And beginning with Scott’s first expedition (Discovery), the desire to reach the South Pole (or for some, the south magnetic pole) or to traverse the continent was a fundamental objective to most of the exploring parties. All this—an exotic destination, a traverse that would provide a cross-section of the continent, a preoccupation with geographic inquiry—was in keeping with the tradition of continental exploration that had emerged over the previous century.
Interestingly, two of the earliest nations to engage in Antarctic exploration, Russia and the United States, were absent. Tsarist Russia was preoccupied with wars, revolution, and an Arctic sea-route to Siberia; the United States was preoccupied with the insular empire it had newly acquired from war with Spain, with Alaskan gold, and with an old tradition of Arctic exploration stemming from the Franklin searches of Elisha Kent Kane and Charles Francis Hall and from the tragic sufferings of the Greeley Expedition to Greenland during the First Polar Year. In 1902 the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh proposed to collect specimens in the Antarctic Peninsula, and in 1909 the American Philosophical Society authorized a committee to promote an American expedition to Wilkes Land, an idea that received the blessing of President Roosevelt; but nothing came of either suggestion. Instead the race for the North Pole, vividly personified in the demonic Robert Peary, commanded national attention. When Peary later campaigned in 1912 for an American expedition to winter at the South Pole—the logistics for which were “only a matter of detail”—other expeditions were already en route to the pole and there was little enthusiasm within the scientific community.19
Yet Antarctica was not Africa or Australia or the Americas or even the Arctic. It was not simply a more forbidding continent but an almost extraterrestrial presence. Once an exploring party passed the coast, there was nothing to stand between it and the purely physical systems that comprised Antarctica. There was no ecosystem, however threatening, that could sustain an explorer. There was no native culture, maritime or terrestrial, that could guide, inform, or assist. No pilots from the indigenous culture of seafarers would navigate a ship through the pack ice. No guides would direct overland parties to new villages, water holes, or trails. No interpreters would intercede between the emissaries of Western civilization and native populations. No native hunters would 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,