Nick Rennison - A Short History of Polar Exploration

According to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised. Despite this there has never been a shortage of volunteers willing to endure the bad times in pursuit of the glory that polar exploration sometimes brings.

Nick Rennisons compelling book tells the memorable stories of people who have risked their lives by entering the white wastelands of the Arctic and the Antarctic, from the compelling tales of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen, to those of lesser known explorers such as Elisha Kent Kane and Douglas Mawson. A Short History of Polar Exploration also looks briefly at the hold that the polar regions have often had on the imaginations of artists and writers in the last two hundred years examining the paintings, films and literature that they have inspired.

Nick Rennison is a writer, editor and bookseller. He has published books on a wide variety of subjects from Sherlock Holmes to London's blue plaques. He is a regular reviewer for the Sunday Times and for BBC History magazine. His titles for Pocket Essentials include Sigmund Freud, Roget: The Man Who Became a Book and Robin Hood: Myth, History and Culture. He lives near Manchester.

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

We led a strange, weird sort of life. A spice of danger, with much of beauty and a world of magnificence.

Isaac Israel Hayes

My first thanks must go to Ion Mills at Pocket Essentials who commissioned me to write a short history of a subject in which I have long been interested and thus allowed me to revisit the fascinating stories of Scott and Amundsen, the disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his men, and all the other tales that make the discovery of new territory in the Arctic and Antarctica such a gripping chapter in the history of exploration. Thanks also to Claire Watts who patiently and efficiently guided the book towards publication in record time. Jayne Lewis for her copy-editing skills, Alan Forster created a brilliant and eye-catching cover, Richard Howard worked long hours at short notice on the index, as did Paul Medcalf in typesetting the book. I am grateful to all of them. Amongst friends and family, my thanks go particularly to Kevin Chappell, Anita Diaz, Cindy Rennison, Eileen Rennison, John Thewlis and Wolfgang Lers who have all, at one time or another, listened sympathetically as I have spoken, at greater length than they probably expected, on the subject of polar exploration. My final thanks must, as always, go to my wife Eve who has been wonderfully supportive and helpful throughout my work on this book.

Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

Chapter Four:

Chapter Five:

Chapter Six:

Chapter Seven:

Chapter Eight:

The Arctic and the Antarctic have been the settings for some of the most compelling dramas in the history of exploration. Some are very well known. Scott making his desperate bid to return to safety after being pre-empted at the South Pole by Amundsen and dying in a blizzard just eleven miles short of supplies at One Ton Depot. Sir John Franklin and the men with him disappearing into the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage, never to be seen alive again. Shackleton undertaking an epic boat journey across the Antarctic seas to South Georgia in order to bring help to his men stranded on the uninhabited Elephant Island. Others, like Douglas Mawsons solo trek to his Antarctic home base after the death of his two companions or Greelys disastrous expedition in the Arctic which led to the deaths of most of its members and accusations of cannibalism levelled at the survivors, are less familiar.

This book attempts a brief survey of the larger story in which these dramatic incidents take their place. It contains a few introductory pages to the history of attempts to locate either a Northwest Passage or a Northeast Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the centuries between the mariners of the Elizabethan Age and the navigators who were Captain Cooks contemporaries. It also includes the shortest of guides to the long-standing idea of Terra Australis and Cooks demonstration that no such continent, as it had been thought to exist temperate and well-populated could possibly lie in the waters of the Far South. However, most of it concentrates on the 140 years between 1820 and 1960. At the beginning of this period, the Antarctic continent had only just been sighted for the first time and much of the geography of the Canadian and Russian Arctic remained a mystery. At the end of it, there were no more blanks on the maps at either end of the earth and scientists and even tourists were just as likely to be found there as explorers and adventurers. The first six chapters of A Short History of Polar Exploration tell the story of these 140 years. They are followed by a very short chapter on the poles in the last fifty years and one on the role the poles have played in literature and the arts for two centuries. The brief biographical dictionary of polar explorers provides a reference guide to the characters who created the dramas of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. The book ends with a bibliography which guides anyone who is interested to books that can reveal far more about polar history than I can hope to do in these pages. If this short history arouses interest in what is an extraordinary story populated by extraordinary people, it will have done its job.

For centuries men entered the North American Arctic not in the hopes of reaching the pole but in quest for what became a Holy Grail of maritime navigation the Northwest Passage. Somewhere in the wastelands of ice and sea there was, they believed, a navigable route from Atlantic to Pacific. This Northwest Passage, if only it could be found, would open up a new avenue to the riches of Asia. In search of it, the early explorers of the Arctic endured terrible hardships and many of them lost their lives.

The very first expeditions were English. Martin Frobisher was the archetypal Elizabethan seadog daring, independent and bloody-minded and he was one of those captains who fought off the Spanish Armada in 1588. He was also an intrepid, if slightly deluded, explorer of the Canadian Arctic. In 1576, backed by the Muscovy Company of London merchants, he sailed north-west and eventually landed on what is now Baffin Island. After an assortment of misadventures, including the capture of some of his men by a group of native people, he returned home, carrying samples of a black rock which, Frobisher was firmly convinced, contained gold enough to justify the despatch of further expeditions. Investors, including the Queen, agreed with him and he led two further journeys to the region. He brought back close to 1500 tons of the mysterious ore but, despite all Frobishers hopes for it, it proved almost entirely worthless.

None the less, other English mariners followed in Frobishers wake. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who was Sir Walter Raleighs half-brother and had written an influential treatise on a new passage to Cathay in the 1570s, sailed for Newfoundland in 1583 and took possession of it for Elizabeth I. On his way back home, the ship on which he was sailing went down and all on board drowned. John Davis, like Gilbert a Devon man, undertook a series of voyages in the late 1580s to the strait west of Greenland which now bears his name. Perhaps most significantly, Henry Hudson made four journeys into Arctic waters from 1607 onwards, acting on behalf of companies of London merchants in search of a new commercial route. On the last of his voyages, in 1610, he entered the bay now named after him and he and his men were forced by the ice to winter on shore. In the spring of the following year, the captain was eager to explore his bay further but most of the sailors with him were less enthusiastic about the prospect. Cold, miserable and frightened, they just wanted to go home. They mutinied and forced Hudson, his son and a few loyal crewmen into a small boat which was then set adrift. The occupants of the small boat were never seen again. The mutineers returned to London where they admitted what they had done but put the blame on two ringleaders who had conveniently died on the voyage home. Some of the survivors were put on trial but acquitted.