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.
