To the Edges of the Earth Read online

  Only then, with the rising appeal of adventure travel and increasing economic and technological means for Europeans to reach ever more remote locations, did interest in the Arctic shift from the pragmatic goal of finding a Northwest Passage to a romantic one of attaining the North Pole. Not that the notion of a North Pole was anything new. At least since the third century before Christ, when Greek mapmaker Eratosthenes laid a grid of parallels and meridians on the Pythagorean concept of a spherical earth, educated Europeans had known that a geometric point, or “pole,” should mark the globe’s northernmost spot. Even Eratosthenes portrayed the Arctic as a frozen realm, however, and no one seemed interested in seeking its northern limit for over two millennia. Yet something in the pristine splendor and primeval struggle depicted in the tales brought back from the Northwest Passage expeditions captured the English imagination at the dawn of the Romantic era. Arctic sea ice had become a feature of British paintings and literature by 1800.

  Fittingly, a popular Romantic novel—a gothic tale of scientific hubris—first stamped the North Pole as an ultimate and potentially final destination. Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, opened with its half-mad title character chasing his creature across the Arctic sea ice toward the North Pole, where the monster aimed to end its life. Four years later, the celebrated poet Lord Byron referred to the North Pole in his “Vision of Judgement.” A flurry of literary uses followed, and the North Pole soon was fixed in the British mind. The first expedition expressly aimed at reaching it, rather than simply a Northwest Passage or Arctic discovery generally, was Parry’s fourth and final one, in 1827, which resulted in spectacular failure when the floating pack ice north of Spitsbergen, which he hoped to cross with man-hauled sleds to get to the North Pole, carried his party south faster than it could march north. Thereafter, the race was on.

  The North Pole was a fundamentally romantic goal promising glory to anyone who could achieve it. The winner might cash in through publishing contracts and speaking fees, as many returning Northwest Passage explorers had, and his country might gain prestige in an ever more imperialistic and nationalistic age, but no one expected a conquest of concrete value, because the North Pole was merely a point on shifting sea ice, then most reliably discerned in daylight by determining the sun’s altitude at noon. Once reached, some asked, who would want to go again? Ah, but what a goal! At a time when machines were replacing men as the engines of production, and faceless bureaucrats seemed to be taking the place of principled leaders, here was an objective requiring invincible will, indefatigable drive, and indomitable courage.

  The British took the lead at first but failed as miserably as they had with the Northwest Passage. In 1865, the Royal Geographical Society’s Clements Markham, a veteran of the Franklin searches and explorer of Asia, Africa, and South America, set the tone by saying about the North Pole, “It is the only thing in the world that is left undone, whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate.”9 Working in league with like-minded Victorians, Markham transformed the pole into an imperial obsession, culminating in the Royal Navy’s British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76 commanded by Captain George Nares. “To reach the Pole is the greatest geographical achievement which can be attempted,” Royal Society president Edward Sabine declared, “and I own I should grieve if it should be first accomplished by any other than an Englishman.”10 For Sabine, Markham, and their ilk, it had become a test of national character and fitness in a Darwinian age.

  The plan seemed simple enough. During the summer of 1875, sail as far north as possible through the waterway separating the west coast of Greenland from the east coast of Ellesmere Island until stopped by sea ice. Here, at least in warm years, British whalers had found a sea-lane open in late summer to 82° north latitude, with the prospect of land extending farther north. Favoring the Ellesmere (or British) side, Nares’s lead ship, HMS Alert, would anchor at the most northerly navigable point through the Arctic winter, with officers and scientists conducting scientific research as time permitted. The straight-line distance from this anchorage to the pole and back would be about 1,000 miles, or less than some Royal Navy teams had man-hauled sledges through the Canadian Arctic searching for Franklin. From this advanced position, which proved to be on Ellesmere Island’s northern coast at 82°30' north latitude, a sledge party would head toward the pole with the return of daylight in early spring. At the time, no one knew how far north the land might extend. An archipelago of islands could reach to the pole.

  The Franklin searchers had followed coastlines and frozen channels between nearby islands, and that was the hope again. Once Nares’s expedition found that land did not extend much beyond 82° north latitude, it began man-hauling loads over desolate and often disrupted sea ice. Having described reaching the pole as “a certainty, so far as human calculation can make it so,” Markham accompanied the expedition as far as Greenland, with his cousin Commander Albert Markham tapped to lead the sledge party.11 “Never before has a Polar Expedition been so perfectly equipped, provisioned, and provided for against all conceivable perils,” the Times of London informed its readers.12

  And rarely had one failed so unexpectedly. Not finding land beyond roughly 82° north latitude sealed its fate, but an unwillingness to improvise made matters worse. Without the ability to cache supplies on land or follow the ice foot along coasts, Nares doubted whether Markham’s sledge party could reach the pole but ordered it to try. It might have gone more than 60 net miles north if it had not traveled as a single group without support from the northernmost point of land. Because they could not lay resupply depots on sea ice, two officers and fifteen men pulled three large sledges loaded with everything they anticipated needing (including two small boats), for a drag weight of over 400 pounds per person. They did not use dogs. And unlike on the Franklin searches, which traveled on or near land where fresh game abounded, because they were heading out onto sea ice, Markham’s men relied on tinned food, which became a contributing cause of scurvy.

  Weather posed endless problems. Departing in early April, the party faced brutally cold temperatures at the outset. “As a rule,” Markham complained, “we were assailed by an intolerable thirst, which we were unable to assuage for two reasons: first, that we could not afford sufficient fuel to condense extra water; and secondly, it was quite impossible to prevent the water in the bottles from being converted into ice.”13 In contrast to the bitter April chill, by the journey’s end in June, the constant daylight and warming temperatures had made the softened ice surface virtually impassable. Between the winter darkness and the summer sea-ice melt, the Arctic provides a narrow window for polar exploration.

  As Markham and his men found, even during this window, Arctic Ocean sea ice provides a poor footing for travel. It is not as smooth as the ice sheets that cover Greenland or Antarctica, which rest on solid land and have gradually accumulated from snowfall over epochs. Sea ice freezes mostly from below each winter and melts mainly from above over the summer. Some marine ice lasts for years in old floes and fields. Unlike shore ice, which is anchored to land, Arctic sea ice moves with the ocean’s currents and the region’s unbroken winds. These shifts create open-water channels, or “leads,” where ice floes or fields split or pull apart, and pressure ridges of upturned ice where they push together. Leads can be narrow enough to sledge across, lakelike and readily circumvented, or wide and long like a river. Pressure ridges can reach 20 feet high or more and extend like a mounded wall of ice in any direction.

  Both leads and pressure ridges greatly impeded Markham’s advance, with his party sometimes forced to ferry across leads on small floes or cut paths through ridges with pick and shovel. Even on ice fields or large floes, deep snow sometimes forced the party to divide and relay the load. “It is a succession of standing pulls,” Markham wrote of one day’s work. “One, two, three, haul! and very little result.” Some snowdrifts swallowed the sledges whole. “On several occasions,” Markham reported, “the men found
it not only easier, but they could make better progress whilst dragging the sledges, by crawling on their hands and knees, than by dragging in the more orthodox manner.”14

  Scurvy made the journey into a death march for some. The disease prostrated its first victim less than two weeks into the ten-week ordeal. From then on, some of the men were borne on sledges, increasing the drag weight and diminishing the pulling power. As more succumbed, Markham finally gave up at 83°20' north latitude, nearly 400 miles from the pole. It was farther north than anyone had gone before, but far short of expectations, and the return march became a ghastly ordeal. With spring, snow became slush, and sledges sometimes broke through the ice with sick men aboard. Finally, in early June, with fewer than half the men still in harness, the party’s sole healthy member, Lieutenant Alfred Parr, sprinted ahead to the ship for help, where he found that scurvy had disabled half the crew.

  By the time relief arrived on June 9, 1876, only six members of the shore party had strength enough to drag sledges, which they relayed with two men borne on each, the other survivors stumbling along on foot. For Nares, scurvy became a compelling reason to abandon the mission. “Pole impracticable,” he wired from his first port of call with telegraph connection, and so it became for Britain.15 Clements Markham and his colleagues within the Victorian exploring community would turn their faces south, to the Antarctic, where a continent with solid footing for man-hauling sledges offered better prospects for British polar discovery.

  THE NARES EXPEDITION’S HARD-WON farthest-north record fell within a decade to an unlikely pair of Americans, James Lockwood and David Brainard, who had not even set out to beat it. They were part of a twenty-five-man U.S. Army Signal Corps expedition under the command of First Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, sent in 1881 to conduct weather research on northern Ellesmere Island, near to where Nares’s expedition had wintered. The Signal Corps then operated the National Weather Service. Greely established his base at Fort Conger, about 50 miles south of Nares’s winter anchorage on the Arctic Ocean, where his men erected a comfortable structure while the ship went south for the winter. During that first summer, while mapping the unexplored Arctic coast of Greenland that protrudes some 70 miles above the most northerly point of Ellesmere Island, Lockwood and Brainard passed a few miles beyond Albert Markham’s farthest north without ever venturing onto the sea ice.

  After two years of low sea-ice melt kept resupply ships from reaching Fort Conger, Greely marched his men 200 miles south in the fall of 1883 to an agreed-upon rescue site on Smith Sound. Ice blocked the American ships from even reaching that point, however. Suffering through an appalling winter in an exposed location on limited supplies, only seven men remained alive when a rescue ship reached them in June 1884. Lockwood had died two months earlier; Brainard had prayed for death. With Greely, he was among the survivors left to tell the tale. They were welcomed home as heroes, despite rumors of cannibalism.

  By this time if not before, the polar north seemed as terrifying as it was alluring, which further enhanced its standing as a test of character, courage, and conviction. A succession of other expeditions had failed to reach the pole without even securing the fleeting fame of a farthest north. These included the doomed team aboard the American navy ship Jeannette, captained by George De Long, that sank in 1881 after being icebound for nearly two years in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia on a fool’s errand to find open water at the pole. And so Lockwood and Brainard’s record held for over a decade until a remarkable Norwegian, Fridtjof Nansen, devised a novel approach to Arctic exploration that became part of the solution to reaching the pole. Massive, slow expeditions on the British model did not work. Light dashes drawing on native ways offered more promise. For his efforts, Nansen became the polar star of his generation and won international fame.

  Nansen had leaped onto the world’s stage in 1888 when, as a zoology graduate student and expert Nordic skier, he devised and executed a six-man crossing of the Greenland ice sheet—the first traverse of the island. Eschewing the hierarchical structure and large scale of standard Arctic expeditions, the party skied across the ice sheet towing small sleds and light equipment of Nansen’s own design. And unlike the young U.S. Navy engineer Robert Peary, who had tried and failed to cross the island from west to east using native Inuit dogsledding techniques two years earlier, Nansen insisted on starting from the virtually inaccessible east coast so that there could be no turning back. “I demolish my bridges behind me,” Nansen is noted for saying; “then there is no choice but to move forward.” He returned to Norway a national hero. “Never keep a line of retreat,” he reportedly added; “it is a wretched invention.” Here was the resolute character and indomitable spirit that people valued in a polar explorer.

  By 1890, Nansen had devised an even more audacious scheme for his next expedition. Based on the discovery of wreckage from the Jeannette on the Greenland coast, an ocean away from where the ship had been crushed in the sea ice, Nansen deduced that the Arctic ice pack must slowly rotate in response to underlying ocean currents. With a proposal that Greely dismissed as “an illogical scheme of self-destruction,” Nansen secured Norwegian funding for a purpose-built, rounded-hull ship, the Fram, which he intentionally froze into the sea ice above eastern Siberia in fall 1893, with the intent of being carried north-by-northwest across the pole in the circulating pack.16 The round hull would rise above rather than be crushed by the ice, Nansen reasoned. The expedition could take years, during which time Nansen and his crew would study polar currents and climate as they drifted.

  The plan worked, to a point. The icebound Fram slowly rode northwest in a wide arc, besting the Greely expedition’s farthest north in January 1895, after more than a year in the pack. Two months later, when it became clear that the arc would fall short of the pole, Nansen and one colleague, Hjalmar Johansen, set off with skis, dogsleds, and kayaks for the pole. They established a new record of 86º14' north latitude—or about 200 miles beyond the prior mark—before turning back for a death-defying sixteen-month journey home. No one could have gone farther and lived. As it was, Nansen and Johansen barely survived. After traveling for three months on skis and with dogsleds to the ice pack’s southern edge and then by kayak across the open Arctic Ocean, they reached the remote western reaches of the recently discovered and still uninhabited Arctic Ocean archipelago called Franz Joseph Land. There they camped for the winter in a hut made of stones and moss, living on what they could catch or kill.

  Setting out again by kayak in May 1896, Nansen and Johansen happened to encounter a British expedition to the archipelago on land a month later. “Aren’t you Nansen?” the expedition’s astonished leader, Frederick Jackson, asked. “Yes, I am Nansen,” came the laconic reply.17 Drifting with the circulating ice all this time, the Fram and its crew broke free of the pack near Spitzbergen a short time later and were reunited with Nansen and Johansen in northern Norway. Together, they sailed down Norway’s coast to rising acclaim and into the capital, Christiania (now Oslo), where the king and the largest crowd ever assembled in Norway turned out to greet them. The pioneering British mountaineer Edward Whymper, the first to summit the Matterhorn and by then a world-renowned icon of Victorian manhood, proclaimed that Nansen had made “almost as great an advance as has been accomplished by all other voyages in the nineteenth century put together.”18

  RETURNING FROM HIS 1897 ascent of Mount Saint Elias, the Duke of the Abruzzi threw himself into preparing an expedition to succeed where Nansen had fallen short by reaching the North Pole. Of course, the duke admired Nansen greatly, as did all explorers and adventurers of the age, and drew heavily on Nansen’s innovations in planning the expedition, including the use of Nordic skis, dogsleds, minimal equipment, and a civilian organizational structure. “I had comrades with me, rather than subordinates,” the duke would say about the eleven Italians selected for the expedition and the nine Norwegians serving as the ship’s officers and crew.19 And each of them would come back singing his praises as a leader.20
Reflecting the then-dominant gender views, as with all prior polar expeditions, every participant was male. The duke personally met with Nansen in Norway during the planning stages and traveled to Spitzbergen for Arctic training and to Siberia for sled dogs. In each of these preparatory trips, he was accompanied by his military aide and soul mate in adventure, Captain Umberto Cagni, ten years his senior, whom he had met on his first naval deployment in 1889 and who had served as his second on the Mount Saint Elias expedition.

  The duke also drew on lessons from the American explorer Robert Peary, who by this time had followed up on his initial 1886 expedition to Greenland with two more to the island. In both, one in 1891–92 and another in 1893–95, Peary crossed a corner of Greenland’s ice sheet from the island’s northwest coast to a bay in the far northeast—journeys of over 1,000 miles by dogsled that Peary believed proved for the first time that Greenland was an island and did not extend farther northward. But at the terminus of his treks, he mistakenly reported seeing a channel and other land in the north. “It was evident that this channel marked the northern boundary of the mainland of Greenland,” Peary wrote, and he added that the land beyond might offer an “Imperial Highway” to the pole—errors that fatally misled later expeditions.21 The channel did not exist, and the land beyond was merely more of Greenland.