The Ice. Stephen J. Pyne
of his manipulation of the ship’s log) a controversy over whether he or d’Urville had first sighted the mainland, and suffered through a subsequent naval career in near ostracism until the American Civil War saw his rank restored. During the war he precipitated another international crisis by seizing two Confederate envoys from a British ship and thrusting Britain and America to the brink of war. Again he was court-martialed. Between 1847 and 1849 his five-volume narrative appeared, and over the next thirty years scientists wrote eighteen volumes more, but Congress declined to appropriate sufficient money to allow the full work of the expedition to be published, and only one hundred official copies of Wilkes’s narrative were actually printed. Wilkes so lapsed into obscurity that when he died in 1877, as William Stanton notes, “many newspapers forgot to mention that he had commanded the First Great National Exploring Expedition.”12 Nonetheless, Mark Twain recalled that during his Missouri childhood Wilkes had been the most famous name in America.13 As wth Wilkes, so with the U.S. Exploring Expedition: it was ever a source of controversy and missed opportunities, well symbolized by the fate of one of its great treasures, the cornucopia of Polynesian artifacts gathered by artist-naturalist Titian Peale. In the mid-1890s the long-missing collection was accidentally unearthed beneath several tons of coal in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution.
There followed a hiatus in Antarctic exploration. The Franklin disaster refocused polar discovery by Britain and the U.S. to the Arctic, and the recession of the fur seal and whaling industries removed economic incentives from the Antarctic. For a while almost the sole advocate of south polar exploration was Matthew Fontaine Maury, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory and Hydrographic Office and author of two seminal works in oceanography: Wind and Current Charts (1847) and the celebrated Physical Geography of the Sea, first published in 1855. Antarctica—or the absence of solid geographic information about it—increasingly preoccupied Maury. He admonished the naval powers that “one sixth part of the entire landed surface of our planet” is “as unknown to the inhabitants of the earth as is the interior of one of Jupiter’s satellites.” Elaborating on the contrast with Arctic exploration, he argued that “for the last 200 years the Arctic Ocean has been a theatre for exploration; but as for the antarctic, no expedition has attempted to make any persistent exploration or even to winter there.” Dismayed over U.S. disinterest in further exploration (the popular interest in polar exploration lay in Elisha Kane’s Arctic travels, and the country was otherwise preoccupied with the exploration of its far western territories and with the political crisis that would culminate in the Civil War), Maury in 1860 urged that Antarctic exploration “should be a joint one among the nations that are concerned in maritime pursuits.” The development of steam power, he argued, made penetration of the pack ice possible.14
Instead, traditional activity in Antarctica continued, although on a vastly reduced scale. Commercial sealers and whalers revisited favorite sites, refining local geographic knowledge. In the 1870s a final burst of activity effectively closed the era and symbolically returned it to its origins. To commemorate the centennial of Cook’s voyages, the British Admiralty and the Royal Society sponsored a four-year (1872–1876) circumnavigation of the world sea for the purposes of oceanographic research. A specially outfitted ship, the Challenger, brought the latest in scientific equipment to bear on the problem. But the Challenger expedition in the Antarctic confined itself to the subantarctic islands, to physical measurements of the sea, and to the collection of specimens of marine life. While its dredgings would help revive scientific interest in the question of a polar continent twenty years later, so primitive were its researches in the remote Antarctic that it failed to recognize as gross an oceanographic boundary as the Antarctic convergence. Meanwhile, another cooperative international undertaking—to measure the transit of Venus in 1874—recalled the 1769 transit that had underwritten Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific. The U.S. established a base at Kerguelen Island, along the convergence. And finally a German expedition again combined sealing with exploration, voyaging under the command of Capt. Eduard Dallman to the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, where some minor islands were discovered.
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”
In the eighteenth century, scientific exploration on the grand scale was epitomized by the international effort to survey the transit of Venus. Not only did it dispatch Cook on his first voyage to the South Seas, but it sent such luminaries as Peter Pallas, then under the direction of the Russian Academy of Sciences, on his expedition to the Urals and the Land of Sibir. The organizational complexity, the emphasis on natural philosophy, and the anticipated practical benefits all identified these explorers as savants of the Enlightenment, not intellectual buccaneers out of the Renaissance. Yet even as Cook conducted his circumnavigations the character of exploration was being reconstituted. Maritime discovery was being complemented by an even more powerful wave of continental exploration; new instruments and technologies refined the purposes and redirected the goals of discovery; and the intellectual context of the Cook era, embedded in the Enlightenment, was being superseded by the sensibilities of Romanticism. Their emphasis on scientific research made explorers something more than foragers of empire.
Out of them would evolve the Romantic explorer, with his fascination for natural history, who would carry discovery into the continental interiors and who would dominate exploration in the nineteenth century. This transformation was part of a vast act of reperception, of intellectual systems-building, and of political and cultural assimilation so fundamental that William Goetzmann has termed it a Second Great Age of Discovery.15 The effects, in fact, were reciprocal. Western civilization greatly expanded its reach, but it also had to grapple with the political, social, economic, and intellectual consequences of assimilating the new lands it unveiled or the old lands it visited anew.
As with the voyages of the Renaissance, the process began in Europe, this time prepared by an era of internal travels by European intellectuals. The example of Cook’s explorations was instrumental in forging the purposes and style of these journeys, although they were no longer restricted to the coasts or to the conceptual context of natural philosophy. In particular, a German ethnographer on Cook’s second voyage, Georg Forster, inspired the man who would symbolize the explorer of the new era, Alexander von Humboldt. Quickly, this new mode of exploration was transported from Europe to the other continents. In place of circumnavigation, a traverse across a continent became the grand gesture of the explorer, and in place of a mappa mundi of the world ocean, a cross-section of a continent’s natural history became the supreme intellectual achievement of an exploring expedition. Previously, travels into the interior had only supplemented sea power. Their purpose had not been to conduct general surveys of geography and natural history but to seek out the treasure and the capitals of unknown civilizations like the Incas and Aztecs, or to establish commercial contact with such ancient peoples as the Chinese and Indians. Explorers, like “the rulers and investors who sent them out,” were “practical men,” observes Parry. “One cannot imagine fifteenth-century explorers searching for the North Pole.”16 Increasingly, however, the primary purpose of ships was to transport men and equipment to new lands; the great treasures were the artifacts of natural history and those natural resources not yet converted by native civilizations. In the process, the character of exploration metamorphosed, and the natural history of Europe—its rocks, its flora and fauna, its peoples—was systematically compared to that of other lands.
Map of Antarctica as it was known at the onset of the heroic age. Expeditions and landforms are both indicated. Only the tip of the peninsula and portions of the Ross Sea were known with any confidence. Redrawn from Robert Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery.
This contrast was broad and its effects powerful. Not only scientific data but experiences, images, sensations, artifacts, and specimens were all information that had to be processed. The sheer volume as well as the novelty of much of this information demanded new sciences such as geology and new sensibilities such as those expressed in Romantic landscape painting, novels, and travelogues. Natural history, in particular, enjoyed an explosive, popular growth. Geographic discovery asked and answered questions of fundamental significance to this civilization. Moreover, the mode of exploration advertised by Humboldt and his imitators involved not only surveying,