To the Ends of the Earth

by John V. H. Dippel

  14. Theodore Bickel, Mawson's Will: The Greatest Survival Story Ever Written (New York: Stein and Day, 1997), pp. 114, 119, 123, 131, 146, 160, 163; Wheeler, Terra Incognita, pp. 129, 130; Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard: Being the Story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911–1914, vol. 1 (Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2008), pp. 196–97, 206.

  Many years after the fact, an Australian told the British travel writer Sara Wheeler that Mawson had confessed during a subsequent overland trek in his adopted country that he had eaten part of Mertz's corpse to stay alive. See Wheeler, Terra Incognita, p. 130. More recently, the Australian historian David Day has contended, in a book entitled Flaws in the Ice: In Search of Douglas Mawson (London: Scribe, 2013), that Mawson deliberately reduced Mertz's rations to hasten the latter's death, so that Mawson could survive by eating his friend's flesh. But Day has no real evidence to back up this highly controversial claim.

  15. See, for example, Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 19–20.

  16. Amy Mitchell-Cook, A Sea of Misadventures: Shipwreck and Survival in Early America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013), p. 112.

  17. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Viking, 2000), pp. 164, 167. Five of the six sailors eaten on these boats were African American.

  18. When the captain of the Essex, George Pollard Jr., returned to Nantucket, a crowd of some one thousand turned out on the docks to see him, knowing full well what he and the other whalers had done to survive. There were no cheers, only silent stares. However, Pollard was never charged with a crime and went on to assume command of another ship. (Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, p. 202.)

  However, in 1884, when four survivors of an English yacht that had sunk in the South Atlantic drew lots to see which one of them would be sacrificed for the others, this incident eventually led to a charge of murder against two of the men, Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens. They were convicted and sentenced to death, but ended up serving only a six-month sentence. This case established the legal precedent that necessity could not justify murder.

  19. As the Canadian businessman who helped finance the recent successful search for Franklin's ships told Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, “It always had to be somebody else doing the eating. British gentlemen in the service to Queen and country don't eat each other. Eskimos and polar bears do.” Adam Gopnik, “The Franklin Ship Myth, Verified,” New Yorker, October 1, 2014, p. 6.

  20. 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-Queens University, 2009), p. 23.

  21. “The Arctic Expedition,” Times (London), October 23, 1854.

  22. Ken McGoogan, foreword to John Rae's Arctic Correspondence, 1844–1855, by John Rae (Victoria, BC: TouchWood, 2014), p. 79.

  23. Elce, As Affecting the Fate, p. 24.

  24. The Times also denounced the Inuit as “liars” in an October 27 editorial, saying that they might have been “tempted by the emaciation and weakness of the white men to attack them.” The Sun stood up patriotically for Franklin's “noble band of adventurers,” by arguing that they could not possibly have “resorted to such horrors.” When Rae returned to London, Lady Franklin received him coldly, telling him his assertions about her husband's party were “shameful.” She vowed that he would pay a high price for trusting the word of “savages” in writing his report. (Ken McGoogan, Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot [New York: Carroll and Graf, 2001], pp. 210–11.)

  25. Richard King, The Franklin Expedition from First to Last (London: John Churchill, 1855), p. 105.

  26. Charles Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Explorers,” Household Words: A Weekly Journal 10 (December 1854): 433–37.

  27. A. Keenleyside, M. Bertulli, and H. C. Fricke, “The Final Days of the Franklin Expedition: New Skeletal Evidence,” Arctic 50, no. 1 (March 1997): 36–46. Previously, during an 1879 search on King William Island, more bones believed to be from the Franklin party had been found, with signs that the flesh on them had been eaten.

  28. Letter of Francis Leopold McClintock to Lady Jane Franklin, September 27, 1859, MS 248/439/22, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge.

  29. Quoted in Bruce Henderson, Fatal North: Murder and Survival Aboard the USS Polaris, the First US Expedition to the North Pole (New York: New American Library, 2001), pp. 168, 171.

  30. Leonard F. Guttridge, Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The True Story of the Greely Expedition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2000), pp. 275, 296–97.

  31. Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (London: Belhaven Press, 1993), p. 107.

  32. George F. Shrady, “The Rescue of Lieutenant Greely, the Effects of the Arctic Climate, and Cannibalism,” Medical Record 26, no. 8 (August 23, 1884): 207.

  33. Riffenburgh, Myth of the Explorer, p. 109.

  34. 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. 91–92. Throughout the nineteenth century, doubts persisted in print about whether the Franklin crew had actually practiced cannibalism—or, if they had, if this was morally inexcusable. In an 1881 book, William Henry Gilder, a survivor of the Battle of Gettysburg, a New York Herald reporter, and second-in-command of an 1878–1880 polar expedition seeking to locate Franklin-related documents, relics, and remains, quoted a letter to him from Rae, exculpating the doomed party: “I considered it no reproach, when suffering the agony to which extreme hunger subjects some men, for them to do what the Esquimaux tell us was done. Men so placed are no more responsible for their actions than a madman who commits a great crime.” In the same book, Gilder theorized that it been the Inuit who had cut up the flesh and consumed it. William H. Gilder, Schwatka's Search: Sledging in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881), pp. x–xi.

  35. McGoogan, Fatal Passage, p. 216.

  36. Riffenburgh, Myth of the Explorer, p. 31.

  37. Quoted in Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 145. Franklin changed his mind after nearly starving to death in the Canadian Arctic.

  38. David Crane, Scott of Antarctica: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 30.

  39. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition, p. 60.

  40. Scott referred to Oates this way in a March 6, 1912, entry in his journal.

  41. Quoted in Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989), p. 554.

  42. Since there is no record of these parting words in Wilson's diary, some have speculated that Scott made them up, to obscure that he had encouraged Oates to commit suicide.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: MORE NOBLE THAN THE “GREED FOR DISCOVERY”

  1. David Thomas Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World: A History, 1870–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), p. 18.

  2. Mindful of the fate of the Franklin party, Weyprecht had issued ammunition to his officers, instructing them to shoot themselves (and tell the crew to commit suicide) rather than resort to cannibalism.

  3. Letter of Charles P. Daly, New York Tribune, January 17, 1886, quoted in Karen M. Morin, Civic Discipline: Geography in America, 1860–1890 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), p. 127.

  4. Fergus Fleming, Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 82.

  5. Christopher Carter, “Going Global in Polar Exploration: Nineteenth-Century British and American Nationalism and Peacetime Science,” in Globalizing Polar Science: Reconsidering the International Polar Years and Geophysical Year, ed. Roger D. Launius, James R. Fleming, and David H. DeVorkin (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 201
0), p. 97.

  6. Cornelia Luedecke, “The First International Polar Year (1882–1883): A Big Science Experiment with Small Science Equipment,” Proceedings of the International Commission on History of Meteorology 1, no. 1 (2014): 58.

  7. Ironically, given the spirit of international cooperation, scientific reports written in Dutch, Russian, Swedish, and other languages were not translated, so that findings were not widely shared. Roger. D. Launius, “Toward the Poles: A Historiography of Scientific Exploration during the International Polar Years and the International Geophysical Year,” in Globalizing Polar Science,” p. 64.

  8. Marc Rothenburg, “Making Science Global? Coordinated Enterprises in Nineteenth-Century Science,” in Globalizing Polar Science, p. 25.

  9. George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), p. 3.

  10. Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), p. 4.

  11. Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! The Story of Arctic Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present (New York: Viking, 1934), p. 8. Cf. Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 16.

  12. Erika 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 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009), p. 16.

  13. Edward J. Larson, An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 62, 75.

  14. David Day, Antarctica: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 20. See also David J. Cantrill, The Vegetation of Antarctica through Geological Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 2–3.

  15. 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. 319.

  16. George Back, Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 16.

  17. Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 29.

  18. Quoted in T. H. Baughman, Before the Heroes Came: Antarctica in the 1890s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 53.

  19. Kane's dissertation, published in 1842, was entitled Experiments on Kiesteine, with Remarks on Its Application to the Diagnosis of Pregnancy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1842).

  20. Elisha Kent Kane, Adrift in the Arctic Ice Pack: From the History of the First US Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin (New York: Outing, 1915), pp. 29, 39. See also Kane, The United States Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1857), p. 27.

  21. In a letter dated April 21, 1851, Thomas Kane wrote to his brother: “A flood of glory [underlined] has rushed in at the doors and windows, that could not fail to carry everything before it…. You are expected home to be the biggest kind of Sion that has reared here [in Philadelphia] since the redoubtable Stephen Decatur of the War of 1812.” (Elisha Kent Kane Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.)

  22. Elisha Kent Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55 (Bedford, MA: Applewood 1856), pp. 153, 165, 166.

  23. For a thorough treatment of this scientific quest, see Granville A. Mawer, South by Northwest: The Magnetic Crusade and the Contest for Antarctica (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006).

  24. “Arctic Explorations: The Second Expedition, in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55,” New London Daily Star, March 16, 1857. By comparison, the top-selling book in the United States during the nineteenth century—Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—sold three hundred thousand copies the year it first appeared, in 1853.

  25. 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. 44. McClintock noted that this study should be of particular value in case his voyage otherwise might be “altogether barren of results.” By the 1860s, the Royal Geographical Society was supplying ordinary travelers with scientific instruments so they could conduct on-site measurements all around the world. (Jones, Last Great Quest, p. 34.)

  26. Ibid., p. 174.

  27. Day, Antarctica, p. 99.

  28. Quoted in Baughman, Before the Heroes Came, p. 52.

  29. Murphy, German Exploration of the Polar World, p. 1.

  30. Initially, the congressional committee considering Hall's request for funding had turned him down, on the grounds that he did not “possess any of the qualifications necessary to carry out an expedition that should be thought of only in connection with scientific discovery.” (See “Expedition to the North Pole: Unseemly Conduct of Captain Hall,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 12, 1870.) Hall had irritated members of this committee by attacking Isaac Israel Hayes—a rival for government funding with impressive scientific qualifications—during his own presentation.

  31. Michael F. Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 79.

  32. Excitement surrounding the De Long expedition was intense. Many thought the Jeannette might actually reach the North Pole, while others expressed grandiose hopes that this voyage might “determine laws of meteorology, hydrography, astronomy and gravitation, reveal ocean currents, develop new fisheries, discover lands and peoples hitherto unknown, and by extending the world's knowledge of such fundamental principles of earth-life as magnetism and electricity and the various collateral branches of atmospheric science, solve great problems important to humanity” (Watertown [New York] Daily Times, July 7, 1879, quoted in Leonard F. Guttridge, Icebound: The “Jeannette” Expedition's Quest for the North Pole [Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986], p. 3).

  33. De Long had preferred an all-military crew so that he could count on their respecting his authority at all times. (Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette [New York: Random House, 2014], p. 80.)

  34. Sarah Moss, Scott's Last Biscuit: The Literature of Polar Travel (Oxford: Signal Books, 2006), p. 93.

  35. Scientific records of the expedition took up eighty-five pages in the second volume of Greely's account of this expedition. He boasted that his team had collected more extensive data on these phenomena than any other International Polar Year party. (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 [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1886], p. v.)

  36. Leonard F. Guttridge, Ghosts of Cape Sabine: The True Story of the Greely Expedition (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2000), p. 108.

  37. However, it was discovered during their second year in the Arctic that some records had not been diligently kept, or specimens properly labelled. (Adolphus W. Greely, Three Years of Arctic Service, vol. 2 [London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1886], p. 65.)

  38. See “Means of the Meteorological Observations Made at Fort Conger, 1881–1883,” Appendix 1, Greely, Three Years of Arctic Service, vol. 2, p. 342.

  39. Quoted in Jones, Last Great Quest, p. 41.

  40. Quoted in Morin, Civic Geography, p. 127.

  41. Jones, Last Great Quest, pp. 62–63.

  42. Letter of Wilson to Dr. Edward T. Wilson, September 16, 1909, quoted in David Crane, Scott of Antarctica: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 398.

  43. Scott, journal entry of July 13, 1911. Quoted in Larson, An Empire of Ice, p. 274.

  44. Wilson had studied the migration of Emperor penguins during the Discovery expedition and subsequently published a monograph on the life cycle of these birds.

  45. Crane, Scott of Antarctica, pp. 427, 500.
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  46. Robert F. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition: The Personal Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, RN, CVO, on His Journey to the South Pole, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1923), p. 253.

  47. Tryggve Gran, The Norwegian with Scott: Tryggve Gran's Antarctic Diary, 1910–1913, trans. G. Hattersley-Smith (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1984), p. 114.

  48. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition, pp. 287, 311.

  49. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989), pp. 231–32.

  50. Ibid., pp. 254, 267, 270, 274.

  51. British explorers did participate in an expedition led by Douglas Mawson in 1929–31, and a privately funded mission took place later in the 1930s, but by then the English public had lost its fascination with this part of the world.

  52. Quoted in Jones, Last Great Quest, p. 165.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: “DOWN WITH SCIENCE, SENTIMENT, AND THE FAIR SEX”

  1. Winfield S. Schley and James R. Solely, The Rescue of Greely (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1885), pp. 222–23. Other accounts have challenged what Schley recollected, claiming that Greely had simply asked for food or told his rescuers to let him and the others die in peace. See, for example, Michael F. Robinson, The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 84. See also Charles H. Harlow, “Greely at Cape Sabine: Notes by a Member of the Relief Expedition,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 30, no. 1 (May 1885): 83. Harlow had been the photographer on the rescue mission and took pictures on site shortly after Greely and the other survivors had been discovered.

  2. Greely's instructions from the War Department had included a sledge outing to nearby Cape Joseph Henry, but this was actually somewhat south of the Fort Conger base camp. 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. xii.