WHEN I TELL FRIENDS THAT I’M WRITING A book about the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, they typically respond in one of two ways. Some say how much they admire Ernest Shackleton’s leadership style, while others question Robert Scott’s tactics in trying to reach the South Pole first. Both responses are telling. A century after their exploits, these two men are still widely known for their personal achievements, but their fame rests largely on how they dealt with adversity in their efforts to reach the geographical South Pole. That, most people assume, is why they went to Antarctica; much else about their expeditions is forgotten.
This book is neither a paean to Shackleton’s leadership nor a critique of Scott’s choices. It is about what was central to British efforts in the Antarctic. In the era before World War I, when Antarctic exploration was largely a British project, that project was largely concerned with science.
Scott led two expeditions to Antarctica during the first twelve years of the twentieth century; Shackleton led one. Scott’s first was part of an international program also involving German and Swedish teams to explore the Antarctic that was fundamentally scientific in design and execution, although of course it had military, commercial, ideological, and personal motives as well. The ensuing expeditions by Shackleton and Scott followed directly on Scott’s first effort and adopted its basic scheme. All three British expeditions entered Antarctica through the Ross Sea. They form a logical unit that stand apart from other expeditions of the so-called Heroic Age, including Shackleton’s second, both in their organization and in their impact.
If the race to the South Pole eventually consumed Scott, it was never at the expense of science. His two expeditions and Shackleton’s 1907–9 venture carried enormous scientific baggage. If getting to the pole first was Scott’s overriding objective, he went about it the wrong way. If he meant to get to the pole first while doing meaningful science along the way, he did it right—but in doing so, he fatally handicapped himself in a contest against Roald Amundsen, a polar adventurer of proven ability who cared only about winning the race. Focus empowered him. Scott and Shackleton served many masters, one of which was the British conception of scientific discovery, exploration, and conquest.
Any account of the three British Antarctic expeditions between 1901 and 1913 inevitably touches on Shackleton’s leadership, Scott’s choices, and the race to the pole. But these expeditions were complex enterprises. Science wove through every part of them, both influencing and being influenced by their other aspects—including such critical intangibles as leadership and choices. I know of no better way to understand the whole of these expeditions than through the lens of their research. Fortunately, the less-told tale of the explorers’ scientific activities is often as gripping as the story of their polar quest.
Examining the astounding research efforts of these expeditions also illumines the fundamental place of science in Victorian and Edwardian British culture. Britain built and sustained its global empire during this period. In doing so, explorers and imperial officers took Western science to the four corners of the world—measuring, mapping, and collecting specimens as part of their program to subdue alien territory and make it British. The proud citizen of a nation that had recently cast off foreign rule, Amundsen came from a different tradition than Scott and Shackleton, and had different goals. Empire is not only about the physical conquest of territories; for the British, it was always about scientifically exploring and systematically exploiting them even as the definition and conception of science itself evolved. In a sense, then, this story is not only about the explorers’ science in its various and contested forms. It is also about power and politics; culture and commerce; hubris and heroism at the end of the Earth.
Books about the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration could fill a library. They fill a bookcase in mine. Yet except for many of the participants’ published diaries and memoirs, most of these books—including some of the best—say little about science. There are notable exceptions. David Yelverton’s thorough account of Scott’s first expedition, Antarctica Unveiled, fully incorporates research activities into the overall account. T. H. Baughman does so too in his works on the dawn of the Heroic Age. Modern-day Antarctic researcher Susan Solomon included science in her retelling of Scott’s second expedition, The Coldest March. Although focused on later periods, G. E. Fogg’s technical A History of Antarctic Science covers the early expeditions in some detail. In his 1967 book, South to the Pole, L. B. Quartermain provides a comprehensive account of expeditions to the Ross Sea region though the Heroic Age. There are others. Here, I attempt to place the research work of three well-known expeditions into a broad scientific, cultural, and social context reaching back into the Victorian era and across to other expeditions of the period. The coverage may be less than encyclopedic at times, but everywhere it is more than representative.
With numerous scientific disciplines and multiple expeditions coming and going, narrative structure became challenging. A chronological account would leave the reader bouncing between a dozen fields of science without context or closure. Instead, I have layered the narrative by major disciplines: biology, geography, geology, glaciology, meteorology, oceanography, paleontology, and terrestrial magnetism. This structure means that each chapter starts anew, in the nineteenth century or before, and carries the story of its particular science into the early twentieth century or beyond.
The chapters are organized to minimize repetition and give some sense of the unity of the whole, yet that unity was more fundamental than this approach suggests. Oceanography, marine biology, and meteorology so merged in the ecological field studies of these expeditions that I combined them into a single chapter. Geology, glaciology, and physical geography are separated into different chapters largely because of the vast amount of new findings generated by these expeditions, but in fact those findings drew these fields closer together. By exposing the stark Antarctic environment to scientific analysis for the first time, these expeditions helped to reveal nature’s fundamental unity to discipline-divided scientists and thus lay a foundation for modern concepts of ecology. Scott and Shackleton loom large in some of the resulting chapters; in others they are eclipsed by such lesser-known figures as Louis Bernacchi, Edgeworth David, Frank Debenham, Hartley Ferrar, Douglas Mawson, James Murray, Raymond Priestley, Griffith Taylor, Edward Wilson, and Charles Wright. On these expeditions, many people played influential roles.
Science involves measurement. For the Antarctic explorers, this mostly meant length, depth, height, weight, area, volume, and temperature. They generally used imperial units: inches, feet, miles, fathoms, leagues, pounds, tons, acres, gallons, and degrees Fahrenheit. So far as possible, this book follows their conventions. Compounding the confusion for modern readers, the explorers used three types of miles—statute, nautical, and geographical—often without differentiation, and sometimes used a short ton instead of the British long ton. In accord with current American usage, unless otherwise noted I have attempted to convert their figures to statute miles and short tons.
Early-twentieth-century explorers called some prominent geographical features by names that are no longer widely used. To avoid confusion, I have generally followed the explorers’ conventions. For example, they typically referred to the entire Ross Ice Shelf as the Great Ice Barrier, a term now generally reserved to the shelf’s seaward edge, and hailed the southern continent’s defining feature, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, as simply the Polar Plateau. Further, in excerpts drawn from the records of early explorers, McMurdo Sound is often called a bay.
Conducting scientific research in Antarctica has always required collaboration, and this is true for my study of its history as well. This book is the direct product of my participation in the National Science Foundation’s 2003–4 Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Always traveling with others, and frequently in the company of experts, through this program I saw much of what the early explorers saw, from Ross Island and the Great Ice Barrier to Beardmore Glacier and the South Pole. On December 18, 2003, exactly one hundred years after Scott, Edgar Evans, and William Lashly became the first humans to enter an Antarctic dry valley, I retraced their steps through Taylor Valley with the longtime manager of its research camp, Rae Spain. A few weeks later, I camped near Shackleton’s winter quarters at Cape Royds with David Ainley, who has studied the cape’s Adelie penguins for years. Both Spain and Ainley know the region’s human history. Such experiences made this book possible. Having taken this extended trip during my tenure as chair of the University of Georgia’s History Department, I want to thank Vici Payne for keeping the office going in my absence.
Many of the explorers’ scientific papers, field notes, diaries, and letters are published; many unpublished ones are held in public archives. For access to the unpublished sources, I wish to acknowledge the archives and thank the archivists and librarians at Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, the Royal Geographical Society of London, the International Antarctic Centre and Canterbury Museum at Christ-church, New Zealand, the Royal Society in London, the National Maritime Museum of Greenwich, the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town, Byrd Polar Research Center at The Ohio State University, and the McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott South Pole Stations in Antarctica. For published resources from their own collections and interlibrary loan sources, I received particular help from the UCLA, University of Georgia, and Pepperdine University libraries and reference librarians, especially from Pepperdine’s Jodi Kruger and Marc Vinyard.
I can only begin to identify all other individuals who have contributed to this book. William Frucht, my editor at Yale University Press, time and again kept this effort on track and brought it to completion, just as he did my earlier book about the history of science on the Galápagos Islands, Evolution’s Workshop. I cherish his continuing support. Through my association with the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, many polar administrators, educators, and scientists have offered advice or information, including National Science Foundation program manager Vladimir Papitashvili, Umram Inan, Evans Paschal, Serap Tilav, Jöerg Hörandel, Collin Blaise, Eyal Gerecht, Antony Stark, Nicolas Tothill, Thomas Nikola, William Holzaphfel, Robert Garrott, Laurie Connell, Paul Ponganis, Carol Landis, Diane McKnight, Justin Joslin, Alexandre Tsapin, Ross Virginia, Michael Poage, Diana Wall, Ralph Harvey, Robert Smalley, Bruce Luyendyk, Luann Becker, Howard Conway, Fred Eisele, Detlev Helmig, Stephen Warren, Stephen Hudson, Glen Kinoshita, Alan Campbell, and (above all) Antarctic Artist and Writers Program manager Guy Guthridge. If I had not dedicated this book to my son, I would have dedicated it to Guy. Most of all, my thanks go to my wife, Lucy, and our children, Sarah and Luke. During my work on this book, they have endured my absences and preoccupations without displaying any bitterness toward penguins.