To the Ends of the Earth Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN V. H. DIPPEL

  War and Sex: A Brief History of Men's Urge for Battle

  Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

  To the Ends of the Earth: The Truth Behind the Glory of Polar Exploration. Copyright © 2018 by John V. H. Dippel. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover image of huskies pulling sledge © State Library of New South Wales

  Cover image of Robert Scott writing in his journal, by Herbert George Ponting

  Cover image of Amundsen photographing at the South Pole, by unknown photographer

  Cover image of crew waving goodbye to the Caird on Elephant Island, by Frank Hurley

  Cover image of letter, by John Powles Cheyne, British Franklin Search Expedition

  Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht

  Cover design © Prometheus Books

  The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website does not indicate an endorsement by the author(s) or by Prometheus Books, and Prometheus Books does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pending

  Printed in the United States of America

  Author's note: All temperatures in this book are in Fahrenheit.

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Trailing Clouds of Glory

  Chapter Two: Hail the Conquered Hero!

  Chapter Three: By Nature Possessed

  Chapter Four: “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

  Chapter Five: Keeping the Brutes at Bay

  Chapter Six: Dog Eat Dog, Man Eat Dog, Man Eat Man

  Chapter Seven: More Noble than the “Greed for Discovery”

  Chapter Eight: “Down with Science, Sentiment, and the Fair Sex”

  Chapter Nine: No Man Is an Island

  Chapter Ten: “We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us”

  Chapter Eleven: In the End Was the Word

  Chapter Twelve: Printing the Legend

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed views in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Oddly enough, the first two men to lose their minds in the Antarctic were Norwegian sailors. Their names were Adam Tollefsen and Engelbret Knudsen. Likely looking for adventure, they had volunteered to go south on board the whaling ship Belgica in the summer of 1897. Not much is known about them. They are most remembered for the terrible thing that happened to them on that ill-fated, icebound vessel.

  While the Belgica was trapped in Antarctic ice for thirteen months, cut off completely from the rest of the world, they both had nervous breakdowns. They eventually regained their senses, but they were never quite the same again. Knudsen had to be institutionalized after the Belgica returned to Europe, and he died not long afterward. Tollefsen, who had been found mumbling incoherently, wandering aimlessly on the ice, recovered and was able to return home with the rest of the crew and resume a seemingly normal life. But the Antarctic left its stamp on his mind, too.

  Perhaps one should not make too much of the fact that Knudsen and Tollefsen were Norwegians. But it is strange that, coming from a Scandinavian country, they would be the most severely affected by the deprivations of Antarctic imprisonment—isolation, extremely low temperatures, months of total darkness, confinement in cramped quarters, shortages of food, immobility, boredom, lack of privacy, and fear of dying at any moment. That they suffered despite their background only indicates how inescapably stressful this ordeal on the Belgica was. Sailors from other countries on board also developed signs of mental illness. Even the Belgian head of the expedition—Adrien Victor Joseph de Gerlache de Gomery—fell victim to depression. Indeed, a superstitious observer might have blamed him for all that subsequently went wrong. After all, it was de Gerlache who had changed the name of this steam-powered barque when he had bought it, from Patria to Belgica—an act believed by seafarers to invariably bring bad luck. And, because of the polyglot nature of the crew he had recruited, there had been tensions from the start of the voyage south, with bad blood between the Belgian officers and the Norwegian crew members boiling over during a stop in Punta Arenas, when several of the Scandinavians had accused de Gerlache of being biased against them. But the cause of this shipboard madness ran deeper than this. The seeds for this expedition's disaster had been sown before they ever raised anchor. It stemmed from disagreements about why the Belgica was headed to Antarctica and what it intended to do there.

  Ostensibly, the 250-ton barque was supposed to be on a scientific mission. During the recent Sixth International Geographical Congress, in London, in 1895, participating European nations had agreed that it was high time to learn more about Antarctica. This was now going to be a top priority. Expeditions would be dispatched there to study its oceans, land features, and life forms. It so happened that de Gerlache was already planning an ocean expedition, purportedly with the goal of collecting this kind of information. The ninety-eight-foot-long Belgica would thus be the first vessel to enter Antarctic waters solely for the purpose of increasing knowledge about this land of mystery and wonder. Its primary objectives were to reach the South Magnetic Pole and to study ocean currents and the weather. To carry out this work de Gerlache had assembled a small, international band of scientists—a Polish geologist, meteorologist, and oceanographer, a Romanian biologist and speleologist, another Pole with a background in physics and biology, and the upstate New York physician Frederick A. Cook, who also served as anthropologist and photographer. So that they could conduct their research properly, the Belgica had been outfitted with what an effusive Boston Transcript writer described as “a splendid collection of the most modern scientific instruments.”1 With this team of scientists, as well as so much equipment and a spacious laboratory on board, there was little doubt that the expedition would make valuable contributions to better understanding this remote and little-visited region—one of the last frontiers on earth. The voyage's greatest obstacle would be encroaching ice. To avoid being caught in its steely grip, the Belgian ship was to head north to Australia after some preliminary exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula, take on new stores there, and then wait until spring before heading south again to resume its research. Wintering in the pack was out of the question. Around Antarctica stretched a vast, impenetrable girdle of ice, and the chances of surviving in it for long—without food or chance of escape—were slim to none. “No man ever wintered on the Antarctic continent, and no quadruped, like the bear and the wolf and the musk ox of the Arctic, lives in this frigid zone,” pointed out one American newspaper.

  But the truth was that the thirty-one-year-old de Gerlache was not steering the Belgica so far south in the name of science. He had a secret ambition. Instead of avoiding the ice and seeking a safe haven, he intended to plow through floes until his ship could go no farther, and then remain there through the winter, encased as in a tomb, until the ice finally cracked apart in the spring. From there he woul
d be in an excellent position to navigate through open water and accomplish what he really wanted to do—set a new “Farthest South” record. This historic feat would make him overnight a national hero: a vessel proudly flying Belgium's tricolor flag and captained by one of its own naval officers would have eclipsed those of larger nations in approaching the bottom of the world. To make this mark, spending a winter icebound off Antarctica's coast was a small price to pay, and de Gerlache had no second thoughts about doing so. He was enthralled by the prospect of the glory that awaited him, of being the first to go where no other ever had. As he would later write, “Everything was wild, sterile and bare, and yet it was also all ours, because we had discovered it.”2

  The Belgian commander was not the only one on board with a secret agenda. Cook, a Columbia-trained physician, had joined the expedition in Rio de Janeiro at the last minute—supposedly to look after the crew's health, but, in fact, to fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting the Antarctic.3 Exploration was his abiding passion. He had no real training as an anthropologist or keen interest in conducting scientific investigations. Roald Amundsen, the ship's first mate, was an intensely ambitious but untested explorer, who had come along to learn more about how to captain a ship and survive in the brutal polar environment. (Amundsen was the only other person on board who wanted to continue southward even if that meant wintering in the ice.) He considered science merely a necessary evil—what polar expeditions had to do in order to obtain funding.4 Even one of the scientists on the Belgica had doubts about his work being worthwhile. Emil Racoviță, the well-to-do Romanian biologist who would go on to become one of the world's leading experts on cave life, amused himself during the icebound months by making cartoonish sketches of his colleagues’ obsessive note-taking.5

  In fact, the Belgica expedition was rent by confusion about its rationale and by internal dissension from the moment it left Antwerp. In his coat pocket de Gerlache carried no instructions from the Belgian government, which had contributed a considerable sum to help finance this voyage.6 Nor did any of the scientists or officers have a clear idea of what their duties might be. No one at the Belgian Geographical Society had mapped out the route that the captain, Georges Lecointe, was to take. So changes of course and stops along the way were decided on the spur of the moment. Along the South American coast, the officers elected to linger and enjoy the sights. De Gerlache was so bedazzled by the fantastical icebergs they passed south of Tierra del Fuego that he paid little attention to organizational details. The officers and scientists were given so much free rein to pursue their own projects that the head scientist, Henryk Arctowski, worried the situation on board might devolve into “anarchy.”7 He had had intimations of such an outcome when shipboard discipline had broken down on several earlier occasions: one sailor had refused to leave his bunk to help prevent the Belgica from colliding with King Leopold's yacht in Ostende harbor; two other sailors went AWOL, got drunk, and never returned to the ship; later, the Swedish cook was let go after starting a fight in Montevideo; and another sailor was fired for refusing to help load supplies. The crew grew so volatile that Lecointe, a former artillery officer, took to carrying a pistol at all times.8 During an extended stopover at the tip of South America, de Gerlache had to ask Chilean authorities to rein in some unruly sailors. These ugly incidents left the expedition party dangerously shorthanded and divided.9

  Compounding this unruliness was an alarming lack of seamanship: some of the crew had never been on the open ocean before; almost all on board, starting with the captain, suffered daily from the “openly acknowledged pastime” of seasickness; an engineer was summarily put ashore on the coast of South America after he let one of the boilers run dry; the Belgica ran aground twice—once near the capital of Tierra del Fuego and a second time as they were gliding between icebergs in January, when the ship nearly sank; and a “misunderstood command” to the engine room caused it to slam into a berg.10 Meanwhile, the conflicting objectives of this poorly planned voyage created more problems. De Gerlache's insistence on spending more time on Tierra del Fuego—combined with Cook's fascination with a local indigenous tribe—delayed the expedition's departure until after the New Year, increasing the odds that the Belgica would eventually become trapped by ice. As they continued on southward, astonishment at the strange beauty of the monstrous bergs that rose ghostlike out of the fog mixed with dread over the threat they posed. Even more disquieting was the crew's growing unease over having left their familiar world behind and entered this alien and forbidding realm—what they increasing regarded as a “place of horror and catastrophe.”11

  Cook, the most literate and observant member of the party, expressed what others were thinking when the gigantic land mass of Antarctica first rose before their eyes. “Everything about us had another-worldly appearance,” he would recall. “The scenery, the life, the clouds, the atmosphere, the water—everything wore an air of mystery.”12 Every thrust forward took them that much further into the desolate unknown. Like Odysseus's crew harkening to the Sirens, they were being drawn irresistibly toward a fatal danger, with home and loved ones now “out of all possible reach for months, perhaps for years, and possibly forever.” And still de Gerlache ordered Lecointe to press on, disregarding the pleas of his scientists to turn back before it was too late. He was obsessed by his own heroic image: “We seemed to be entering a different world, one where, like the heroes of Scandinavian myth, we were being subjected to supernatural trials and labours by terrifying gods. And was it not indeed a new world we were penetrating then, not to deliver some slumbering Valkyrie but to wrest a few of its jealously guarded secrets from the pristine Antarctic?”13 But these secrets were not about to be revealed. After reaching 71.30 degrees south, on March 2, 1898, the jaunty, white-hulled barque, with its cobweb of limp rigging and impertinent little yellow smokestack, ground ignominiously to a halt, surrounded by a sheet of fresh, rapidly spreading ice, and no frantic exertions of her 35-horsepower steam engine could budge it. Now the Belgica was truly, as even de Gerlache had to concede, a “prisoner of the ice.”14 At the ends of the earth, the march of civilization had ground to an ignominious halt.

  The party was woefully unprepared for a protracted Antarctic sojourn. De Gerlache had neglected to provide the men with winter clothing, so they had to stitch together crude coats out of wool blankets. For sustenance, they would have to depend on canned food—enough to last a year if they were prudent, but not any longer. This tasteless diet (supplemented now and then by fresh seal and penguin meat), unchanging scenery, idleness, and ever-present anxiety about the Belgica being crushed by the ice induced a malaise. “Little by little, the members of the Expedition became, body and soul, affected with languor,” noted de Gerlache.15 After gradually growing fainter, the sun slipped out of sight for good on May 17th, leaving the scientists, officers, and crew in utter darkness for the next two months. Deprived of light, their skin turned greenish-yellow and oily. With their rations cut, the men weakened, had constant headaches, and could not sleep. Many came down with scurvy, but couldn't stomach the raw, greasy seal meat that would cure it. They read and reread books on navigation and lighthouses, played whist, listened to records, told stale jokes—anything to break the monotony. They ached like teenagers for a glimpse of a woman.16

  With no hope of liberation for months, the mood on board soured. Men withdrew into their thoughts and brooded. Cook detected a deepening despair: “The curtain of blackness which has fallen over the outer world of icy desolation has also descended upon the inner world of our souls. Around the tables, in the laboratory, and in the forecastle, men are sitting about sad and dejected, lost in dreams of melancholy from which, now and then, one arouses with an empty attempt at enthusiasm.”17 With all of de Gerlache's dreams of drifting closer to the pole completely dashed, all he and his crew could do was hope they could stay alive until they were set free.

  As was amply illustrated by the fate of the Belgica, hopes that expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic
would demonstrate human mastery over the entire planet were all too often dashed. In fact, the history of this exploration is largely one of unmitigated frustration, disappointment, failure, and defeat, only occasionally interspersed with remarkable milestones such as navigating the Northwest Passage and “discovering” the two poles. One problem was the polar environment itself. Its climate, barrenness, remoteness, and unpredictable nature defied attempts to inhabit it. But the clash between explorers and this strange world was but part of a larger conflict between expectations and reality, between ambitions and accomplishments, between actions and outcomes, that confounded the Western world in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In fact, the setbacks and disasters that explorers experienced in the polar ice foreshadowed the disillusionment with civilization's inevitable progress that would occur decades later, as a result of naïve ideological experiments and devastating world wars.

  As was the case on board the Belgica, some of these debilitating clashes arose from conflicting reasons for going so far north or south in the first place. Others resulted from trying to view this alien kingdom through ill-fitting and inadequate lenses and thus failing to engage it on its own terms. And still others came about because the explorers could not bring themselves to discard the values and practices that they considered superior and invincible and adapt to the new demands of the Arctic and Antarctic. Altering this deeply ingrained outlook was particularly difficult for nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans because they adhered to a moral outlook and code of conduct that were not easily modified. The explorers were predisposed to view the world in binary terms. Everything was defined in opposition to something else: man versus Nature; “civilized” versus “barbaric”; Christians versus “heathens”; gentlemen versus “lower classes”; men versus women. But at the top and bottom of the world, these distinctions lost relevance or became counterproductive.