is fooled.
There is great power in these utopias of the far North and the far South. The years pass, the expeditions multiply, and so do the disasters. Despite some success, with each surge of national pride, catastrophes follow in their wake. Journeys to both ends of the world are transformed into funeral processions. The hulls of sailing ships may be lined and reinforced, but they are sheared with the crushing force of pieces of pack ice; terrible shipwrecks are the result. When they do escape, the ships are immobilised in the pack. Ice saws and gunpowder are useless. The vice is still closing. The officers find that their uniforms are unsuitable for the cold, that their bodies are rapidly weakening, and that they have not brought enough food with them. How can one resist such a hostile environment? With a few exceptions, the indigenous arts of survival are completely unknown to them. Entire crews leave and never come back. In European capitals docks are crowded with people awaiting their return in vain. Newspapers make headlines out of every drama the adventurers have. They increase their print runs. Sales skyrocket. Readers are hooked on sensation. Meanwhile, the pack becomes a land of ghosts.
The higher the latitude of the ships, the more the ice changes its form. Metaphors are of no use in estimating their volume or for describing their admirable variety. Icebergs can take on the features of tragic characters. They transcribe spectral atmospheres, not in glorious solitude but with the anguish of isolation. The ice tests the explorers’ nervous systems. In their notebooks, they write down their inner states. They repeat the same phrases, use the same words, experience the same feelings. When the imagination luxuriates, it is a surface effect.
They all tell their life stories. They explain the reasons that drove them to these fractured lands. They try to justify their mission’s failure and the collapse of their dreams. Silent remembrances rise from the depths of memory. The sailors note down their bizarre dreams, the hallucinations that have afflicted them, and other experiences that they have had of a supernatural character, such as yeti-like figures coming out of the fog. They are spectres, not ‘rational actors in a wild region’.15 Those who return to safety rarely return to a normal life. They become famous. But most of them are broken. The weaknesses of heroism come to light. The ice is the mausoleum of conquering nations.
A story about skulls
The young Arthur Conan Doyle is in his third year of medical school in Edinburgh. For a taste of adventure, he breaks off his studies and embarks for a few months on the whaling ship Hope. From February to August 1880, he sails between Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Spitsbergen. He is horrified to discover what the whale hunters did. He describes the thick fogs, and several times he falls into the cold waters. Luckily, he escapes. The experience leaves its mark. In his diary, he writes about the ‘other-world feeling’ that he experienced from the very first moments, and which never left him. This other-worldly feeling haunted him with the power of an obsession.16 The budding writer did not return unscathed from his journey beyond the Arctic Circle.
In polar environments, perhaps more than anywhere else, metaphors are used as a means of orientation in an uncertain context. The captains use them, of course, to decorate the notes in their logbooks. But deep down they know that they are lifelines that help sailors to keep their minds on the job. The eye does not capture everything in front of icebergs drifting in the ocean. Such volumes seem immovable. Yet they are versatile and fleeting. Icebergs weaken the consciousness as soon as they appear. They thwart one’s intentions because they do not correspond to objects that are easy to identify. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes that, in everyday life, metaphor generally expresses ‘the need to incorporate, as part of the total causal system, even the most surprising event, bordering on a supposed “miracle”.’17
An iceberg emerging from the mist has all the features of a miracle.
It is inexplicable: how can one describe it? The appearance of a mass on the water, the memory of the moment when it broke away from a glacier, its immense dimensions, the fear of a collision, all these elements ‘disturb’ one’s habits. The mind feels the need to find clearer and more stable meanings. It must be able to fill its confusion. Metaphors help it to rationalise its ‘situation of need’.18 They domesticate the feeling of ‘the uncanny’, as Sigmund Freud put it, that icebergs inspire. They tame the irrational part of the sublime feeling, when nature is frightening. Their role is to re-establish, as far as possible, an unequivocal, or at least a more reassuring, order of understanding. For this reason, the iceberg gives rise to many metaphors. It also becomes the ideal partner for inner conversations. Everyone recognises their own image in it. On the condition that we admit its finitude. But in what way exactly?
Walter Benjamin closely studied the use of allegory in Baroque drama. He interprets this figure as the language of the creature separated from its origin by the original sin. No transcendence governs its existence any more. No salvation is possible. Everything is frozen. With the allegory, history itself becomes crystallised. The ‘observer is confronted with . . . a petrified primordial landscape.’19 In the history of art, baroque allegories do not present themselves with harmonious lines, as symbols of eternity. They show skulls. The skull is the face of time.
The polar romantic spirit extends and interprets the content of baroque allegory in its own way. An iceberg floating alone carries the spleen of the fragile human condition. In the nineteenth century, many explorers and less adventurous travellers internalised this feeling. Their metaphors reflect this. Icebergs become gigantic skulls. For the fallen conquerors, these blocks are princely figures in an archaic setting. They illustrate the vanity of mankind, like personal tombs that anticipate a collective disaster. They themselves are destined to be destroyed and are glaciers in mourning. They bear witness to the glacier’s slow death. As they calve, the fragments reveal the meaning of the whole. They express the evolution of a world on the threshold of catastrophe.
In the end, icebergs are fascinating because they embody a series of insoluble paradoxes. They give rise to hope as much as to despair. Their solid forms say, first of all, that they will last. They arouse a desire for permanence. Then they erode, showing that they are destined to fall apart. The block is ephemeral. On the one hand, it sculpts itself, changing its appearance in a short time. Its ability to reinvent itself is captivating. On the other hand, it reminds us of the fleeting nature of existence, impeding any real consolation.
The romantic spirit is sometimes euphoric, sometimes inconsolable. It combines exaltation and sadness, the passion for the grandiose and the allegorically natural. It admires monumental nature and contemplates death. It always sees icebergs as something other than what they are: contours and proportions that evoke familiar faces, animal profiles, the silhouettes of buildings, or even skulls. In the middle of the polar oceans, everyone interprets their morphological diversity through the prism of their desires or concerns. Sometimes they know that the causes of their changing aesthetics lie elsewhere: winds, currents, collisions, warm waters. Perhaps they even suspect that without ice there would be no humanity, or any other life.
But icebergs capture all the metaphors and reflect them back without absorbing them. They are the mirrors of personal histories as much as of myths of conquest. They exacerbate the constantly self-reflective sensibility of the Moderns.20 The aesthetics of the sublime is an aesthetics of humans who speak to other humans.
Mirror, my beautiful mirror
Church and Noble’s journey is over.
More than a century later, a professional sailor is sailing in the Southern Ocean. His mind is made up: he leaves the first run of the solo round-the-world race in March 1968. It didn’t matter that he had a good chance of winning. He left the competition because he wanted to follow his own path, away from ‘civilisation’ and all its fakery. Using a home-made slingshot, he fires a brief message onto the deck of an anchored oil tanker: ‘I am continuing non-stop to the Pacific Islands, because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul.’21 Despite his melancholy, he moves even further away from his family and friends and ventures towards Cape Horn and the Pacific, towards the Galápagos