by Adam Gopnik
Sometimes I think there must have been a man who put the sex in sextant and the pole in polar . . . And yet where the stories of African exploration always involve intimations — or outright explications — of sodomy or forced cohabitation, on the whole the polar stories emerge, however improbably, as chaste in tone and sound. A low-calorie diet and extreme cold and exposure seemed to be enough to suppress sexual appetite. The polar men were the monks and hermits of the middle classes, the Benedictines of the bourgeoisie. You have to come into our own time to find poetry of homoerotic engagement at the poles. Elizabeth Bradfield, the American poet, has a beautifully long poem in her Arctic sequence called “In Solitude,” which begins
Leave your reindeer bag, damp and moldering
and slide it to mine. Two of us, I’m sure, could
warm it, could warm. Let me help you from your traces,
let me rub what’s sore. Don’t speak. Your hair has grown long
on the march, soft as my wife’s.
Something like that must have happened in the nineteenth century, but it takes the imagination of the early twenty-first century to give it form and words.
And yet there are other, louder kinds of joy among them too. They sing “Oh, Susanna” as they sledge from the ice to the perilous safety of a boat, or they make “Off to Charleston” the anthem of the trip. One expedition brings a French cook, whose name, you will be surprised to know, is Schubert, to be sure that they eat well. And they constantly engage with the enterprise, the creative act, of naming things. What I referred to as the Adamic act — the notion that we take control of the world by giving it a particular name — is never stronger than it is in the mid-century polar men. Kane calls one bay Rensselaer Harbor and another landmark Mary Minturn River, after the sister of the wife of the New York philanthropist who is paying the bills — a sort of slow crawl of strange names in places that, to European eyes, had until then been just oh, that place there. The names stick and change to suit the mood: in a dark moment on the same expedition, the explorers felt bound to change the name of their hut from Fort Desolation to Fort Starvation.
There may be moments when we feel there is play-acting hypocrisy among the polar men: they squabble, they manoeuvre, they try to make money. But this touching and immediately affecting core of familiar behaviour is one of the things that makes them appealing. They took themselves up to the remote regions — what else could they take? — and so in their accounts we see the shape of their time and the play of its manners with a silhouetted clarity, the clarity of shadow puppets playing against a bright white screen, in a way that we see it nowhere else.
This element of show, of performing for a remote but eventual audience, becomes more powerful as time goes on; the economic and military rationales fade and the search for absolute winter, both north and south, becomes openly a race for glory. By the later nineteenth century the polar explorers, mostly privately funded, become as famous as opera divas, and on the whole with an opera diva’s temperament and generous attitude towards the competition. Peary and Cook, the two great American explorers, are like an Arctic Duse and Bernhardt: only their competitions end in screaming rage. Strong elements of comedy lie in the last race for the poles, a set of paired assaults in which Mary Shelley’s early-century image of crazed competitive sledding by two doomed and driven protagonists actually takes place at either extreme of the earth.
It is, though, a new generation of gloomy Scandinavians who seem, in their fatalism and determination, much better cut out for the job than anyone else, and who possess winter survival skills they have acquired through long traditions of skiing and sledding and enduring. On the whole the Scandinavians are the most successful of all the men of the Far North; Nansen’s expeditions, though they never quite make the Pole, never lose a single man. And eventually, of course, there is the matchless Amundsen, a true polar man, who goes north and then eventually conquers the south. (He proved, among other things, that there was in the eyes of the time just one great polar region, one big white blank, all open to the same kind of exploration. This may explain why the popular imagination still places penguins at the North Pole.) There is even a single, sparkling Italian expedition, which has the comfiest tents and the best food and actually gets remarkably near the Pole. It’s a reminder of just how much national pride projected onto that seeming nothing becomes something. Much more than an imperial program of conquest, it is a kind of nationalist program of transferred pride that’s at play.
In the North, in 1898, the final conquest of the poles begins. It’s typical of the time that Jules Verne, the great French science fiction and fantasy writer, takes up the story of Arthur Gordon Pym that Edgar Allan Poe left unfinished and writes a two-volume sequel in 1897, The Sphinx of the Ice Fields (in English, An Antarctic Mystery), the story of Pym and his attempt on the South Pole. But instead of being about strange misty spectres and eerie fatality, it becomes one of Verne’s very workmanlike, well-explained stories about how submarines and sledges manage to conquer the Pole.
A new note of mechanical ingenuity and rational self-confidence inserts itself into what was once the remote spectre or the Promethean Pole. At last, in 1909, after mad balloonists and grim, determined Scandinavians fail, two men, both Americans, claimed to have achieved the North Pole: Frederick Cook and Robert Peary. What’s astonishing about it is that the debate about which of them got there first continues to this day. It’s a long and complicated story, but essentially Cook got somewhere first, then came back and declared that where he had got to was the Pole. Peary went second and, having far greater access to the machinery of publicity, managed to drown out Cook’s announcement, notably with the help of the National Geographic Society, which had sponsored his journey. The real fight turned out not to be to get to the Pole but to get credit in New York for getting to the Pole. Even as Peary was approaching ultimate north, by his own account he kept his spirits up by counting the dollars he imagined he would win with the syndication of his story.
The fight continues to this day. Cook later got into legal trouble and was imprisoned for an unrelated fraud, and so the notion that he had always been a fraudster became widespread. Yet his claim to have been the first man to the Pole is taken seriously by some. You can go online and find websites devoted to the “Alfred Dreyfus of the North” — that is, the man who was cheated and disgraced unfairly by the forces of hate. Expert opinion now suggests that neither of them actually got to the North Pole. Peary probably was about a hundred miles short, and Cook was two or three hundred miles short. In any case, it seems that wherever Peary ended up, the people who ended up there first — very much like Hillary and the Sherpas — were his African-American assistant, Matthew Henson, and the troop of Inuit who accompanied them. It was they who actually made the final expedition, wherever it was that it really ended.
So Cook had no proof that he had arrived at the Pole, and Peary very little. Cook was sloppy but Peary was a jerk; he never got to enjoy his success, dogged as it was by dislike for his arrogance, which he did not try very hard to cover up. (Peary would surely have done better if he had acted more like an American hero, noble and restrained — his best play in the circumstances would have been to say something like, “I say nothing of Dr. Cook’s claims. He must speak to his own conscience and evidence. I know only of my own experience,” or the like — and leave it to fate.) He couldn’t do it. Perhaps you or I couldn’t do it either.
Peary couldn’t act like a hero, or rather, he was so concerned about acting like a hero that everything he did made him look like a schmuck. The Greenland Inuit — the “Eskimo Highlanders,” as the British called them, with reference to their own remote peoples — had for centuries used as their super-valuable source of iron three lumps of extraterrestrial meteorite, fallen out of the sky long ago; the Dog, the Woman, and the Tent, the Inuit called them (the Tent weighed one hundred tons). The meteorites had been their Fort Knox, thei
r Stonehenge, their particle accelerator, their nuclear reactor — the inexplicable source of their technological supremacy as they chipped away tools to skin walruses and disembowel whales.
In one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in the not-very-auspicious nineteenth-century record, Peary, in 1894, carted away the three meteorites — and sold them to the Museum of Natural History in New York for forty thousand dollars. It was like the theft of the Elgin Marbles, with the worse consequence that where the Greek marbles were loved and cherished when they landed in London, the Inuit iron hauled away looked, in its Upper West Side dwelling, as it does to this day: like nothing but puzzling inarticulate lumps, to be rushed past by schoolchildren on their way to the totem poles and war canoe. It is true that once Europeans and other, easier and cheaper sources of iron became available to the Inuit, they hardly needed their three magic stones again. But the callousness and condescension with which Peary did this made him look terrible. (Curiously, though he is superficially still cast as a hero, publicity is an oddly transparent thing; people see through it, and Peary’s reputation was always as more of a manipulator than a mensch.)
The search for the North Pole ended, not in the arid purification of heroic adventuring but in a slightly seamy squabble of national chauvinism, greed, fortune hunting, and publicity — all the elements of the modernity that had been born then and of which the Pole was supposed to be the, well, polar opposite. There is something comic in the figure of the Italian explorer Nobile, who, in 1926, on an expedition with Amundsen, dropped a hundred pounds’ worth of Italian flags from a plane onto the spot that he decided was the Pole. Small green, red, and white pennants plummeting down towards what he imagined was the exact spot. So the first of flags dropped on the Pole was the flag of a warm southern country — Vivaldi’s country, the country where a generation of angst-ridden Germans had gone to escape from the palace of Teutonic snows in the Gothic North to the sunny south. Italy’s flag was not only on the Pole, it was all over the Pole. The absurdity of the enterprise was ensured by the necessity of the gesture.
But what of it? That’s one of the questions we have to ask ourselves. There was, after all, nothing there except an abstract point on a chart. There was, as Julius Payer, a German explorer in one of Weyprecht’s expeditions, struggled to explain, no real reason to try to find the Pole. Payer, wintering over during that 1872 trip, attempted to teach the men the geography of the poles. He faltered. “After many painful disillusions,” he wrote, “the pole was ascertained to be the intersection of lines in a point, of which nothing was to be seen in reality.” The big blank at the top of the world — no glamorous monsters or doctors on sledges, no spectres sucking you in upon your arrival — was just imaginary lines, a fictive point, a geographic concept. The blank map that Lewis Carroll imagined was the real map. Is it any wonder that Payer fled the North for Paris, where he made a living painting ever larger and more theatrical melodramatic images of imaginary Arctic horror? Hideously unreal images of men struggling with whales and storms — what matter that it had nothing to do with the auroral beauty or bitter austerity of the real place? The North was better imagined than actually seen, for you could imagine it as theatre and experience it only as endurance and abstraction.
Yet the fight that went on between Cook and Peary still excites arguments and Internet pages. Fifty miles short, a hundred miles short, three miles short, right on top of it — the question is, in a sense, absurd. But the whole enterprise had been absurd from the beginning — no point to it but the point of doing it — so that to doubt the achievement, in a sense, was to doubt the purpose. If it had been an adventure or an imperial conquest, then the geography would have been seconded to the reality of the goods that would have flowed from it. But nothing could flow from this action, nothing could flow from this discovery. The abstract point was the absurd point precisely in the totality of its abstraction. It was not merely that the journey was not worth the pain, the game not worth the candle. It was that there was no game, and no candle either, just darkness and an abstract notion made by mapping. There was a point at the Pole, but there was no point to the Pole. The Nile has its source, Everest has its summit, but though the poles exist as points on maps, they have no existence apart from that, no special quality or quiddity that exists outside an abstract model of the earth. The great destination turned out to be . . . nowhere in particular, indistinguishable from all the other places you suffered through for the sake of arrival. For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
This note of absurd existential quest, touched and humanized by the sheer endurance of the questers, is even stronger in the still more famous 1911 conquest of the South Pole. Everyone by now, I think, knows the stories of Sir Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen: how Scott set out first for the final conquest of the Pole after a series of expeditions he had taken over the previous five years; how he was, in his view, cheated by Amundsen, the great Norwegian explorer who was infinitely more skilled on the ice, and was also prepared to eat his expedition’s dogs on his way there and then on his way back. We know how Amundsen skied in, skied out, devoured his dogs, and planted his flags — an accomplishment without, oddly, much of an aura, much of a legend attached to it, even now. And we all know of the site of legend, Scott’s last camp, after their by now doubly pointless attainment of the Pole, and of how Scott’s polar party died, a short, unobtainable distance from a food depot.
And we know too of those heroic and moving final moments of Scott’s expedition when Lawrence “Titus” Oates, a man whose frostbitten foot leaves him unable to walk anymore, turns to his companions and says, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Words that sum up centuries of British understatement and British upper-class stolidity. It is, in effect, a kind of South Pole, frigid version of Mr. Kurtz’s cry — “the horror, the horror” — at the heart of darkness. But in this case the heart of whiteness is not the dim, dark guilt of imperial adventuring but is instead the bright, glowing heart and heartbreakingly understated sound of British gallantry.
To mock Scott is easy, and many people do. When we read through his diary with its firm stiff-upper-lip-ness, when we look through his claims, we see something that seems very remote from us, something that can even seem to us, well, spoiled — tainted by the eternal condescension of the European to everything outside himself. We can’t accuse Scott in this case of being an imperialist, a colonizer; there was no one there to imperialize or colonize except those penguins — whose eggs did indeed get stolen and taken back by one of the youngest members of his final expedition south, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote that great book about it afterwards. That subsidiary expedition, sometimes called “the winter journey,” in which Cherry-Garrard and two companions set out from Scott’s camp to bring home the egg of the emperor penguin, was truly the worst journey ever made of all those bad journeys. So horrible that the sweat of the men on the expedition froze inside their clothes, making it impossible for them to move more than several feet every day (it took them forty-five minutes simply to light a match, because their hands had become so stiffened by their own frozen perspiration, there in the South Pole winter).
But besides those emperor penguin eggs, there was very little colonial damage done to the South Pole. And yet there is a whole literature today in which poststructuralist and postmodern critics go after Scott’s scalp for his stiff-upper-lip-ness, for his condescension, and see that final, doomed expedition as summing up all the ills of imperialism. It’s true that Scott was an English gentleman, with the vices and virtues of his kind. He was incompetent, he was condescending, and he was locked into the clichés of his class, though no more than you and I or the average college professor is locked into the clichés of ours. He was also courageous and gallant right to the end, and those two things — the condescension and the courage — run together. Only someone who starts with an unduly high opinion of himself will be forced to keep his own opinion high till the end. The words that
Mary Shelley gives Dr. Frankenstein near that far-off North Pole haunt our reading of Scott’s pitiful and pathetic diaries of the last days of his expedition: “I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk! O my friend, if you had known me as I once was, you would not recognize me in this state of degradation.”
And then Scott’s last expedition, in 1911 and 1912, on the eve of war, is soon followed by Ernest Shackleton’s attempt in the Endurance to find the South Pole, with England already in the midst of the First World War. Allowing his ship to get crushed by the ice pack, Shackleton then takes his crew on their famous harrowing cross-ice and -ocean voyage to safety — safety achieved, but no more than safety accomplished. Another story of near-complete incompetence and failure, basically Shackleton’s expedition gives nothing to science, goes nowhere, spends other people’s money; its only real virtue is that, in the end, somehow he manages to get only three men killed.
