While Nemo may be the first fictional character to claim the South Pole, he was not the first to reach it. It is difficult to know to whom this particular credit should go. In Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his fourteenth-century poem The Divine Comedy, the Greek literary hero Ulysses (now in the underworld) relates his final, fatal, voyage southwest towards ‘the stars / of the other pole’.2 He recalls having spied a mountain higher than any he had previously seen, before his ship, encountering a whirlwind, went down. Dante’s whirlwind is a variation on the mythological South Polar vortex that besets many literary voyagers. The protagonist of an anonymous early eighteenth-century French novel, Relation d’un voyage du Pole Arctique, au Pole Antarctique, finds his vessel sucked down a tremendous whirlpool at the North Pole, rushed along ‘terrifying torrents’ in ‘subterranean passages’, whence it emerges in a calm, foggy sea at the other end of the Earth. In the Antarctic regions the sailors encounter flying fish as large as cows and architectural evidence of intelligent life.3
What this French fantastic voyage only gestures towards, other early narratives are keen to describe in detail: a native South Polar people. They make their first appearance in what is often cited as the earliest ‘Antarctic’ work of fiction, Bishop Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem (1605), a dystopian satire set in a southern continent that sprawls from the equator to the Pole. The people inhabiting the far southern region of Moronia are, as the name suggests, rather stupid. Unsurprisingly, given that they live in a cold, icy land shrouded in ‘nearly perpetual’ darkness, they prefer to stay indoors, dwelling on what they might have done or could have been.4 Other inhabitants of the region are more exotic and more sinister: ‘frenzied’ cannibalistic savages, witches, werewolves and ghosts.5
Captain Nemo plants his flag at the South Pole in Alphonse de Neuville’s illustration to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870).
Growing evidence from exploratory expeditions that the far south was hostile to life made comparatively little impact on fiction over the following centuries. Novelists refused to give up such a productive idea as an inhabited Antarctic, often positing instead an icy barrier enclosing a temperate or even tropical land, or an open sea dotted with islands. Even a novelist as careful of factual detail as Verne has a group of marooned sailors drifting over the Pole on an iceberg in Les sphinx des glaces (1897). Speculations about a liveable polar environment were given a credibility of sorts by developing scientific and geographic knowledge. The possibility of geothermal heat was raised in 1841 when James Clark Ross’s expedition happened on one of the regions’ few active volcanoes, the smoking Erebus. Understanding of the Earth’s ‘squashed sphere’ shape – which means that the poles are comparatively close to the planet’s core – similarly bolstered the suggestion that the high latitudes offered unusual access to underground heat sources, fuelling fantasies of an ice-free, temperate (or even tropical) polar environment. ‘Lost race’ stories dominated Antarctic fiction in the late 1800s and continued well into the twentieth century.
World map from Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem (1643 edition).
The South Polar region has thus been home to all manner of fictional beings: hermaphrodites in Gabriel de Foigny’s Australe connue (The Southern Land, Known, 1676); flying people in Roger Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750); intelligent monkeys in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Monikins (1835); a treacherous jet-black tribe in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838); descendants of ancient Greeks, ancient Romans and sixteenth-century Englishmen in various late nineteenth-century texts (Eugene Bisbee’s The Treasure of the Ice, 1888; Charles Romyn Dake’s Strange Discovery, 1899; Edward Bouvé’s Centuries Apart, 1894); ‘Antarctic Esquimaux’ who speak Maori in Julius Vogel’s Anno Dominis 2000 (1899); dinosaurs in Frank Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall (1901) and John Taine’s The Greatest Adventure (1929); giant insects, giant intelligent crabs and giant humanoid lobsters in pulp science-fiction magazine stories of the 1930s; Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon men in Edison Marshall’s Dian of the Lost Land (1935); leprechauns and Satanists in Dennis Wheatley’s The Man Who Missed the War (1945); ageing Nazis in M. E. Morris’s The Icemen (1988); and giant radioactive elephant seals in Matthew Reilly’s Ice Station (1998).
Just as attractive as the idea of indigenous people near the South Pole was the possibility of lucrative commercial prospects. While the resources of the far southern ocean and the Antarctic islands – whales and seals – were vigorously exploited, producing literary responses such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Sea Lions (1849), nobody knew what the region around the Pole itself might offer. The narrator of Daniel Defoe’s fictional travel tale A New Voyage round the World (1724), sailing in subantarctic waters, relates the rumour that ‘if there was any Land directly under the Poles, either South or North, there wou’d be found Gold of a Fineness more than Double to any that was ever yet found in the World’. He remains sceptical, however, partly due to lack of evidence, and partly because no one could ever reach the spot, which is surrounded by ‘Mountains of Snow, and frozen Seas which never Thaw’.6 Nevertheless the allure remained. In Christopher Spotswood’s late nineteenth-century utopia, Voyage of Will Rogers to the South Pole (1888), the temperate polar land of Bencolo harbours plentiful precious metals, and Rogers happily pockets the five pounds of gold presented to him by his Antarctic friends.7 The protagonist of George McIver’s Neuroomia (1894) easily digs up a large nugget of Antarctic gold, predicting that ‘if it were known in the other continents that gold was so plentiful in Neuroomia, there would be a rush of a few millions of people to these parts, if only to perish on the ice.’8 By the mid-twentieth century the focus had changed only slightly: ‘Several Governments have an eye on the South Pole’, observes the flying detective hero of W. E. Johns’s Biggles Breaks the Silence (1949), ‘and that’s nothing to wonder at … nobody knows what metals, coal and oil there may be in that ground for the first nation to tame it’.9
Biggles is here equating the South Pole with the continent of Antarctica, not 90 degrees south. While the Geographic Pole itself may have national, political, geographic, scientific and psychological significance, it has little obvious commercial value. There are no seals or whales to be found, and any minerals are under miles of ice and far harder to retrieve than in other parts of the continent. When the title character of Victor Appleton II’s Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster (1954) decides to go to the ‘South Pole’ to mine iron, he too is using the term loosely; he fires up his ‘blaster’ somewhere near the Transantarctic Mountains. Although Antarctic fiction shifted in the later twentieth century from adventure novels and lost-race romances to eco-, techno- and political thrillers, these novels too are normally set in relatively accessible parts of the continent, rather than at the Pole.
One of Leslie Stead’s illustrations to W. E. Johns’s Biggles Breaks the Silence.
For many creative writers the Antarctic was simply a generic blank space in which to set their narratives and the South Pole its most exotic point. Fictional heroes of serial adventures – Tarzan, the Hardy Boys, Doctor Who – inevitably visit at some stage, adding it to one of their many far-flung destinations. Other writers, however, were more interested in the specifics of the place, drawing on the long-standing symbolic associations of the Pole. Unlike the Arctic, which, in the Western geographic imagination, sits ‘on top’ of the Earth, the Antarctic hangs underneath, with the South Pole at its nadir, inevitably evoking a sense of being ‘upside-down’. This is what attracted early utopianists and satirists to the Great Southern Land – it was an ideal place in which to depict a society that metaphorically turned one’s own on its head. Nicolas-Edmé Rétif de la Bretonne’s La découverte australe par un homme-volant (Austral Discovery by a Flying Man, 1781) features the high-latitude land of ‘Megapatagonia’ where ‘all is upside-down and back-to-front’.10 Cooper’s intelligent monkeys – or ‘monikins’ – have their brains in
their tails. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), by Canadian novelist James De Mille, features an Antarctica occupied by a contrarian people who worship darkness and practise pathological self-denial. The idea is taken to its logical extreme in a short story by Russian writer Valery Bryusov entitled (in English translation) ‘The Republic of the Southern Cross’ (1905). The citizens of the Republic’s capital, Zvezdny, located on the Pole itself, are struck by the disease of ‘contradiction’, which makes them act in precisely the opposite way to their intentions: people turn left rather than right; policemen confuse rather than direct traffic; doctors prescribe poison rather than medicine. As the disease reaches epidemic proportions, the city quickly descends into anarchy.
The front cover of Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster (1954).
Typical of this kind of up-ending are Antarctic narratives which reverse expected gender hierarchies. Adam More, the aptly named narrator of De Mille’s anti-utopian satire, can cope with many of the perverse habits of the native Antarctic Kosekin – ‘Their love of darkness, their passion for death, their contempt of riches, their yearning after unrequited love, their human sacrifices, their cannibalism’ – but draws the line at females taking the initiative: ‘that a woman should propose to a man – it really was more than a fellow could stand’.11 The hero of Frank Cowan’s Revi-Lona (privately published in the 1880s) takes a different approach when he discovers ‘a perfect but petticoated paradise’ at the South Pole. Revelling in being a ‘big and brawny’ newcomer in a society where men are ‘little and learned’ and women large, beautiful and dominant, he fathers 98 children from 40 women in his six-year stay.12 He connects the female-dominated society with the topsy-turvy nature of their land: ‘you embody the surroundings of the southern pole of the planet, I embody the environment of the northern hemisphere.’13
If, for some novelists, the South Pole signalled an upside-down world, for others it suggested an inside-out one. John Cleves Symmes Jr’s claim that the Earth was hollow, with a habitable interior accessed via large, ice-rimmed holes at the poles, was too suggestive of imaginative possibilities for novelists to ignore. The first fictionalization of the theory appeared just a couple of years after Symmes had circulated his initial pamphlet: Symzonia (1820) opens with the narrator and supposed author, Adam Seaborn, bemoaning the lack of blank spaces remaining on the Earth’s surface. Equipping himself with Symmes’s writings, he heads south. Having passed through the southern polar hole, his expedition discovers a utopian (and startlingly white-skinned) people blessed with bountiful resources. The author behind the obvious pseudonym has never been determined, with some critics arguing that the novel was written by Symmes himself to promote his theory, and others that it satirizes his ideas.
The polar hole down which Seaborn’s ship sails smoothly, the crew barely noticing the transition from outer to inner realm, seems a far cry from the legendary whirlpools that medieval sailors feared. But when Edgar Allan Poe, writing in the interval between Symmes’s proposal and the first official U.S. exploring expedition to the far southern regions, took up the idea, the polar vortex returned in all of its sublime terror. The narrator of his ‘MS Found in a Bottle’ (1833) finds himself (through a series of maritime accidents) on a seemingly supernatural ship sucked by a ‘strong current, or impetuous undertow’ towards the South Pole: ‘we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge – some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction’.14 The story ends abruptly with the narrator plummeting down a gigantic whirlpool (presumably maintaining the presence of mind to stuff his account into a bottle at the last moment). The protagonist of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), ends his eventful and traumatic South Polar voyage in a similarly dramatic fashion: with his boat rushing towards a ‘limitless cataract’, he is confronted by a mysterious, giant, perfectly white human figure.15 For Poe the South Pole is a place of simultaneous annihilation and vision, catastrophic destruction and ultimate insight.
The notion of a polar vortex in one sense obliterates the Pole itself: no longer a place on the Earth’s surface, it becomes the midpoint of a gaping hole, the centre of nothingness. Yet at the same time this idea gives the Pole an identity: instead of a point on a featureless snowscape, unidentifiable except through complex calculations, it is marked by a striking natural feature. Moreover, the vortex transforms the Pole from an end to a means: rather than the final point of a journey, it becomes the key to a new space – a gateway to another, interior world. Portals of various kinds recur in Antarctic fiction, with writers often bestowing ingenious or ludicrous topologies upon the world’s southernmost point. In The Monikins the Pole acts as a kind of valve that lets off steam from the Earth’s interior.16 Thomas Erskine’s utopian satire Armata (1817) is set on a sister planet connected to Earth by a watery channel at (it appears) the South Pole, so that the two globes are joined like ‘a double-headed shot’.17 Later writers scale this idea up to an interplanetary level. In Gustavus Pope’s Journey to Mars (1894), stranded explorers are rescued by Martian visitors who exploit the ‘Cosmo-magnetic currents’ between the poles of Earth and its neighbour for their travels.
As these examples make clear, before Amundsen and his team reached the South Pole in late 1911, all literary representations of this place were inescapably speculative. Realistic depictions of the Antarctic continent necessarily stopped at its coastline. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who grounded his gothic horror ballad ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798) in detail gathered from travel narratives of the far north as well as the south, goes no further than the sea ice. Cooper set his utopian satire The Monikins on fictional lands near the Pole, but the main action of his second, more realistic Antarctic novel The Sea Lions – a nautical adventure narrative and morality tale about the rival captains of two sealing expeditions – takes place on an unspecified island near the polar circle.
‘Attacked by bears’. Illustration from W.H.G Kingston’s At the South Pole.
However, novelists who eschewed the fantastic conceits of flying people, lost tribes, polar vortexes and routes to Mars were left to contend with the problem of creating drama in an environment emptied of many of its traditional sources. The boys’ adventure novelist W.H.G. Kingston did his best in At the South Pole (1870), putting his troubled whaling crew through a fearsomely cold Antarctic winter, an encounter with a wrecked Portuguese vessel from a long-gone era, volcanic eruptions and close calls with colliding and overturning icebergs, but to sustain his narrative he also added wolves, outsized walruses and enormous polar bears, transposing far northern threats to the largely unknown south. When exotic (and exoticized) elements are not simply found in the fictional Antarctic, they can be transported there as part of the narrative: the American hero of Gordon Stables’s In the Great White Land (1903) equips his expedition with a group of hardy indigenous Arctic nomads called ‘Yakyaks’ along with their ‘Yak-dogs’; four young polar bears trained to pull a sled; two St Bernards; a Scotch collie; and several Shetland ponies. His trek to the South Pole (enabled by a trusty Yak-yak) is forestalled by the discovery of a frozen sea stretching over the region.
Front cover of Gordon Stables’s In the Great White Land (first edition, 1903).
In the same year that British boys thrilled to the adventures reported in Stables’s novel, the naval officer Robert F. Scott led the first serious attempt to reach the South Pole. In the following two decades, a slew of expeditions (mostly European) tried to cross the ice without mechanical aids, using man- or dog-power to cover vast amounts of territory in an attempt to know and claim the southern continent. This period has come to be termed, almost always with qualifying quotation marks, the ‘Heroic Era’ of Antarctic exploration. It drew adventure novelists up short as the reality of South Polar exploration produced non-fictional narratives that rivalled, in their ability to hold the public imagination, anything produced by creative writers.
4 Pole-hunting
I
n one early twentieth-century novel, an Antarctic explorer named Anthony Dyke outlines his sole burning ambition to his besotted mistress:
He went on, in his vibrating heart-stirring whisper, to speak of the South Pole … Dyke meant, had always meant, to capture the South Pole, and all other tasks were but a filling or wasting of time. He had marked it down as his own. He spoke of it as if it had been some dangerous yet timid animal of the chase, round which he had made narrowing circles till it crouched, fascinated, unable any more to flee from its pursuer; it knew that it could not escape and that when Dyke ceased to circle and dashed in, it must fall into his hands.1
This metaphor – the explorer as a safari hunter, the South Pole as his quarry – is from one perspective absurd: in what way is an invisible, stationary point like a dangerous crouching animal? In another sense, however, it is quite apt, evoking the culture of imperial adventure and masculine endeavour in which early journeys into the continent were inevitably embedded. Reaching the South Pole was not only a quest, it was a conquest, even if its defeated subject was an abstract spot on an entirely lifeless plateau. Roald Amundsen (whose voyage narratives were the factual sources for Dyke’s fictional adventures2) draws on the language of chivalry rather than safari when describing the quest for the South Pole, but constructs a similarly violent image. The main aim of early Antarctic explorers, he writes, was ‘to strike the Antarctic monster – in the heart, if fortune favoured them’.3 It was, of course, Amundsen himself who struck the final blow.
South Pole Page 4
