[Thor Heyerdahl (1914 -2002)]
Heyerdahl led the Kon-Tiki expedition, in which he and his crew, plus a parrot and a stowaway crab, sailed 8,000 kilometres across the Pacific Ocean, on a balsawood raft in 1947.
[Kon-Tiki]
As the raft swished into the Humboldt Current the crew found themselves in water that was teeming with life – they had visits from whales and saw thousands of fish.
[The Kon-Tiki crew]
After they crashed on the Raroia reef in Polynesia the crew stayed for a while, celebrating with the locals.
[The Plastiki]
The Plastiki, a boat made from 12,500 plastic bottles, sailed from San Francisco to Sydney, passing through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a big soupy mess six times the size of the UK, made up of bags, bottles and other plastic waste.
[Kon-Tiki logbook]
I turned the pages of the weathered exercise book filled with tales of adventure on the high seas.
THIS BIG, FLUFFY SUIT BELONGED to Sir Wally Herbert – the first man officially to walk to the North Pole. Behind it, on the other side of the display case, is a miniature version, a tiny girl’s snowsuit that belonged to Wally Herbert’s daughter, Kari, who lived with her parents in an Inuit family for several years when she was young. The snowsuits are the only artefacts belonging to Wally and Kari Herbert on display. Wally’s photographs, maps, drawings and the wooden sledge that took him and his crew, with their supplies, to the North Pole, pulled by 15 dogs, are in the vault of the museum. The museum would love to exhibit the sledge. ‘It’s one of our treasures,’ Kay tells me, ‘but we just don’t have the space.’
The sledge lives, wrapped in plastic, on a shelf in Museum Store A, which contains piles of polar kit: binoculars, scissors, tools for measuring sunshine, a bag of arrows made by Arctic tribesman – even a pair of string underpants (no one is quite sure where they came from). It is on a bottom shelf because it takes six strong men to lift it. On Wally’s expedition to the North Pole, it would have been piled high with provisions, attached to a pack of dogs and pulled across the snow and ice. Sometimes one of the team would catch a lift on it – standing on it like you would catch a lift on a trolley in an airport or supermarket – and ride northwards.
Wally Herbert became a polar explorer because of what happened one rainy day when he was 20 years old: ‘I was sitting in a bus; my raincoat was soaking wet. [The bus] lurched and a newspaper fell off the luggage rack smack into my lap.’ The newspaper landed open at a page that had an advert for team members to join an expedition to Antarctica.
The word ‘expedition’ touched the romantic in him. He got a place on the trip … and then on another one, then another. Over the 50 years he worked in the polar regions, where he travelled over 37,000 kilometres, mapping vast swathes of the snowy waste and painting the scenery.
The most famous of these travels is his North Pole adventure, in which he led his team, with this sledge, on the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest axis from Canada, to Svalbard and to the North Pole, via the alarmingly named Pole of Inaccessibility.
It was a 15-month journey of around 6,000 kilometres, which has never been repeated. In the winter of 1966–67, in preparation for the expedition, he and two team mates lived with the Inuit in Greenland for four months then travelled 2,414 kilometres by dog sledge to Canada. At the end of Wally’s stay, the Inuit group he lived with pinned a map to the door of his hut, marked with all the places Wally was most likely to die.
Wally planned it all perfectly, including delivery of pipe tobacco all along the route. However, he liked to be led by intuition and would sometimes set off in a direction in the morning based on the dreams he had had the previous night. He took lots of photographs and drew maps en route. Reaching the North Pole was a remarkable achievement. Sir Ranulph Fiennes described him as ‘the greatest polar explorer of our time’, and Wally was knighted in 2000.
If Wally Herbert was the first to the North Pole, then why hasn’t everyone heard of him? Well, it was all in the timing. Just as the press were waking up to his arrival at the North Pole, two men stepped on to the moon.
Also, his adventure took place a long time after Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, which has become the stuff of legend. Interestingly, the two record-breaking trips are linked. Many people had tried to get to the North Pole before Herbert. In 1909, exactly 60 years before Wally Herbert officially reached the North Pole, Robert Peary and James Cook claimed they had made it, but neither had enough evidence to certify their claims. At the time, however, the two men’s tales were enough to change history.
Roald Amundsen (after whom Roald Dahl was named) had been planning an expedition to the North Pole; when he heard about the controversial journeys claimed by Peary and Cook, he decided instead to turn the map around and turn south, to claim the title of first to the South Pole, beyond any doubt. Captain Robert Falcon Scott also changed direction, and the race to the South Pole began.
Everyone knows that Scott made it to the South Pole shortly after Amundsen, on the Terra Nova Expedition. It ended tragically, as Scott, Oates, Bowers, Evans and Wilson froze to death on their return journey to base camp. Scott’s diary has become legendary, telling the story of how Captain Oates went out into the snow to die rather than slow down his team mates. The final words of his diary, written on 29 March 1912, are heartbreaking: ‘It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. SCOTT. For God’s sake look after our people.’
The diary is in the British Library, but thousands of objects relating to the Terra Nova Expedition are in the SPRI. They own Bowers’s diary and 1,701 (I love the precision of that number) glass plate images taken by the Terra Nova’s photographer, Herbert Ponting, as well as his camera. When I visited, the institute was about to acquire hundreds of photographs taken by Scott on the expedition which until then had been in private hands, as well as his writing desk, upon which he wrote the famous diary.
In another museum in Cambridge, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, there is a letter from Marie Stopes, campaigner for women’s rights, to Scott. She was also a palaeobotanist, and was interested in the idea that the world’s continents were once one supercontinent called Gondwanaland. She wrote to Scott asking if she could go with him to Antarctica. He replied saying she could not, but he promised to bring back fossil samples to help her with her theory. He had the fossils she had asked for on his body when he was found.
‘We’re still very much connected with the explorers through their families. We are in touch with children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. They come to look at their family’s things – journals, clothes – and then they get involved in things we’re up to’ explained Heather Lane, Librarian and Keeper of Collections at the SPRI. The day I visited they were getting ready for an exhibition of Scott’s granddaughter’s paintings, created in Antarctica when she was the artist-in-residence aboard HMS Scott.
Down in storage there is a pair of skis worn on Scott’s Discovery Expedition; they are on a shelf just above Wally Herbert’s sledge. Before his death in 2007, Wally Herbert was known to visit the SPRI, and it was he who donated his North Pole sledge to the museum. ‘He probably had it in the garage at home and wondered what to do with it, and so gave it to us,’ said Kay. ‘We also have a lot of his furs, radio equipment and photographs from the expedition.’ They just don’t have the room in their museum to display very many things.
As we walked back upstairs into the museum, I was told how the SPRI works. The museum is just one part of it. The institute is devoted to the polar regions and so is filled with polar books, ethnographic objects made by native people, animal specimens, thousands of photographs and a lot of data collected by the earliest explorers up to the most recent. ‘The early data is a baseline and still informs expeditions now,’ Heather explained. ‘We have over 250,000 maps useful for planning expeditions. You name a polar explorer, they’ll have been here.’
Heather showed me a big, b
rass ship’s bell from Scott’s vessel Terra Nova. It is kept on a small wooden stool, halfway up the stairs that lead from the museum floor up to the curators’ offices. Each day, at 10.30 a.m. and 4 p.m., the bell is rung according to ship time. In the morning it is rung five times, and in the afternoon eight – just as it would have been rung by Scott and his team on the Terra Nova.
In the SPRI, the bells are a signal to everyone that it is teatime – a chance for whoever is in the institute – researchers, scientists, writers, curators – to get together for a nice cup of tea. Heather said, ‘If you watch Herbert Ponting’s film about Terra Nova called The Great White Silence, you can hear the ship’s bell being rung. None of us can watch it without thinking of teatime; it’s a Pavlovian response.’
I wasn’t there during either teatime, but I didn’t leave empty-handed – a curator gave me some rhubarb he had grown in his garden. I took it to my grandparents’ house in Norfolk to eat with them. My grandpa had a copy of Scott’s diaries, and a copy of Herbert Ponting’s film, so we settled down to watch it.
The bell ringing is the first sound you hear in the film. It reminded me of the SPRI and its hidden treasures. It also made me want to put the kettle on, but I didn’t want to miss the film.
[Wally Herbert’s sledge]
Sir Walter William ‘Wally’ Herbert became the undisputed first man to walk to the North Pole in 1969. He led his team, with this sledge, on a 15-month journey, which has never been repeated.
[Wally Herbert with his dogs]
After reaching the North Pole Wally Herbert returned to Portsmouth aboard the HMS Endurance. Here he is with two of the expedition’s huskies, Eskimo Nell and Apple Dog.
[Wally Herbert (1934–2007)]
With his family in 1972.
THIS WAX CYLINDER IS A piece of intangible cultural heritage. Hidden inside it is a beautiful song, sung by a man named Angivranna in 1915. He is the man in the photograph, sitting holding his drum. He is no longer alive, and many of his people also died, soon after first contact with the white men who came to their land in search of furs to make themselves rich. Those that lived had their lives totally transformed by contact with the outsiders. So this song will never be sung in the same way again.
The wax cylinder is stored behind the scenes at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. It is too fragile to display and risk damaging the unique, irreplaceable song that it contains.
‘Song 21’ is one of 137 songs collected by ethnologist Diamond Jenness while he was part of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–18. Others on the expedition spent the years looking for new lands and new species. Diamond Jenness, meanwhile, made contact with the Inuit, and was adopted by an Inuit family for two years, in order to learn as much as possible about how they lived.
His new mother was called Icehouse, or Higalik; his father, Ikpuck; his brother, the Runner; and his little sister, one of the happiest girls in the Arctic, Jenny Sunshine. He wrote a wonderful book, The People of the Twilight, about his time with the charming, funny, welcoming family and their extended tribe.
At first everyone watched him closely. ‘They remembered the legend which said that Eskimos, Indians and white men were originally brothers,’ Jenness wrote. ‘Their mother was a beautiful woman who rejected every suitor until her father’s dog metamorphosed into a handsome young man, visited her and won her love. She herself went down to the ocean floor to preside over the waves, the fish and the sea animals; but her children scattered in all directions. Only the Eskimos remained human; the Indians kept their human forms but became like wild beasts at heart; and the white men degenerated into monsters even in outward appearance.’ His adopted mother asked him whether white men had arms that trailed to the ground and whether his real mother had hair.
Over time, he earned the family’s trust. He shared his food, they shared theirs; he traded his things – fish hooks, needles, pans and, later, bullets and guns for hunting – for theirs: lamps, pots and clothes and, later, for stories and songs: his ‘specimens’, which are now in the museum’s collection. After six months, his adopted mother, having come to love her son, told him, ‘You white men are just like us’. She still couldn’t be sure about white women, because she’d never met one.
Diamond Jenness loved to record Inuit songs on his Edison phonograph. At first, they were nervous of the machine: ‘The first man who sang into it shivered with apprehension when he heard his voice come back to him out of the horn, and asked in an anxious whisper, “Is there a spirit concealed in the box?” Nothing would induce him to sing again, and for a time I feared this first record of their music would also be my last.’
However, Jenny Sunshine found the whole thing a lot of fun and ‘sang half a dozen chants and made the house ring with laughter when we played them over again’. From then on, he had no trouble finding singers and recorded 150 songs for future study.
The machine still sometimes amazed them. One afternoon, Jenness played them a song that was sung by the expedition’s guide, an Inuit man named Paleak. Everyone listening knew he was 21 kilometres away across the ice – they had seen him that morning, and then travelled onwards, leaving him behind. So how was he singing to them now? It must be magic.
I chose ‘Song 21’ from all of the songs and incantations recorded by Jenness that are in storage at the museum because they also own a photograph of the man who sung it. It feels so alive, to know that the singer is Angivranna, and that the photograph was taken as he played his drum and sang his song.
All the songs Jenness recorded were dance songs and incantations to the weather. Dance songs were sung in a dance-house, where everyone wore their best clothes, adorned with trophies like the teeth or claws of a polar bear, or the knuckles of a seal. Whoever was dancing would usually wear a cap with a bird’s bill on top, as well as gloves and boots.
The people Jenness lived among travelled with the seasons, and a dance-house would be built from snow and animal skin wherever they settled. They would leave it behind, along with the other houses, when they moved on. Inside the dance-house, every piece of news, every event, every emotion was recorded in dance and song. Jenness described the dance-songs as being a bit like the local newspaper.
They were sung to tell the story of adventures when a group had been away hunting, to welcome guests, to pass stories from tribe to tribe, as lullabies to send babies to sleep and to pass the evenings in winter. The songs changed as they went from singer to singer, a bit like Chinese Whispers.
Their only instrument was the drum, like the one Angivranna is holding, made from wood and deerskin. Children liked to flip their fingernails against their teeth to make music. Usually, the singer would drum with the instrument held above their head, and sing while moving from foot to foot, swaying and circling around. Everyone would join in loudly. When the singer yelled with joy everyone would cheer.
I find it wonderful to listen to Diamond Jenness’s voice at the beginning of the recording of’Song 21’. ‘He introduces it, saying: ‘4C57 Dance song by Angivranna, Coppermine River man.’ The gramophone recorder whirs into action and the song begins: ‘Ai yai ya ai ya qa-ai yei ya …’
Imagine it being sung across the ice of the Arctic nearly a hundred years ago as Diamond Jenness hovered close by, hoping the recording would turn out well.
Jenness explained how, with each song, the Inuit helped to transcribe the words. ‘They jostled my arm as they crowded around, talked incessantly all at the same time, and laughed at the babble of their own voices. But they were always good-natured, and genuinely interested in helping me in my work.’
The translations weren’t perfect. Angivranna’s song seems to be about trying to remember the right words to the song, while running around hitting a seal, a bear, and then spearing a fish. But to Angivranna and his tribe, its meaning would have been crystal clear as they leapt around the dance-house singing stories in time to the drum.
Much as Jenness loved collecting the songs for the museum, he didn’t always have f
un in the dance-house: he describes how one night 30 people banged his frying pans, while snow melted from the ceiling and dripped ice on to his head. ‘The din and odour were terrific, more than flesh and blood could endure,’ so he went outside and ‘gradually regained my senses’.
In his book, Jenness describes how even the children at play would create dance-houses and pretend to be people inside singing and dancing. They also played at catching caribou and shot arrows for fun. The Inuit taught him how they fish, hunt, sew clothes, sing and dance. In return, they learnt about things he could do, like swim, which was something they never imagined was possible.
When, a year into the expedition, Jenness and his team first heard about the war that had been raging far away from the Arctic, he explained it to his family: ‘Ikpuck would not believe our western natives when they told him that the white men were killing each other like caribou, and my own explanation mystified him deeply.’ He thought about it for days and wondered whether the ancient story was true, for using their knowledge in such a way was really ‘unnatural and inhuman’. Perhaps white men had become monsters, just as the legend foretold.
News of the war didn’t interrupt the expedition. Jenness carried on trying to find out about the Inuit and, at night, ‘they gathered around my phonograph and filled the house with song’. There were no love songs, for relationships were practical; there were no war songs, for they avoided the Indians far to the south who were the only ones who could cause trouble. Their songs were prayers, and the dance-song was their form of storytelling. Jenness writes, ‘However harsh their voices, their melodies revealed a deep sense of musical beauty.’
The Secret Museum Page 15