The Explorers Page 14
The Age of Polar Exploration was anticipated by Aristotle, who theorized that the world needed a set of balanced landmasses on either end to spin properly. The fringes of the Arctic were explored first, by Vikings and other sailors, due to their proximity to Europe. But the Age of Polar Exploration was never fully addressed until the discovery of Antarctica by Captain James Cook in 1775, which confirmed Aristotle’s theory. It had long been fantasized that the South Pole was a place of great jewels and riches, but even when it became apparent that it consisted of absolutely nothing but snow and ice, mining its nonexistent riches was replaced by the manic desire to touch its geographic soul—the 90°, 0° mark on the map.
The same was true of the equally awful North Pole. Which is ironic, because for the longest time, mankind had absolutely no inclination to chart the polar regions. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the first expedition of substance was undertaken, by British naval officer William Parry in 1827. He attempted to reach the North Pole, but failed. He did, however, succeed in reaching 82 degrees north latitude, a record that stood for forty-nine years.V
Polar exploration was not as glamorous as finding the source of the Nile, walking across Australia’s outback, charting the North American continent, or climbing the great Mount Everest. But by the end of the nineteenth century the first three achievements on that list had been accomplished, and the fourth appeared to be as physically impossible as swimming to the bottom of the ocean. It can almost be said that mankind only reluctantly began racing to the poles because all the warm destinations had already been reached.
As we’ve established, there is nothing at the North or the South Pole. Nothing. Yet men endured some of exploration’s greatest miseries and calamities for the privilege of standing on perhaps the two loneliest spots on the planet. They bundled themselves in layer upon layer of clothing—reindeer-skin boots and pants wrapped in windproof canvas, reindeer-skin gloves, waterproof canvas smocks—and beneath it all, itchy wool sweaters, hats, and underwear that became soaked in sweat from their exertions, and then froze the instant the explorers stopped moving. They began each journey with sled dogs. By design, their beloved animal companions were then killed and eaten whenever food grew sparse. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, polar explorers endured diseases such as scurvy that were once consigned to sea travel, and even lead poisoning from poorly soldered cans of food.
All this, just to say they’d been the first to stand on a 90°, 0° point on the map.
Strangely, once the poles had been reached, polar exploration was done. Complete. Nobody wanted to go back. What was the point?VI It was the ultimate example of exploration as competition, and one of the rare times in history that being first mattered most—and being second, not at all.
It was Scott’s route that proved his undoing. His ascent of the Beardmore Glacier took valuable time and drained his supplies. Scott’s team was just 178 miles from the Pole when Amundsen arrived first on December 14, 1911. By the time Scott descended the glacier and reached the South Pole on January 18, 1912, he and his team were greeted by the dispiriting sight of a small tent on the exact spot. Inside the tent was a Norwegian flag. A depressed Scott was devastated. “Great God! This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”
Scott’s first impulse was to withdraw into his depression, yet he realized that his actions would have grave effects on the morale of his men. The lot of them were already suffering from scurvy, frostbite, and exhaustion after months battling the –40° temperatures. Scott set aside his disappointment and rallied the men for the journey back to the Ross Ice Shelf.
They reached Beardmore Glacier on February 7, during a windstorm. After taking time to collect rock samples, including some with plant impressions that proved the land had once been forested, they continued. On February 17, Seaman Edgar Evans died a short distance from the supply camp they had established on the glacier.
Food was dwindling and the distance to travel was still great, but Scott was the very model of composure. Then things got worse. Just 31 miles from a depot containing a ton of supplies, Scott was forced by serious blizzards to halt their progress. It was there that army captain Lawrence Oates, afflicted with a mind-boggling case of frostbite, gave in to despair. The blizzard would not cease. By that time the dogs had all been eaten and the other food stores were gone, too.
The key to staying alive meant reaching the cache of canned food they had stored on their outbound journey. But Oates was suffering from scurvy and his feet were completely frostbitten. At night he slept with one leg outside his reindeer-skin sleeping bag so that it would freeze and thus kill the pain in his toes. There was no way Oates could continue, and no way for Scott or the others to carry him. So when a blizzard once again pinned the expedition inside their tents on March 16, 1912, Oates knew what had to be done. “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said to his companions, who knew full well he was about to sacrifice his life for theirs.
So it was that Oates opened the tent flap and stepped out into the blizzard.
This, in the words of another polar explorer, is what he encountered: “There is something extravagantly insensate about an Antarctic blizzard,” wrote Admiral Richard Byrd. ‘’Its vindictiveness cannot be measured on an anemometer sheet. It is more than just a wind, it is a solid wall of snow moving at gale force, pounding like surf. The whole malevolent rush is focused upon you as a personal enemy. In the senseless explosion of sound you are reduced to a crawling thing on the margin of the disintegrating world; you can’t see, you can’t hear, you can hardly move.”
Imagine the arc of Oates’s exploration: curiosity, hope, and passion got him to the South Pole. Courage allowed him to face the very real fact that his injuries would be the death of his companions. Independence opened that tent flap. Self-discipline quieted the voice in his head that told him to turn right back around and dive back into that reindeer skin sleeping bag. And finally, perseverance told him to keep staggering farther and farther into the blizzard until the cold finally shut his body down for good. Maybe he opened his coat to speed the process. But he walked, and kept on walking, until the end finally came.
This much we know, because Oates’s body has never been found.
Sadly, Oates’s efforts were in vain. The rest of Scott’s expedition perished within two weeks. A blizzard trapped them in their tent just days after Oates died. Food ran out before the storm ended.
Evidence shows that Scott was the last to freeze to death, because even with his dead mates lying on either side of him, he wrote a series of letters and journal entries detailing the bravery and bad luck his expedition endured. “Every day now we have been ready to start for our depot eleven miles away, but outside the door of the tent, it remains a scene of swirling snowdrift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now,” he wrote on March 29, 1912. “I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall see it to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake, look after our people.”
Scott’s letters are how the world learned of Oates. Otherwise, that selfless act would have gone unknown. “With the blizzard at its height,” wrote Scott, “he left the tent and was never seen again.”
The bodies of Scott, Edward Wilson, and Henry Bowers were discovered on November 12, 1912, side by side in their tent, where they had slowly died from starvation and cold. Given the choice to commit suicide by injecting themselves with the copious amounts of morphine in their medical kit, they opted to endure the agony of slowly freezing to death. This is an extreme form of moral courage, choosing to die naturally rather than by their own hand because it was against their personal principles, even though absolutely no one but themselves and their Maker would ever know the truth.
Scott, Wilson, and Bowers were left where they were found. Their tent was collapsed
upon them and snow allowed to accumulate, burying the bodies forever. The cold has no doubt preserved them without decomposition. So the three of them lie there still, side by side by side.
In the century since his death, the location of Scott’s tent has been lost. Yet because his party died atop frozen ocean rather than land, their journey is not yet complete. The inexorable movement of ice away from the Antarctic landmass toward the Southern Ocean means that someday their bodies will be part of an ice floe that will drift and eventually melt, giving their bodies up to the sea.
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So how to develop such a profound reservoir of courage? For the explorers, it meant the daily discipline of confronting each and every challenge head-on. The first step of every journey was always the hardest. Each day would bring failure, surprise, and maybe even death. Their trick was to be bold, even when they were cold, wet, tired, hungry, miserable, or sick. This didn’t mean explorers had more courage that other segments of society lacked. They simply believed it was better to try and fail than not to try at all. “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “He is just braver five minutes longer.”
A most unlikely example of this daily discipline was botanist Alexander von Humboldt. Entitled, chubby, and gay, the German socialite’s only enduring interests were his mother and the study of botany. Yet he undertook two of the most courageous journeys in history.
Humboldt was born in 1769, the same year that Isabel Godin began her long journey down the Amazon in search of her husband. He was the son of a wealthy Prussian cavalry officer and a French Huguenot woman who had fled to Berlin to escape religious persecution. His father died when he was ten. By 1790, Alexander von Humboldt seemed destined to spend his lifetime squandering his somewhat sizable inheritance when fate intervened in rather cruel fashion. First, he traveled extensively through Europe with Georg Forster, who had sailed aboard Captain Cook’s second voyage of discovery as a young man.
Though Humboldt was fifteen years younger than Forster, the two shared a passion for travel that inspired Humboldt to pursue new adventures. Then Humboldt’s mother died just days after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Alone for the first time in his life, he consoled himself by pursuing a long-stifled yearning for international travel. Humboldt soon met Aimé Bonpland, a young French doctor who shared his unlikely passion for plants and animals. The two became fast friends. When the Napoleonic Wars put an end to their goal of exploring the Nile together, they came up with an audacious plan to explore the jungles of South America, which were thought to be full of new and exotic plants. To see if they were cut out for the journey they walked the 500 miles from Marseilles to Madrid together. Their journey ended at Spain’s royal palace, where they sought an audience with King Carlos IV in the hopes that he would grant them permission to explore his nation’s South American colonies. Disregarding the obvious fact that Humboldt and Bonpland had no practical botany experience, Carlos not only met with them, but he was so mesmerized by their profound curiosity that he put them on the next ship to Cumaná. The journey had begun.
On February 7, 1800, Humboldt and Bonpland set out on foot from Caracas, planning to trace the Orinoco River from the ocean backward to where it connected with the Amazon. Along the way they would observe and catalog whatever plants and animals they might see. When Christopher Columbus had discovered the Orinoco in 1498 he thought it was the great river that was reputed to flow out of Eden. It was conceivable that every type of plant and animal would be found there. Though they didn’t think that true, Humboldt and Bonpland had chosen the most symbolically powerful journey in all of botany to make their exploration debut. The two men must have needed all the courage they possessed to even consider such a challenge.
It was a journey that had never been attempted before, and the likelihood of success by the two inexperienced, pampered adventurers seemed slim. The heat and humidity were stifling and the physical discomforts prohibitive, ranging from insects that ate their flesh to an electric fish they encountered when wading the swampy llanos grassland. This Eletrophorus electricus, as named by Humboldt, produced a current of 650 volts—enough to kill a horse. Humboldt personally allowed the fish to jolt him so that he might experience this phenomenon. “The shock,” he wrote, “produced a violent pain in the knees, and in almost every joint for the rest of the day.”
By April the two were deeper into the Orinoco Basin than any previous explorers. When their rowboat gave out, they purchased dugout canoes from local tribes, then paddled farther and farther upriver. They made their beds each night along the river’s edge, exposed to insects, poisonous snakes, and jaguars. The slightest cut became a running sore. Worst of all to the would-be botanists, the humidity destroyed their notebooks, making it impossible to keep detailed scientific records. Yet they pushed on. Each day saw new discoveries.
After traveling more than 1,500 miles upriver, Humboldt and Bonpland discovered the Casiquiare Canal, a natural channel linking the Orinoco and the Rio Negro. Recognizing that the latter river fed into the Amazon, Humboldt proclaimed their three-month journey a success. He had personally collected twelve thousand new varieties of plants. That celebration was quickly cut short, however, on the eve of their return when both men were stricken by typhoid from drinking untreated water. Weak, burning with fever, and doubled over with stomach pains, they set out for home, knowing that it was imperative to get to a hospital. When Bonpland’s condition worsened until he was near death, his body covered in rose-colored splotches and the pain of his constant stomach cramps made worse by migraine headaches, it was Humboldt who paddled their dugout down the rapids and swamps of the Orinoco. After an entire month of this determined suffering, their painful odyssey came to an end when they reached the town of Angostura.VII
Both men spent six months in the hospital. Word of their journey soon traveled back to Europe, where they were widely viewed as heroes. Humboldt and Bonpland had metamorphosed from dreamers to a pair of truly courageous (and famous) explorers. Thus, rather than sail home and bask in the limelight, both men were hungry to push their limits once again.
They immediately traveled to Cartagena, and began a journey up the uncharted Magdalena River. It took them six weeks to reach the city of Bogotá. When they came to the point where they could go no farther, Humboldt and Bonpland purchased mules to help them cross the Andes. As they trudged through the deep snows of Quindiu Pass, Humboldt was inspired by the sight of a distant peak. The young German had never attempted mountain climbing before, but was determined to attain that majestic summit. Unknowingly, he and Bonpland were about to become the first mountain climbers in South American history.
The mountain was Chimborazo. At 20,564 feet the snow-covered volcano is one of the highest peaks in the Southern Hemisphere. The first portion of the climb was relatively uneventful, but once they came within a mile of the summit, Humboldt and Bonpland encountered obstacle after obstacle: snow, ice, low clouds. The altitude made them nauseous, and they began to bleed from the eyes, lips, and gums. Still, they pressed on. But just below the summit the two explorers came across a vast ravine that lay between them and the top that was impossible to cross. Despite the fact that they didn’t make the summit, the altitude they attained was the highest point anyone in the world had ever climbed to that time. It would be thirty years before that record was broken.
The rest of that 1801–2 journey was one form of exploration after another: Observing the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun in Lima; investigating Incan ruins at Canar (the first archaeological expedition in South America); and collecting specimens of bark from the cinchona tree, the antimalarial source of quinine. When it was done, they accepted an invitation to visit President Thomas Jefferson at his home in Virginia, where Humboldt spent three months perusing the great man’s library before sailing for Europe, where he lived in comfort and splendor for the rest of his long
life.VIII
It could be said that spending the final sixty years of his life basking in praise and adulation was Humboldt’s reward for those years of daily courage in the wilds of South America. His journey’s ultimate conclusion was an explorer’s wet dream: undertake a great adventure, complete it with smashing thoroughness and success, return home alive and in good health, be acknowledged with a lifetime of wealth and fame, and then live on after death through the various places and species christened in his honor. In addition to the Humboldt Current, a rough count shows forty-seven cities, schools, plants, sea creatures, and animals named for Humboldt. These include a squid, penguin, orchid, skunk, and a gorgeous yellow flower from the Ultricularia genus known as a bladderwort.IX
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Nothing and no place is named after Sir Richard Francis Burton. Mount Speke in Uganda, Speke Gulf in Tanzania, and a very small creature known as the Speke’s gazelle are all that bear the name of John Hanning Speke. This is not to say that they wouldn’t have been interested in the enduring fame Humboldt enjoyed—after all, Burton and Speke were two men of considerable ego. But gazelles and bladderworts weren’t their primary focus. Their expedition was always bent on a bigger legacy. Burton was a keen ethnographer and studious in collecting botanical samples. Speke was also enthralled with new discoveries in plants and animals. So once they found Lake Tanganyika—a great accomplishment in its own right—the journey then focused solely on finding the source of the Nile. Nothing else mattered. Dick Burton and Jack Speke were on the verge of solving history’s greatest puzzle. Let Humboldt, now living out his final years in Berlin, have his plants and penguin. Let George Everest have the world’s tallest mountain. Let Livingstone spend years and years fixated on the Zambezi River—important in its own way, but nowhere nearly as mythic as the source.