To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  Among other tasks, all three of these expeditions sought to improve navigation in the Southern Ocean by charting the lines of terrestrial magnetic attraction in the deep south and locating the south magnetic pole. This drew them away from the whaling grounds around the Antarctic Peninsula to the region south of Australia, where the magnetic pole lies. As all navigators knew, compass needles do not point to the geographic poles but rather toward (though not necessarily directly at) the magnetic poles. Navigation by compass requires knowing the variation between the two northern and two southern poles, and thus the location of the magnetic ones.

  Of these three expeditions, only Ross’s British one aboard the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, two heavily built wooden naval vessels built to carry mortars but refitted to withstand ice, managed to sail through the belt of sea ice that had blocked Cook. To Ross’s delight, his expedition discovered that the pack gave way south of Australia to water that was ice-free in summer. Entering it from the north, Ross found a vast open sea bounded on the west by a mountainous land that he named Victoria Land for his queen and on the south by a sheer wall, or “barrier,” of glacial ice that rose vertically 200 feet out of the water, extended for 500 miles from west to east, and fronted an ice shelf. Far in the distance, Ross spied land to the east, giving three sides to what became known as the Ross Sea. Almost as striking as the Great Ice Barrier, which Ross called one of the world’s wonders, he reported sighting two towering volcanos—one of them steaming—rising from an island at the barrier’s western end, just across a bay or sound from the Victoria Land coast. He called the volcanos Erebus and Terror for his ships. Later geographers named the island and ice shelf (as well as the sea) for Ross.

  In reaching the ice barrier, James Clark Ross set a new farthest-south record of 78°09' south latitude that stood for fifty-eight years, but he was barred by it from sailing any farther south. “We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the cliffs of Dover, as to penetrate such a mass,” Ross declared.20

  The magnetic pole, he determined, lay to the west, behind Victoria Land’s so-called Western Mountains; the geographic pole lay south beyond the ice barrier. Ross could not reach either by ship. Indeed, sailing in wind-powered ships, he could only effect one brief landing, and it was on a rocky islet off the Victoria Land coast, which he presumptuously named Possession Island because on it he claimed possession of the entire region for the British Empire. After cruising twice along the barrier, Ross returned home to report on what he had seen. He could not gauge the ice shelf’s southern extent or say if Victoria Land was part of a continent or merely a large island. No one went back for nearly six decades to settle these points. By then, popular interest in polar exploration had increased, and the Australians were positioned to play a role.

  THE FIRST AUSTRALIAN TO do so was a Norwegian immigrant named Carsten Borchgrevink. Trained as a forester and inspired by his native countryman Fridtjof Nansen to seek adventure, fame, and perhaps fortune in polar exploration, by the early 1890s Borchgrevink had become a science teacher in a small mining town southwest of Sydney. His only prior record feat came in 1890, when he claimed to make the first ascent of Mount Lindesay, then thought to be the highest peak in Queensland. (It had actually been climbed at least once before.) At some point Borchgrevink heard about the work of the Australian Antarctic Exploring Committee, whose interests in a scientific expedition to Antarctica overlapped with his own. Borchgrevink also spoke about the possibility of finding mineral wealth in Antarctica’s Victoria Land mountains and of the whaling, sealing, and fishing industry that could flourish in the Ross Sea. He simply could not convince anyone to back his scheme of leading an expedition there and did not have the resources to organize one independently. “It was up a steep hill I had to roll my Antarctic boulder!” he later said of these early years.21

  Borchgrevink’s initial opportunity to reach Antarctica came in 1894, after Australian-Norwegian entrepreneur Henryk Bull organized the first-ever sealing and whaling voyage to the Ross Sea. Borchgrevink tried to sign on as a scientist but was accepted as a sailor. Traveling from Melbourne aboard a steam-powered, metal-hulled Norwegian whaling ship renamed the Antarctic for the cruise, in 1895 Bull, Borchgrevink, and a few others briefly landed at Cape Adare on Victoria Land’s northeast coast. By virtue of having jumped off the dinghy before the rest, Borchgrevink boasted of being the first person to set foot on the Antarctic mainland. His claim was puffery. Whalers and sealers had landed on the Antarctic Peninsula for decades without knowing if it was an island or part of a continent. Further, two members of his own party said that they had disembarked at Cape Adare before him.

  After returning to Australia, however, and then traveling on to the Sixth International Geographical Congress in London during the summer of 1895, Borchgrevink made the most of his boast. He was part explorer, part huckster.

  Borchgrevink’s timing was perfect. Before his arrival, the congress had already endorsed the importance of Antarctic exploration, particularly in the Ross Sea sector. Steam-powered ships made it feasible, one delegate observed, and who knew what might be found there? Some suggested that the land was prowled by polar bears; others said there could be plants or perhaps even a native people long cut off by ice from the rest of humanity. Supposing that Antarctica once had a warm climate, several delegates predicted that ancient fossils of foundational species would be discovered. “The key to the future knowledge of terrestrial magnetism lies in the determination of the exact position of the south magnetic pole,” added former Royal Society president Joseph Hooker, the last surviving member of Ross’s expedition.22 Borchgrevink would never address a readier audience. His surprise appearance and bold assertions electrified the congress.

  “Having spent thirty-eight days working through the ice-pack” south of Australia, Borchgrevink reported about his recent journey, the Antarctic reentered open waters and made for Cape Adare. “From there we saw the coast of Victoria Land to the west and south as far as the eye could reach, rising from dark bare rocks into peaks of perpetual ice and snow 12,000 feet above the sea-level.” They were the first to do so since Ross’s day. Cape Adare, Borchgrevink stated, protected a sheltered bay, featured a penguin colony, and offered a gradual incline rising into the interior beyond the coastal mountains, though he had no conception of what might lie there. “I strongly recommend a future scientific expedition to choose this spot as a centre for operations,” he advised the congress. “I myself am willing to be the leader.”23 Following his address, the congress unanimously resolved that “the exploration of the Antarctic Regions . . . is the greatest piece of geographic exploration still to be undertaken” and urged “the various scientific societies of the world” to take up this work in earnest.24

  A burst of Antarctic activity ensued. An official Belgian expedition sailed to the Antarctic Peninsula in 1897 for a planned summer of coastal mapping, with the American Frederick Cook serving as its physician and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, on board for his inaugural polar venture, as first mate. Their party became the first one to overwinter south of the Antarctic Circle when the ship became trapped in the sea ice for thirteen months. Unprepared for the ordeal, scurvy and madness reigned until Cook and Amundsen wrested temporary control from the stricken captain, Adrien de Gerlache.

  Britain, Germany, and Sweden began planning separate but coordinated expeditions to the little-known continent. Each expedition was charged with sailing to a particular quadrant of Antarctica’s circular coastline late in 1901 to take synchronized magnetic and meteorological readings through the entire year of 1902 before returning north early in 1903. Further, each planned on conducting independent biological and geological research of scientific and commercial value. Organizers of the British expedition, particularly the polar-minded and record-obsessed Clements Markham (who still reigned over the Royal Geographical Society with an iron fist), also contemplated sending men on dashes toward the geographic and magnetic poles should conditions allow. With this co
ntingency in mind, the British opted for the Ross Sea quadrant and commissioned a purpose-built research ship, the Discovery, under Commander Robert Falcon Scott and with Sub-Lieutenant Ernest Shackleton as third officer. Although not part of the coordinated international effort, expeditions from Scotland and France also prepared to sail for the Antarctic early in the new century.

  THIS SNOWBALLING ANTARCTIC ACTIVITY threatened to sideline Borchgrevink and the Australians, until 1898, when London media mogul George Newnes agreed to foot the bill for a preemptive strike in return for exclusive newspaper, magazine, and book rights to the story. This left little time for planning and preparation, but neither meant much to the impulsive Newnes and overeager Borchgrevink.

  At the time, articles about celebrated explorers and their thrilling exploits were a mainstay of popular journalism. David Livingstone’s spine-tingling account of his first missionary journey to parts of Africa never before visited by Europeans became one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century, for example. Moreover, when New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. sent reporter Henry Stanley to find Livingstone in the jungle after reports of the explorer’s death reached Europe and America, the newspaper’s circulation surged. By funding Stanley’s exploits, Bennett learned that newspapers could both make and exploit news. He followed up by underwriting the Jeannette’s quixotic 1878 voyage in search of an open Arctic Ocean. The expedition’s catastrophic conclusion after pack ice crushed the ship and sent its crew members on a death march toward Siberia resulted in news stories and feature articles that gripped the world, with the New York Herald inevitably being the first to report the news that it had created.

  Newnes hoped for similarly popular stories from Borchgrevink’s venture. After all, it was the first expedition ever planned to winter in the Antarctic. That alone should generate compelling copy, Newnes believed, but he was wrong. The expedition’s unspectacular failings generated little interest among readers, who by the time Borchgrevink returned were preoccupied by the Boer War and looking ahead to Scott’s much larger and better-hyped government-sponsored endeavor. Even the aid of Newnes’s best editors and ghostwriters could not transform the Norwegian-born explorer’s mundane achievements, petty setbacks, and stilted prose into articles or a book with much appeal. Of course, other publishers helped to spike the story.

  “New Year’s Day broke bright and clear with the Union Jack flying merrily at the flag-staff,” Borchgrevink wrote in a typical passage, regarding the first day of 1900 at his Cape Adare base. Then he added on behalf of himself and the eight surviving members of his shore party, “We looked back with sentiments of pardonable pride on the work accomplished by us during the year just spent, feeling that as the young century was rising above the horizon like the sun after the long Arctic night, so was the light of knowledge illuminating the hidden mysteries of the last terra incognita on the face of the globe.”25

  Of course, that New Year’s Day did not break in any normal sense for Borchgrevink. The midsummer sun had not set for weeks and therefore did not actually rise above but rather circled the horizon. Moreover, these men would not look back with much pride on a year of dissension that failed to fulfill their leader’s plans and included the death of the expedition’s zoologist from an intestinal disorder. Some of them actively regretted the ordeal, and most had lost faith in their leader. Beyond surviving the winter, their few successes lay ahead. Scott and Shackleton would study Borchgrevink’s failings and learn from them.

  By establishing his base camp at Cape Adare, Borchgrevink isolated his party on a narrow peninsula at Victoria Land’s extreme northeast corner. Once his ship, the Southern Cross, returned to Australia for the winter, the men had little to do and virtually no place to go. Cramped quarters in a small prefabricated hut, with few tasks to occupy their attention over the four-month Antarctic night, led to frayed nerves and growing bitterness. Forgetting to unload the smoking tobacco only made the grumbling of the expedition’s many nicotine-addicted members worse. In addition, where Borchgrevink had promised easy access from Cape Adare to the interior, and a short sprint by dogsled to the south magnetic pole, followed perhaps by a long trek to the south geographic pole, he found steep mountains and impassable glaciers blocking the way.

  Perhaps it was simply that conditions proved harsher than expected, but no part of the Southern Cross Expedition lived up to the advance publicity for it. Zoologist Nicolai Hanson conducted the most interesting work done at Cape Adare, but much of it was lost through improper labeling and storage after he died. Only the magnetic and meteorological data collected by Melbourne Observatory researcher Louis Bernacchi had much value to science, yet no one was more critical of Borchgrevink than Bernacchi. He damned him as an incompetent scientist and a poor leader. With few stirring achievements or thrilling adventures to relate, there simply was not much of a story worth telling about the expedition in the popular press other than the fact that nine out of ten men managed to survive in a hut on land through an Antarctic winter—the first humans to do so. Later leaders would learn that they must supply meaningful duties and engaging activities to fill the midwinter darkness, and no one would again try to base an Antarctic expedition at such an isolated place as Cape Adare.

  Even Borchgrevink admitted on his return, “There was not much humour or fun in our experiences.”26 Nor was there much adventure or exploration. Simply being in the Antarctic does not guarantee a good story. It took leaders like Scott, Shackleton, and Mawson to make it an exciting and meaningful venture.

  Borchgrevink’s most noted success occurred after the Southern Cross picked up the party at Cape Adare for the second summer and briefly sailed south and then east along James Clark Ross’s fabled ice barrier. Near the curved barrier’s southernmost point, Borchgrevink found an inlet earlier observed by Ross. Here, the ice shelf’s surface dropped nearly to sea level. Borchgrevink managed to disembark with two others and dash 10 miles by dogsled across it to set an anemic new farthest-south record of 78°50'.

  In his expedition report, Borchgrevink rightly recognized the ice barrier as “nothing more than the northern extremity of a great ice sheet sloping northward from land near the South Pole.”27 As such, that ice sheet or shelf could offer a level route to the South Pole.

  More interested in science than in records, Bernacchi feared the worst from Borchgrevink’s discovery of the Ross Ice Shelf’s level sledding surface. “A dash to the South Pole is not, perhaps, of very great scientific interest, but it is a goal for which most expeditions will strive,” he predicted upon his return to Australia. “What is rather desired is a steady, continuous, laborious and systematic exploration of the whole Southern Region.”28 In saying this, Bernacchi displayed a deep knowledge of his fellow Australians, as well as of the British. They would go for the pole.

  If his dreams of becoming a great polar explorer were not fully realized, at least Borchgrevink had more adventures than most Australian science teachers, and lived to tell the tale. Twice more, he proposed leading expeditions to the Antarctic, but nothing came of either offer. Yet speaking for himself and his men, he would write of his Southern Cross Expedition, “A young Antarctic day was born, and we saw a vision of many bold bands of explorers in our wake.”29 The first came quickly.

  SCARCELY A YEAR AFTER the Southern Cross returned north, Scott’s British expedition aboard the Discovery headed south from England to the Ross Sea region for two winters and three summers of polar exploration. It was scheduled to stop in Melbourne, but ultimately bypassed Australia for New Zealand, where added provisions were loaded and Bernacchi boarded as a last-minute replacement to serve as the expedition’s physicist. To maintain the naval character of the undertaking, Scott planned for all its members to winter aboard the ship, anchored in some sheltered Antarctic cove rather than on land in the prefabricated hut that had been provided for that purpose. In contrast with Borchgrevink’s bare-bones trip, the Discovery Expedition sailed on a state-of-the-art, purpose-built ship un
der orders from the Royal Navy in a venture cosponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and funded by both private donors and the British government. With Scott in charge, caution would be thrown to the winds in the pursuit of firsts and farthests. And although he chafed under Scott’s military discipline, no one aboard was readier to take those risks and reap their rewards than Shackleton.

  Unlike Borchgrevink, Shackleton had no deep-seated interest in Antarctica. An ambition for adventure drew him toward the pole and an addiction to the celebrity that polar exploration brought kept him going back. Seeking to escape the narrowing prospects open to him on land, as the scion of a declining middle-class family in late Victorian Britain, and hoping for adventure on the high seas, Shackleton joined the merchant marine as a cadet with officer potential. It did not prove as exciting as he hoped. Although he gained an officer’s stripes, Shackleton soon was looking for an honorable way, as one of his fellow officers recalled, “Of breaking away from the monotony of method and routine” of serving as a subordinate on someone else’s commercial ship. “He saw himself so slowly progressing to the command of a liner that his spirit rebelled at the thought of the best years of his life passing away in weary waiting.”30 That fellow officer further observed, “I do not think Shackleton had any preconceived inclination toward the Antarctic as a possible field for personal enterprise, but when the ‘Discovery’ expedition was planned he saw an outlet for the expansion of his concentrated vitality, and snatched at the opportunity for adventure.”31

  While working on a passenger ship ferrying troops to the Boer War in 1900, Shackleton befriended the South Africa–bound son of the Discovery Expedition’s chief private benefactor, the wealthy English industrialist Llewellyn Longstaff. With the race for the North Pole intensifying and interest in Antarctica budding, Shackleton saw polar exploration as an outlet for his ambition and a means to adventure. He asked Longstaff to intervene on his behalf with the organizers of the expedition, and, although they had planned it as a strictly Royal Navy enterprise, they could scarcely refuse their benefactor’s one personnel request. Shackleton became the Discovery’s third officer and a crew favorite. Charming, restless, and brimming with self-confidence, he won over everybody but Scott, who came to view him as a rival. Both led by example and acquired devoted followers. Even Antarctica was not big enough for both of them. Yet at first even Scott was charmed, and asked Shackleton along on the expedition’s polar dash.