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 first time it became integral rather than marginal to a new era of discovery. It found conceptual ties with other uninhabited (or uninhabitable) regions in the solar system, witnessed the invention of new techniques for penetrating The Ice, and posed immense, often unprecedented legal and geopolitical questions.
The first empirical work of discovery around Antarctica, the second of Cook’s celebrated voyages (1772–1775), put the hypothetical southern continent center stage in exploration. Curiously, already the abstract and intellectual attributes of Antarctica were apparent, for Cook’s objective was to prove or disprove the existence of the continent. “You are to proceed upon farther Discoveries … keeping in as high a Latitude as you can, & prosecuting your discoveries as near to the South Pole as possible,” his “secret instructions” read, “in further Search of the said Continent….”4 But Cook’s voyages were themselves a transitional event in the evolution of the exploring tradition of the West, and it is worth examining the nature of this metamorphosis for what it reveals about the relationship of Antarctica to Western civilization.
Captain James Cook was the most prominent of a swarm of eighteenth-century circumnavigators who brought to a culmination an era of predominantly maritime exploration which had its origins in Renaissance Europe. More than their mere fact or the data they shipped back to an awestruck Europe, those voyages set in motion a social dynamic: exploration became an institution, the explorer a role. There are many ways by which one culture can learn about other lands and peoples. But exploration—as an institution, a concept, and a tradition—is apparently an invention of Western civilization, and it appeared, not accidentally, with that other Western invention, modern science. By themselves, the voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were logical successors to centuries of European travel, trade, conquest, and seafaring. The exploits of Alexander the Great, for example, may be thought of as a kind of exploration by conquest; the sudden acquisition of lands, wealth, exotic peoples, and knowledge created problems in intellectual and geopolitical assimilation identical to those posed by the voyages of the Renaissance. The Hellenistic synthesis achieved by the Alexandrian school, symbolized by the school’s magnificent library, is an archetype for the information explosions that would typically follow future eras of discovery.
Yet the pattern in the fifteenth century was different, too. Other times and other peoples had experienced challenges similar to that posed by Alexander in the ancient world without becoming the basis for a world system. By contrast, the process set in motion by the European voyages of discovery was a process of world discovery, and it would result in a single world geography. It established a unique activity, exploration, and it created a unique if syncretic role, that of the explorer. A composite of old activities and preexisting technologies, the result was, like modern science, peculiarly new. Geographic discovery, the articulation of a scientific philosophy, a religious reformation, a rebirth of trade, art, and maritime city-states—all reinforced each other to make the nation-states of modern Europe different from the tribal entities and empires of antiquity, the scientific outlook distinct from earlier natural philosophies, and the process of discovery something curiously different from travel, adventure, pilgrimage, and trade.
In a sense, there was one world to be discovered, and Europe would discover it. Other periods of travel and exploration had had a self-arresting, ethnocentric quality. But this new era had a self-reinforcing mechanism that continually thrust outward and would, sooner rather than later, absorb European civilization as it did other societies. It would challenge the explorer as much as the explored. The events surrounding the first great voyages set in motion a dynamic of exploration—tied on one hand to the geopolitics of European expansion and on the other to the equally aggressive principles of modern science—that would prove irreversible. Although in some ways a model for the new empirical sciences, especially in its challenge to authoritative texts of the ancients and to Holy Scripture, geographic discovery was a beneficiary of the new philosophy. Experimental science was limited only by the ingenuity and technology of its practitioners; the limitations on the growth of knowledge lay in society, not in nature. Unlike geographic exploration on the traditional model, the experimental philosophy did not depend on the availability of new lands and new peoples.
The great vehicle for European discovery was the ship. Exploration was predominantly maritime, intimately bound to the founding of coastal cities, the development of oceanic empires, and the mapping of the world’s coastlines. Its outstanding revelation was the unity of the world’s oceans; its grand expression, a voyage of circumnavigation; and its intellectual achievement, a mappa mundi of the Earth’s coastlines. The process began with the interior seas of Europe, then spread into the Atlantic and beyond. The Mediterranean and the Baltic were themselves composites of smaller seas, seas dotted with islands large and small and joined by straits of greater and lesser significance. No continent has a higher ratio of coastline to land mass than Europe, although North America has an analogous system of interior seas with the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and Hudson Bay. Not surprisingly, Europe’s outward expansion came by water, beginning with the hybridization of Europe’s northern (Baltic) and southern (Mediterranean) seafaring traditions.
Seafaring and the establishment of maritime empires were not unique to Europe. As J. H. Parry has observed, there were