style="font-size:15px;"> 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
