An epoch of exploration had survived in the distant wastes of The Ice, but in much the same way that the twilight wedge preserves the refracted rays of the setting sun. The heroic age passed with remarkable suddenness.
The premier Antarctic adventurer, Ernest Shackleton, obtained a private sponsor, a ship christened Quest, and his old first mate, Frank Wild, in an attempt to revive Antarctic exploration after World War I with an expedition to Wilkes Land in 1921–1922. Unfortunately, the strain of command and a series of severe storms encountered by the Quest as it steered toward the pack from South Georgia aggravated a heart condition, and Shackleton, at age forty-seven, died before reaching The Ice. Dispirited, the crew persisted in a troubled, desultory attempt to find worthy projects before more storms forced them to retire altogether from the Antarctic. It had been the man and the myth more than the place that had attracted the exploring party. The Antarctic had not beckoned, it had been sought out. Chroniclers might well have echoed Starbuck in the final drama of Moby-Dick. “Oh! Ahab…. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!”25 Melville’s Ahab represented the demonic side of the era’s restless searching, as Tennyson’s Ulysses showed its nobler side. But by the 1920s neither dimension was present. The heroic age drifted away—an aimless Quest, a Pequod stripped of both its Ahab and its Moby Dick, a Ulysses buried at South Georgia.
Only a decade earlier the scene had been quite different. When Scott’s party perished on The Ice, one by one, the tragedy could evoke the full-blown sentiment and rhetoric of an era; Scott’s final words, entered painfully in his diary, could be quoted for their lessons on how an English gentleman lived, strived, and died. The heroic age was then at its climax, the last grand expression of an era of Western exploration. It had literally reached the ends of the Earth. Chroniclers like Cherry-Garrard and Scott himself were suitably prepared to explicate the meaning of Antarctic exploration, if not the meaning of The Ice itself. The Oxford Book of English Verse and the Collected Poems of Robert Service would be carried to The Ice, just as a few years hence they would be buried in Flanders fields. What transpired on Antarctica seemed like a fantasy, an optical trick of the polar desert, a superior mirage that had cast a distant image from another place and time high into the unblinking Antarctic sky.
The survivors of the Terra Nova expedition erected a jarrahwood cross atop Observation Hill, near the site of the Discovery hut on Ross Island. On it they carved the closing lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—words written a few years before Darwin ventured forth on the Beagle and Humboldt first dreamed of summarizing the whole realm of physical knowledge through a geographic compilation he called Cosmos, sentiments published the same year the Wilkes expedition returned to the United States. Its choice was perhaps more suitable than the Terra Nova expedition realized. Tennyson had transformed a wanderer into an explorer, a yearning for home into a passion for knowledge, a struggle against fate into an obsession for struggle and a refusal to accept the limits of geography, time, or experience. Reshaping a pagan hero from classical antiquity into a Romantic explorer, Tennyson symbolized how the neoclassical world of the Enlightenment, with its rational codifications and attachment to “useful knowledge,” had been overwhelmed and expanded into something larger. Perhaps something too large. No one could romanticize the death of Cook as the survivors could romanticize the death of Scott. Their selection of the poem as a testimonial to the South Pole Party signified the intellectual continuity that the Terra Nova expedition shared with the whole character of discovery that had emerged after Cook. But by the time the Quest reached the pack, leaderless and purposeless, that succession had been broken. Sailing beyond the sunset had only brought the survivors to The Ice.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
. . . . . . . . . . .
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Vital Interlude: Richard E. Byrd
When interest in Antarctica revived, it did so in ways that modernized traditional expeditions and purposes. Beginning in 1923, Norwegian whalers resuscitated the mixture of commercial activity, exploration, and territorial claim-making that had typified much of nineteenth-century discovery. They also attempted to relocate Antarctic whaling from the peninsula to the Ross Sea, a move made possible by the development of pelagic whaling. Between 1926 and 1937, the firm of Lars Christiansen was preeminent. In 1931 Capt. Riiser-Larsen made the first circumnavigation of the continent since Wilkes and Ross. During the same period two major oceanographic surveys entered the Southern Ocean. Germany’s Meteor expedition (1925–1927), intent on studying the physical properties of the Atlantic, introduced a new state of sophistication into research around the Antarctic, including the use of an echo sounder, the first of the remote-sensing devices so crucial to later Antarctic exploration. More sustained and productive were the expeditions of the Discovery Committee (1925–1939), organized by Great Britain to conduct oceanographic research in the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Much of the work was biological—a program of whale conservation was an objective—but the study of submarine geography and the definition of the Southern Ocean were also important consequences. For the continent proper, however, the big story was the trilogy of expeditions that ventured to the Antarctic coast and interior—the Wilkins-Hearst expedition, the first Byrd Antarctic Expedition, and the British-Australian-New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) under Antarctic veteran Mawson.
In one sense, these activities only reconfirmed the traditional parameters of Antarctic exploration. In another sense, however, they collectively signalled a slow reformation, one that involved new technology, new participants, and a new cultural context. The most visible change was the introduction of aircraft. Virtually every commentator on polar exploration—from Cherry-Garrard to Peary—believed that the airplane was the vehicle of the future. The Wilkins-Hearst expedition (1928–1930), which ventured toward the peninsula for two austral summers, inaugurated the process with a flight in December 1928. Within ten weeks, the first Byrd Antarctic Expedition—the whole strategy of which centered around the use of three aircraft—began its flights from the Bay of Whales, on the west side of the Ross Ice Shelf.
Airplanes were not the first machines in the Antarctic, however; the heroic age, after all, had been predicated on the steamship, which made possible routine navigation through the pack. Shackleton, Mawson, and Scott had all experimented with tractors in lieu of dogs and horses, and Mawson had brought a radio and a propeller-driven air sledge. Scott and Drygalski had used captive balloons. But these devices had all been intended to supplement overland traverses on the Arctic model. It was otherwise with the airplane. Once introduced, it progressively dominated the mechanics, composition, and purposes of Antarctic exploration. The appearance on The Ice of a mechanized society was accelerated by the transfer to civilian pursuits of technologies developed under the impress of World War I. And not merely machines but new perspectives were being brought to bear on the question of Antarctic discovery. It is no accident, for example, that Buckminster Fuller published his dymaxion air chart the same year that Wilkins and Byrd first flew over Antarctica.
The new generation of Antarcticans were aviators in search of exploits—Antarctic Lindberghs—as much as explorers eager to seize upon novel tools for geographic discovery. Hubert Wilkins wanted to realize Shackleton’s old ambition to cross the continent, though he proposed to do it by plane. An Australian who had Arctic experience and a veteran of the Quest expedition, Wilkins planned to fly from the Antarctic Peninsula to the Ross Sea. Twice he failed—once in 1928 and again in 1930—but he flew over large portions of Graham Land and took many aerial photographs. (Later, Wilkins unsuccessfully tried to complement his flights over the Arctic and Antarctic by passing under both regions in a rickety submarine, the Nautilus.) Meanwhile, the British–Australian–New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition under Mawson remained along the coast of East Antarctica. Although flights were made, high winds prevented