For Jules Verne, Captain Cook remained the most singular of explorers, “the most illustrious navigator whom England [can] boast.”26 Nearly two thirds of his book on eighteenth-century navigators is dedicated to Cook’s three voyages, and his rise from humble beginnings to greatness. Cook undertook the Tahitian voyage at the age of forty and, well-warned by Wallis’s predicaments, gave strict orders for his men to avoid injuring the natives. But Banks’s journals tell of repeated and painful incidents, where common thieving met with severe punishments—and in almost every incident, the natives were killed by gunfire. Verne recounts how Cook “took possession” of islands, of boats, or harbors—of how they moved on from Tahiti to New Zealand, and the bloodshed that followed. Cook complained that, surely, “human and sensible people will blame me for having fired upon these unfortunate Indians,” who “did not deserve death for refusing to trust.”27 And yet, he exonerated himself and his men using the same language of discovery found in the rhetoric of the experimenters, who toyed with electricity despite danger, concocted gases and explosives without consideration of consequence, and (in the case of the fictional Frankenstein and the actual Aldini) attempted reanimation of corpses without scruple. “My commission by its nature,” Cook explains in his journals, “obliged me [. . .] [and] I could only do so by penetrating into the interior” even by means “of open force.”28 To throw the doors off of nature, to bring the light, to map and to understand outweighed other considerations. If they could not be bought with trinkets, they would be stymied by force, their land and provisions taken by those who claimed their islands for the crown. Cook’s first voyage earned him the rank of commander, and he set out for a second—the jungles of Tahiti, even the lands of Australia and New Zealand, did not answer his duty. Cook set out to find the mystery land of the southern pole.
In Ice and Snow
“I am going to unexplored regions, to ‘the land of mist and snow,’ but I shall kill no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the ‘Ancient Mariner.’ You will smile at my allusion, but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets. There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.”
—Walton’s second letter, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Walton, intrepid explorer of Shelley’s Frankenstein, has a secret. He has pitched his career, a dangerous cycle of unsafe seas and unknown harbors, on the hopes of a narrative poem. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a “Lake poet” and friend of Wordsworth, a man with dark demons, but whose brighter lights strongly influenced a young Humphry Davy, composed Rime of the Ancient Mariner about a ship lost beyond the 40th degree, somewhere in the Antarctic Circle. The ship ultimately ends under the hot eye of an unforgiving sun, but it starts “through the drifts [and] snowy clifts” where “ice was all between.”29 The ship’s predicament falls to the bad faith of the Mariner, who kills an albatross and later must pay for his treachery by losing his captain and crew and hosting supernatural beings. Walton’s own ship is likewise locked by “vast and irregular plains of ice,” which seem to have no end—and though he promises to avoid the fate of Coleridge’s hero, he nevertheless has “something at work” in his soul that he can neither understand nor master. Unlike Captain Cook, Walton has nothing pushing him to the nether regions of the world except his “enthusiasm” for “dangerous mysteries.” But even Cook pursued his mission beyond the hopes and certainly beyond the worst fears of his own men.
Today, we know that Antarctica, a continent twice the size of the continental United States, sits at the southern pole. But in the eighteenth century, the assumption that land must be found in the south arose from no scientific knowledge at all, just assumptions about balance. If the globe had so many continents to the north, they reasoned that just as many must lay to the south; the idea was present even in the work of Ptolemy, and as empires expanded through the centuries, more ships went in search of them. British explorer Matthew Flinders would ultimately claim Australia as the promised terra incognita in the early nineteenth century, writing with certainty that nothing could exist below. The Endeavour never ventured so far south, though Cook’s ships Resolution and Adventure crossed the Antarctic Circle in the 1770s, coming within about 75 miles of the coast before retreating from crushing sea ice.* For weeks together, Cook and his men saw great bergs—large as land masses and treacherously shedding themselves into the sea with earsplitting cracks and groaning sighs. The danger increased as they moved further south, until the field of ice extended beyond the visible horizon. Cook did not change course, but continued on steadily south. Birds visited Cook, too, not only albatross but penguins and other sea birds, but—says Cook’s journal—“we had now been so often deceived by these birds, that we could no longer look upon them [. . .] as sure signs of the vicinity of land.”30 They had signs of other kinds, however, not so violent as Frankenstein’s lightning strike but at least as awesome in wonder. The seas had calmed, the night cleared. And there, between midnight and three in the morning, a light appeared in the heavens. “It sometimes broke out in spiral rays,” Cook explains, “and in a circular form [. . .] its light was very strong, and its appearance beautiful [. . .] it diffused its light throughout the whole atmosphere.”31 Knowing already of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, Cook calls the phenomena Aurora Australis, after the unknown world of the south that he continued to seek. “It was seen first in the east, a little above the horizon; and in a short time, spread over the whole heavens”: light, even in the darkest corner of the world, though winter was closing in white on white, deadly and solid—and night would close them up, too, long and lasting.
What drives humankind to the edges of experience? Cook’s journey presages fiction, but also inspires it: Walton’s journey in Frankenstein—Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner—and later, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym give us pole-hunters, explorers who leave the habitable regions and look for new worlds beyond the ice. Cook may have been searching for the southern continent in the late 1700s, but in the early 1800s, nations vied for discovery of the northwest passage, a means of crossing from the top of the world to its nether side. Gothic novelist Wilkie Collins writes The Frozen Deep about a lost explorer (capitalizing on a true and unfolding tale about the ill-fated voyage of Sir John Franklin) [Fig. 11]. The perilous journey and its unyielding frozen wasteland drew imaginations, not for what it contained but what it promised. What if, as Walton believed, the force that drew the needle north was a life-giving force? What if a paradise akin to Tahiti’s tropic shade awaited? The notion seems foolish to the modern reader, but the ideas that fueled fictions like Pym or Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth evolved from scientific minds working over scientific problems. Edmund Halley, rough contemporary to Isaac Newton, promoted just such an unusual notion. It took account of steam vents and volcanoes, of rotation and magnetism, and suggested that the earth must be hollow.32 Nested spheres, each with its own ecosystem, might be entered, he and his followers surmised, through the northernmost pole—something Verne would, once again, capitalize on. Two stories emerge: one of an undiscovered continent, and one of an undiscovered polar world. The first, despite Joseph Banks’s misgivings, would turn out to be true; the second, false—but the race for the North Pole would carry on anyway, in one long and devastating journey after another.
The arctic, for humankind, remains one of the world’s most inhospitable places. But its blank, white desolation offers, in its way, the counter to unremitting darkness. Both represent an unknown that, in the age of exploration, did not frighten—but rather, invited. Victor Frankenstein speaks of darkness and light in inverse terms; ignorance offered safety and comfort, enlightenment resulted in tortures and destruction. In Poe’s Pym, say critics Frank Frederick and Diane Long Hoeveler, “blackness” corresponds to “the dread of mechan
ical time” while “whiteness” results in a numbness and illusion that is both preferable and totally annihilating.33 And to cite a different tale, which is as “steampunked” as Frankenstein (most notably in China Miéville’s Railsea), Herman Melville’s eminently inspirational Moby-Dick describes the perilous desire and dread for “whiteness.” It’s very “indefiniteness” shadows forth “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way”—explains the narrator, alighting upon the foreboding of seventeenth-century chaos. “Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours”—the very theory that Newton himself made possible. For these reasons, Melville writes, that a wide landscape of snows thrilled and terrified, “a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink.”34 I have written that all explorers’ tales were, in their way, selling fictions; likewise, the adventure novel sells with truth. Poe borrows heavily from the American explorer Jeremiah Reynolds, and Melville from tales of the vessel-destroying whale Mocha Dick. The legend and the spirit of adventure, the mythmaking of a generation, and the magnetic draw not of the poles but of the great unknown, lingers on.
A hundred years after the publication of Frankenstein, search parties would discover the remains and grisly diary of Robert Falcon Scott, an arctic explorer who had, by November 1912, been dead and frozen for eight months; they had been in a race against a team of Norwegians to be the first to discover the pole—and failed. “Great God! this is an awful place,” writes Scott in what would be his last testament to the living world, “and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”35 Famously, Scott’s companion Titus Oates, knowing he was too weak to go on, walked into a blizzard to save his companions the trouble of caring for him—“I am just going out,” he said, “and may be some time.” They died only eleven miles from the depot that could have saved them, and Scott’s last entry reads, pitifully, “For God’s sake, look after our people.”36 Author, curator, and explorer James P. Delgado tells of the strange remains still to be found scattered across the north, “fragile and yet strangely resilient [. . .] be they a ring of rocks that once marked a tent, or the intact hulk of Breadelbane, crushed and sunk in 1853.”37 Such relics still inspire stories, such as the steampunk graphic novel The Arctic Marauder, a northern recasting of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, wherein the eccentric scientist Louis-Ferdinand Chapoutier pilots an iceberg ship to disperse chemical weapons. Artic Marauder, says steampunk critic Erika Behrisch Elce, “overlays the romance of Victorian scientific exploration with a modern tale of cruelty and violence” and “scientific hubris.”38 But as the narratives of Banks, Cook, and, later, Jules Verne (who is the namesake for the hero’s original sailing vessel) attest, the combination of exploration and cruelty isn’t modern at all. Captains and sailors assailed the islands with weapons and disease, and explorers died of fever, dysentery, starvation, scurvy—or froze to death, drowned in frigid seas, or were carried off by hungry animals of the north and far south. Cook himself died at the hands of natives on his third voyage, with his crew bartering with the Hawaiian natives to get back his head and hands (the only parts of him that remained). Delgado, in his twentieth-century trips to the frozen north, describes the process as a spiritual journey: “I have stood on grey gravel beaches, with the wind never ceasing,” he writes, “floated in frigid waters [and . . .] mused, alone for an hour, in the small cabin of the Gjøa.† [. . .] For I . . . sought the Northwest Passage, and found there but the way back home again.”39 For the explorers of ice and snow, however, the white empty void, its howl of wind and crack of ice, is all the home there is, a great white casket entombing dry bones. And still, Sir Joseph Banks spent his last years pining that he never again went to sea.
Dark Continents
Holmes recounts the decline of Sir Joseph Banks in his waning years; crippled by recurrent gout and swollen legs, both literally and figuratively bound to his presidential chair at the Royal Society, Banks’s dreams and desires stir further and further afield. “From Soho Square,” writes Holmes, “[Banks’s] gaze swept steadily round the globe like some vast, enquiring lighthouse beam.”40 He could no longer make the journey, but he could vicariously navigate the perilous beyond through the exploration and writing of others. In 1803, Banks reminds his reader of the aim of all science—to peer, to penetrate, to risk: “I cannot agree with those who think it too hazardous to be attempted: it is by similar hazards of human life alone that we can hope to penetrate the obscurity of the internal face of Africa” [author’s italics].41 The great unknown, unmarked, unmapped territory would be known in years to come as the Dark Continent.
American journalist Henry Morton Stanley, the man who hunted down Dr. David Livingstone in Africa in 1869,‡ typically achieves credit for first using the term “dark continent,” but Banks’s own words already describe the land as obscure—a blank on the existing maps, with a rough outline penciled in by sailors but without the geographical features, lands, and kingdoms within. That does not mean no one had arrived on those unknown shores; the Greeks and Romans (closer, geographically) settled parts of North Africa, and the Egyptian kingdoms were well known even to Europeans. The Dutch colonized parts of Africa to serve the East India Company, a trading route known for economic empire and brutal tactics, and other nations (including France and England) set up outposts for use by the slave trade. Fort settlements made no attempt at further exploration, but concentrated upon the coasts and the grim holds of slave ships; what more could be had from a land so devastating? Frank McLynn, an early biographer of Morton Stanley, described a hellish landscape of heat and disease, where “screws worked loose from boxes, horn handles dropped off instruments, combs split into fine laminae and the lead fell out of pencils . . . hair ceased to grow and nails became as brittle as glass [and even] flour lost more than eight per cent of its weight.”42 Who, he might ask, would desire more of such a land as this? Walton, possibly. “I am practically industrious—painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour,” claimed Frankenstein’s erstwhile explorer, “but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore. [. . .] Shall I meet you again, after having traversed immense seas, and returned by the most southern cape of Africa?” The slavers worked only to harvest men, to barter them, and to brutalize them. The explorers had their sights set upon something else. Sir Joseph Banks founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Inland Districts of Africa, which (despite being abysmally named) set about opening routes through Egypt and the Horn of Africa for discovery, not conquest, enlightenment, nor the trade of souls.43 They would search for the legendary city of Timbuctoo, a mythic place not unlike the cities of gold sought by the conquistadors, “glittering with towers and palaces roofed in gold.”44 It sat upon the Niger, they claimed, at the convergence of the Arab and African routes. What else might flow down from such ample ports? Science may have been the principal aim, but so, too, was commerce, and where enrichment might be had, politics would follow. None of this would be set out in the advertisements—none of the potential darkness and dread laid bare. Only the bright edge of bright-eyed wishes, the desire to see a new land and bring the light to its dark corners. Hopes were high. But not one of the early explorers returned alive.
Jules Verne recounts the stories of Friedrich Hornemann, who explored Fezzan (modern Libya) and north of the Sahara, Major Houghton in Gambia, W. G. Browne in Darfur, and Mungo Park (supported in earnest by Joseph Banks) as he searched for the Niger and Timbuctoo. Hornemann died in Nupe in 1819, Houghton was betrayed by his guides and perished, and Browne was murdered while trying to reach Tehran. Others succumbed to fevers or disease, like Cook’s sailors in Tahiti—others died
by accident. But many, many more simply vanished in the dark heart of unknown territory, answering letters with silence, lying in unmarked graves or lost in desert and river, scattered by carrion birds. And still, in 1795, Mungo Park left Portsmouth to follow in Houghton’s footsteps. His arrival in Bondou (part of Senegal in West Africa) proceeds without accident; his journal bubbles with enthusiasm and humor. He recounts how the wives of the monarch there prod him about his looks, insisting that his white color and features must be artificial, “the first, they said, was produced when I was an infant by dipping me in milk, and they insisted that my nose had been pinched every day till it had acquired its present unsightly and unnatural conformation.”45 Park recounts kindly and curious treatment throughout, that natives repeatedly counted his toes and fingers to determine whether so odd a creature would be human. He tells, too, of the king of Kasson, who tried to protect him from traveling through war-torn territory. The halcyon days over, Park moves ahead into darkness, into captivity with the Moors of Jarra, his long and dismal trek through monsoon-ridden valleys, his reduction to poverty and nakedness by robbers, and finally, a deepening despair. Alone, hungry, and ill, Park wanders in twilight until a Moorish woman finds him and leads him to a tent. By lamp, she and her companions sing to him, calling him the pitiable, motherless outcast.46 All we expect from the bold explorer—from the Waltons on their forecastle decks, facing the great beyond—reduces to this, the weary, grief-stricken Park, like Victor Frankenstein on his iceberg. Holmes describes Park’s near collapse in romantic and poetic terms; like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Park’s despair is overturned not by Providence and prayer alone, but by nature—he recognizes a tiny plant, the size of a thumbnail, blooming underfoot. His scientific curiosity reengages, and (much more like the mythic hero) he starts up, banishes thoughts of death, and carries on. Park returns to England and publishes his travels, which influence more than one writer to be. Not only Jules Verne, who would go on to write about jungles and exploration of unknown parts in his Voyages Extraordinaires, but also Joseph Conrad: “In the worlds of mentality and imagination which I was entering, it was they, the explorers, and not the characters of famous fiction who were my first friends.”47 But Mungo Park, or at the least, the Mungo Park who appeared in the pages of Travels in the Interior of Africa, was a fiction of the first order. Holmes calls Park, himself, the terra incognita, and why not? Who were these men, but the stories they presented? And who but these men, or others who would risk all to follow them, could ever contradict the story they revealed? Fact and fiction merge, and converge, and the public turned selected stories into bestsellers, lighting up the grimmest part of each tale with a golden and iridescent light. The great race for Africa had begun, a “scramble” of invasion, division, colonization, and imperialism that began in the Victorian era and extended to the first whisper of World War I. And in the wake of devastation wrought by the new century, all that is “light” about Enlightenment exploration seems very dark indeed.
Clockwork Futures Page 13