Ninety degrees north : The quest for the North Pole

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In the mid-19th century, the North Pole was a mystery. Explorers who tried to penetrate the icy wastes failed or died. After Sir John Franklin disappeared with all his men in 1845, serious efforts began to be made to find the true Northernmost point. This is a vivid and witty history of the disasters that ensued.

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THE GATEWAY There are five North Poles: the North Geographical Pole, the absolute, fixed cap of the globe; the North Magnetic Pole, to which our compasses point, and which is not stationary but rambles at present through the Canadian Arctic; the North Geomagnetic Pole, which centres the earth's magnetic field and sits today over north-west Greenland; the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility, a magnificently named spot in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska, which represents the point farthest in all directions from land (currently, 684 statute miles from the nearest coast); and there is even a Pole in the sky, the North Celestial Pole, the astronomical extension of a line drawn through the earth's axis which nearly-but not quite-hits Polaris. John Cleve Symmes did not know this. Had he done so, he would probably have dismissed it as miserably unadventurous. For Symmes, an ex-officer in the United States army; had a vision of the North Pole that has yet to be equalled for ingenuity. During the early decades of the nineteenth century he lectured to packed halls using a specially constructed wooden globe to demonstrate his theory of polar geography. His globe had two rings representing the ice fields at either end of the earth's axis. So far so good. It was common knowledge that the polar regions were cold and icy places. Where Symmes's globe departed from the norm, however, was in its countersunk holes which represented the Poles themselves. These, according to Symmes, were gateways to a series of seven worlds that nestled within each other like the layers in a Chinese sphere. Sufficient sunlight poured through the holes to sustain a pallid form of life-or so his intricately calculated diagrams seemed to prove-and even if the air at the core was slightly stale it was nonetheless breathable. If only one could reach the Poles, he explained, an entire inner universe would be within one's grasp. Symmes presented his theories `in confused array, and clothed in homely phraseology' and died in 1829 having proved none of them. Yet he was incredibly popular in his time. It was true that some attended his lectures only to laugh, but they came all the same. `I pledge my life in support of this truth,' Symmes declared in an 1818 circular, `and am ready to explore the hollow if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.' In 1822, a Senate vote did, actually, produce twenty-five members in favour of sending an expedition to investigate the existence of such a hole; and three years later Russia offered him a place on a north polar voyage-an invitation he had to refuse through lack of funds. By the time of his death, Symmes had fallen into disgrace, and `Symmes's Hole' had become a byword for bogusness, but the appeal of a polar hole lingered, whether it be in the north or south. In 1838, when America sent Lt. Charles Wilkes to explore Antarctica, one of Symmes's acolytes, a man named Jeremiah Reynolds, was asked to join the team. Edgar Allan Poe, at the same time, incorporated Symmes's hole into his famous story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , wherein a young navigator plunges into the earth's southernmost axis to be greeted by a vast, white figure which could have represented God but which could equally have been one of Symmes's blanched, netherworld inhabitants. It is easy from a modern viewpoint to scoff at Symmes's fantasies. The truth was that his guess was as good as anybody's. No one knew what was at the North Pole. Legend held that there were undiscovered continents at the world's apexes, Arcadian lands whose benign (and possibly divine) inhabitants waited patiently for humanity to discover them. Another, more rational theory, espoused by many, held that the North Pole was, a temperate sea. In favour of this argument was the fact that ice was known to flow south; it was also known to cling to land masses such as Greenland and other Arctic islands. This suggested that some force was pushing the ice southwards, and that there was no land at the North Pole otherwise the ice would stick to it. Could it be, therefore, that the Pole comprised a tepid lake that pressed down on the surrounding pack to produce the bergs that constantly menaced the North Atlantic whaling fleets? Could it be, even, that this lake was the global eistern that fed the world's oceans? There were gaping holes in this theory (though none to match Symmes's) but in the absence of anything better, it would have to do. The idea that there might yet be land of some kind within the Open Polar Sea was too attractive to abandon entirely-a volcano, an island and even a conical spike of rock were envisaged as the global pivot-but the suggestion, proffered hesitantly by one or two scientists, that there was nothing but ice at the Pole, was dismissed as both defeatist and without foundation. The allure of the Open Polar Sea was very real. If such a thing did exist, it would allow European navigators speedy access to the lucrative and exotic markets of the Orient. Set against its promise, however, was the seeming impossibility of reaching it. In 1553-4 Sir Hugh Willoughby had led two ships to disaster, eventually perishing with many of his men on the coast of Finland. Not long afterwards, the Dutch explorer William Barents had come to grief above the Russian coast, in the sea that now bears his name. And in the following century, at the other end of Russia, Virus Bering of Denmark had died in the strait between Alaska and Siberia. These and many other navigators left their names and their bones on the Arctic map, without registering even the possibility that an Open Polar Sea might exist. But the dream continued, and in the early nineteenth century, Sir John Barrow became the latest to perpetuate it. As Second Secretary to the British Admiralty from 1804 to 1845, and instigator of the world's largest systematic programme of exploration, John Barrow was a passionate believer in the Open Polar Sea. In 1818 he sent two Royal Navy ships to find it, cross it and claim it for Britain. They met the ice pack off Spitsbergen and were driven back in disarray, their timbers smashed and wracked by storms so fierce that their bells rang. Undaunted, in 1827 Barrow sent another expedition under the famous explorer Captain W. E. Parry who had already proved his worth on three journeys into the Arctic. Recognizing that the Open Polar Sea might have to be gained via a tonsure of ice, Barrow equipped Parry with boat-sledges that could be dragged over the floes to a point where they could sail triumphantly to the Pole. Parry and his men hauled their boats manfully across the polar pack and reached a record north of 82° 45' before realizing that, no matter how hard they tried, the ice was drifting south faster than they could walk north. They retreated, having done little to elucidate the matter of an Open Polar Sea. Symmes, who was then still alive, greeted Parry's failure with contempt. He was ill-disposed towards those who disagreed with him and he still stuck to his theory. `Had the proposition of concentric spheres, or a hollow globe, been made by an English or French philosopher, instead of a native of the United States,' wrote one of his propagandists, James McBride, `I very much question, whether so large a share of ridicule would have been attached to its author and adherents.' In his eyes there was an anti-American conspiracy afoot. Barrow's much-publicized ventures encompassed not only the North Pole but the North-West Passage, a seaway that ran through the Canadian Arctic. This was supposed-erroneously as it transpired-to provide a short-cut between the Atlantic and the Pacific and was of as much interest to the United States as it was to Britain. When Parry was despatched to find the North-West Passage, the Symmes faction rose patriotically. `Parry now is out on his third voyage,' wrote McBride, `as though there were some hidden mystery there, which the English government is anxious to develop ... I am induced to believe that they have discovered something in those regions which indicates a state of things different from that heretofore believed to exist.' Neither Parry the explorer nor Symmes the visionary ever discovered the truth. But John Barrow did, in an odd, posthumous fashion. In 1845, three years before his death, he sent Sir John Franklin to find the North-West Passage. Franklin departed with two of the Royal Navy's finest ice ships, whose screw propellers were powered by locomotive engines of trusted design. He had food for seven years, silver cutlery and 1,000 bound editions of Punch . Nothing could possibly go wrong. He entered the Arctic and neither he, his ships nor his 136 officers and crew were ever seen again. Over the next ten years, scores of ships were sent to find Franklin. They did, eventually, discover relics and skeletons indicating that his ships had become icebound off King William Island to the west of Boothia, a peninsula that juts from Canada's Arctic coast. His crew had then attempted to march south to the Canadian mainland and had perished from a combination of scurvy and starvation. The decade of rescue missions laid bare a mystery that is still being examined today. It also revealed the futility of trying to find a profitable seaway through the ice-choked archipelago of the north. And it put the Arctic firmly on the map. The place was becoming familiar-in the same way perhaps as the moon. But there was one key difference: the moon could be seen, whereas no one knew what was at the Pole-and that, covertly, was what many of Franklin's rescuers wanted to find out. In one of his last tirades, published in 1846, Sir John Barrow wrote, `The North Pole is the only thing in the world about which we know nothing; and that want of all knowledge ought to operate as a spur to adopt the means of wiping away that stain of ignorance from this enlightened age.' His words were still being quoted more than fifty years later. Between Greenland and the Canadian Arctic lies a body of water known as Baffin Bay. From Baffin Bay three possible sea routes lead on into the Arctic: Smith Sound to the north, Jones Sound to the west and south of Smith Sound, and further still to the south and west, Lancaster Sound. It was into Lancaster Sound that Franklin had sailed in 1845, travelling west until he reached Cornwallis Island at which point, after a brief reconnaissance to the north, he had turned south down Peel Sound and there, off King William Island, he had met his doom. Naturally, the majority of his would-be rescuers went into Lancaster Sound after him. Their task should have been easy: Franklin's orders had been to sail as far west as possible (Cornwallis Island) and then to strike south in search of the North-West Passage; but if there was no route south he was to head north and see if one could be obtained in that direction. On reaching Cornwallis Island the rescuers saw Peel Sound blocked by ice and, without for one moment considering that it might in other years have been clear, they directed their attentions to the north. By 1852, Franklin had yet to be found and his agents of salvation were becoming puzzled. It seemed as if he had vanished from the map. That they had not found him was partly due to meteorological mischance: Franklin had gone down Peel Sound in a freakishly warm season. It was also due to misplaced ambition: if the southward route was out of the question that left only the northward, which raised the possibility that Franklin had broken into the Open Polar Sea from which he had been unable subsequently to escape. Changing ice conditions were fully acknowledged here; they would accord nicely with the fact that he had seemingly vanished and, importantly, it would give whoever did find him the chance also to find the North Pole. Among those who used the Franklin search as an excuse to find the Pole was a British Commander named Edward Inglefield. In 1852 he took the steam yacht Isabel into Baffin Bay and made straight for Smith Sound-to which, as he wrote, `it is well known that Sir John Franklin's attention had been sometimes directed'. Inglefield was guilty of gross fabrication. However confusing Franklin's orders may have seemed, they had never once mentioned Smith Sound. Indeed, since its discovery in 1818, Smith Sound was believed to be a bay, and if not a bay then a channel that was permanently filled with ice. There was no conceivable reason for Franklin to have gone there, and one of the few things that people knew about his expedition was that he had not done so. Nevertheless, Inglefield persisted in his fiction. His was a minor expedition as far as the Franklin search was concerned, but it was a major one in the quest for the Pole. On entering Smith Sound, Inglefield met not ice bat open water. It stretched into the distance and he pursued it as far as he was able. His impetus was the declared hope, `most of all of reaching Franklin and giving him help'-to say otherwise would have cast him as a callous adventurer-but as he sailed further north, `wild thoughts of getting to the Pole-of finding our way to Bering Strait ... rushed rapidly through my brain'. At a latitude of 78° 28'N he was forced back by ice and returned to Baffin Bay where he made a fruitless stab at Jones Sound before going up Lancaster Sound like everybody else. He returned to London with no news of Franklin and a clutch of mail from his fellow rescuers. His foray attracted little attention from a public waiting to hear what had happened to their vanished hero. It did, however, cause a stir amongst the secret band of North Polers. Inglefield claimed to have sailed `one hundred and thirty miles farther north than any navigator', and while this was incorrect-the 80th parallel had been crossed in the Atlantic by at least two previous expeditions-he had certainly travelled further up Smith Sound than anyone else; moreover, he had broached what was possibly a route to the Open Polar Sea. One of the first to respond to his discovery was a young American named Elisha Kent Kane. Continue... Excerpted from NINETY DEGREES NORTH by Fergus Fleming Copyright © 2001 by Fergus Fleming Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

It was once believed that the North Pole was surrounded by an open polar sea. Some of the attempts to prove this theory and to reach the pole itself once the theory was abandoned are the subject of this book. Fleming, author of the critically acclaimed Barrow's Boys, provides an entertaining history of the many failed attempts to reach the North Pole, from the hardship of the Kane expedition of 1853 through the Amundsen-Ellsworth North Pole sighting via airship in 1926. Though not all polar attempts in this time period are covered, many of the major attempts are recounted and analyzed, providing a story that is both awe-inspiring and humorous. Drawing on research from published and unpublished accounts, Fleming tells the stories of the failed land/sea attempts by such polar adventurers as Edward Nares, Fridtjof Nanson, Charles Francis Hall, August Petermann, and George Washington de Long, as well as the fatal attempt by Sweden's Salomon August Andre by balloon. The controversial topic of who first stood at 90-degrees North is not answered here; only through the investigation of Frederick Cook's and Robert Peary's expeditions does the reader learn that neither can conclusively claim this achievement. Suitable for both public and academic library collections. Sheila Kasperek, Mansfield Univ., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Whether it was believed to be surrounded by a vast, temperate sea that would facilitate speedy trade between the West and the Orient or, by one fanciful account, the gateway to a subterranean universe of wonder, there is no doubt that the North Pole exercised a powerful pull on the 19th-century imagination. Fleming (Barrow's Boys; Killing Dragons), whose first book outlined the ambitious program of British exploration set in motion by John Barrow, begins this exceptional account roughly where that one left off, recounting the major expeditions sent in search of the top of the world from 1845 to 1969. The book is fascinating for how Fleming renders the haughty, post-Enlightenment brio of the principal adventurers and the extreme, often fatal ends toward which it pushed them. Fleming beautifully weaves together intriguing journal excerpts and exhaustive expedition details to form an unforgettable impression of both the characters involved and the hardships they faced. And the hardships here are gruesome. Scarcely one of the many glory seekers from Britain, the U.S., Germany, Russia, Italy and elsewhere return from their quests wholly intact, either physically or mentally. They ate their dogs, they ate moss and, sometimes, they ate each other, but even when it became clear that nothing but a wasteland awaited them at the pole, they pressed on. Stoires like this make for a captivating look at the best and worst possibilities of the human spirit, told by an author who has established himself as one of the best adventure writers today. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

This is Fleming's second volume on the history of British exploration to the North Pole. The first volume, Barrow's Boys (1998), covered the first half of the nineteenth century, and this new book chronicles the failed attempts, from the 1850s to the 1920s, to reach the Pole. Drawing on journals and other archival records, Fleming recounts such explorations as Elisha Kent Kane's journey (1853^-1855), in which Kane survived mutiny and the loss of his ship; and George Nares' attempt (1875^-1876), which was crippled by scurvy. In other voyages a ship sinks, men die, resort to cannibalism, and lose their way. An appendix contains a paper on scurvy written in 1877 ("the unfortunate patient indulges in the gloomiest of ideas, the fetor of the breath is now intolerable"). At times Fleming takes a less than serious tone in writing about these explorers, considering the improbable chances of their success. Yet he portrays them as heroic and obsessed adventurers. The book, which includes 24 pages of black-and-white photographs, is adventure storytelling at its best. --George Cohen

Kirkus Book Review

The author of Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (2001) returns with another rousing real-life adventure: a chronicle of the determination, madness, mendacity, suffering, and incredible endurance of the men who sought to be the first to stand at the North Pole. Picking up where Barrow's Boys (1998) ended, with the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1847, the author shows Sir John Franklin's successors one after another learning the bitter lessons of life and death north of the Arctic Circle. He closes with the passing, in 1940, of the widow of Lieutenant George Washington De Long, who starved and froze to death in 1881 while searching for the mythical "thermal gateway" to the Pole. De Long's sufferings, horrible as they were, are common fare on Fleming's menu, along with foolishness, foolhardiness, and fecklessness. For decades, explorers sought the "Open Polar Sea," a warm lake of water at the Pole that putatively pushed the icecap and its baby burgs southward. Another popular theory held that both poles featured gateways to the inner earth, where civilizations waited to be discovered. Once again, Fleming displays razor-edged wit and an unerring sense of what we want to read. He tells of a polar bear dragging a doctor around by the head. Of temperatures so cold that human exhalations freeze and hit the ground with a tinkle. Of a dog's tail freezing to the ground. Of desperate men reduced to eating their own dogs-and eyeing one another hungrily. We learn, too, about continent-sized egos, especially that of Robert Edwin Peary, whose controversial claim to have reached the Pole Fleming disputes. All the polar lunatics and heroes are here: Kane, Hayes, Hall, Hegemann, Weyprecht, Osborn, Nansen, Cook (liar extraordinaire, says the author), and Amundsen, each one reanimated by fluid, vivid prose. A superb, well-researched saga, crackling with intelligence and wit. (4 maps, 24 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)