To the Edges of the Earth Read online

  Dedication

  TO MY WIFE,

  LUCY,

  WITH LOVE

  Maps

  Arctic Explorations Toward the North Pole with Robert Peary’s 1908–09 Route

  British Antarctic Expedition with Ernest Shackleton and Douglas Mawson’s 1907–09 Routes

  Portion of the Karakoram Range (Western Himalaya) with the Duke of the Abruzzi’s 1909 Routes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Preface: The Wonderful Year 1909

  Chapter 1

  The Aristocracy of Adventure, Circa 1909

  Chapter 2

  The Audacity of Adventure, Circa 1909

  Chapter 3

  The Allure of Adventure, Circa 1909

  Chapter 4

  The Great Game

  Chapter 5

  The Peary Way

  Chapter 6

  Beyond the Screaming Sixties

  Chapter 7

  The Savage North

  Chapter 8

  Poles Apart

  Chapter 9

  On Top of the World

  Chapter 10

  The Third Pole

  Chapter 11

  Returnings

  Epilogue

  The Last Biscuit

  Notes

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Author

  Also by Edward J. Larson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  The Wonderful Year 1909

  THE ADVENTURES DESCRIBED IN these pages carried the dreams of the multitudes in Europe, America, and Australia. “Never in the history of modern exploration have efforts so widespread and persistent as those of the present been made to uncover the mysteries of the unknown parts of the world,” the New York Times commented in 1908. “Two explorers are seeking to solve the riddle of the North Pole. Four parties have in view the ice-capped continent of the Antarctic. . . . In the heart of Asia are impenetrable mountain ranges and vast deserts still unknown to modern geographers.”1 With the adventure-enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt in the White House and the like-minded though less active Edward VII reigning over Britain’s far-flung imperial domains, new technologies easing access to remote places, and empire in vogue, explorers vied to reach places that previously seemed unattainable. Three unclaimed poles became the ultimate goals: the North Pole, the South Pole, and the so-called Pole of Altitude in the Himalayas, with the second sometimes divided into the south geographic and south magnetic poles. With fame assured to anyone bold enough to try and tough enough to succeed in reaching them, 1909 was shaping up as a climactic year in the modern age of adventure-based exploration.

  The expeditions of 1909 represented the culmination of long efforts in high latitudes and altitudes by explorers with notable track records. The lead American contender, Robert E. Peary, had mounted seven prior expeditions to the high Arctic, with the last three aimed squarely at the North Pole. British explorer Ernest Shackleton had tried once before for the South Pole. Then the most famous of the three, Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, the Italian Duke of the Abruzzi, had made widely hailed first ascents on three continents as a mountaineer and once led an Arctic expedition that set a farthest-north record. Australia’s premier field geologist, Edgeworth David, went along with Shackleton to try for the south magnetic pole, aided by future polar star Douglas Mawson. These were celebrities of the day chasing immortality at the edges of the earth.

  The explorer’s instinct was not new. It is probably as old as human life itself. Around 1500, with the emergence of improved navigation and surplus population, European explorers began probing far beyond their own well-known regions of the world. From Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Samuel de Champlain to James Cook, Lewis and Clark, and David Livingstone, to name but a few, Europeans and their transplanted progeny began exploring and colonizing long-inhabited lands across the globe. With Eurocentric pride, they called it “the Age of Exploration,” and so it was for them. Never before had one people traveled so far and so fast from its homeland and reestablished itself in so many places so quickly.

  With most of the world’s inhabited places explored if not colonized by Europeans by the nineteenth century, the high Arctic and remote mountainous regions gained a central place in the Western imagination. They became new places to explore. Realms of ice fascinated romantic poets, gothic novelists, adventure-seeking aristocrats, and the rising middle class. Popular nineteenth-century writers from Charles Dickens and Jules Verne to Edgar Allan Poe and A. Conan Doyle, drawing mainly on the long history of British efforts to find a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, adopted Arctic settings for some works. Amid scenes of icy desolation, they showed humans thrown back on their own resources in the face of a hostile or indifferent natural world. Other authors, especially poets, looked to the Alps for inspiration. The latter scene might be portrayed as sublime or even spiritual in a pantheistic way; the former inevitably was a frozen hell—at best a testing place for human fortitude, at worst a site of desperation, madness, and death. Climbers might find their god in the mountains; polar explorers rarely did in the endless expanse of arctic ice.

  In popular literature, the poles and high mountains exerted a strong and sometimes fatal attraction on heroes and antiheros alike. In the opening scene of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, for example, the young and impressionable protagonist slips into a deserted room and reads wistfully of “the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,—that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole.”2 In an oft-quoted sentence that would resonate with polar explorers and alpine mountaineers alike, the book later commented, “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”3 Mary Shelley begins her classic 1818 horror story, Frankenstein, with her infamous title character chasing his monstrous creation across the arctic ice toward their doom at the North Pole. In Persuasion, Jane Austen depicts a polar explorer’s homebound wife yearning to follow her husband to the Arctic. First-person narratives penned by returning Arctic explorers and extreme mountaineers sold as well as any novel during the Victorian era. They invariably related tales of struggle and sacrifice in the face of hostile natural forces beyond the bounds of civilized norms. Not all survived, and none ever attained the pole.

  Having grown up with such stories and narratives, by 1909, explorers of a new generation were better equipped than their Victorian predecessors to reach their elusive goals. The public hung on every word as a series of extreme expeditions reached for the earth’s still unexplored places. Their leaders became the lions of the season and the heroes of the age. By year’s end, the London Daily News could write in its annual review, The Wonderful Year 1909, “Few events of the year 1909 have created more interest than the return to civilization of the explorers who, for a time, had been lost to the world in their endeavours to solve the mystery of the Polar seas.”4

  Within half a decade, however, an all-consuming world war had created new fields for glory and pathos, coupled with an altered understanding of heroism. Subsequent cultural, economic, and political developments kept the focus elsewhere for most of the twentieth century. With climate change, however, the shrinking sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets had regained the attention of scientists, explorers, and the general public by the century’s end. Private yachts and cruise ships now ply the Northwest Passage and the Antarctic coast. Mountain glaciers serve as i
ndicators of global warming. The thinning of the Arctic sea ice opens new areas for commerce. Ice cores from the world’s remaining ice sheets offer evidence of past temperature swings and testify to the remarkable rapidity of the current warming. The regions that the exploring parties of 1909 discovered, long frozen in time, are changing before our eyes, giving new meaning to the old accounts.

  Conducting research in polar regions has always required collaboration, and this is true for my study of its history as well. This book especially benefited from my participation in the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which allowed me to go where the Antarctic explorers went, camp where they camped, and climb where they climbed. Always traveling with others, and frequently in the company of experts, through this program I saw much of what Shackleton, Mawson, and the other early visitors to the Ross Sea region saw, from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and Ross Ice Shelf to the South Pole and summit of Mount Erebus. Extended stays at Shackleton’s Cape Royds and near Scott’s Hut Point and Cape Evans, where the explorers’ primitive winter quarters remain intact down to their unused crates of hardtack biscuits and long-frozen meat in the larder, gave insight into how the parties lived beyond what I could hope to glean from archival research. Other trips took me to Elephant Island and the Antarctic Peninsula, the Himalayas, and the high Arctic above Norway and North America. Despite the changes of the past century, these coddled visits gave me a deep respect and appreciation for the explorers of 1909.

  Many of the papers, field notes, diaries, and letters of these explorers are published. Some unpublished ones are held in public archives while others remain in private hands. For access to unpublished sources, I wish to thank the archives and archivists at Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, U.K., the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Royal Geographical Society of London, the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, the British Library in London, the Victoria State Library in Melbourne, the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, Museo Nazionale della Montagna in Turin, Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University, and members of the explorers’ families. For published resources from their own collections and interlibrary loan sources, I received particular help from the UCLA, University of Richmond, University of Melbourne, and Pepperdine University libraries. Online sources now make some of these original published sources readily available from repositories around the world. Again, I owe a great debt to my editor at William Morrow/HarperCollins, Peter Hubbard.

  The expeditions of 1909 at once drew on past traditions and forged new approaches. Looking back, these early twentieth-century efforts relied on human porters in Kashmir and the Karakoram, man-hauling on the Antarctic ice sheet, and sled dogs for the Arctic sea ice. None carried radios, so they remained out of contact with the outside world once they passed the reach of telegraph cables. Looking forward, they adopted new methods of organization, execution, and funding. In tackling K2, for example, the Duke of the Abruzzi set the modern standard for a supported mountaineering expedition. To reach his starting point in the far north, Peary employed a ship of advanced design and engineering. In as much a bow to a sponsor’s self-serving request as to any anticipation of future means of Antarctic transport, Shackleton took along a motorcar refitted to run on ice. It did not go far.

  The history of these three expeditions, overlapping in time and similar in ambition if not results, tells a shared story of struggle to reach the edges of the earth and draw them within the bounds of human experience. Peary captured their common spirit in a letter that he sent to President Theodore Roosevelt from Greenland’s northernmost Inuit village in August 1908. “I have secured the necessary walrus meat, Eskimos, and dogs,” the seasoned polar explorer reported. “From now on the real struggle begins, and the element of luck may play a stronger hand than experience, hard work, and most careful provision, combined. I shall do my utmost. I hope for success.”5 A restless, adventuresome spirit propelled Peary and other explorers of his day forward into 1909 and beyond. It still lives in many of the polar scientists and extreme mountaineers that I met in the course of researching and writing this book. The world of Shackleton, Peary, and the Duke of the Abruzzi is now ours, even at its outermost edges.

  Chapter 1

  The Aristocracy of Adventure, Circa 1909

  THE YEAR 1909 BEGAN with the European and American press abuzz with rumors about a pending marriage between Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of the Abruzzi, and the American Katherine Elkins. The dashing thirty-five-year-old duke, grandson of modern Italy’s founding king, Victor Emmanuel II, was considered Europe’s most eligible bachelor. Miss Elkins, the spirited twenty-two-year-old daughter of a wealthy coal baron who represented West Virginia in the United States Senate, was dubbed “The Belle of America.” They had supposedly met at the White House in 1907 under the watchful eye of President Theodore Roosevelt, who admired the Italian aristocrat as one of the world’s leading explorers, mountaineers, and yachtsmen, and esteemed Elkins as one of his daughter’s closest friends. “From Rome to Washington the wires have been kept busy transmitting all the bearings of such an interesting match,” the Times of London reported in 1908, “and the newspapers have greatly enjoyed making the fullest display of the affair.”1

  It had been love at first sight, every account agreed, but in a Romeo-and-Juliet twist relished by the media, the lovers’ families stood in the way. Apparently intent on securing European alliances through royal marriages, Italy’s tradition-minded king forbade the union, the press reported, even as his softhearted queen lobbied for it. “The publication of gossip about the engagement,” the London newspaper noted, “has become so intolerable that [Senator] Elkins yesterday was compelled to a statement asking newspapers to cease printing dispatches and rumors on the subject.”2 At the dawn of modern celebrity journalism, with every major American city boasting multiple penny dailies in cutthroat competition for circulation as nationwide media empires were being born and broken, this plea served only to pique interest in the story. And when the senator ordered the post office to intercept and return all letters and packages from the duke to his daughter, including one reportedly containing an engagement ring, the press and public made the elder Elkins the villain. Some later accounts had it costing the ambitious senator the presidency.3

  New York’s Evening Post denounced the prying coverage as yellow journalism at its worst, and the Times of London agreed, but both reprinted the core of it, sent reporters scurrying after the latest scoop, and clearly sided with the star-crossed lovers, if for no other reason than that the union would sell papers.4 “The mystery surrounding the Duke of the Abruzzi and Miss Elkins, so far as the marriage which an inquisitive Press is anxious to arrange between them is concerned, remains as deep as ever,” the Times noted in late 1908.5 “The Duke of the Abruzzi might, were he so minded, find a wife in almost any royal household in Europe,” the New York Times added. “He has chosen to seek her in the mountains of West Virginia, and all students of his past history and the best-informed members of Washington society believe he will succeed.”6 Reports pointed toward a wedding on January 29, 1909, the duke’s thirty-sixth birthday; some had him renouncing his title to marry a commoner. It was not to be.

  Instead of renouncing his title or defying his king, early in 1909 the duke escaped the controversy by departing on another of the grand adventures that were the source of his fame. He would go to the Himalayas to make the first ascent of one of the world’s highest mountains—the so-called Pole of Altitude. He had already participated in the second successful ascent of the Matterhorn by the snow-swept Zmutt Ridge, and in 1897, at age twenty-four, he made the first summit of 18,000-foot Mount Saint Elias, the second-highest peak in both the United States and Canada. Such were the logistical challenges of reaching and climbing the remote Mount Saint Elias that six efforts had failed before the duke’s, and another one would not succeed for fifty years. Yet he had done it, along
with dozens of other Alpine ascents, while serving as an active officer in the Italian navy and pursuing a spirited social life. During the year after the Mount Saint Elias climb, the duke’s 89-foot yacht won more races in the European circuit than any other vessel. In 1906, he led the first expedition to scale East Africa’s Ruwenzori Range, summiting each of its six 15,000- and 16,000-foot massifs. In his achievements, it surely helped that the duke had been born the son of Spain’s reigning monarch and grew up as the nephew of Italy’s king. Still, it took courage as well as privilege. No other European aristocrat of the era had embraced the outdoor life with such vigor and success, and among world leaders, only Roosevelt could compare.

  In the public eye, however, these mountaineering exploits paled beside the duke’s 1899–1900 assault on the North Pole. At the time, for popular acclaim, no extreme outdoor adventure—no “call of the wild,” as novelist Jack London would term it—could compare with polar exploration, which may explain both why some began hailing the duke’s new objective as “the Pole of Altitude” or “the Third Pole” and why he attempted to reach the North Pole even though his first love was mountaineering.7 In 1909, the media could report that the duke’s “trip to the Himalayas was the direct result of a rupture of his romance with Miss Katherine Elkins,” but in reality it was probably the aura generated by his polar trek that had attracted her to him in the first place.8 More than his prior climbs, his polar expedition’s farthest-north claim had made him a global celebrity and object of international romantic intrigue. First ascents carried social cachet during the Gilded Age but were eclipsed by a farthest north.

  OVER THE PREVIOUS HALF century, the North Pole had evolved from a geographic curiosity to an ultimate destination. Since the European discovery of America, interest in the Arctic had focused on finding a navigable northwest sea passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This was an eminently practical goal, promising shortened trade routes between Europe and Asia. For three centuries, Britain’s Royal Navy led the way north by northwest through the labyrinth of sea channels in the Canadian Arctic, but never made it all the way across due to the vicissitudes of ice, shortness of the summer season, darkness of the winter, uncertainty of the route, and limitations of sail and early steamship technology. Martin Frobisher launched this quest in the mid-1500s, with the likes of Henry Hudson, William Baffin, and others extending it into the next century. During the early nineteenth century, multiple major naval expeditions, commanded by John Ross, William Parry, and John Franklin, pushed ever farther westward, but never far enough, before ice beset them. By midcentury, following Franklin’s horrific lost expedition in 1845 and the massive British effort to find it, everyone realized that a commercially viable Northwest Passage did not at that time exist.