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2	No Middle WayThe Exploration of Antarctica

Come, my friends,

Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1842)

The Pole lay in the center of a limitless

plain.… One gets there, and that is about

all there is for the telling. It is the effort to

get there that counts.

—Richard E. Byrd, Little America (1930)

This simplest of the world’s environments harbors the simplest of the world’s civilizations, one based almost exclusively on exploration. The pack ice and the veil of fog that perpetually shrouds the pack warded off human inquiry until renewed speculation about a tropical terra australis situated near the South Pole, a concept whose ancestry traces back to Greek geographers, inspired Great Britain to send Capt. James Cook to discover the facts. Antarctica thus began as an idea, and its discovery would be intimately connected to intellectuals and intellectual history. Its extraordinary isolation was not merely geophysical but metaphysical. The transition to Antarctic exploration demanded more than the power to overcome the energy gradients that surrounded The Ice: it demanded the capacity and the desire to overcome Antarctica’s information gradient. The penetration of Antarctica thus required not only the development of special ships and steam power or aircraft, but suitable syndromes of thought. Antarctic exploration would be deliberate, not accidental. “No one comes here casually,” observed J. Tuzo Wilson, presiding over the International Geophysical Year. “It is a continent of extremes and of contrasts where there is no middle way.”¹

The Ice stripped civilization (and exploration) to its most elemental forms. Exploration often became a matter of simple survival. Antarctic outposts evolved into information colonies, importing energy and ideas and exporting raw data. Discovery proceeded inland without the alliances and associations of former epochs—without trade, conquest, missionizing, pilgrimage, travel; without a community of life from which explorers could derive sustenance and inspiration; without indigenous human societies which could supply guides, native technologies, companionship, and alternate moral universes. Discovery had a remote, abstract, surficial quality. Expeditions traveled to such intangible geographic sites as the pole of rotation, the geomagnetic pole, and the pole of inaccessibility, or sought against the stark Antarctic icescape to recapitulate such traditional exploration gestures as a circumnavigation of the seas or a cross-continental traverse. In some respects, Antarctica is best understood by what it is not, and Antarctic discovery is perhaps best revealed by the things it lacked. It is appropriate that Captain Cook—the exponent of negative discovery, as Daniel Boorstin describes him—should inaugurate the exploration of Antarctica by setting out to disprove its existence.² In the end, explorers and the civilization that sent them did not discover The Ice so much as The Ice allowed them to discover themselves. The ineffable whiteness of the polar plateau became a vast, imperfect mirror that reflected back the character of the person and civilization that gazed upon it.

Not even the Arctic offered a comparable degree of alienness. During the great explosion of Renaissance exploration, the search for a Northwest Passage around the Americas and a Northeast Passage around the top of Europe led to a quick assessment of the Arctic. The density of its pack ice made maritime exploration impossible for any distance. But the circumpolar Arctic was occupied by native peoples, the technology existed by which to travel over the pack at least seasonally, and the lands themselves provided a ready point of access. Eventually European and American explorers learned to live off the pack and its shores, to exploit the drift of the pack—the Arctic gyre—to advantage. Although the Arctic pack decayed annually along its perimeter and its summer surface was almost impenetrable because of meltponds and pressure ridges, the pack retained its identity throughout the year. Arctic sea ice was a surrogate land surface. Antarctic sea ice was not. The Antarctic pack was a formidable barrier, and it defined the rhythms of Antarctic discovery.

Unlike the Arctic, too, there were no ecosystems or permanent human societies on the Antarctic ice terranes. Humans confronted an entirely physical universe one-to-one—without intervening biological communities or indigenous cultures. Much of what passed for discovery prior to Antarctica was in reality a process of translation from one culture to another. Native guides and native collectors, interpreters, and scholars who immersed themselves in the lore of other peoples were fundamental to the acquisition of geographic knowledge by Western civilization. Europe reworked these assorted systems of learning into a grand synthesis, much as it connected disparate maritime (and later land-based) civilizations into a world network. The success of Arctic explorers, for example, was predicated on adapting native technology to new purposes. Robert Peary, Fritjof Nansen, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson—these great Arctic explorers became in effect white Eskimos. None of this was possible on The Ice. Wally Herbert recorded the astonishment of a group of Greenland Eskimos who were shown a film about Antarctica:

What my audience in Greenland had seen of the Antarctic projected on the screen was as strange to them as the expression I had seen on their eyes…. They had seen only a cold desert, beautiful but barren. There was no vegetation there; no gnats, mosquitoes, mice or hares; no musk-oxen, reindeer, caribou or polar bears. It was a weird world they had seen in these pictures, desolate and pure—quite unlike their living, breathing, hunting territory.³

The isolation of Antarctica was almost total. The Ice was sui generis; it was solipsistic, self-reflexive. The other continents had been information sources; the quintessential experience of the explorer had been one of novelty, of an abundance of specimens, artifacts, data, scenery, and experiences. Western civilization had evolved systems of knowledge and procedures for learning which assumed just such expectations. The Ice, by contrast, was an information sink. The explorer was compelled to look not out, but inward. The power of discovery depended on what was brought to the scene more than on what could be generated out of it. Like other discovered worlds, Antarctica posed immense problems of assimilation—political, economic, intellectual. But unlike with the seas or the other continents, traditional means of institutional absorption and understanding broke down on The Ice. Paradoxically, what began as a richly imagined continent not unlike others became, when finally explored, a white spot on the globe.

Not until the mid-twentieth century was Antarctica prepared to become a point of departure for an epoch of exploration rather than a terminus. Antarctica would join the deep oceans and interplanetary space as an arena for exploration, but the transition would come at a cost. The human perspective—best symbolized by the relationship between an explorer and his interpreter or guide, or by the explorer submerged in native lore—would be replaced by a more abstract flow of information from distant prosthetic devices interrogating a geography relentlessly hostile to human presence and alien to traditional human understanding. On The Ice there were no native peoples or prior civilizations with whom explorers or the other Western institutions could interact. The exploration of Antarctica would not be encumbered by the spectacle of clashing cultures, but neither would it be enriched by their interchange. No Bartolomé de Las Casas would publicize a Black Myth, but no George Catlin would record the simple splendor of the Plains Indians, no Vilhjalmur Stefansson would write about the vitality of the Inuit, no Franz Boas, enthralled by the Eskimos of Baffin Island, would argue for the cultural relativity of moral worlds. There would be no anthropology in Antarctica, no myths of primitivism—no Noble Savage, no Virgin Forest—by which to contrast and criticize the artificialities of Western civilization. The Ice is utterly inhuman. Two centuries after Captain Cook’s vessels, the Resolution and the Adventure, maneuvered through the pack, two decades after the International Geophysical Year inaugurated the full-scale exploration and occupation of Antarctica, Vikings 1 and 2 landed on Mars. The ethnocentricity of Western exploration was gone, but so was its anthropocentricity.

“In further search of the said continent”

The discovery of Antarctica pivoted on two events which were fundamental to the larger history of Western exploration and for which Antarctic discovery was a principal objective: the voyages of Captain James Cook and the International Geophysical Year. Until then the Southern Ocean, pack ice, and icebergs represented the outermost of seas and islands discovered through Western exploration since the Renaissance. The Southern Ocean became the last of the world’s oceans to be explored, Antarctica the last of the continents. The discovery of Antarctica, however, did not introduce dramatically novel modes of exploration or produce unassimilable information. Although the 19205 introduced a transitional phase in the purposes and techniques of exploration, only with the advent of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in the mid-1950s did Antarctica become really fundamental. For the first time it became integral rather than marginal to a new era of discovery. It found conceptual ties with other uninhabited (or uninhabitable) regions in the solar system, witnessed the invention of new techniques for penetrating The Ice, and posed immense, often unprecedented legal and geopolitical questions.

The first empirical work of discovery around Antarctica, the second of Cook’s celebrated voyages (1772–1775), put the hypothetical southern continent center stage in exploration. Curiously, already the abstract and intellectual attributes of Antarctica were apparent, for Cook’s objective was to prove or disprove the existence of the continent. “You are to proceed upon farther Discoveries … keeping in as high a Latitude as you can, & prosecuting your discoveries as near to the South Pole as possible,” his “secret instructions” read, “in further Search of the said Continent….”⁴ But Cook’s voyages were themselves a transitional event in the evolution of the exploring tradition of the West, and it is worth examining the nature of this metamorphosis for what it reveals about the relationship of Antarctica to Western civilization.

Captain James Cook was the most prominent of a swarm of eighteenth-century circumnavigators who brought to a culmination an era of predominantly maritime exploration which had its origins in Renaissance Europe. More than their mere fact or the data they shipped back to an awestruck Europe, those voyages set in motion a social dynamic: exploration became an institution, the explorer a role. There are many ways by which one culture can learn about other lands and peoples. But exploration—as an institution, a concept, and a tradition—is apparently an invention of Western civilization, and it appeared, not accidentally, with that other Western invention, modern science. By themselves, the voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were logical successors to centuries of European travel, trade, conquest, and seafaring. The exploits of Alexander the Great, for example, may be thought of as a kind of exploration by conquest; the sudden acquisition of lands, wealth, exotic peoples, and knowledge created problems in intellectual and geopolitical assimilation identical to those posed by the voyages of the Renaissance. The Hellenistic synthesis achieved by the Alexandrian school, symbolized by the school’s magnificent library, is an archetype for the information explosions that would typically follow future eras of discovery.

Yet the pattern in the fifteenth century was different, too. Other times and other peoples had experienced challenges similar to that posed by Alexander in the ancient world without becoming the basis for a world system. By contrast, the process set in motion by the European voyages of discovery was a process of world discovery, and it would result in a single world geography. It established a unique activity, exploration, and it created a unique if syncretic role, that of the explorer. A composite of old activities and preexisting technologies, the result was, like modern science, peculiarly new. Geographic discovery, the articulation of a scientific philosophy, a religious reformation, a rebirth of trade, art, and maritime city-states—all reinforced each other to make the nation-states of modern Europe different from the tribal entities and empires of antiquity, the scientific outlook distinct from earlier natural philosophies, and the process of discovery something curiously different from travel, adventure, pilgrimage, and trade.

In a sense, there was one world to be discovered, and Europe would discover it. Other periods of travel and exploration had had a self-arresting, ethnocentric quality. But this new era had a self-reinforcing mechanism that continually thrust outward and would, sooner rather than later, absorb European civilization as it did other societies. It would challenge the explorer as much as the explored. The events surrounding the first great voyages set in motion a dynamic of exploration—tied on one hand to the geopolitics of European expansion and on the other to the equally aggressive principles of modern science—that would prove irreversible. Although in some ways a model for the new empirical sciences, especially in its challenge to authoritative texts of the ancients and to Holy Scripture, geographic discovery was a beneficiary of the new philosophy. Experimental science was limited only by the ingenuity and technology of its practitioners; the limitations on the growth of knowledge lay in society, not in nature. Unlike geographic exploration on the traditional model, the experimental philosophy did not depend on the availability of new lands and new peoples.

The great vehicle for European discovery was the ship. Exploration was predominantly maritime, intimately bound to the founding of coastal cities, the development of oceanic empires, and the mapping of the world’s coastlines. Its outstanding revelation was the unity of the world’s oceans; its grand expression, a voyage of circumnavigation; and its intellectual achievement, a mappa mundi of the Earth’s coastlines. The process began with the interior seas of Europe, then spread into the Atlantic and beyond. The Mediterranean and the Baltic were themselves composites of smaller seas, seas dotted with islands large and small and joined by straits of greater and lesser significance. No continent has a higher ratio of coastline to land mass than Europe, although North America has an analogous system of interior seas with the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and Hudson Bay. Not surprisingly, Europe’s outward expansion came by water, beginning with the hybridization of Europe’s northern (Baltic) and southern (Mediterranean) seafaring traditions.

Seafaring and the establishment of maritime empires were not unique to Europe. As J. H. Parry has observed, there were many maritime cultures around the globe, and the problem of European “discovery” was really a process of connecting these various maritime states.⁵ Marco Polo, after all, returned from Cathay to Venice by sea, hopping from one maritime network to another. The essence of the European achievement was to recognize that these various enclaves of maritime prowess collectively formed a single world ocean, to join these various civilizations into a general geopolitical economy, and to organize the geographic and technological knowledge of these peoples into a larger intellectual construct. The process was often one of adaptation and translation; interpreters were fundamental to the success of the enterprise. Vasco da Gama made the Indian Ocean crossing after seizing an Arab pilot along the coast of Africa. Magellan’s crew, after the massacre of its leaders on Luzon, wandered aimlessly in the South China Sea until they captured a local pilot who took them to the Moluccas. And Columbus relied on indigenous peoples to find his way around the islands of the Caribbean.

Nor was the exchange limited to geographic lore. Other bodies of information found their way into European consciousness. Although Western civilization would be the vehicle for discovery, the intellectual universe of the West would be as profoundly altered by the revelation of this information as were the cultures and lands it visited. Europe’s inherited systems of thought gradually crumbled—not merely expanded by the infusion of data, but utterly redesigned from new, sometimes alien points of view. The effects would ramify throughout that entire intellectual universe of art, science, natural philosophy, political theory, natural history, jurisprudence, literature.

To the voyages of discovery the continents—other than Asia, the objective—were impediments. Instead seaborne explorers searched eagerly, even maniacally, for passages around or straits through the land masses. The conviction slowly grew, some of it based on inherited speculation from the sages of antiquity, that the various oceans were united, and the European experience in the Mediterranean and the Baltic-Atlantic had suggested that connections would be found by probing coastlines, bays, and inlets. The search for a Northwest Passage around North America and a Northeast Passage around Scandinavia; the quest for saltwater straits, such as that discovered by Magellan and those, such as the Anian or Buenaventura, which existed only in the imagination; the hunt for an isthmus, like that at Panama, which would connect two seas by a brief overland passage—all amplified prior European experience. Ultimately, the successful circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan demonstrated that the world’s oceans were one, and throughout the era European exploration remained true to its maritime origins. Outposts for trade in the Far East, Africa, and the New World required a maritime nexus sustained by a succession of maritime empires. Portuguese, Dutch, and English mercantile and political ambitions began with the establishment of port cities; before New World conquistadores ventured inland to topple Precolumbian empires they first constructed seaports; new colonies were coastal, never venturing far from their maritime lifeline. Expeditions into the interior proceeded along waterways, by river or lake, if not by saltwater inlet.

During this process of discovery, the techniques used to explore new regions and the interpretive systems within which information about them was incorporated broke down. The world ocean could not be assimilated by a simple elaboration of piloting skills and portolan charts developed for the Mediterranean and the Baltic-North seas. There were problems of scale that could not be solved through a simple enlargement but that demanded new principles of organization. Because of the voyages, the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy, the summa of ancient geographic wisdom, would be superseded instead of merely revised, much as the De Revolutionibus of Nicolaus Copernicus would replace, not merely redesign, the inherited lore contained in Ptolemy’s companion cosmology, the Almagest.

In many ways, Antarctica conformed to this pattern. The myth of a great southern land and sea, the fabled terra australis—an inheritance from Hellenistic lore—was among the last of the Cíbolas, El Dorados, and Brasils to dissolve beneath the harsh gaze of exploration. The Greek passion for symmetry demanded that the globe contain an immense land mass south of the torrid zone (the equator) to balance the vast known lands to the north. For centuries, while cartographers invented new techniques of projection and radically redrew the known outline of the world’s coastlines, incorporating a New World unimagined by the ancients, mappae mundi contained the hypothetical Southern Continent. The discovery of the Straits of Magellan and even the Drake Passage did not destroy this tradition. Magellan saw land to both sides, and his strait could be envisioned as a New World equivalent to the Dardanelles. Drake did not see land to the south, but that fact, when accepted, only shrank the dimensions of the imagined continent. Meanwhile, intermittent landfalls on large masses in the Pacific announced what might be peninsulas from the terra australis.

Here the voyages of Cook assume their importance. Systematically, Cook investigated the remaining coastlines of the Pacific. The reputed outliers from the Southern Continent were, in reality, the islands of New Zealand and Australia—whose great size earned it the old name. The Northwest Passage did not exist. The Southern Continent, if it existed, was in a forbidding region of polar ice, wholly uninhabitable. During Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775), on which he enjoyed favorable pack-ice conditions, he circumnavigated the Southern Ocean, crossed the Antarctic Circle, and penetrated to latitude 71 degrees 10 minutes South, near the Amundsen Sea. Though he found abundant marine riches—his popular account, A Voyage towards the South Pole (1777), started a veritable rush of whalers and fur sealers to the subpolar area—he fatally wounded the vision of a flourishing civilization near the pole. Cook did not make landfall or even see the coast, though he “firmly believed” that some land existed farther south which was responsible for the ice. Instead he had to content himself with threading his two ships through the decaying perimeter of the pack and around enormous “ice islands.” In exploration, as in other dimensions of natural history, the pack ice defined the effective perimeter—the littoral—of the continent. Interestingly, Cook’s greatest geographic discoveries did not reveal new lands so much as they defined the dimensions of known coastlines and erased whole continents of a hypothetical geography. Cook summarized:

I have now made the circuit of the Southern Ocean in a high Latitude, and traversed it in such a manner as to leave not the least room for the Possibility of there being a continent, unless near the Pole and out of the reach of Navigation…. Thus I flatter myself that the intention of the Voyage has in every respect been fully Answered, the Southern Hemisphere sufficiently explored and a final end put to the searching after a Southern Continent, which has at times ingrossed the attention of some of the Maritime Powers for near two Centuries past and the Geographers of all ages.⁶

Cook thus became the great practitioner of “negative discovery,” and it is appropriate that the scene of his grandest triumph should be the Antarctic—the “country of Refusal,” as poet Katha Pollitt describes it, where “No was final.”⁷

Even the indomitable Cook, however, backed away, sensibly enough, from deeper penetrations into The Ice. “The risk one runs in exploreing a coast in these unknown and Icy Seas, is so very great, that I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”⁸ Should anyone have “the resolution and perseverance to find … beyond where I have been,” he concluded, “I shall not envy him the honour of the discovery, but I will be bold to say, that the world will not be benefited by it.”⁹ The challenge was not merely technological but intellectual. There were no means to enter The Ice and no purpose to justify the attempt.

It was recognized even in the eighteenth century that Cook’s remarkable voyages were special, that they combined new skills with new purposes of exploration. Yet they were not isolated phenomena. Cook was only the highest expression of the era; other circumnavigators sailed the unknown seas, and scientific inquiry had begun to move inland from the coast. New lands were discovered and old ones resurveyed in the spirit and with the intellectual apparatus of the Enlightenment. Especially in the Antarctic, where the true coastline had not yet been visited, there was ample room for both amateur and professional. Cook’s travels became an exemplar and stimulant for further voyages of discovery, and his published reports inspired a good deal of political and economic rivalry for the lands and resources he had observed.

But the North Pacific was more promising than the Southern Ocean; the northwest coast of North America was already an active arena for imperial ambitions, and its sea otters and fur seals were more accessible than the seals and whales of Antarctica. Not until 1819 did interest in Antarctica awaken—promoted in part by the accidental discovery of the South Shetland Islands by William Smith, a British merchant captain blown off course by a storm, and in part by the systematic voyages of Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who had been sent by Czar Alexander I on “an extended voyage of discovery” in the ships Vostok and Mirnyi. “Every effort will be made to approach as closely as possible to the South Pole,” read Bellingshausen’s instructions, “searching for as yet unknown land, and only abandoning the undertaking in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”¹⁰ The South Shetlands were fecund with fur seals, and after confirmation of the find by Capt. James Sheffield, an American sealer, word of their commercial possibilities spread rapidly. Within a year scores of sealers had swarmed around the islands, and the senior British officer at Valparaiso, Capt. Edward Bransfield, hastily organized an expedition (which included Smith) to the islands in order to claim them for Britain.

The rapid exhaustion of seals led to a search for other rookeries in the region, principally by British and American sealers. Capt. Benjamin Pendleton, overseeing a flotilla of five ships (1820–1821), dispatched Capt. Nathaniel Palmer of the Hero on a voyage from the South Shetlands to the Antarctic Peninsula (Palmer Land) across the Bransfield Strait. At one point Palmer visited Bellingshausen aboard his ship. Capts. John Davis and Christopher Burdick (1820–1821) also crossed the strait and made the first documented landing on the mainland. The Lord Melville unwillingly spent the first Antarctic winter. The next year, Pendleton and Palmer returned with eight ships, explored King George, Clarence, and Elephant islands, and, in the company of George Powell, a British sealing captain, discovered the South Orkney Islands. Pendleton later brought three ships south for a combination of sealing and scientific exploration (1829–1831); the accounts of the expedition’s naturalist, James Eights, inaugurate the scientific assimilation of Antarctica. Palmer’s exploits were publicized by his mentor, Edmund Fanning. Although others probably saw land at the same time (the place was swarming with sealers), they lacked the desire or talent for publicity that came to Palmer.

Meanwhile, Capt. Benjamin Morrell (1822–1823) entered the Weddell Sea on the east side of the peninsula. A book he wrote about his voyages, while perhaps inaccurate, roused considerable popular interest in the south polar regions—not the first or last time that literature would prove as powerful an incentive to Antarctic exploration as science. Nonetheless, a scientific expedition under Capt. Henry Foster of the Royal Navy visited the South Shetlands (1828–1831) to take gravity measurements, part of a series of global geodetic experiments, and Capt. James Weddell inaugurated the long involvement of the merchant firm Samuel Enderby and Sons in the economic and exploration history of Antarctica.

Enderby had previously opened up the South Pacific whaling grounds. Discovering the pack at a historic minimum (1822–1824), Weddell entered the sea that now bears his name to latitude 74 degrees, a feat never since duplicated. The Enderbys continued their mixture of business and patronage throughout the 1830s, with voyages under Capt. John Briscoe (1830–1832) that circumnavigated the Southern Ocean and discovered Enderby Land, under Capt. Peter Kemp (1833–1834) that led to the discovery of Kemp Coast, and under Capt. John Balleny (1838–1839) that mapped Balleny Island and may have sighted the mainland around what was later named Wilkes Land. Charles Enderby became a charter member of the Royal Geographical Society (1830), and in defiance of normal sealing and whaling practices, with their fanatical secrecy, he deposited ship’s logs with the society.

But the big story was an impressive display of international rivalry: in the late 1830s expeditions were launched more or less simultaneously by France, Great Britain, and the United States. To this group may be added a fourth, Imperial Russia; although it preceded the others by nearly twenty years and led to no further Russian interest in the region for another 130 years, the enigmatic voyages of Bellingshausen share the characteristics of the expeditions of d’Urville, Ross, and Wilkes. All built upon the example and accounts of Cook. Collectively, they confirmed the existence of an Antarctic continent, mapped as much of the coastline as wooden ships operating in fog and pack ice could, and closed out an era of Antarctic discovery.

Bellingshausen explored the region for two austral summers and found it pretty much as Cook described it. He conducted one pass from the South Sandwich Islands, along the pack, to Australia, probably sighting the continent in the vicinity of Queen Maud Land. His second voyage, from Australia to the Antarctic Peninsula, completed a successful circumnavigation of the Southern Ocean. While in the area of the peninsula, Bellingshausen discovered several islands, visited with some of the first sealers to the South Shetland Island area, and possibly spied the mainland. But, as he notes in his journal, “in this climate the sky is seldom unclouded,” fog and snow drizzles were endless, the seas were choked with icebergs, and floes from the loose summer pack made navigation treacherous. After “two years’ uninterrupted navigation” among the ice, Bellingshausen concluded, in words echoing Cook, that “this ice must extend across the Pole and must be immovable and attached in places to shallows or to such islands as Peter I Island.”¹¹ Isolated from both the international scene and further Russian interest, however, the expedition was forgotten, its findings dormant until the advent of IGY and the revival of Soviet concern with the Antarctic.

Not so the later, competing exploratory voyages sent by France, Britain, and America. All were national exploring expeditions, well integrated into scientific institutions. All of the voyages aspired to advance the domain of useful knowledge no less than the prestige of their sponsoring governments. The French expedition under Capt. Dumont d’Urville and the British expedition under Capt. James Clark Ross had as primary objectives the exact determination of the south magnetic pole. This was a subject with both practical and popular appeal as well as scientific significance. Carl Friedrich Gauss had articulated a theory of terrestrial magnetism that predicted the exact location of the pole, and Alexander von Humboldt had championed the cause, pleading for a global magnetic survey that would lead to a geomagnetic map. In addition, d’Urville had specific instructions to proceed more deeply into the Weddell Sea than Weddell had and thereby claim for France the honors of the farthest voyage south. The United States Exploring Expedition, under the command of Lt. Charles Wilkes, proceeded—after enduring years of political buffoonery during which its existence was several times threatened amid the exuberant turmoil of Jacksonian democracy—under a bizarre mixture of purposes, among them the service of American whaling and sealing interests, the desires of fledgling scientific organizations, the nationalist sentiments of Capt. Benjamin Pendleton and Josiah Reynolds, and the crackpot idea of William Symmes (the popularly styled “Newton of the West”) that a subterranean paradise existed in the Antarctic which could be entered through a colossal hole at the pole. The d’Urville and Wilkes expeditions spent two austral seasons in their voyages, the Ross expedition three.

Although d’Urville had two prior voyages of discovery to the South Pacific behind him, his expedition was something of a disappointment. Not surprisingly, he failed to penetrate the pack in the Weddell gyre, and his travels along the coast of East Antarctica indicated that the magnetic pole lay impossibly distant from him, on the other side of the ice. He did, however, sight the mainland (Terre Adelie) at nearly the same time as Wilkes. Sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society, as well as by the Royal Navy, Ross had no better luck with the Weddell Sea or the magnetic pole. But the handsome veteran of Arctic voyages (he had already been to the north magnetic pole) made fundamental discoveries in the area of the Ross Sea, including Ross Island and the Ross Ice Shelf. His two ships, Terror and Erebus, provided the names for the volcanoes on Ross Island, an area of great significance to subsequent Antarctic exploration.

It was Wilkes, however, whose orders were nebulous, whose expedition existed in almost constant disarray, and whose ships were ill-fitted for polar travel; it was Wilkes who first proclaimed an “Antarctic continent” based on his scattered but consistent observations of the East Antarctic mainland. Predictably, too, it was the prickly Wilkes who generated the most controversy. While his maps of Antarctica and Pacific islands proved remarkably sound, and the expedition’s collections helped launch several scientific careers and became an argument for the establishment of a national museum (eventually, the Smithsonian), Wilkes endured scorn from Ross over conflicting sightings of land, faced a court-martial upon his return for his recourse to harsh discipline, engendered (because of his manipulation of the ship’s log) a controversy over whether he or d’Urville had first sighted the mainland, and suffered through a subsequent naval career in near ostracism until the American Civil War saw his rank restored. During the war he precipitated another international crisis by seizing two Confederate envoys from a British ship and thrusting Britain and America to the brink of war. Again he was court-martialed. Between 1847 and 1849 his five-volume narrative appeared, and over the next thirty years scientists wrote eighteen volumes more, but Congress declined to appropriate sufficient money to allow the full work of the expedition to be published, and only one hundred official copies of Wilkes’s narrative were actually printed. Wilkes so lapsed into obscurity that when he died in 1877, as William Stanton notes, “many newspapers forgot to mention that he had commanded the First Great National Exploring Expedition.”¹² Nonetheless, Mark Twain recalled that during his Missouri childhood Wilkes had been the most famous name in America.¹³ As wth Wilkes, so with the U.S. Exploring Expedition: it was ever a source of controversy and missed opportunities, well symbolized by the fate of one of its great treasures, the cornucopia of Polynesian artifacts gathered by artist-naturalist Titian Peale. In the mid-1890s the long-missing collection was accidentally unearthed beneath several tons of coal in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution.

There followed a hiatus in Antarctic exploration. The Franklin disaster refocused polar discovery by Britain and the U.S. to the Arctic, and the recession of the fur seal and whaling industries removed economic incentives from the Antarctic. For a while almost the sole advocate of south polar exploration was Matthew Fontaine Maury, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory and Hydrographic Office and author of two seminal works in oceanography: Wind and Current Charts (1847) and the celebrated Physical Geography of the Sea, first published in 1855. Antarctica—or the absence of solid geographic information about it—increasingly preoccupied Maury. He admonished the naval powers that “one sixth part of the entire landed surface of our planet” is “as unknown to the inhabitants of the earth as is the interior of one of Jupiter’s satellites.” Elaborating on the contrast with Arctic exploration, he argued that “for the last 200 years the Arctic Ocean has been a theatre for exploration; but as for the antarctic, no expedition has attempted to make any persistent exploration or even to winter there.” Dismayed over U.S. disinterest in further exploration (the popular interest in polar exploration lay in Elisha Kane’s Arctic travels, and the country was otherwise preoccupied with the exploration of its far western territories and with the political crisis that would culminate in the Civil War), Maury in 1860 urged that Antarctic exploration “should be a joint one among the nations that are concerned in maritime pursuits.” The development of steam power, he argued, made penetration of the pack ice possible.¹⁴

Instead, traditional activity in Antarctica continued, although on a vastly reduced scale. Commercial sealers and whalers revisited favorite sites, refining local geographic knowledge. In the 1870s a final burst of activity effectively closed the era and symbolically returned it to its origins. To commemorate the centennial of Cook’s voyages, the British Admiralty and the Royal Society sponsored a four-year (1872–1876) circumnavigation of the world sea for the purposes of oceanographic research. A specially outfitted ship, the Challenger, brought the latest in scientific equipment to bear on the problem. But the Challenger expedition in the Antarctic confined itself to the subantarctic islands, to physical measurements of the sea, and to the collection of specimens of marine life. While its dredgings would help revive scientific interest in the question of a polar continent twenty years later, so primitive were its researches in the remote Antarctic that it failed to recognize as gross an oceanographic boundary as the Antarctic convergence. Meanwhile, another cooperative international undertaking—to measure the transit of Venus in 1874—recalled the 1769 transit that had underwritten Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific. The U.S. established a base at Kerguelen Island, along the convergence. And finally a German expedition again combined sealing with exploration, voyaging under the command of Capt. Eduard Dallman to the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, where some minor islands were discovered.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”

In the eighteenth century, scientific exploration on the grand scale was epitomized by the international effort to survey the transit of Venus. Not only did it dispatch Cook on his first voyage to the South Seas, but it sent such luminaries as Peter Pallas, then under the direction of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on his expedition to the Urals and the Land of Sibir. The organizational complexity, the emphasis on natural philosophy, and the anticipated practical benefits all identified these explorers as savants of the Enlightenment, not intellectual buccaneers out of the Renaissance. Yet even as Cook conducted his circumnavigations the character of exploration was being reconstituted. Maritime discovery was being complemented by an even more powerful wave of continental exploration; new instruments and technologies refined the purposes and redirected the goals of discovery; and the intellectual context of the Cook era, embedded in the Enlightenment, was being superseded by the sensibilities of Romanticism. Their emphasis on scientific research made explorers something more than foragers of empire.

Out of them would evolve the Romantic explorer, with his fascination for natural history, who would carry discovery into the continental interiors and who would dominate exploration in the nineteenth century. This transformation was part of a vast act of reperception, of intellectual systems-building, and of political and cultural assimilation so fundamental that William Goetzmann has termed it a Second Great Age of Discovery.¹⁵ The effects, in fact, were reciprocal. Western civilization greatly expanded its reach, but it also had to grapple with the political, social, economic, and intellectual consequences of assimilating the new lands it unveiled or the old lands it visited anew.

As with the voyages of the Renaissance, the process began in Europe, this time prepared by an era of internal travels by European intellectuals. The example of Cook’s explorations was instrumental in forging the purposes and style of these journeys, although they were no longer restricted to the coasts or to the conceptual context of natural philosophy. In particular, a German ethnographer on Cook’s second voyage, Georg Forster, inspired the man who would symbolize the explorer of the new era, Alexander von Humboldt. Quickly, this new mode of exploration was transported from Europe to the other continents. In place of circumnavigation, a traverse across a continent became the grand gesture of the explorer, and in place of a mappa mundi of the world ocean, a cross-section of a continent’s natural history became the supreme intellectual achievement of an exploring expedition. Previously, travels into the interior had only supplemented sea power. Their purpose had not been to conduct general surveys of geography and natural history but to seek out the treasure and the capitals of unknown civilizations like the Incas and Aztecs, or to establish commercial contact with such ancient peoples as the Chinese and Indians. Explorers, like “the rulers and investors who sent them out,” were “practical men,” observes Parry. “One cannot imagine fifteenth-century explorers searching for the North Pole.”¹⁶ Increasingly, however, the primary purpose of ships was to transport men and equipment to new lands; the great treasures were the artifacts of natural history and those natural resources not yet converted by native civilizations. In the process, the character of exploration metamorphosed, and the natural history of Europe—its rocks, its flora and fauna, its peoples—was systematically compared to that of other lands.

Map of Antarctica as it was known at the onset of the heroic age. Expeditions and landforms are both indicated. Only the tip of the peninsula and portions of the Ross Sea were known with any confidence. Redrawn from Robert Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery.

This contrast was broad and its effects powerful. Not only scientific data but experiences, images, sensations, artifacts, and specimens were all information that had to be processed. The sheer volume as well as the novelty of much of this information demanded new sciences such as geology and new sensibilities such as those expressed in Romantic landscape painting, novels, and travelogues. Natural history, in particular, enjoyed an explosive, popular growth. Geographic discovery asked and answered questions of fundamental significance to this civilization. Moreover, the mode of exploration advertised by Humboldt and his imitators involved not only surveying, mapping, and cataloguing the abundance of material objects in the world; it celebrated that very profusion. The exhaustive collections and encyclopedic tomes of these explorers exemplified a facet of the Romantic syndrome, the Promethean desire to encompass everything. Writing from South America, Humboldt told how he and his companion, Aimé Bonpland, dashed about like madmen picking up one new object after another, how they would go mad “if the wonders don’t cease soon.”¹⁷ No more than its classification schemas could the sensibilities of the Enlightenment survive such an onslaught of information without profound disruptions.

Within this expanding realm of experience, however, Antarctica was an anomaly, a universe unto itself. It was impenetrable to maritime exploration, except as its inconstant pack ice allowed, and it was even more hostile to overland, cross-continental traverses. Its only rivers were glaciers. But the problem was not solely the formidable physical geography of the ice terranes: The Ice also challenged the philosophical precepts, artistic genres, and scientific systems by which the era had understood the metaphysics (and metahistory) of nature. The abundance of the observed world was stripped away. The novelty, the revelatory message, the inspiration of Nature were all erased. The process became progressive as one advanced to the interior, to the informing source of The Ice. The Promethean desire to embrace everything lost its meaning in a landscape of nothingness. In place of increasing information, there was less. In place of abundant objects, there was only ice; and in place of tangible landmarks, such as mountains or lakes, there were only abstract concepts, such as the poles of rotation, magnetism, or inaccessibility, all invisible to the senses. The only civilization explorers discovered in Antarctica was the one they had brought there. Inquisitiveness, knowledge, sensibility were simply reflected back and turned inward. The challenge for the Humboldtean explorer had been to cope with an overabundance of information, but the Antarctic explorer confronted an under-abundance of information. Finding technological means by which to penetrate the pack or to proceed inland did not by itself resolve the question of perception and assimilation.

The Antarctic would not—could not—be ignored. There were several causes for the revival of interest in Antarctica. The simple fact that the region was unexplored and geographically unknown was a compelling argument for at least some scientific reconnaissance. Steam power made travel into the pack possible, and decades of successful Arctic exploration had developed ship designs and materials (and customized ships) that could withstand the crushing pressures of the pack ice. A desire to resuscitate the whaling industry brought commercial ships back to the Southern Ocean, and in 1892 Scottish and Norwegian whalers visited Antarctica. The Antarctica, under Capt. Carl Larsen, investigated new coastline along the eastern side of the peninsula. Eventually, the Larsen firm became for twentieth-century Antarctic exploration what the Enderby Brothers had been for the nineteenth century. Its modest success led to another private expedition under Henrik Bull which, at Cape Adare in January 1895, made the first landing on the Antarctic mainland.

Perhaps the most compelling cause for renewed attention was the dangerous expansion of European colonial rivalry and the growing realization that Antarctica was the last of the world’s continents not yet explored. In 1893 John Murray, the Canadian biologist and oceanographer who had collated the fifty volumes published by the Challenger expedition, read a paper to the Royal Geographic Society in which he argued for the existence of an Antarctic continent and proposed an outline of its coast. The idea stirred his rival, Clements Markham, then head of the society. At the Sixth International Geographical Congress (1895), held in London and presided over by Markham, it was resolved that “the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken.”¹⁸ Although the North Pole had not yet been reached, the Arctic was generally known with an accuracy acceptable to the state of geographic knowledge; a race to the pole was a coup, a monument to ambition and Arctic survival skills. But Antarctica, not simply the South Pole, was as much a terra incognita as it had been during the Renaissance. What Rudyard Kipling wrote in “The Explorer” (1898) seemed especially applicable to the Antarctic:

Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes

On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated—so:

“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—

“Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you.

Go!”

Now that conscience could be answered. Adequate technology, an international consensus on the continent’s scientific significance, national competition, and nearly a century of experience with this mode of exploration—everything was present to make Antarctica a centerpiece for Western discovery. The next International Geographical Congress (Berlin, 1899) proclaimed 1901 as “Antarctica Year.” Quickly, a score of major expeditions attempted to achieve for the alien Antarctic what Pallas had done for central Asia, Lewis and Clark for North America, and Humboldt for South America. The heroic age of Antarctic exploration was underway.

It began modestly with a Belgian expedition (1897–1899) led by Lt. Adrien de Gerlache. The Belgica explored the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula and wintered, inadvertently, in the Bellingshausen Sea. Among the members of the expedition were Frederick A. Cook, soon to be embroiled in an infamous controversy with Robert Peary over the discovery of the North Pole, and Roald Amundsen, who, frustrated in his desire to reach the North Pole, redirected his efforts to the South Pole instead. Already the genealogical—almost tribal—character of polar exploration was evident. So was the practice of naming expeditions after their ships. And so also were the special challenges of Antarctic discovery. During the Belgica’s long winter imprisonment, nearly everyone suffered anemia, lethargy, acute depression, or paranoia; there was one death from a heart attack, and two men went mad. Meanwhile, a member of the Norwegian whaling expedition to Cape Adare, Carsten Borchgrevink, returned with the Southern Cross expedition (1898–1900), which was sponsored by a British newspaper magnate. Borchgrevink sailed to Cape Adare, established the first land base on the continent, made a sledging journey to the Ross Ice Shelf, wintered over, conducted meteorological and magnetic investigations, and collected specimens of rocks and marine fauna.

Borchgrevink was only the point man for the great national expeditions to follow. At the New York meeting of the International Geographical Congress (1904), Henryk Arctowski of the Belgica expedition revived Maury’s plea for an internationally sponsored exploration of the Antarctic. But national rivalry was a greater motivator than international cooperation. Even new nations, such as Norway, found in polar exploration a suitable international arena to display their nationalist energies. Still, there was some attempt at coordinating independent national expeditions. Markham, for example, orchestrated the earliest wave so that the Germans went to East Antarctica, the Swedes to the peninsula, and the British to the Ross Sea. But in its intensity no less than its scale, this was truly the heroic age of Antarctic discovery.

Its range of participants would not be matched until the 1950s: the National Antarctic Expedition (Discovery) under Capt. Robert Scott (1901–1904), the German Antarctic Expedition (Gauss) under Prof. Erich von Drygalski (1901–1903), the Swedish Antarctic Expedition (Antarctica) under Dr. Otto Nordenskjöld (1901–1903), the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (Scotia) Jed by Dr. William S. Bruce (1902–1904), the French Antarctic Expedition (Le Français) headed by Dr. J.-B. Charcot (1903–1904), the British Antarctic Expedition (Nimrod) under Lt. Ernest Shackleton (1907–1909), the Second French Antarctic Expedition (Pourquoi Pas?), also under Charcot (1908–1910), the Amundsen (Fram) expedition led by Roald Amundsen (1910–1912), the second Scott (Terra Nova) expedition (1910–1913), the Japanese (Kainan Maru) expedition under Lt. Choku Shirase (1911–1912), a second German expedition (Deutschland) led by Dr. Wilhelm Filchner (1911–1912), the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (Aurora) led by a veteran of the first Shackleton expedition, Douglas Mawson (1911–1914), and the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (Endurance), under Ernest Shackleton (1914–1916).

Nearly all of these expeditions had some assistance from their national governments, although contributions from scientific societies and wealthy industrialists were important. Most tended to include substantial scientific staffs, filled with specialists in various fields. All exhibited at least some transfer of techniques or personnel from north polar exploration. And beginning with Scott’s first expedition (Discovery), the desire to reach the South Pole (or for some, the south magnetic pole) or to traverse the continent was a fundamental objective to most of the exploring parties. All this—an exotic destination, a traverse that would provide a cross-section of the continent, a preoccupation with geographic inquiry—was in keeping with the tradition of continental exploration that had emerged over the previous century.

Interestingly, two of the earliest nations to engage in Antarctic exploration, Russia and the United States, were absent. Tsarist Russia was preoccupied with wars, revolution, and an Arctic sea-route to Siberia; the United States was preoccupied with the insular empire it had newly acquired from war with Spain, with Alaskan gold, and with an old tradition of Arctic exploration stemming from the Franklin searches of Elisha Kent Kane and Charles Francis Hall and from the tragic sufferings of the Greeley Expedition to Greenland during the First Polar Year. In 1902 the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh proposed to collect specimens in the Antarctic Peninsula, and in 1909 the American Philosophical Society authorized a committee to promote an American expedition to Wilkes Land, an idea that received the blessing of President Roosevelt; but nothing came of either suggestion. Instead the race for the North Pole, vividly personified in the demonic Robert Peary, commanded national attention. When Peary later campaigned in 1912 for an American expedition to winter at the South Pole—the logistics for which were “only a matter of detail”—other expeditions were already en route to the pole and there was little enthusiasm within the scientific community.¹⁹

Yet Antarctica was not Africa or Australia or the Americas or even the Arctic. It was not simply a more forbidding continent but an almost extraterrestrial presence. Once an exploring party passed the coast, there was nothing to stand between it and the purely physical systems that comprised Antarctica. There was no ecosystem, however threatening, that could sustain an explorer. There was no native culture, maritime or terrestrial, that could guide, inform, or assist. No pilots from the indigenous culture of seafarers would navigate a ship through the pack ice. No guides would direct overland parties to new villages, water holes, or trails. No interpreters would intercede between the emissaries of Western civilization and native populations. No native hunters would translate their indigenous knowledge of geography or educate these missionaries of Western enthusiasm in survival skills. Exploration did not accompany a folk migration, as it did in North America, Australia, and Central Asia; popularly acquired lore could not assist formal discovery or be challenged by it. And exploration did not consort with the state-making of European imperialism, as it did in South America and Africa. There was no mechanism by which to systematically transfer knowledge from native lore into the intellectual systems of the West. The Antarctic landscape was far from rich in the kinds of information to which natural history had become accustomed. Only along the coast were there organisms; only in selected oases were there even rocks; nowhere were there strange peoples or lost civilizations. There was only ice and more ice. In such an environment the Antarctic explorer could no longer act as the Romantic hero; he became an existentialist hero or a modernist antihero. Even as the great flurry of expeditions sailed south and sledged across the ice—full of visions of Humboldt, Kipling, and Robert Service—the intellectual explosion that would be called modernism was revolutionizing science, art, and literature. As participants in intellectual history, the explorers of the heroic age were splendid anachronisms, the last and purest of a breed for which Antarctica had offered a final refuge.

The exploration of the Arctic offered only a partial equivalence. There was some transfer of equipment, such as sledges and ships; some transfer of purpose, notably the race to the poles; and a mixed transfer of explorers, especially as the explorer came to be a professional, an all-purpose figure ready to go to any number of unvisited regions. Roald Amundsen, Frederick Cook, Erich von Drygalski, John Rymill, Hubert Wilkins, Richard Byrd, Laurence Gould, Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, to name a few, all explored both in the Arctic and Antarctic. Other Arctic explorers, such as Peary and Nansen, had traversed the Greenland ice sheet and developed techniques useful on Antarctic shelves and sheets. Borchgrevink brought two Lapps to assist with his sledging, and Robert Peary strongly recommended that Eskimos be transported to the Antarctic. Specially designed polar ships, such as the Fram, were used in both packs. Along the Antarctic coast, exploring parties could hunt seals (or less desirably, penguins) for food. But the differences between the Arctic and the Antarctic were far more impressive.

They begin with the “very striking antithesis of natural conditions,” as Peary referred to it, between the two polar regions. Arctic exploration was physically dominated by the pack—ice and sea, pressure ridge and lead. The scene was ever changing, and the explorer was, in Peary’s words, ever confronted with the “choice between the possibility of drowning by going on or starving to death by standing still.”²⁰ In the Antarctic, the pack was a barrier to penetrate by ship before the real business of exploration could begin. The crevasse fields of mountain glaciers offered a hazard analogous to that of leads, but without the vitality and drama. The constant discovery of islands amid the Arctic Sea had extended the range of traditional voyages of maritime exploration. These islands reduced the Arctic basin to a series of smaller seas and served as points of departure and refuge. The Antarctic islands offered much less, although some presented convenient anchorages and less massive coastal ice terranes than the mainland, and most voyages of the heroic age established bases on them. In some cases, such as the Drygalski expedition, the party never successfully left the island.

The critical distinction between the two polar regions was the absence of life and native cultures in Antarctica. The “Peary system”—a distillation of decades of Arctic experience—relied heavily on local foodstuffs and on native technology and lore. Though he brought bread and pemmican and other foods, Peary procured fresh meat by hunting in advance of the journey. Walrus, bear, musk ox, whale, seal, caribou (reindeer), hare, some birds and fish—one could live off the land. In Antarctica, exploring parties hunted seals (and when desperate, penguin), but only along the pack and coast. More fundamentally, the Arctic had the polar Eskimo and his dogs, and the successful Arctic explorer began by learning Eskimo language and Eskimo culture. What the Western explorer brought was a new degree of organization and a new sense of purpose—intellectual products of a larger civilization, like the steamships that poked through the pack. Where the polar Eskimo had a score of words for particular kinds of snow and ice, thanks to institutions like science and exploration Western civilization would soon have hundreds and would constantly add new ones. Similarly, while Amundsen’s successful trek to the South Pole relied heavily on Arctic (modified Eskimo) techniques, its purpose was foreign to Eskimo culture.

Once a Western explorer was in the Arctic, his equipment consisted of adaptations of native technology, and as often as not it was easier to recruit native assistants than to train other, inexperienced Europeans. The greatest of Arctic explorers—the Nansens, the Stefanssons, the Pearys—in effect became natives, white Eskimos. Their writings on Eskimo (or Lapp or Siberian) life and the humanitarian spirit of comradeship that they felt with their native associates account for much of the charm of Arctic literature. When Peary reached the North Pole, he arrived in the company of one black American (Matt Henson, his old valet) and four Eskimos. The episode is a vivid reminder both of Leslie Fiedler’s observation that the heroes of nineteenth-century American literature were almost always accompanied by dark-skinned companions and of the extent to which Western civilization had absorbed the learning of other cultures into a grand new system.²¹

The encounters with other peoples—an inevitable consequence of exploration—eventually led to the development of anthropology. Explorers had to cope with alien cultural environments as much as with foreign landscapes. Not merely their empirical data on latitudes and temperatures, or their encyclopedic collections of artifacts and specimens, but their experiences within other moral universes formed part of the expanding horizon of information that was the principal intellectual legacy of the era. Franz Boas would revolutionize American anthropology in large part out of his experience with Greenland Eskimos. Vilhjalmur Stefansson would live for years within Eskimo society, and in Northward the Course of Empire he improbably proposed that the future world civilization would be Nordic. No one would write an Antarctic equivalent to his The Friendly Arctic; on the contrary, Antarctic literature would abound in dystopias. Information requires contrast. The geographic contrast of the Arctic between sea and ice, the deadly dance between lead and floe, was echoed in the contrast between life and death, European and Eskimo. But there was no such contrast in the interior of Antarctica, only the sublime emptiness of the ice sheet, a self-reflexive mirror. The alienness of Antarctica consisted not simply in the continent’s physical harshness but in its unrelenting cultural and biological impoverishment, a profound deprivation that could be both psychologically and physiologically unsettling.

As Amundsen demonstrated, the Peary system by which forced marches were used to reach an explicit destination could be brought to Antarctica. Other Antarctic expeditions exploited such tactics to attain one of the south poles, although the British stayed with ponies and man-hauling for motive power. But neither in purpose nor in equipment could this system sustain long-term exploring parties on the scale necessary to systematically survey the Antarctic interior. This was more than a question of dogs versus horses versus men as prime movers of Antarctic sledges; all would soon be displaced by tractors and aircraft. For all its harshness, the Arctic had been inextricably bound up with human society for millennia and with Europe for centuries. No one had so much as passed a winter in Antarctica until Borchgrevink did it on the eve of the twentieth century. Without a biotic and cultural environment, not only was exploration more difficult, but discovery lost much of its charm. The traditional travelogue, with its abundant anecdotes about native life, was turned inward into a monologue. In Antarctica there was no society except that of the exploring expedition, no contrast between cultures, only the looking-glass Ice that reflected back, in simplified form, what was brought to it.

The remarkable successes of the heroic age came at a tremendous cost. Exploration, like other activities brought to The Ice, was stripped to its most elemental forms, and it became almost pathologically single-minded. The great tales of Antarctic adventure—the last real sagas in Western exploration—were stories of survival. In fact, the desire to struggle, to test oneself, was apparently one of the things Western civilization brought to The Ice. The celebration of martial discipline, of self-striving, of exploration, primitivism, and physical adventure was rampant in the West. Shackleton’s recruiting advertisement in a London paper said it all: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”²² The response was overwhelming. Such men accomplished astonishing feats but often endured unnecessary hardships. Cherry-Garrard, for example, lamented that “men were allowed to do too much,” that frequently “we wasted our manpower” through requests for volunteers.²³ Other purposes than character-testing and other means than man-hauled sledges, he insisted, would have to justify future expeditions.

Nor was this enthusiasm all a sop to popular whims, all bogus contests dreamed up by yellow journalism to sell its tabloids. The sentiments were strong among intellectuals, and the expedition leaders, supporters, and organizers were by and large intellectuals or men of education. In the United States the appeal took a slightly different form, manifest in the “strenuous life” urged by Teddy Roosevelt, the Klondike verse of Robert Service, the call for a “moral equivalent of war” by philosopher William James, and the literature of naturalism, epitomized by Jack London. “It is a source of satisfaction,” affirmed Peary on behalf of an age, “that the two last great physical adventures, the winning of the North Pole and the South Pole … should have been won by brute physical soundness and endurance, by the oldest and most perfect of all machines—the animal machine—man and the Eskimo dog.”²⁴ The Antarctic showed in this matter, as in others, an inversion: it was as though the object was not to struggle to advance a goal, but to discover a goal that would justify struggle.

As if there were a psychological obsession among Anglo-Americans to show that they were as hardy as the explorers, pioneers, and soldiers who had first built the European empires, the heroic age was populated with sagas of a number and intensity without parallel in the exploration of other continents. Associated with the age are the various journeys of the Terra Nova expedition: the Polar Party, led by Robert Scott, perishing miserably if heroically on the Ross Ice Shelf after reaching the pole; the Crozier Party under Edward Wilson, stumbling horribly around the crevasse-ridden ice shelf off Ross Island in the course of winter journey, enduring temperatures of −75 degrees F. to collect the egg of an emperor penguin; the Northern Party under Raymond Priestley, brought by ship from Cape Adare to Terra Nova Bay, only to be stranded because of pack ice and to winter in a stone hut on Inexpressible Island, living on penguins before making a journey on foot back to Ross Island; Douglas Mawson, his other comrades dead, struggling to pull himself out of a crevasse, then outfitted with crude wooden crampons wrestling a half-sled across 150 miles of “an accursed land,” his skin sloughing off from malnutrition; the Nordenskjöld expedition, with one party marooned a second winter at Snow Hill Island, another stuck on Paulet Island, and a third, the crew of the rescue ship Antarctica which sank in the pack, meeting by chance on the ice before being removed by the first Argentine vessel to venture to Antarctica; Ernest Shackleton, pioneering a route to the pole during his Nimrod expedition, only to be forced to withdraw within 97 miles of his destination; and Shackleton again, during the Endurance expedition, trapped in the pressure pack of the Weddell Sea, watching his ship crushed within the ice, riding ice floes and small ships to Elephant Island on the tip of the peninsula, setting out in an open skiff to South Georgia Island, climbing the South Georgian Alps to reach the whaling village of Grytviken and, ultimately, to rescue his entire crew without the loss of a man. The success stories of Antarctic exploration (such as Amundsen’s lightning march to the pole) are nearly forgotten or dismissed as too simple. It was not merely what was done but how it was done that was important. The competent but prosaic Roald Amundsen seems to function chiefly as a foil for the tragic Robert Scott. Nowhere in Western literature is there a more compelling, sustained chronicle of life, humanity, and civilization reduced to their minima.

In the end, these were sentiments as much imported to The Ice as extracted from it. The Ice reduces, distorts, reflects, and preserves, but it does not create. The heroic age did not arise solely out of Antarctica but from Western civilization’s encounter with Antarctica. The conclusion of the heroic age did not result from a change in The Ice: it came about because of new experiences in the civilization that sent out the explorers. For explorers, the celebration of the life of strenuous endeavor ended on the ice sheets of Antarctica, and for Western civilization as a whole it ended in the trenches of the Great War. It seemed pointless to carry the White Man’s Burden across the white nihilism of The Ice. Gradually, the principal actors in the drama—both the explorers and their supporters—passed from the scene or, like Mawson, retooled for a new era. The intellectual and political fervor for imperialism abated, and modernism dissolved many of the scientific and cultural ties that had sustained this mode of geographic exploration. No longer did visits to remote tribes, jungle-covered ruins, or wind-swept deserts answer fundamental questions. Even the major sciences such as geology, which had been invented to accommodate the data of continental discovery, failed to adapt to new ideas and lapsed into a moribund state, becoming tied more to the laboratory and the library than to the field.

Exploration itself suffered a crisis of identity and purpose. On one hand, it was progressively equipped with new, mechanized technology, while on the other it lacked new lands and peoples to discover. The interior of Antarctica was simply too vast and the rewards too meager to justify further expeditions in the mode of the heroic age. The long-sought transcontinental traverse would not occur until the mid-1950s, and by then it had lost much of its meaning, not because the deed itself was different but because its context had changed. Even as the Berlin Congress proclaimed its Antarctic Year, reaffirming the value of Antarctica for geography, Max Planck published his quantum theory of black-body radiation; De Vries, Correns, and von Tschermak simultaneously announced the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics; and Sigmund Freud promised to reconstruct the basis of psychology with The Interpretation of Dreams. As Scott’s loyal party erected its memorial cross, complete with inscription from Tennyson, Niels Bohr outlined a new theory of the atom. As Shackleton engineered the escape of the Endurance expedition from the Weddell Sea, Albert Einstein elaborated the general theory of relativity. The empirical, conceptual, and philosophical foundations of modern science were experiencing their most important transformation since the seventeenth century, and the relationship of science to exploration as a mode of inquiry would, in time, share that revolution. By the 1920s a transition was underway, not only in the character of Western exploration but in its liaison to the earth sciences. An epoch of exploration had survived in the distant wastes of The Ice, but in much the same way that the twilight wedge preserves the refracted rays of the setting sun. The heroic age passed with remarkable suddenness.

The premier Antarctic adventurer, Ernest Shackleton, obtained a private sponsor, a ship christened Quest, and his old first mate, Frank Wild, in an attempt to revive Antarctic exploration after World War I with an expedition to Wilkes Land in 1921–1922. Unfortunately, the strain of command and a series of severe storms encountered by the Quest as it steered toward the pack from South Georgia aggravated a heart condition, and Shackleton, at age forty-seven, died before reaching The Ice. Dispirited, the crew persisted in a troubled, desultory attempt to find worthy projects before more storms forced them to retire altogether from the Antarctic. It had been the man and the myth more than the place that had attracted the exploring party. The Antarctic had not beckoned, it had been sought out. Chroniclers might well have echoed Starbuck in the final drama of Moby-Dick. “Oh! Ahab…. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”²⁵ Melville’s Ahab represented the demonic side of the era’s restless searching, as Tennyson’s Ulysses showed its nobler side. But by the 1920s neither dimension was present. The heroic age drifted away—an aimless Quest, a Pequod stripped of both its Ahab and its Moby Dick, a Ulysses buried at South Georgia.

Only a decade earlier the scene had been quite different. When Scott’s party perished on The Ice, one by one, the tragedy could evoke the full-blown sentiment and rhetoric of an era; Scott’s final words, entered painfully in his diary, could be quoted for their lessons on how an English gentleman lived, strived, and died. The heroic age was then at its climax, the last grand expression of an era of Western exploration. It had literally reached the ends of the Earth. Chroniclers like Cherry-Garrard and Scott himself were suitably prepared to explicate the meaning of Antarctic exploration, if not the meaning of The Ice itself. The Oxford Book of English Verse and the Collected Poems of Robert Service would be carried to The Ice, just as a few years hence they would be buried in Flanders fields. What transpired on Antarctica seemed like a fantasy, an optical trick of the polar desert, a superior mirage that had cast a distant image from another place and time high into the unblinking Antarctic sky.

The survivors of the Terra Nova expedition erected a jarrahwood cross atop Observation Hill, near the site of the Discovery hut on Ross Island. On it they carved the closing lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—words written a few years before Darwin ventured forth on the Beagle and Humboldt first dreamed of summarizing the whole realm of physical knowledge through a geographic compilation he called Cosmos, sentiments published the same year the Wilkes expedition returned to the United States. Its choice was perhaps more suitable than the Terra Nova expedition realized. Tennyson had transformed a wanderer into an explorer, a yearning for home into a passion for knowledge, a struggle against fate into an obsession for struggle and a refusal to accept the limits of geography, time, or experience. Reshaping a pagan hero from classical antiquity into a Romantic explorer, Tennyson symbolized how the neoclassical world of the Enlightenment, with its rational codifications and attachment to “useful knowledge,” had been overwhelmed and expanded into something larger. Perhaps something too large. No one could romanticize the death of Cook as the survivors could romanticize the death of Scott. Their selection of the poem as a testimonial to the South Pole Party signified the intellectual continuity that the Terra Nova expedition shared with the whole character of discovery that had emerged after Cook. But by the time the Quest reached the pack, leaderless and purposeless, that succession had been broken. Sailing beyond the sunset had only brought the survivors to The Ice.

Death closes all; but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

. . . . . . . . . . .

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Vital Interlude: Richard E. Byrd

When interest in Antarctica revived, it did so in ways that modernized traditional expeditions and purposes. Beginning in 1923, Norwegian whalers resuscitated the mixture of commercial activity, exploration, and territorial claim-making that had typified much of nineteenth-century discovery. They also attempted to relocate Antarctic whaling from the peninsula to the Ross Sea, a move made possible by the development of pelagic whaling. Between 1926 and 1937, the firm of Lars Christiansen was preeminent. In 1931 Capt. Riiser-Larsen made the first circumnavigation of the continent since Wilkes and Ross. During the same period two major oceanographic surveys entered the Southern Ocean. Germany’s Meteor expedition (1925–1927), intent on studying the physical properties of the Atlantic, introduced a new state of sophistication into research around the Antarctic, including the use of an echo sounder, the first of the remote-sensing devices so crucial to later Antarctic exploration. More sustained and productive were the expeditions of the Discovery Committee (1925–1939), organized by Great Britain to conduct oceanographic research in the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Much of the work was biological—a program of whale conservation was an objective—but the study of submarine geography and the definition of the Southern Ocean were also important consequences. For the continent proper, however, the big story was the trilogy of expeditions that ventured to the Antarctic coast and interior—the Wilkins-Hearst expedition, the first Byrd Antarctic Expedition, and the British-Australian-New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) under Antarctic veteran Mawson.

In one sense, these activities only reconfirmed the traditional parameters of Antarctic exploration. In another sense, however, they collectively signalled a slow reformation, one that involved new technology, new participants, and a new cultural context. The most visible change was the introduction of aircraft. Virtually every commentator on polar exploration—from Cherry-Garrard to Peary—believed that the airplane was the vehicle of the future. The Wilkins-Hearst expedition (1928–1930), which ventured toward the peninsula for two austral summers, inaugurated the process with a flight in December 1928. Within ten weeks, the first Byrd Antarctic Expedition—the whole strategy of which centered around the use of three aircraft—began its flights from the Bay of Whales, on the west side of the Ross Ice Shelf.

Airplanes were not the first machines in the Antarctic, however; the heroic age, after all, had been predicated on the steamship, which made possible routine navigation through the pack. Shackleton, Mawson, and Scott had all experimented with tractors in lieu of dogs and horses, and Mawson had brought a radio and a propeller-driven air sledge. Scott and Drygalski had used captive balloons. But these devices had all been intended to supplement overland traverses on the Arctic model. It was otherwise with the airplane. Once introduced, it progressively dominated the mechanics, composition, and purposes of Antarctic exploration. The appearance on The Ice of a mechanized society was accelerated by the transfer to civilian pursuits of technologies developed under the impress of World War I. And not merely machines but new perspectives were being brought to bear on the question of Antarctic discovery. It is no accident, for example, that Buckminster Fuller published his dymaxion air chart the same year that Wilkins and Byrd first flew over Antarctica.

The new generation of Antarcticans were aviators in search of exploits—Antarctic Lindberghs—as much as explorers eager to seize upon novel tools for geographic discovery. Hubert Wilkins wanted to realize Shackleton’s old ambition to cross the continent, though he proposed to do it by plane. An Australian who had Arctic experience and a veteran of the Quest expedition, Wilkins planned to fly from the Antarctic Peninsula to the Ross Sea. Twice he failed—once in 1928 and again in 1930—but he flew over large portions of Graham Land and took many aerial photographs. (Later, Wilkins unsuccessfully tried to complement his flights over the Arctic and Antarctic by passing under both regions in a rickety submarine, the Nautilus.) Meanwhile, the British–Australian–New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition under Mawson remained along the coast of East Antarctica. Although flights were made, high winds prevented extensive aerial photography and the expedition contented itself with biological research and with the subantarctic islands. Even the Norwegian whalers outfitted their factory ships with small seaplanes, and by 1930 no serious expedition to Antarctica failed to rely on aircraft.

The introduction of new machines and new purposes was matched by the introduction of new men. While Britain institutionalized its experience by the creation of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge, which was endowed with money left from public donations to support the widowed families of the Terra Nova expedition, and while there were plentiful published journals and memoirs with which to inspire and instruct aspiring Antarcticans, new players dominated the scene. Among the commanders of the heroic age, only Mawson really survived to lead another expedition. In fact, it may be said that between the heroic age and the advent of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), Antarctic exploration was dominated by one nation, the U.S., and American interest was largely the product of one man, Richard E. Byrd. Byrd took his first expedition south in 1928–1930; his second in 1933–1935; his third, transfigured into a governmental body, the U.S. Antarctic Service, in 1939–1941; his fourth, the Antarctic Developments Project of the U.S. Navy, of which he was cheerleader and titular head, in 1946–1948; and, to complete the transition, the American Antarctic contribution to the International Geophysical Year (1954–1958), of which he was honorary chief. Almost single-handedly he reestablished an American presence and created a cadre of explorers who would staff future American expeditions.