by Adam Gopnik
But if in one sense people already had a word picture in mind of what they’d find in the eternal winter of the polar regions, in other ways they were intrigued because the path itself remained provocatively blank, unknown. You may recall that in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” his dark comic allegory of imperial adventure, the Bellman’s map, meant to guide the crew as they go in search of the Snark that might be a Boojum, is “a perfect and absolute blank” — and all the better for being one.
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!”
“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!”
That was the radical winter map, as it was the map of much British imperial adventure (with the necessary addition that what looked blank was often heavily populated by those you did not want to see). Yet in this case there was some truth to the fantasy: if the polar goal was known, or imagined, the map that took you there was largely blank. Even well into the nineteenth century, the there there is shown, even on sophisticated maps, as a series of uncharted circles.
And that made it all the more intriguing. For every modern nation needs a nothing. Every nation needs a blank on which it can imprint its mark — its idea of itself, its fantasy of its history and of its meaning. Every modern country finds some vague, unsettled, ambiguous, and complicated area — either very short-lived or very broken up into bits — and makes of it an epic world. The first vast nothing for Europeans was the medieval past, and they populated it with fantasy forebears. The Americans found their blank map in a frontier neatly peopled with bad guys. And the Arctic, or the polar regions, and later on the Far South, for the British and Americans and Canadians, was certainly one such place. What was the good of Mercator’s equators and North Poles? (Mercator was an important mapmaker.) They are merely conventional signs. The point of the voyage was not to follow the tracks but to find the unknown, the mystical whirlwind of Poe’s imagination, the icy racetrack of Mary Shelley’s.
This sounds exciting but it could often play out absurdly — comically, with a comedy often touched by a grim spectre of death. And of course it hardly needs saying again, I hope, that far from being any kind of blank, the Far North, at least, was a populated and civilized place — the Inuit dance in and out of these European adventures as onlookers, helpers, aides, and wondering audience.
For certainly there was much to laugh at. A grimace of black humour haloes the adventure, and as much as radical winter leads us towards images of nineteenth-century endurance, it also fuels the black comedy of the skeptical twentieth. Scott warming his colleagues becomes Chaplin eating his shoe. Given the technology the Europeans had on hand, given how little they knew, given how meagre were their resources, the heroism of this attempt is still striking. But just as striking is the absolute absurdity and foolishness of it. They went in the face of all reason, and they went in the face of all warning.
And yet they really did go. Beginning in the early 1800s, under the direction of an extraordinary British navel bureaucrat named John Barrow, the British navy began the search for the Pole. One of the first people whom Barrow, who was responsible for priming almost all the polar exploration between 1816 and 1845, spoke to about the idea was a whaler named Scorseby, one of the few sailors with wide experience in the Arctic — at least, as much as any man could have at that time. Now, the ostensible goal of the British exploration was, of course, the Northwest Passage — the much dreamed-of throughway that would lead from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of a great circle route above Canada. A northwest passage to India in particular was the goal, which would obviously give the British Empire a kind of unity, a kind of geographic simplicity that at that moment — and indeed until much later, when Disraeli swindled the French out of the Suez Canal — it did not possess.
What Scoresby tried to remind Barrow was the simple truth, which was that finding the Northwest Passage and not finding the Northwest Passage would in the end be almost exactly the same thing. “Now it is evident to those who visit the Greenland seas that were such a passage once accomplished it might not again be practicable in ten or even twenty years . . . I do not mean to imply,” Scoresby wrote in a letter, “that there is no such thing as a northern passage to India . . . yet I firmly believe that if such a passage does exist, it will only be open at intervals of some years.” And then only after an insanely wasteful and interminable-seeming search. And that, among the first advice given and not taken, was in some ways the soundest advice anyone ever gave. Even if the Northwest Passage existed, which eventually it was shown to do, it would be of minimal or no value to actual navigation, because of the circumstances of the Arctic. Winter was stronger than water.
But Barrow did not listen; no one listened, and they pressed ahead. In 1818 Sir John Ross, a Scottish admiral, led the first official expedition to set out in search of the Northwest Passage. Now, imagine what this was like. Really try to picture it. There is still little central heating back home, no electricity, no ironclad ships. Canned food has been invented but the can opener has not, so all the canned food taken along on the first trip has to be opened with an axe and a mallet. That’s the early modern nature — pre-technological in many respects, set in the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution — in which these Arctic voyages take place. And yet, very coolly — if that’s the right word — they set out for the top of the world.
Now Ross, famously, screws up. He looks around at the foot of Lancaster Sound and insists that what he sees in front of him is not any kind of open passage but a wall of mountains that shuts him off from further exploration. He charts them, he names them, and then he turns around and goes home. He’s usually thought now to have seized upon a common mirage of the northern waters, one in which the extreme refraction projects onto the horizon mountains and other forms that are not there — a winter illusion that would have delighted Coleridge or Friedrich. But it is certainly true that Ross did not wait too long or press too hard to see if he was right. And so those back in London redoubled their will and purpose to send more people out. Ross was court-martialled, and a whole new generation of Arctic explorers was sent out in the firm belief that Ross had only imagined his mountains.
And in this way the British polar program quickly becomes the original type of modern government-funded research — an anticipation of the space program and the particle collider, research for research’s sake. The money comes from government funds, sometimes from philanthropists, rarely from any kind of speculative investment. It’s mostly done, as splitting atoms and shooting men into orbit is done, to see if they can do it. It is rooted in some vague idea of national prestige, married to what Norman Mailer, in the context of the U.S. space program, once quite rightly called the WASP dream of doing things for their own sake, as a purely existential test of the national and personal will. “The Protestant Brit is,” he wrote in Of a Fire on the Moon, “disciplined, stoical, able to become the instrument of his own will, has extraordinary boldness and daring together with a resolute lack of imagination. He’s profoundly nihilistic. And this nihilism found its perfect expression in the odyssey to the moon — because we went there without knowing why we went.” The polar voyage is also undertaken to show that those who go are capable of heroism because they can endure suffering. That’s what makes the radical winter of polar explorations radical — in search of Paradise we end up tethered to an iceberg, where penguins
or petrels, so to speak, gnaw our livers. There’s a lot of pain in it, but some kind of glory too.
One by one the expeditions go out, get wintered in, iced in; mountain ranges are charted, bays and rivers are named, but nobody gets closer to the Pole. Finally, in 1845, Sir John Franklin, already the captain of several expeditions, is sent in two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, with 133 men and a surprisingly casual plan to report back next year — and he is lost. He doesn’t come out after wintering in.
From that moment on, that existential accent, the existential slant of the northern expeditions of polar searches becomes more and more pronounced. Because every expedition that goes, for almost another decade, is an expedition that threatens to become lost while searching for the lost expedition. One after another they are sent to search for Franklin, though Franklin is clearly lost, and surely dead. No one can rationally expect the man and his crew to have survived unaided for four or five winters in the Far North. Nonetheless, Lady Franklin, who in particular is wealthy and determined — Charles Dickens called her pig-headed at one point — has twenty thousand pounds sterling offered for his rescue, and one after another the expeditions go on. In 1850 fifteen separate ships are engaged in the search for Franklin. We’ll go out in search of Franklin because the previous expedition that went in search of Franklin got lost, so now we need to find them.
You can begin to sense that between the lines — indeed, right within the lines — of the official literature of the polar period, they all knew that there was some deep pointlessness to this enterprise. It was almost like something out of a Samuel Beckett play. At one point E. K. Kane, a U.S. naval master, sets out on a search for Franklin, and one of his subordinates, Hayes, addresses him officially as “Doctor E. K. Kane, USN commanding Arctic expedition in search of etc. etc.” Etcetera, etcetera — that was the wary motto. Everyone knows that the formula “in search of Franklin” has become at this point an empty set of words, and yet it’s an empty set of words that continues to propel these expeditions. The goal had become a kind of weary permanent ellipsis in the imagination of the Far North.
And yet, absurd or not, they kept on going. Detailed accounts of the polar voyages have been written many times. I won’t narrate all the stories of success and, mostly, failure again but ask instead that other, deeper question: Why do we still care? Fewer men died with Franklin than under the orders of the average dunderheaded British infantry officer. Why do we still care about their fate, so much so that well into our own time, one scientific expedition after another, one documentary after the previous documentary, is devoted to the story of their loss and recovery? What happened to Franklin is, in its way, a trivial question. He had a wooden ship in the Arctic and no idea what he was doing — what do you mean, what happened to him? But we still ask why. Why did they go then, and why do we care now?
Part of it is just our voyeur’s fascination with hard times being had by other people. They went in search of absolute winter — and got it, good and hard. The title of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of Scott’s last expedition to the Pole, The Worst Journey in the World, covers them all, and its first sentence — “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has yet been devised” — the moral all shared. These are the hardest journeys men have ever willingly undertaken. One expedition after another involves extreme suffering in extreme cold, chill and frost and hunger almost unimaginable for us to contemplate. Kane and his men, on their way to rescue four of their companions in the Arctic in 1854, suffer from hypothermia so severe that they would fall asleep for hours at a time standing up, then turn and wake, then turn and mutter, delirious, as a group: “[We] laughed immoderately, gibbered, uttered the most frightful imprecations . . . After the lapse of a few minutes . . . the raving maniacs were changed to sullen and moping idiots, weeping and blubbering like children; and in this condition all would move on mechanically for perhaps half a mile, when, as if all were actuated by one disorderly spirit, another outburst would take place, and the former scene of maniacal fury was re-enacted.” Then they would pause, fall asleep, or keep themselves awake by eating snow — not as a frozen liquid, not for water, but because it burned their faces so intensely that it would keep them from that hypothermic slumber. And stumble on, and hallucinate, and sleep for a few minutes, and burn their mouths awake, and stumble on again. On another voyage, rats sneak on board in New York, breed inside the ship, and then come out to ravage all the stores when the cold strikes in Frobisher Bay. And the rats ravage the stores so thoroughly that the men are then forced to eat rats as their regular diet! (The Inuit dance in and out of these stories in much better shape; an Inuit woman travels forty miles with a newborn baby just to see white men, and then she goes back while they shiver in wonder at her aplomb.)
What moves us and stirs us about all the polar expeditions, I think, as we read them, is the tension between the suffering they endured — what one can only call the existential daring of their actions — and their matched love of the bourgeois, quotidian manners of the nineteenth century, which they evidence every day in their daily lives and recreation. Upon that blank map of the way north, they imprinted, as we all do, the signs of their own experience. The bad times were real, but so was the “cleanness,” the absence of sordid motives, and that isolation that threw them back upon each other for company and comfort. They brought the bourgeois, optimistic society they lived with into a land neither middle class nor hospitable, and so made a stylized image, both comic and courageous, of their time — a kind of polar refraction of its own, casting their own image upon the icebergs.
There’s no better place to get the taste, the vibe, of high Victorian virtue and nonsense than in the loneliness of the Far North. The Arctic, and later the Antarctic, explorers are prepared to face the snows in exchange for the absolute experience. They are also sponsored by Nabisco and Cadbury and Harrods. They go out to show what men can endure, and on board ship, as they winter in, publish their own newspapers, one called the Polar Times. They put on pantomimes, they engage in burlesque cross-dressing, they perform puppet shows and Shakespearean plays. The intersection of Romantic and middle-class values that marks the entire century is never more comical and touching than it is on board the polar vessels. Henry Feilden, the naturalist on the Alert, near the Pole in 1875, writes with a lyrical joy about his surroundings that is typical of the era:
The air was so exhilarating that we hurried over the crisp snow singing, shouting and laughing . . . And what a moon! Like a great mirror or shield of burnished steel, not as you see her in the tropics or the Mediterranean, pale, warm and soft, dimpling land and sea with shadows, but cold, bright and stern . . . And then we looked at the great frozen waste in front of us, smooth ice, crooked ice, hummocks, floes and packs all jumbled together in mystic confusion . . . We trotted back to the ship and as we gathered round our own bright lighted social table, with many luxuries on it, we laughed and talked and were as fully a party as could be found in Christendom.”
The cold, stern truths of natural theology, the warm, bright social table of the middle classes — the two conditions were their . . . well, two poles, and they oscillated happily between them.
Plays, masquerades, concerts, shipboard newspapers — they even try to keep from despair by regularly overeating. Far from the imaginary abstemious, purifying diet of hardtack and pemmican that they often ended up with when the ship went down, they actually lived rather well. A birthday feast on one of Hayes’ voyages in 1860 “included a cheerful household soup, salmon, duck, a huge plum pudding from Boston, blancmange, mince pies, raisins, olives, cheese, and coffee.” And always coffee, because coffee was easy to carry and easily made. Though it’s true that eventually, at one point, Kane’s men on board were reduced to the diet of fashion models: two cups of coffee a day and a bowl of soup.
The nineteenth-century diseases, the nineteenth-century mental complaints, are evident as
well in their life together. They suffer from too much intimacy and overcrowding. Suffer from those things, one sometimes feels, even more than from the cold and dark. Every polar ship finally ends up with fifty Madame Bovarys coming to hate the look of their lover’s ears. Though the notion of comradeship usually, briefly, zips up the discontent and dislike on their return, when it gets censored, their journals and diaries reveal the inevitable and perpetual grumble of men in too-tight quarters who can’t stand each other’s habits. Kane’s men, for instance, came to dislike him, not because he flogged them, not because he was tyrannical, not because he was cool, not because he was remote, but because, as Fergus Fleming writes, “He developed an irritating habit of dropping French and Latin quotes into the conversation.” Madame Bovary’s neurasthenia, that nineteenth-century sense of having to be too polite in too-tight clothing and too-tight quarters with people you can’t quite stand, is never more palpable than in the diaries of the polar men.
In most accounts of European imperial adventures, the sexual appetite that ornaments — or sometimes underlies — the expedition is transparent: we need think only of Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence during their different moments in Arabia to recognize this. Naturally so: adventure doesn’t end appetite, and imperialism of other lands easily becomes imperialism of others’ bodies. But one of the strangest things is that no matter how long you pore over the accounts and chronicles of the northern voyages, what you don’t find are tales, or even intimations of tales, of buggery and sodomy of the kind you find elsewhere in stories of imperial conquest, and that are always part of the reality of men living with other men in close quarters for long periods of time. It seems almost as if the choice of polar exploration was, for many of the men, a kind of middle-class monasticism. After all, the allure of surrendering ordinary sexual pleasures in exchange for some notion of a purified existence is a very powerful urge in Western culture. The drive to escape the sexual urge that dominates men’s lives, an urge that lived so edgily and uneasily with the official virtues of their time, was part of what marked the polar men. There was the allure of money and the allure of fame and the allure of accomplishment. But there was also the perpetual lure of escape — escape from the meaningless claustrophobia of ordinary life for the potent crowding of the winter boat.
