To the Ends of the Earth
Page 36
45. Elisha K. Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55 (Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1856), p. 83.
46. See, for example, Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores, p. 219.
47. 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. 575.
48. From Kipling's poem “The English Flag,” quoted in T. H. Baughman, Pilgrims on Ice: Robert Falcon Scott's First Antarctic Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 89.
49. Luigi di Amedeo, On the “Polar Star” in the Arctic Sea, trans. William Le Queu, vol. 1 (London: Hutchinson, 1903), p. 89.
50. Nansen, Farthest North, vol. 1, p. 196.
CHAPTER TEN: “WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY, AND HE IS US”
1. 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. 19, 20, 32, 35, 66, 77, 78, 98, 107–108.
2. Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 288, 290.
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), pp. 58, 277, 282, 290.
4. This charge was never conclusively substantiated, although an exhuming of Hall's corpse in 1968 determined that he had ingested an unusual amount of arsenic during the final weeks of his life. (See Chauncey C. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), p. 345.) To this day, it remains unclear if he had consumed this willingly, to commit suicide, or been murdered.
5. Bruce Henderson, Fatal North: Adventure and Survival aboard USS “Polaris,” the First US Expedition to the North Pole (New York: New American Library, 2001), pp. 94, 115, 151, 169.
6. 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), pp. 94, 62.
7. Berton, Arctic Grail, p. 443.
8. Adolphus W. Greely, untitled ms., July 19, 1883, Folder 28, Box 3, Series II, “Official Orders and Narratives,” Collection of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 1881–1884, Research Collections, Explorers Club, New York.
9. Diana Preston, A First Rate Tragedy: Captain Scott's Antarctic Expeditions (London: Constable, 1997), p. 143.
10. Tryggve Gran, The Norwegian with Scott: Tryggve Gran's Antarctic Diary, 1910–1913, trans. G. Hattersley-Smith (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1984), pp. 138–39, 156, 219.
11. Fergus Fleming, Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole (London: Granta, 2001), p. 215.
12. Quoted in Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores, p. 267.
13. Henderson, Fatal North, pp. 55–56, 62, 63.
14. David Crane, Scott of Antarctica: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 171.
15. Scott once wrote to his wife Kathleen that he regarded life as a constant struggle to survive. See Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 317.
16. Quoted in Michael Smith, Shackleton: By Endurance We Conquer (London: Oneworld, 2014), p. 128.
17. Scott told his wife that he believed Shackleton had intended all along to break his promise. (Crane, Scott of Antarctica, p. 390.)
18. Letter of Ernest Shackleton to Robert Scott, July 6, 1909, MS 367/17/1, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge. Six months later, Shackleton wrote again, explaining that any forthcoming expedition of his would be “purely scientific” and not make any effort to reach the South Pole. (Letter of Shackleton to Scott, February 21, 1910, MS 367/17/2, SPRI.)
19. Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 8.
20. Godfrey, Godfrey's Narrative, p. 57.
21. Elisha K. Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55 (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1856), p. 84.
22. Mark M. Sawin, Raising Kane: Elisha Kent Kane and the Culture of Fame in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), pp. 204, 273.
23. Berton, Arctic Grail, pp. 441–42, 254.
24. Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 321, 401–402.
25. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989), p. 205.
26. Preston, First Rate Tragedy, p. 127.
27. Crane, Scott of Antarctica, p. 220.
28. Ibid., p. 123.
29. Raymond E. Priestley, Antarctic Adventure: Scott's Northern Party (New York: E. F. Dutton, 1915), p. 77.
30. Sara Wheeler, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), p. 76. “At the end of the day, Campbell's word was law.” (Victor Campbell, The Wicked Mate: The Antarctic Diary of Victor Campbell, ed. H. G. R. King [Bluntisham, Huntington: Erskine, 2001], p. 129.)
31. Priestley, Antarctic Adventure, pp. 278, 279, 295, 353–54.
32. Jean-Baptiste Charcot, The Voyage of the “Why Not?” in the Antarctic, trans. Philip Walsh (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), pp. 199, 209, 210.
33. In his study of how to improve the chances of survival after a disaster, John Leach has also concluded that “crowding” increases stress, although being alone can quickly bring a survivor “to his knees in a surprisingly short time, quicker indeed than many physical or physiological factors.” See John Leach, Survival Psychology (London: Macmillan 1994), pp. 116, 107.
34. Lawrence A. Palinkas and Peter Suedfeld, “Psychological Effects of Polar Expeditions” Lancet 371, no. 9607 (January 12, 2008): 158.
35. Sarah Moss, The Frozen Ship: The Histories and Tales of Polar Exploration (New York: Blue Bridge, 2006), p. 166.
36. See “Report from the Committee on Invalid Pensions,” January 9, 1877, report no. 79, House of Representatives, 44th Congress, 2nd Session, Index of Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives for the Second Session of the 44th Congress, 1886–87, vol. 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1877).
37. Roald Amundsen, My Life as an Explorer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1927), p. 19.
38. Quoted in Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette (New York: Random House, 2014), p. 176. See also De Long, The Voyage of the Jeannette: The Ship and Ice Journals of George W. De Long, vol. 1, ed. Emma De Long (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), p. 472.
39. Quoted in Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice, p. 177.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: IN THE END WAS THE WORD
1. Elsbeth Huxley, Scott of the Antarctic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), p. 254.
2. Letter of Scott to Sir Edgar Speyer, March 16, 1912, quoted in Robert F. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition: The Personal Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, RN, CVO, on His Journey to the South Pole (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1923), p. 461.
3. Scott was granted his wish: after some ten thousand persons attended the memorial service for him and the other lost explorers in London, some £74 thousand—or roughly £3.5 million (or over $5 million) in today's currency—was donated to their families. (Katherine Lambert, The Longest Winter: The Incredible Survival of Captain Scott's Lost Party [Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2004], p. 201.)
4. Appropriately enough, during the memorial service for Scott at St. Paul's, on February 14, 1913, the dean read similar lines from 1 Corinthians: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
> 5. That Scott has achieved such last fame primarily because of his literary achievement is an argument advanced in a recent biography of the explorer—David Crane's Scott of Antarctica. A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
6. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989), p. 202. See also J. M. Barrie, introduction to Scott's Last Expedition, p. xiii. Barrie's Peter Pan declares that “Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”
7. In a short paper written between Antarctic expeditions, Scott voiced his disdain for the existing European model, “with all its hideous inequalities of condition and opportunity,” and preference for those who quested for a “new and nobler social order” based on moral principle. (Robert F. Scott, “Note on the Social Order,” undated, handwritten manuscript, British National Antarctic Expedition [BNAE], vol. 2, 1901–1904, Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge.)
8. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition, pp 11, 7.
9. Stephen R. Bown, The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen (New York: Da Capo, 2012), p. 195.
10. Scott, Scott's Last Expedition, pp. 15, 44.
11. Ibid., pp. 73, 87, 100, 214.
12. Ibid., pp. 230, 338, 287.
13. Max Jones, introduction to Journals: Captain Scott's Last Expedition, by Robert F. Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. xxxiv. Cf. Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 322. One example was Scott's critical reaction to discovering the state in which Shackleton had abandoned Hut Point, leaving the window open so that the space inside was full of snow as well as boxes overflowing with excrement. (Diana Preston, A First Rate Tragedy: Captain Scott's Antarctic Expeditions [London: Constable, 1997], p. 139.)
14. For example, George De Long's widow, Emma, undertook a similar pruning of harsh comments he had written about his fellow officers on the Jeannette. (See Leonard F. Guttridge, Icebound: The “Jeannette” Expedition's Quest for the North Pole [Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986], p. 307.)
15. Scott, Last Expedition, p. 471.
16. Ibid., pp. 412–13.
17. It has been pointed out that Scott's observation, in his letter to Barrie that “We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end,” echoes the words uttered by Wendy at the end of Peter Pan: “We hope our sons will die as English gentlemen.” See Jones, introduction to Journals, p. xxxv.
18. “A Triumphant Failure” [review of Scott's Last Expedition], Independent Weekly (New York) 76 (January 27, 1913): 408.
19. Scott was also in need of more money to support his wife. The couple had initially put off marriage because Scott did not feel he and Kathleen would have enough to live off. (Preston, First Rate Tragedy, p. 95.)
20. David Crane, Scott of Antarctica: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 322. Scott's book was well received: the London Spectator called it the “ablest and most interesting record of travel to which the present century has yet given birth.” (Quoted in Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott's Antarctic Sacrifice [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], p. 69.)
21. Preston, First Rate Tragedy, p. 171.
22. Crane, Scott of Antarctica, p. 503.
23. Preston, First Rate Tragedy, p. 61.
24. Jones, introduction to Journals, pp. xxiv, xliv–xlviii.
25. Richard Davis, “History or His/story? The Explorer cum Author,” Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 16, no. 2 (1991): 96, https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/scl/article/view/8143/9200 (accessed November 12, 2015).
26. Mark M. Sawin, Raising Kane: Elisha Kent Kane and the Culture of Fame in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), p. 2.
27. On his second polar expedition, starting in 1853, Kane brought along his own large “well-chosen” library. “The Arctic Exploration,” Plattsburgh (NY) Republican, June 11, 1853. Cf. Kane, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ‘54, ‘55 (Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1853), p. 14.
28. Letter of Thomas Kane to Elisha Kent Kane, January 26, 1851, Elisha Kent Kane Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.
29. Kane, Arctic Explorations, p. 133. A passage such as this one recalls Shelley's description of the Arve in his 1817 poem “Mount Blanc”:
Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—
Thou many-colored, many-voiced vale, Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail
Fast cloud-shadows, and sunbeams! Awful scene, Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down
From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne, Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame
Of lightning through the tempest!
30. Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909 (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 303. Cf. “Arctic Explorations: The Second Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55,” Daily Star (New London), March 16, 1857.
31. William E. Lenz, introduction to The Poetics of the Antarctic: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American Cultural Perceptions (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. xxii, xxiv.
32. Davis, “History, or His/story?” p. 101.
33. McClintock initially sold some seven thousand copies of his 1858 book The Voyage of the “Fox.” Beau Riffenburgh, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (London: Belhaven, 1993), p. 43. See also Shelagh D. Grant, foreword to The Voyage of the “Fox” in the Arctic Seas, by Francis Leopold McClintock (Victoria, BC: Touchwood, 2012), p. 2.
34. Clements Markham, The Threshold of the Unknown Region (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1873), pp. vi–vii, 271, 195, 123, 190.
35. Robert M. Bryce, Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1997), p. 901.
36. Charles Kingsley, 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 (London: Macmillan, 1878), dedication page.
37. 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. 2, 13, 14.
38. Like explorers’ speaking tours and meetings with royalty and presidents, medals “certified their stories of success.” Dennis Rawlins, Peary at the North Pole: Fact or Fiction? (Washington: Robert E. Luce, 1973), p. 61.
39. Conversely, these organizations were quick to discredit explorers whose purported achievements diminished those of the expeditions they had financed. The Arctic Club of America, for instance, led the attack against Frederick Cook, since it had funded Peary: fourteen members of that organization had each donated $4 thousand to finance the latter's bid to be the first person to get to the North Pole. (Wally Herbert, The Noose of Laurels: The Discovery of the North Pole [London: Hoddard and Stoughton, 1989], p. 144.)
40. Herbert Ponting, The Great White South or with Scott in the Antarctic (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1923), pp. 60, 128, 165.
41. Quoted in Crane, Scott of Antarctica, p. 6.
42. Stephen R. Bown, prologue to The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen (New York: Da Capo, 2012), p. xvii.
43. Roland Huntford, The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the South Pole (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 76.
44. After his return from the South Pole, Amundsen negotiated a contract giving the London Daily Chronicle exclusive newspaper rights outside Scandinavia to his story for £2,000. In Norway, his brother Leon hammered out a deal that earned Amundsen a record amount of 111,000 kroner for the book rights. (Tor Bomann-Larsen, Roald Amundsen, trans. Ingrid Christophersen [Stroud, Gloucestershire: History Press, 2014], pp. 113–14.)
46. Bown, Last Viking, pp. 95, 190.
47. Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the Fram, 1910–1912 (Paderborn: Salzwasser Verlag, 2010), pp. 243, 302.
48. Turner, 1912, p. 137.
CHAPTER TWELVE: PRINTING THE LEGEND
1. Bruce Henderson, True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 257.
2. Robert M. Bryce, prologue to Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1997), p. xi.
3. Some associate this remark with Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb to the top of Everest. But, in fact, Mallory uttered it just before he set out on his ill-fated climb in 1924.
4. Even in Antarctica, the ice covering its surface moves, at an estimated rate of thirty-three feet per year, in the direction of the Weddell Sea. See Dale Mole, “In Search of Amundsen's Tent,” Geographic South Pole, June 3, 2012, https://southpoledoc.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/in-search-of-amundsens-tent/#content (accessed June 3, 2015).
5. Roald Amundsen, The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,” trans. A. G. Chater (London: John Murray, 1913), pp. xvii–xviii.
6. Scott did think that the tent was not at the pole, but a mile-and-a-half distant from it. (See Robert F. Scott, diary entry of January 18,1912, quoted in Roland Huntford, Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen [London: Continuum, 2010], p. 249.)
7. “City, State and Nation Welcome Byrd,” New York Times, June 24, 1926.
8. Before his death in 1928, Bennett reportedly admitted that Byrd had ordered him to go back to Spitsbergen when the leak was discovered. (See, for example, Shelton Bart, Race to the Top of the World: Richard Byrd and the First Flight to the North Pole [Washington: Regnery History, 2013], pp. 364–65.) However, Bart and some other historians have concluded that Byrd actually did reach the North Pole. (See, for example, Lisle A. Rose, Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008], p. 142.)