The siege of the South Pole : the story of Antarctic exploration

Front matter

rHE STORY OF EXPLORATION

EDITED BY

J. SCOTT KELTIE, LL.D., Sec. R.G.S.

Preface

THIS book has been the burden of the holidays of three years — in Switzerland, in Scotland, and in the United States — and it expresses the result of the reading of thirty. Though I have never been within two thousand miles of the Antarctic Circle it has been my good fortune to possess the personal friendship of all, or almost all, the living explorers and promoters of exploration in the Antarctic Regions, and I have been privileged to speed the parting ships of every Antarctic expedition which left a British port, from the sailing of the Dundee fleet in 1892 to that of the Terra Nova, in 1903, though to my regret on each occasion I shared the unhappy fate of the stowaways, and was landed before my native shores were left behind, or at the farthest before the tropics were reached.

I have based this history of Antarctic exploration as far as possible on original narratives and on the conversation of the men who themselves took part in it. In this respect I owe a special debt to three: to Sir Joseph Hooker, the last survivor of the Erebus, who, in addition to much other kindness, has read the proofs of the earlier chapters, including those dealing with Sir James Clark Ross's expedition; to Sir John Murray, of the Challenger, whose friendship and scientific guidance for more than twenty years have been the most effective parts of my education ; and to His Excellency Professor Georg von Neumayer, the charm of whose personality and the viii PREFACE

enthusiasm of his devotion to South Polar problems have been a continual inspiration.

In trying to elucidate the origin as well as to describe the events of the various expeditions, I have assumed that from the historical point of view the motive and the aim are as important as the resulting achievement or failure. The story is told to the best of my power with an impartial mind, and scrupulously follows the facts ; if any error has been made as to the narrative it is a mistake and not due to any bias. Where an opinion is expressed that opinion is my own, and though I consider it right it may possibly seem wrong to some.

The two introductory chapters dealing with voyages which fell short of the Antarctic Circle are designedly brief and uncritical. In them I have stated the views of those whom I consider to be the best authorities. The descriptions of exploration from the voyage of the Resolution to that of the Challenger are more detailed because, except for Cook's voyage, the narratives drawn upon are almost all out of print and difficult to consult. The later voyages are touched on lightly, for each is described in one or several authoritative narratives recently published, and to be found everywhere. The names of these works are given in the Appendix.

In selecting and arranging for the illustrations I have been greatly helped by the Editor of this series, my old colleague, Dr. J. Scott Keltie. The unique picture of Admiral Bellingshausen was secured by the kind representations made to the Head of the Russian Admiralty by my friend Colonel J. de Shokalsky of St. Petersburg. Captain R. F. Scott of the Discovery, Professor E. von Drygalski of the Gauss, Dr. Otto Nordenskjold of the Antarctic, M. Arctowski of the Belgica,

PREFACE ix

and Mr. W. S. Bruce, of the Scotia, have generously allowed photographs taken by them to be reproduced. Captain Scott and Mr. Bruce have also been kind enough to read the proofs of the portions of Chapter XX dealing with their expeditions. There are many others to whom I am grateful for help, especially my friends Mr. E. Heawood, Librarian of the Royal Geographical Society, whose patience I have too frequently called into lively exercise, and Mr. J. G. Bartholomew for his cooperation in the preparation of the maps; to Captain A. Mostyn Field, the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, who kindly aided me in settling several historical points, and to Mr. P. L. Davis, of the Nautical Almanac Office, for a copy of the valuable letter written by his father, the late Captain Davis, R. N., when on the Terror.

This book does not profess or attempt to describe the Antarctic Regions or their peculiar conditions; it is merely the record of an uncompleted episode in the history of geographical exploration.

H. R. M.

62 Camden Square, London, N. W., 15th July, igo$>

Contents

Preface vii

I The Origin of the Idea i

II The Intellectual Sleep and the Awakening . . 10

CHAPTER I "A wanderer is Man from his birth

He was born in a ship on the breast of the river of Time Brimming with wonder and joy . . ."

— Matthew Arnold.

VOYAGES towards the South Pole commenced so long ago, and they have exercised an influence on the trend of exploration so continuously, that a complete history of the search for the Antarctic would almost be a history of geographical discovery.

The particular motive to Antarctic exploration has varied from age to age as the special problem it was expected to solve has changed with the growth of knowledge and the development of thought. When first stated the problem was no more than a philosophical speculation, a mere academic thesis interesting a few learned men. It grew to be a burning question in the struggle of rival Powers for commercial and political supremacy. It was a force in empire-building, with the Commonwealth of Australia as a product of its partial solution. The period of stress and strife has passed with the strenuous lives of the circumnavigators ; but a time of renewed interest of a quieter sort has come when it is particularly appropriate to turn a backward glance toward the beginning.

The Antarctic problem has now crystallised into an object of scientific research, the results of which may indeed become practically useful, but in a manner too uncertain and remote to be a leading motive. Its solution has been reduced to the result of exploration in the ice, and the final result will round out the knowledge of the globe into completeness and will leave no spot of

The World According to Homer. B.C. iooo.

Earth unknown. When the story of the Antarctic can be fully told Terra Incognita will cumber the map no more. At the dawn of geographical history an antarctic problem was impossible because the Earth was viewed as a fiat disc girdled by the Ocean River and bounded by darkness. Curiously enough the name became possible before the idea. When the early Greek students of the stars, looking out hour after hour and night after night on the wheeling vault overhead, classified the brightest points into groups or constellations they named the most conspicuous of these which never set Arctos — the Bear — and the point round which it, in common with the rest of the heavenly host, appeared to turn was called the Arctic pole. The natural antithesis of an antarctic pole of the heavens, that is, a fixed point opposite the arctic, must have occurred to many minds, for it was easy in imagination to complete the sphere of the celestial vault, traced out in part by the unseen portion of the circuit of the stars, but the flat cake of the habitable world stretched between, separating the domain of light and possible knowledge from that of darkness and the unknowable. The dark and gloomy space under the Earth traversed only by the souls of the dead on their way to Hades, was known as Erebus, a place of terror, used ages later by Shakespeare as a fit metaphor for the man that had no music in his soul.

We cannot attempt here to discuss all the modern views as to the growth and decay of the ancient theories to which we must refer, but from the immense literature which has flourished upon the resulting soil we will attempt to show how the mind of all ages has exercised itself upon this particular problem. The narrative is not critically exact, for it claims only to afford a basis on which the efforts of modern explorers may be seen in their relation to the gradual unfolding of human knowledge regarding the Earth.

Herodotus made merry over the absurdity of the round disc of the habitable Earth put forth in the descriptions of Hecatseus. As a traveller and a lover of truth he knew that travellers had been able to get farther from west to east than from north to south about the Mediterranean as a centre, and he was content with this knowledge.

The speculations of the Pythagorean philosophers were not restrained by trammels of fact or experience, and relying on general principles they contemplated the probability of the Earth being a sphere because the sphere was the most perfect form, and the abode of Man the perfection of creation ought also to be perfect of its kind. In this conception of ideal perfection and symmetry we find the first principle of geographical theory ; Herodotus himself had made large use of it in tracing out the course of the rivers of Africa by comparison with those of Europe. If the Earth were spherical the long narrow belt of the Habitable World could occupy only a small portion of its surface. Was the Ocean River to be extended into a huge continuous sheet enveloping all the rest? The idea was contrary to Greek reason. Symmetry demanded other worlds breaking up the dreary voids of ocean on which the mind could not otherwise dwell in comfort. If the new form of the Earth could be entertained by reasonable people there was no reason why there should not be another Habitable World under the Antarctic pole of the heavens to balance that which lay under the Arctic pole. So with the possibility of a spherical Earth the Antarctic problem had its birth.

It is a far cry from a poetical fancy to an established fact. Many minds could entertain the fancy, however novel it might be, but only one or two in all the ages of human history could test the fancy as to whether it was fact or not. Aristotle, the intellectual giant who founded so much of modern science, demonstrated the truth of the spherical form of the Earth and some of his proofs enunciated three and a half centuries before the beginning of our era still hold their place in the school-books of to-day. According to Aristotle the Earth was a sphere because of the tendency of matter to fall together to a common centre, and it was proved to be a sphere by the fact that no other form could always throw a circular shadow on the moon during an eclipse, and because on no other form of Earth could the shifting of the horizon be explained as one travelled from north to south and saw the old familiar stars drop out of sight, while new constellations rose into view.

This stupendous discovery of the true form of the Earth brought in its train others of equal magnitude. A spherical Earth in the centre of a spherical heaven studded with constellations of invariable form was no longer an unknown trackless waste. The stars were landmarks everywhere, for by noting the height of the celestial pole above the horizon the traveller could tell how far he was north or south of the middle line or equator which could be imagined as dividing the globe into halves. And it followed that a distance on the surface that corresponded to an increase or decrease of the elevation of the celestial pole by one degree must be exactly one three-hundred-and-sixtieth of the whole circumference of the Earth. It would suffice then to measure the length in miles or yards of that distance and multiply by 360 to know the size of the globe and so to calculate the exact dimensions and position of the Habitable World surrounding the Mediterranean and the distance it would be necessary to sail over the ocean to come from its west coast to its east or from its north coast to its south. All this was clear to the minds of Aristotle and his followers, but there were innumerable difficulties to be overcome before the established theory could be applied to elicit new facts. Though latitude could easily be reckoned from the altitude of the pole by night, or that of the sun at noon, there was no such easy method of finding longitude, because there was no time-keeper by which a traveller could carry with him the time of an initial meridian. The instruments for finding latitude were also clumsy in the extreme, and the method most in use for centuries was that of noting the length of the longest day. It was difficult, for these reasons, to lay out a line due north and south, the ends of which could be fixed with any precision in order to measure the size of the Earth ; hence it is amazing how very near the estimate of such a mathematician as Eratosthenes came to the truth.

When the shape and size of the Earth became known the main problem of geography was completely altered; it was no longer the question of the possibility of an antarctic region existing; but the possibility of reaching it. The problem, in fact, was the wider one of the distribution of land and water, of climate and the means of travelling, the antarctic problem of to-day being but the unsolved residue of the larger problem.

The estimates of Eratosthenes (about 250 B. C.) made it apparent that the Habitable World of the Greeks occupied only about one-quarter of the surface of the sphere. It seems a limited World to us, though vast enough to those whose swiftest means of transport were the horse and the galley. Controversy was active amongst the Greek philosophers as to the plan of the Earth. The Stoics upheld the continuity of the ocean and viewed the Habitable World as one out of four large islands placed symmetrically upon the sphere, one to balance the other. Nature loved life, so those three unknown Worlds were also inhabited and it was easy to fit the hypothetical peoples with appropriate and expressive names according to their position with regard to the Old World, the Antoken,

Perioken and Antipodes. Strabo and Pomponius Mela at a much later date gave expression to this view.

But the rival philosophers following the lead of Hipparchus ridiculed a theory founded on no better basis than the principle of symmetry, and relying on a statement of the Chaldean astronomer, Seleukos, that the Indian ocean was tideless (a statement entirely contrary to fact) argued that the land was really continuous and the seas occupied enclosed basins within it, of which the Caspian was one of the smallest. How this idea of Seleukos outweighed the historical circumstance mentioned by Herodotus that a Phoenician expedition had circumnavigated Africa by the south we cannot tell. The fact remains that the Alexandrian School took up the theory of continuous land and that Ptolemy, the greatest teacher of that School, and the ultimate repository of the Geography of the Greeks, embodied it in his celebrated map. Thus it happened that his error changed the direction and retarded the progress of geographical discovery for twelve hundred years after his death.

Anyone who reads the laborious arguments by which the ancient philosophers buttressed their fancies as to other habitable worlds and their people must be struck by the vast amount of admirable controversy which might have been rendered unnecessary by a few expeditions carried out writh the determination which characterised the Greek wars. One reason of this apparent lack of enterprise was undoubtedly the general acceptance of the existence of zones of climates, which was an important truth but poisoned by the exaggerated intensity of the climates attributed to the extreme zones.

Without going fully into the question of the zones it is enough to say that even when the flat-Earth theory prevailed it was recognised that far to the north of the pleasant temperate zone, which included the Mediterranean lands, there was a frigid zone of frightful cold, and to the south a torrid zone of frightful heat. The acceptance of the spherical theory of the Earth involved the duplication of these zones in the southern hemisphere

The Theory of Impassable Zones.

and their continuation as unbroken rings round the globe. It was very generally held that the frigid zones were unfit for habitation on account of the cold, and the torrid zone on account of the heat, while the temperate zones alone were habitable. Hence the Habitable World of the north temperate zone was separated from the Antichthone or habitable world of the south temperate zone by the burning torrid belt, in which, as the equator was approached the heat and dryness of the Sahara grew worse and worse, until all life became impossible. The two habitable worlds were believed to be separated by an impassa-

If. ■ ble gulf of unendurable heat; the sea was alive with whales of incredible size, and monsters defying description; it was thick with floating weed through which a ship could not make way, and notwithstanding the intensity of the solar heat by day and the fire thrown down by the stars at night, it was veiled in a perpetual stifling fog. All these exaggerations have so clear a basis of truth that we can hardly acquit the Phoenician sailormen, who traded far into the tropics, of wilfully heightening the discomforts of the doldrums, the terrors of equatorial thunder-storms and of the dust clouds blown from the Sahara, in order to maintain their monopoly.

Whether the southern hemisphere were held to consist mainly of land or of water the terrors of the torrid zone supply a sufficient explanation of the failure of the early explorers to penetrate it. At the same time there is evidence that before the growth of the torrid myth some voyages to the south had been undertaken with success. It may be that Ophir was in the southern hemisphere ; it is practically certain that Africa was circumnavigated by the Phoenicians and that other early travellers had sailed far southward along the east coast of that continent. But these achievements were forgotten, and the legacy of Greek wisdom to Christendom was the fact that the Earth is a globe and the belief that the southern hemisphere of that globe contained habitable land which could never be reached.

Chapter II The Intellectual Sleep And The Awakening

"Let things be — not seem.

I council rather, — do, and nowise dream! Earth's young significance is all to learn : The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urn Where who seeks fire finds ashes."

— Robert Browning.

/TETHER interests filled the troubled Middle Ages, the ^-^ Greek language with the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy were almost forgotten in Christendom, and the results of Greek learning were kept alive only in the Moslem world. The Antarctic problem disturbed no man's rest, and fired the fancy or adventure of no one.

The churchmen detected a fruitful source of heresy in the idea of a spherical Earth, and after a while found it contrary to Scripture; but it is pleasant to note that the Venerable Bede maintained the true view in England. In the first enthusiasm of Christianity worldly knowledge was brushed aside as not being essential to salvation. St. Basil, who did not himself deny the sphericity of the Earth, said:

" Of what importance is it to know whether the Earth is a sphere, a cylinder, a disc or a concave surface? What is of importance is to know how I should conduct myself towards myself, towards my fellowman and towards God."

Perhaps it was the belief in Antipodes, human beings inhabiting the side of the Earth opposite to the known

IO

SLEEP AND AWAKENING n

world, that was most obnoxious to the Christian Fathers. From the theological point of view belief in the existence of vast inaccessible lands inhabited by millions of people raised exactly the same difficulties as in the case of belief in the other planets being also inhabited. Were there separate Divine revelations to these people, were there separate Atonements?

Thus the Antarctic problem became an element in theological controversy. St. Augustine met the difficulty in a philosophical spirit by distinguishing between demonstrated facts and mere speculation and his argument is worth quoting in the following translation from De Civitate Dei, kindly made by Dr. Sutherland Black:

" Further, as touching what they fable, that there are antipodes — that is to say, that on the opposite side of the Earth, where the sun rises when he sets to us, men plant [their] footsteps opposite to our feet — it is by no means to be believed. Nor, indeed, do they [who so allege] maintain that they have learned this by any historical knowledge, but, so to speak, they conjecture it by a process of reasoning [to the effect] that the Earth is suspended between the vaults of the sky and that the world occupies at one and the same time the lowest and the intermediate position, and from this they form the opinion that the other half of the Earth which is below cannot possibly be without human inhabitants. But they fail to observe that even although the world be believed, or even in some sort shown, to be of a rounded and spherical form, it does not, therefore, follow that the Earth also in that part is free from the accumulation of waters; nor yet even should it be thus free, would it forthwith follow of necessity that it should be peopled. For in no way does the scripture lie which when it relates the past produces confidence in that its predictions are being fulfilled, and it is too absurd that it should be said that certain men had been able, the immensity of Ocean traversed, to sail from this side and arrive at the other so that there also the human race should be set up from that one first man. . . ."

To Augustine the trouble seemed to be to understand how the Antipodes could be descended from Adam, and the completeness of his theory as to the constitution of the City of God required that all men should be descended through Noah from Adam. His suggestion that the other side of the world might be entirely covered with

Spherical Earth with no Antipodes. (After Rainaud.)

water was worked out in a mediaeval spherical Earth which could harbour no Antipodes, being devised on the principle that the lithosphere or solid globe need not be concentric with the hydrosphere or globe of waters. But centuries before this ingenious plan of avoiding the theological difficulty was arrived at the spherical Earth was banished from Christendom on the plea that it was in contradiction to Scripture.

Lactantius early in the fourth century covered with ridicule those who could believe in so monstrous a conception as a spherical Earth, and without using any argument save " It is written " he denounced the whole theory as a Greek invention. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a monk who had travelled to India and could not reconcile his own observations with a flat Earth, set himself in the sixth century to the hopeless task of constructing an Earth out of his own head on the model of the Jewish tabernacle with a prodigious conical mountain in the midst for the sun to rise from and set behind.

The Earth According to Cosmas Indicopleustes.

It is an unedifying story. The temporary result was that in the mind of Europe the Earth became once more as flat as a pancake, and the wheel-maps of the Middle Ages reverted to the circular disc of the earliest Greeks. The Antarctic problem, after being stigmatised as heresy, had been crushed out of existence. How serious the heresy v/as may be gathered from the fact that in the year 741 Pope Zacharias excommunicated an Irish priestnamed Virgil because he taught the doctrine of Antipodes " admitting the existence of souls who shared

Wheel-Map of the Twelfth Century. (From Nordenskiold's Facsimile Atlas.)

neither the sin of Adam nor the redemption of Christ." The bold Irishman probably recognised the truth of Augustine's argument and thought it unnecessary to suffer to the utmost in support of a speculative fancy, for after twenty years he was consecrated Bishop of Salzburg, a pretty strong proof of his recantation.

The reign of Papal authority lasted long, but from time to time the ancient ideas found expression. Ptolemy's views leaked back into current thought from the tenth century onward through the Arabic translations brought to Europe by the Moors and made known by the writings of Isidore of Seville. Occasionally a speculative monk in drawing a wheel-map extended it far beyond the limits of the Old World, and like Macrobius represented some possibility of a southern temperate and even of a southern frigid zone. Speculation revived as to the existence of Antipodes to the west as well as Antipodes to the south. Roger Bacon, so far before his age in all that concerned natural science, openly declared his belief in them, and of course in the spherical form of the Earth.

The travels of Marco Polo opened the eyes of the awakening intellect of Europe to the immense eastward extension of the Old World, and made it clear for the first time that the Torrid Zone was no barrier of fire, but a path for Chinese and Arab trade in the far east of Asia and along the east coast of Africa. Marco Polo prepared the way for the translation of Ptolemy made by Angeles in 1410. The world was ready for this revelation and there is something of pathos in the sight of the first leaders of thought in modern Europe eagerly welcoming as the latest advance the work of the last of the Greeks. Long before this, isolated writers, such as Moses, a converted Spanish Jew, in the eleventh century, Michael Scott, the astrologer and reputed wizard, and Albert Trismegistus, the alchymist, had urged that the Torrid Zone was not impassable on account of heat, and that it might be traversed though with great difficulty.

Europe at last became fully awake. In every department of intellectual activity the idle disputations in which the learning of the Schoolmen had its end were being discarded. Facts of natural science were no longer an-

The Map of Macrobius.

swered according to the letter of Aristotle, but according to his spirit by direct appeal to nature. The art of navigation had greatly improved, the Northmen had discovered new lands far in the west, the compass had been invented, or adopted from the Chinese, and as a final spur to action the power of Mohammedanism passed from the cultivated Arab to the sanguinary and ignorant Turk.

This change was one of the most remarkable of the whole renaissance. The Turk burnt the Alexandrine library and the Pope admitted the sphericity of the Earth ; the sceptre of intellect passed by these acts from Islam to Christendom, and the way was reopened to attack the problem of the Antarctic. The shifting of the balance of power began to press heavily on trade. The routes to the Far East were blocked by the Turk ; but the products of the Far East had become indispensable to Europe. The possibility of a sea-passage to India became a pressing affair, and Ptolemy's Terra Incognita uniting the south of Africa with the Malay peninsula would bar the way; but here it appears that the early European geographers were not altogether inclined to follow Ptolemy, and many even of the wheel-maps show the Indian Ocean open to the south.

The problem of the sea-route to the East absorbed the attention of the Portuguese Prince Henry, of English descent on his mother's side, whose life-long efforts to promote maritime enterprise gained for him the surname of The Navigator. With the advent of Prince Henry we pass from speculation to exploration, and thanks to his vigorous initiative the clouds of ignorance which had obscured three-quarters of the Earth's surface for millenniums, began to roll away.

It is scarcely possible in the twentieth century for us to understand the horror of the unknown ocean which haunted the seafarers of the Mediterranean even so late as the beginning of the fifteenth century. It would seem as if the fancies of the ancient Greeks had expanded in vagueness and terror during the intellectual sleep until they became veritable nightmares. West of the Pillars of Hercules the portals of the pleasant Mediterranean, where every coast-line had been neatly and accurately charted there lay an infinite expanse of water, but southward as the Torrid Zone was approached the sea became covered with darkness, the waves rose to mountain height, the wind dropped calm, the water itself evaporated into a saline mud in which dwelt monsters of indescribable size and variety. Blackest horror of all, the huge hand of the Devil himself would be thrust up above the boiling sea groping for wandering ships; one of the fantastic islands in the Atlantic on a mediaeval map bears the title, de la man de Satanaxio. We hear at the present day of the superstitions of sailors, and multiplying these superstitions by the centuries which have passed since Prince Henry organised his pioneer exploration, we can dimly apprehend what the courage of the old mariners was, nerving them to contend against far greater obstacles than those interposed by Nature.

Year after year, from 14 18 until he died in 1460, Prince Henry sent out his ships under stout skippers trained at his naval observatory at Sagres in the knowledge of Ptolemy and the Arabs, and posted up in all the information brought back by their contemporaries. The farthest south of these days was Cape Nun (280 46' N.) long held impassable ; it was passed by Gil Eannes in 1433 or 1434. Ten years later the dreary harbourless coast of the Great Desert was passed and the name of Cape Verde, the Green Cape, testifies to the joy and surprise of the navigators in their discovery that the Torrid Zone was not all Sahara, but contained fertile and inhabited land. The Navigator died long before the achievement of crossing the equator by one of the ships which followed voluntarily in the track which he had opened with the labour of a life-time. This occurred about 1470.