, Papers from the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, Papers of David L. Brainard, Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, NH.) But Brainard omitted mention of these thefts in his books about the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition.

  60. Brainard, Outpost of the Lost, p. 130.

  61. Brainard, diary entry of May 12, 1884.

  62. Letter of Adolphus Greely to Bassett Jones, April 15, 1931, Bassett Jones Papers, 1818–1938, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

  CHAPTER THREE: BY NATURE POSSESSED

  1. James Cook, The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World, vol. 3 (London: J. Limbird, 1824), pp. 51–2; George Young, The Life and Voyages of Captain James Cook (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1836), p. 168.

  2. Even Irish philosopher Edmund Burke's concept of the “sublime” did not suffice to enable them to comprehend what they saw on their journeys into these frozen and vacant kingdoms. See Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 12.

  3. Eric Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 4.

  4. Cook, Three Voyages, pp. 22, 47.

  5. The English-born American sealer John Davis first landed on the Antarctic coast in 1821.

  6. Carsten Borchgrevink, First on the Antarctic Continent; Being an Account of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1898–1900 (London: George Newnes, 1901), pp. 105, 116.

  7. 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. 46.

  8. William E. Parry, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific: Performed in the Years 1819–1820, in His Majesty's Ships Hecla and Griper, under the Orders of William Edward Parry (London: John Murray, 1821), p. 117.

  9. For a discussion of how preconceptions shape what we see and how we respond to new environments, see Paul Simpson-Housley, Antarctica: Exploration, Perception, and Metaphor (London: Routledge, 1992).

  10. Mark M. Sawin, Raising Kane: Elisha Kent Kane and the Culture of Fame in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), p. 94.

  11. So he wrote in his 1823 novel Wilhelm Meister. See Wilson, Spiritual History of Ice, p. 73. The German philosopher believed that these huge frozen formations had shifted and shaped land masses elsewhere on earth during a great ice age.

  12. William E. Parry, prayer, May 27, 1827, “Prayers used on Hecla, 1827, Voyage to North Pole” MS 438/44, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge.

  13. George Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River (London: John Murray, 1836), pp. 71, 117, 120, 179, 181.

  14. Charles F. Hall, Arctic Researches and Life among the Esquimaux: Being the Narrative of an Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, the Years 1860, 1861 and 1862 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1865), p. 34.

  15. Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 65.

  16. Wilfrid Noyce, The Springs of Adventure (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1958), p. 87.

  17. Jean-Baptiste Charcot, The Voyage of the “Why Not?” in the Antarctic, trans. Philip Walsh (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), p. 294.

  18. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989), p. 62.

  19. Alexander Armstrong, A Personal Narrative of the North-West Passage, with Numerous Incidents of Travel and Adventure during Nearly Five Years’ Continuous Service in the Arctic Regions while in Search of the Expedition under Sir John Franklin (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857), p. 209.

  20. Elisha Kent Kane, The United States Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1857), p. 59.

  21. Sara Wheeler, Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), p. 141.

  22. Martin Conway, With Ski and Sledge over Arctic Glaciers (London: J. M. Dent, 1898), pp. 105–106.

  23. Wheeler, Terra Incognita, p. 51.

  24. Ibid., pp. 84–85.

  25. Ibid., p. 141.

  26. Elisha Kent Kane, Greenland Notebook, Correspondence, Elisha Kent Kane Collection, American Philosophical Society (APS), Philadelphia.

  27. Elisha K. Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Childs and Petersen, 1857), pp. 14, 15, 34, 44, 52, 53.

  28. W. Parker Snow, Voyage of the Prince Albert in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Narrative of Every-Day Life in the Arctic Seas (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), p. 70.

  29. Louis Bernacchi, “Landfall,” in The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic, ed. Elizabeth Kolbert (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), p. 31.

  30. Kane, Grinnell Expedition, pp. 26, 67, 388.

  31. Clements Markham, The Lands of Silence: A History of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), pp. 10–11.

  32. William H. Gilder, Schwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records (New York: Echo, 2007), p. 7.

  33. Kane felt that the scale of these massive icebergs dwarfed what humans had built. See Kane, Grinnell Expedition, p. 67.

  34. Quoted in Iain McCalman, Darwin's Armada: Four Voyagers to the Southern Oceans and Their Battle for the Theory of Evolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), p. 134.

  35. George W. De Long, The Voyage of the Jeannette: The Ship and Ice Journals of George W. De Long, ed. Emma De Long, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), pp. 448, 472.

  36. Parry, Journal of a Voyage, pp. 115, 123–26.

  37. Catherine Delmas, Christine Vandamme, and Donna Spalding Andreolle, eds., introduction to Science and Empire in the Nineteenth Century: A Journey of Imperial Conquest and Scientific Progress (Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), p. vii.

  38. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned” (1798).

  39. Bernacchi, “Landfall,” p. 40.

  40. Fridtjof Nansen, introduction to Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Expedition
in the “Fram,” 1910–1912, trans. A. G. Chater, vol. 1 (London: John Murray 1913), pp. xxix–xxx.

  41. The English poet William Blake had used the phrase “Minute Particulars” in his “prophetic” poem Jerusalem (1804–1820) to describe all of Creation being present in its smallest forms:

  He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.

  General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;

  For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars…

  42. Michael Friendly, “The Golden Age of Statistical Graphics,” Statistical Science 23, no. 4 (2008): 4, https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.3979.pdf (accessed May 7, 2015).

  43. Parry, Journal of a Voyage, p. vii.

  44. Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition, pp. 218, 222, 224.

  45. Kane, Arctic Explorations, pp. 152, 153.

  46. Francis Leopold McClintock, The Voyage of the “Fox” in the Arctic Seas: A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 218.

  47. The Scott party was so dedicated to gathering scientific specimens that they lugged thirty-five pounds of plant fossils back from the South Pole. These were found inside the tent next to the bodies of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers.

  48. Cherry-Garrard, Worst Journey in the World, p. 582.

  CHAPTER FOUR: “LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI”

  1. Ralph M. Myerson, “Isaac Israel Hayes,” Polar Priorities 20 (September 2000), Elisha Kent Kane Historical Society, http://archive.is/S6EU (accessed October 20, 2015). Cf. Douglas W. Wamsley, Polar Hayes: The Life and Contributions of Isaac Israel Hayes, MD (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2009), p. 73.

  2. Isaac I. Hayes, An Arctic Boat Journey in the Autumn of 1854 (Boston: Brown, Taggard, and Chase, 1860), pp. 3-4.

  3. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

  4. Quoted from Hayes's journal, in Chauncey C. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), p. 265.

  5. One of the more famous paintings capturing the Arctic's otherworldly beauty is based on a sketch made by Hayes during his subsequent voyage there, in 1861. This is Frederic Church's Aurora Borealis. Hayes described what he had seen with this painterly language: “The light grew by degrees more and more intense, and from irregular bursts it settled into an almost steady sheet of brightness…. The exhibition, at first tame and quiet, became in the end startling in its brilliancy. The broad dome above me is all ablaze…. The colour of the light was chiefly red, but this was not constant, and every hue mingled in the fierce display. Blue and yellow streamers were playing in the lurid fire; and, sometimes starting side by side from the wide expanse of the illuminated arch, they melt into each other, and throw a ghostly glare of green into the face and over the landscape. Again this green overrides the red; blue and orange clasp each other in their rapid flight; violet darts tear through a broad flush of yellow, and countless tongues of white flame, formed of these uniting streams, rush aloft and lick the skies” (Hayes, The Open Polar Sea: A Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole, in the Schooner “United States” [New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867], p. 194). Some contend this painting expresses the bittersweet mood in the United States following the Union victory in the Civil War.