the Eucharist. When the ceremony is over, he and his companions hoist the mast and sail. They take hold of the oars and set off. On their return journey, they are carried by favourable winds that bring them home without incident.7
Brendan’s epic was copied hundreds of times between the ninth and the thirteenth century, a real bestseller. Today’s commentators believe that the travelling monks saw an iceberg floating off the coast of Iceland. They would have entered the straits where icebergs calve off the coastal glaciers of Greenland.
At the time Church and Noble were travelling, icebergs were, in the European imagination, sometimes the ancestors of a geological age, sometimes creatures in the service of a sacred history. In both cases, they are icons of the sublime. Our narrator and the painter are not the only ones to see ‘floating mountains’ in the ocean, or cathedrals, ruins of lost cities, winding avenues, and sometimes even the face of the Creator. When ships are icebound, there is plenty of time to observe the landscape, and at such moments the romantic mind opens its toolbox and chooses the most expressive aides.
Thomas M’Keevor served in 1812 as the physician for the Selkirk settlers in the Red River Colony in Canada. In a short travelogue, he expresses his fascination for the icebergs adorning Hudson Bay. Some of them, he wrote,
bear a very close resemblance to an ancient abbey with arched doors and windows, and all the rich embroidery of the Gothic style of architecture; while others assume the appearance of a Grecian temple supported by round massive columns of an azure hue, which at a distance looked like the purest mountain granite . . . The spray of the ocean, which dashes against these mountains, freezes into an infinite variety of forms and gives to the spectator ideal towers, streets, churches, steeples, and in fact every shape which the most romantic imagination could picture to itself.8
This description is already in the style of Louis Legrand Noble! It shows that icebergs have been perceived, in the Western world, as a real production in the amphitheatre of the most unbridled reveries. We all have the faculty of imagination in common. The five Labrador Inuit shown around London by Captain George Cartwright in 1772 thought St Paul’s Cathedral was a mountain. They mistook the bridge over the Thames for some kind of stone structure. Those from Avannaa who landed with the explorer Robert Peary in New York in 1887 were struck by the resemblance of the first skyscrapers in Manhattan to icebergs. Each, in its own way, mixes ‘the natural and the architectural’.9 The metaphorical gaze, transposing one environment into another, is no less a characteristic of the Romantic spirit. Western travellers are wordsmiths. They make sentences. They chase the wildest of associations and spend their time imagining something other than what they see. They enter imaginary palaces vicariously and experience feelings of grandeur. It is as if they have promised to bring back postcards from these strange worlds.
Lonely spectres
In the wake of Franklin’s tragedy, the far North and then the far South became obsessions that ran throughout the second half of the nineteenth century until the 1920s. Everyone had unique experiences in these icy latitudes. They are sometimes exhilarating, but always exhausting. And the closer one gets to the poles, the more dramatic they become.
Before embarkation, the explorers are full of enthusiasm. They dream of sea ice and icebergs. Roald Amundsen decided to follow in Sir John Franklin’s footsteps because he had spent his nights, as a child, trying to find the Northwest Passage. Every morning, on awakening, he steeled himself to endure any hardship. His colleague Ernest Henry Shackleton tells of his dream in which he sees himself, at the age of twenty-two, on the deck of a ship in the Atlantic, his eyes in thrall to the snow and ice. His sole aim is to reach one of the planetary poles.10 Frank Worsley imagines that he is sailing among drifting icebergs on Burlington Street, London, where Shackleton had set up an office to audition candidates for the position of captain of the Endurance. Next thing, he was recruited.
These desires to conquer knew no bounds. But the enthusiasm of initial dreams does not last. Reality is a quite different thing. In his 2012 Atlas of an Anxious Man, the Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr recounts how he discovered the Arctic territories twenty years after writing the novel The Terrors of Ice and Darkness. Yet it is difficult to find a better description of the torments endured by polar explorers.
The text combines the records of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Arctic Expedition of 1872–1874 with the fictional tribulations of Josef Mazzini, a young man who retraces the journey many years later. Ransmayr relies heavily on the diary of Julius von Payer, a cartographer and a first-class ensign who was also the land-based commander of the expedition that set out to find the Northeast Passage.
The crew left the German locks at Geestemünde on 13 June 1872 on the Admiral Tegetthoff, a three-masted schooner, heading for the North Cape and then the Pole. While on the train heading to the port of embarkation, they thought they were bound to discover an island beyond the frozen desert. Sitting in comfort, they imagined green valleys, wild reindeer, a world of freedom and life without cares. So, when they finally get there, their disillusionment will be even greater. Payer notes at the outset that
an indescribable solitude lies over these snow-clad mountains . . . When ebb and flood do not lift the groaning and straining drift ice, when the sighing wind is not brushing across the stony chinks, the stillness of death lies upon the ghostly pale landscape. People speak of the solemn silence of the forest, of the desert, even of a city wrapped in night. But what a silence lies over such a land and its cold glaciered mountains lost in impenetrable, vaporous distances – its very existence must remain, so it seems, a mystery for all time . . . A man dies at the North Pole, alone, fades like a will-o’-the-wisp, while a simple sailor lifts the keen and a grace of ice and stones waits for him outside.11
The ship is soon frozen in the ice. It is transformed into a ghastly cabin. Their ordeal begins. For months they live in a ‘a world totally alien’, threatened by erosive activity that constantly refashions the snow. Silence is short-lived. The noise of the ice floe becomes permanent. Even its more delicate variations obsess them. Sometimes icebergs ‘break with a burst of selfdestructive thunder under the glow of the sun’s rays . . .’; sometimes ‘ice dies with a hiss like a flame.’12
The sailors struggle against the pressures that open up dangerous cracks around their ship. They battle against these wide gaps with trunks of oak from the ship, which ‘turns, sinks and rises’ in the chaos of the ice particles. They experience periods of whiteness during which there are no forms, no contrasts, no objects and no colours. The ice absorbs everything. Their exchanges are reduced to a few inaudible monosyllables and mumblings.
They keep themselves fit as much as they can, with a strict discipline. They have a clear schedule which prescribes regular physical exercise. They read a lot. But the ice does not loosen its grip. They decide to join a floe that is drifting. During their journey they come across a ‘massive, rubble-covered iceberg’. The moment is sublime because ‘these were the first stones and boulders we had seen in a long time, limestone and argillaceous schist.’ For the sailors, these are ‘emissaries’ from a nearby land. They pick up debris and feel nostalgic for paradises lost as the iceberg disappears into the mist. A few days later, on 30 August 1873, a shoreline appears, and they name it after their king, Franz Josef.13
One passage in Payer’s diary is very moving. It is the one where he lays bare their collective disappointment. One day, in a brief moment of insight, the crew members realised that ‘the “North Pole” [is] not a country, not an empire to be conquered, nothing but lines intersecting at a point, nothing of which can be seen in reality!’14 Many felt this way in the second half of the nineteenth century. North Pole explorers were coveting an invisible place. They tried to locate it with the help of cartography and deductive logic. But the absurd competition between nations turned their desire for adventure into a chimera.
What value can a goal have when one can’t see it? Why reach for a geometric, purely abstract goal when snowy winds sweep across the ice, temperatures turn the body’s extremities blue, one’s own breath freezes, and