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
