“THE FASCINATING THING ABOUT Mr. Shackleton’s report,” the New York Evening Globe commented one day after its publication on March 24, 1909, “is the story of the struggle rather than the results of the struggle. All of us feel loftier in our inner stature as we read how men like ourselves pushed on until the last biscuit was gone.”1 At the dawn of the twentieth century, after the rise of industrialized technologies that promised to make all results possible and before the Great War that made even the most self-sacrificing human struggle seem meaningless while, at the same time, tarnishing technology’s gleam, the Globe’s comment captured the essence of heroism as extraordinary efforts by ordinary people.
Shackleton, like Robert Peary (but not Mawson, Henson, or the others who were not expedition organizers), had an advance contract with a leading newspaper for an exclusive first report on his expedition. For both men, income from these contracts helped to finance their efforts. For newspapers—then at the height of the publishing wars that marked the era in journalism—disasters, battles, and harrowing expeditions sold best. Publishers paid top dollar for exclusive accounts. On March 22, the Nimrod stopped for a day at Steward Island, just south of New Zealand, where a special telegraph operator waited to dispatch Shackleton’s report to London’s Daily Mail, much as Peary would lay over in Labrador six months later to telegraph his first account to the New York Times. Of royal lineage, and needing no funds beyond those of his family and his nation, the Duke of the Abruzzi had no such contracts, made no such stops, and gave no reports on his expedition beyond official ones to the Italian Alpine Club and the Italian Geographical Society. As he had done for the Mount Saint Elias and Ruwenzori expeditions, the duke turned the task of writing the official account for the Karakoram expedition to Filippo De Filippi. His handsomely illustrated volume joined Shackleton’s and Peary’s books in parlors and libraries around the globe.2
A MASTER STORYTELLER AND a family man with a gift for attracting women and befriending men, Shackleton knew what the public wanted and, in his report for the Daily Mail, dished it out in due measure. Newly discovered mountains and the world’s largest glacier; waist-deep snow with crevasses that swallowed ponies and left men hanging by their harnesses; man-hauling 500-pound sledges over blue ice; and struggle, always struggle, filled this first narrative. “For sixty hours,” he wrote at one point, “the blizzard raged, with 72 degrees of frost and the wind blowing at seventy miles per hour. It was impossible to move. The members of the party were frequently frostbitten in their sleeping-bags.” The race to survive ran through the account, underscored by the repeated refrain “food had again run out.”3 These were Shackleton’s own words. The ghostwriter who helped transform his sledging diary and this first narrative into a bestselling book, In the Heart of the Antarctic, would not join him until New Zealand.
To capitalize on its investment, the Daily Mail solicited dozens of celebrity endorsements for Shackleton’s feat, which it published along with the queen’s “very hearty congratulations,”4 though her telegram mistakenly credited Shackleton rather than Mawson with hoisting her flag at the magnetic pole. Mountaineer Martin Conway hailed the ascent of Mount Erebus as “a great achievement,” while Albert Markham of former farthest-north fame called the polar trek “a wonderful performance.”5 Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Scott added their tributes, though for personal reasons each was pleased that Shackleton had fallen short of the pole. By the time his first report had circled the globe, Shackleton had stepped out of Scott’s shadow and into the limelight of worldwide fame.
After the humiliation of the Boer War and with the rising German challenge to its military superiority, the British Empire needed heroes, and Shackleton seamlessly fit the bill. First in New Zealand, then in Australia, and finally in England, he was cheered by the masses and feted by the elites in the upstairs-downstairs Edwardian swirl. “I am representing 400 million British subjects,” Shackleton said before his departure, and upon his return, they all seemed to adopt him.6
It was the struggle more than the results that won plaudits. “An amount of pluck and determination has been displayed by Lieut. Shackleton and his companions which has never been surpassed in the history of Polar enterprise,” the Royal Geographical Society proclaimed.7 The Standard spoke of his “intrepid heroism,” the Morning Post of his “extraordinary endurance.”8 “The benefit,” the Spectator said of Shackleton’s expedition, “is to be seen in the proof it gives that we are not worse than our forefathers; that the blood of the Franklins, the Parrys, and the Rosses still flows in a later generation; and that men of the various ranks and various callings are still found ready to encounter great risks and endure prolonged privation and suffering for no gain to themselves beyond the joy of mastering difficulties.”9 A knighthood followed. It scarcely mattered that Shackleton had failed to reach the pole. “His adventures,” the Nation observed, “appear to have been brilliant, if not extremely valuable.”10
Shackleton wanted to go back as soon as possible to finish the job. He discussed it with Frank Wild during the grueling return march and received Wild’s commitment to return. The fame, money, lectures, and elite social invitations only made him want to go more. “The world was pleased with our work, and it seemed as if nothing but happiness could enter life again,” Shackleton wrote with some candor, but he recognized the fleeting nature of celebrity and knew that it needed feeding by new fame.11
Scott was already planning an expedition to the South Pole, however, and Amundsen one to the North Pole that he secretly flipped south upon hearing the claims of Peary and Frederick Cook. Little glory lay in coming in second to a place whose reputed value lay in getting there first. As a British entrant in this race, Shackleton queued behind Scott. When Amundsen succeeded on December 14, 1911, and then Scott reached the pole five weeks later but perished with his party on the bitter march back, Shackleton was doubly eclipsed. Scott had followed Shackleton’s route up Beardmore Glacier and across the Polar Plateau. He also adopted Shackleton’s means by favoring ponies over dogs for pulling sledges but, like Shackleton, ultimately fell back on man-hauling. Amundsen, in contrast, followed Shackleton’s instincts (rather than his route) by starting his trek at the Bay of Whales—Shackleton’s intended winter quarters—and then taking the shorter, quicker path to the pole along the Ross Ice Shelf’s eastern edge. With the stories of Amundsen and Scott overshadowing his Nimrod accounts, Shackleton all but faded from sight. Repeated efforts to augment his book and lecture earnings by investment schemes and business ventures failed.
Seeking new feats in the Antarctic before interest waned, Shackleton planned the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition for 1914–16. The ambitious plan involved sending a support party to the old British huts on Ross Island to lay resupply depots as far as the Beardmore Glacier while he took the main party to the Weddell Sea, from which he would march across the continent to the Ross Sea. The Ross Island party was stranded at Scott’s old huts when its ship drifted out to sea in a gale, however, and Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was icebound and crushed before reaching the Weddell Sea coast.
These setbacks provided the path to lasting glory for Shackleton, whose leadership skills always rose in crisis situations. With an air of confidence that masked his own fears, Shackleton led his men on a storied five-month journey across drifting sea ice and by lifeboats to Elephant Island. From there, Shackleton and five others sailed 800 miles across the notoriously turbulent Southern Ocean by open boat to a whaling station on South Georgia Island. The leadership displayed by Shackleton during this epic trek and open-boat voyage was much like that shown by him on the Nimrod Expedition’s southern journey, writ large for everyone to see. Yet there was more. On the fourth attempt, in the teeth of midwinter storms, he rescued all his men on Elephant Island and turned his attention to the Ross Sea sector, where three had already died. But after joining the imperial effort to rescue the survivors, Shackleton returned to an England consumed with the bloodiest war of its history. Amid the Great War, no one much cared about polar heroics. Lasting fame for the Endurance Expedition came too late for Shackleton to enjoy. Following World War I, he tried one last time for Antarctic glory with an expedition in 1921–22, but died at the age of forty-seven from a heart attack on South Georgia Island. Rather than bring his body back to England for a hero’s funeral, Shackleton’s wife, Emily, asked that it be buried on South Georgia near his beloved Antarctic. The tombstone bears Shackleton’s favorite words, drawn from the poet Robert Browning, that a man should strive “to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.” Years later, Frank Wild’s ashes were interred on the right-hand side of The Boss’s grave.
FOLLOWING THE NIMROD’S RETURN, Australians reserved their heartiest adulation for Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson, who became the young commonwealth’s first national heroes. For them, it was about both struggle and results, because they had made it to the magnetic pole, whatever that was worth.
David reached Sydney first, arriving by steamer from New Zealand on March 30. A crowd gathered at the harbor before dawn to meet his ship; six hundred more filled the university’s Great Hall at noon for a reception. “Almost everyone who was anybody in the University was present,” one reporter noted.12 “Professor David, on rising, was obliged to stand mute for five minutes while cheering, shouting, stamping, and hand-clapping was maintained by the energetic undergrads.”13 Two days later, it was the city’s turn, at a town-hall reception where, due to overcrowding, as many were turned away as gained entrance. Newspapers reported that David’s wife was refused admission on the grounds that six ladies had tried the same ruse already. “To-day his name with Lieutenant Shackleton’s was acclaimed throughout the civilized world,” the Lord Mayor said of David.14 For his part, David characteristically demurred: “In all sincerity and without the pride that apes humility, I say that Mawson was the real leader and the soul of our expedition to the magnetic pole. We really have in him an Australian Nansen, of infinite resource, splendid physique, [and] astonishing indifference to frost.”15
Then it was Mawson’s turn, arriving in Sydney on April 16 and reaching Adelaide five days later. Both his childhood and adopted hometowns turned out to welcome him. Meeting him at the train station and drawing him on a handcart through the streets, hundreds of University of Adelaide students chanted:
Raw feet, raw feet, down a hole,
Rough seat, rough seat, on the pole;
Seal fat, seal fat, come and see,
Douglas Mawson, D.Sc.16
Like Shackleton, Mawson now felt the explorer’s pull back toward the ice.
Declining an invitation to go with Scott, Mawson organized his own expedition for 1911–13 to explore unknown portions of coastal Antarctica due south of Australia. The trek became the stuff of Australian folklore after one of Mawson’s two sledging companions disappeared into a crevasse with his dogs, sledge, and most of the supplies, leaving the other two to march some 300 miles to the main base. Eating their remaining dogs as virtually their only food and sleeping under a tent cover, only Mawson made it back, and he suffered abominably from extreme hunger and exhaustion; severe skin, hair, and nail loss (including the entire layer of skin on the soles of both feet); snow blindness; and depression. His second colleague became delirious before dying, likely due to hypervitaminosis A from eating so much dog’s liver. At one point after dropping into a sheer-walled, seemingly bottomless crevasse, the now-alone Mawson gained the strength to pull himself up on his harness rope by thinking, “There was all eternity for the last and, at its longest, the present would be but short.”17 Given up for lost by this time, Mawson arrived at his base only hours after the supply ship had sailed, leaving him with a small rescue party in the Antarctic for a second brutal winter. His account of the ordeal, The Home of the Blizzard, became a polar classic.18 After distinguished service as a munitions officer during World War I, Mawson settled down to a celebrated career as a research geologist in South Australia. He led joint British, Australian, and New Zealand expeditions to the Antarctic from 1929 to 1931, resulting in the formation of the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1936. Mawson remained an active member of the Australian Antarctic Executive Planning Committee until his death in 1958. The first issue of Australia’s $100 note featured a picture of him in polar garb on the front.
David also served in the Great War, volunteering at age fifty-seven to organize and lead a corps of Australians engaged in mining and tunneling for trench warfare on the Western Front. He received the Distinguished Service Order and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel following his role in the mining of German positions during the Battle of Messines in 1917. David never went back to Antarctica but, like Mawson, remained a champion of Australian discovery and exploration there.
DUE TO COOK’S PREVIOUSLY published claims, Peary returned from the Arctic in 1909 to an unexpectedly cool reception. It was not that Americans did not care that one of their countrymen had reached the North Pole. If anything, from Peary’s perspective, they cared too much, and jumped to a rash conclusion based on a superficial reading of the character of the claimants. The “polar controversy,” as it became known, unfolded in one tumultuous week in September 1909, with Peary on the defensive, after which he was either powerless to recover fully or too broken to try. The heroic eluded him.
On August 9, while Peary was in Smith Sound and first learning of his rival’s claim from local sources, Cook secured passage on a Danish ship from Greenland to Copenhagen. After the captain heard Cook’s astonishing news, he stopped in the Shetland Islands on September 1 at the first port with a telegraph station so that Cook could tell the world. Cook sold his story to the New York Herald. Forty years earlier the Herald had sent Henry Stanley to find David Livingstone in Africa; thirty years earlier it had dispatched the ill-fated Jeannette Expedition to the Arctic. No publication had a better reputation for expedition coverage, and Cook now offered it his exclusive newspaper account for a mere $3,000. To Cook, credibility mattered more than cash. The Herald’s legendary publisher, James Gordon Bennett, could scarcely believe his good fortune and threw the full weight of his global publishing empire behind Cook’s account. The story broke on September 2 with front-page coverage that continued for weeks. As it appeared in the Herald, Cook’s tale had all the hallmarks of a polar narrative except much detail on key parts of the trek.
Cook’s claim to have reached the pole a year earlier with two Inuit sledge drivers circled the globe in hours and became the top story everywhere. The polar community split. Adolphus Greely and Fram captain Otto Sverdrup, both of whom had felt Peary’s wrath, accepted it at face value, even as the Jeannette Expedition’s George Melville and Arctic veteran George Nares dismissed it out of hand. Amundsen gave some credence to his former Antarctic colleague’s story, while Shackleton and the leader of the Duke of the Abruzzi’s northern party, Umberto Cagni, deemed it plausible. Nansen and Scott wanted more evidence. For many, the distances covered, speed traveled, and sparse records raised doubts. Peary would challenge Cook on all three counts, leading Cook’s defenders to take Peary to task on them as well. On September 4, however, Copenhagen welcomed Cook with open arms, and three days later the Royal Danish Geographical Society awarded him its highest medal. Offers of up to half a million dollars for book rights and lectures lay before him.
While still in Copenhagen, Cook first learned from the press that Peary had returned from the Arctic claiming the pole. Cook hailed his rival’s achievement. “The pole is big enough for two,” he declared. Cook could afford to be gracious because, without challenging his priority, Peary’s success made his own appear more plausible. If one could make it across the Arctic sea ice by dog sledge in a season, more could as well. “Probably other parties will reach it in the next ten years,” Cook added.19 By this time, the American public had largely decided for Cook, and the new president, William Howard Taft, who knew far less about exploration than his predecessor, sent him a congratulatory telegram. “Thus, in the course of a single week, were the claims of two rival American explorers dramatically proclaimed to the world,” the London Daily News reported.20
On September 21, 1909, Cook returned by ship to a hero’s reception in his hometown of thirty years, Brooklyn. “It is estimated that several hundred thousand people assembled along the route of the parade,” the New York Herald reported. “Buildings were decorated, schoolchildren sang and waved flags and the people shouted, ‘We believe in Cook!’”21
Peary responded with a rage that cost him dearly. He reached Indian Harbor, Labrador, on September 5 and telegraphed his first reports a day later. “Stars and Stripes nailed to the Pole,” he wired to the Associated Press news service. “I have the pole,” he added to the New York Times.22 Showing as much concern for debunking Cook’s claim as for telling his own story, Peary wired the Associated Press a day later regarding Cook, “The two Eskimos who accompanied him say he went no distance north and not out of sight of land.”23 Peary added about Cook in a telegram to the Times, “He has not been at the pole on April 21st, 1908, or any other time. He has simply handed the public a gold brick.”24 Differentiating himself in racial terms that others turned against him, Peary proclaimed himself as “the only white man to have ever reached the pole.”25 He promised a detailed exposé of Cook’s claim upon his return and dared his rival to publish his proof. Peary even sent a telegram critical of Cook to the Herald, which its editors published alongside tributes to Cook and their own damning commentary on what they depicted as Peary’s “savage charges against Dr. Cook.”26 Controversy sold newspapers, Bennett knew, and he cast his man as the hapless victim of the powerful interests backing Peary.
Those interests rallied to Peary’s side. The Times led the drumbeat against Cook, complete with the front-page comment “His claim to have reached the north pole belongs to the realm of fairy tales” and new testimony that Cook had lied about his first ascent of Denali.27 Peary’s longtime backers in the National Geographic Society, Peary Arctic Club, American Museum of Natural History, and Explorer’s Club took up his defense, with the society impaneling a committee to certify his account. The polar community generally accepted Peary at his word but often without dismissing Cook’s claim. “Peary undoubtedly got to the pole” was how Shackleton now put it; “between him and Dr. Cook the pole certainly has been reached.”28 Nares and Melville came down foursquare for Peary, however, with Nares declaring that Peary’s “well-known arctic veracity” should settle the matter and Melville exclaiming, “Isn’t it bully!”29 Geographic societies in Europe lined up behind Peary as well, especially after December, when Cook failed to supply sufficient evidence to an agreed-upon panel of Danish experts charged with investigating his claim. The Explorer’s Club used that ruling to expel Cook. It even led Amundsen to wonder aloud about his old Antarctic colleague, “Is he a swindler, or merely ignorant?”30
The testimony of explorers, experts, and institutions mattered little to the American people, Peary found. He lost the public’s favor with his initial reaction, and Cook won it with his affable response. “It is perfectly apparent that Commander Peary has repelled and Dr. Cook has gained public sympathy,” a Buffalo newspaper commented near the outset of the controversy.31 As the back-and-forth wore on, informal surveys bore out this initial assessment. In late September, the Detroit Free Press found that 93 percent of its readers supported Cook over Peary, while the Pittsburgh Press reported that, of the 75,000-odd readers responding to its survey, over 73,000 believed that Cook reached the North Pole first and nearly 60,000 did not think Peary ever got there. “If this ratio holds good all over the country, Dr. Cook may well afford to remain indifferent to any decision finally arrived at by scientists,” the newspaper noted.32
Such findings did not come solely from pro-Cook sources or simply reflect antiestablishment bias. Late in 1909, the publisher of the serial version of Peary’s narrative, Benjamin Hampton, asked eighty professors, lawyers, doctors, and other midwestern opinion leaders, twenty of them women, about their views on the controversy and found that all but two were decidedly “anti-Peary.”33 America’s leading mass-circulation weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, satirized the controversy in a fictional play synopsis tellingly subtitled “A Typical American Drama of the Present Day,” which revealed how middle-class Americans most likely viewed the episode. The play’s befuddled Cook character claims to cover 244 miles to the pole in a matter of hours, while its tyrannical Peary character sends back supporting parties so that he alone can get there. Then he commands “his faithful Negro servitor” and four Eskimo helpers, “Forward, march, to the nearest telegraph station.”34 From England, essayist G. K. Chesterton offered the pointed double couplet:
Earth’s icy dome, the skull that wears
Terrible crystals for a crown,
Is billed at last with Cook’s renown.
And Peary’s personal affairs.35
Surveying the scene, the San Francisco Chronicle observed, “The verdict of the country is that Dr. Cook is a gentleman and Commander Peary is a cad and that without reference to whether either of them reached the Pole.”36
America’s foremost progressive theologian and dean of the University of Chicago divinity school, Shailer Mathews, drew moral lessons from the episode. “The time was when the search for the North Pole stood for the very acme of uncommercialized heroism,” Mathews noted in a popular essay published at the height of the controversy. “And now! The call of the North Pole to heroism has become a quarrel by wireless telegraph.” He complained of both claimants, “We find one man with an all but incredible story of endurance which runs counter to the entire run of experience in arctic traveling, and the other man refusing to share the honor of standing on the North Pole with another white man.” This was too much for Mathews. “A hero should be as great as his exploits,” he wrote. “Even a cad can risk his life for the sake of going on the lecture platform.”37
Peary retreated before the onslaught. Without conceding anything to Cook, he declined to accept public honors or speaking invitations until competent authorities resolved the controversy in his favor. While Cook took to the lecture circuit, Peary retired to his private island in Maine. He began venturing onto the public stage only after the National Geographic Society ruled for him and the Danish commission against Cook, but even then only for limited engagements in friendly venues.
In 1911, over vocal opposition, Congress recognized Peary’s claim by retroactively raising his rank to rear admiral and retiring him from the navy with pay, effective on the day he claimed the pole. By then, Cook had faded from public view, only briefly to reenter it when charged, tried, convicted, and jailed for fraud in a securities scam during the 1920s. Amundsen visited him in federal prison. Peary died in 1920 still bitter about his treatment after claiming the North Pole. He did little of public note in the intervening years except to advocate for the use of aircraft during World War I. Instead, the once very public man lived quietly with his family in Maine and Washington. Cook died in 1940 still professing that he got to the pole first. Each man left his defenders and detractors. Over time, even the New York Times and National Geographic Society qualified their support for Peary’s claim. If neither claimant reached the North Pole, then Amundsen most likely got there first by sailing over it by airship in 1926, making him the first person at both poles.
THE DUKE OF THE Abruzzi returned to Europe just as the public controversy over the North Pole broke. His arrival managed to snag lead headlines in the New York Herald for one day of that critical first week, but gave place to the Cook-Peary controversy on every other day. Even then, the second paragraph of the Herald article turned to press inquiries about the duke’s views on the polar controversy and an aide’s terse reply, “He never gave interviews to the press and would consequently say nothing.” The following paragraph reported on the duke’s private comments about the topic to local officials. He did not know enough about Cook to have an opinion, the Herald noted, but “in regard to Commander Peary he said that everybody would trust him.”38 Even in the duke’s presence, interest focused more on Peary and Cook than on his own record climb. After five full paragraphs debating Peary and Cook, the article turned to rumors about the duke’s romance with Katherine Elkins. Gossip had him returning to meet her in Paris in defiance of the king’s wishes.
Royalty has its privileges, which the duke enjoyed, but it also came with its burdens, which the duke accepted. He returned to active duty as an admiral in the Italian navy and led a task force during his nation’s ensuing war with the Ottomans over control of Libya. World War I followed. Italy fought on the side of Britain and France, with the duke serving as commander in chief of allied naval forces in the Adriatic. Victory in both wars cost Italy dearly, and soon the royal House of Savoy became little more than a front for Mussolini. His days of serious climbing over, the duke shifted his focus to exploring the headwaters of the Shebelle River in the Ethiopian highlands and building a sustainable agricultural community in Italy’s African colony of Somaliland, where he died in 1933. He never married Katherine Elkins, although he always loved her, and upon her death, three years after his, she was buried wearing his bracelet.
By leaving Italy during Mussolini’s rule, the duke retained more dignity than other members of the House of Savoy. Character matters in the judgement of history, and the duke maintained his good name by living up to the highest standards of his rank in his public service as well as in his mountaineering. David and Mawson, too, were men of character who pushed themselves to the limits of human endurance. As shown by the promises he made and broke to Scott, Shackleton was more of a hustler and opportunist than these others, yet his extraordinary resolve and resourcefulness became clear in crisis. “For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott,” polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard later observed, but “if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”39 Of the top explorers of 1909, only Peary left a mixed legacy. Few doubted his courage and determination. Even in his lifetime, however, many questioned his treatment of the Inuit and the truth of his claims. These doubts have only grown with time, so much so that the historical marker at his Eagle Island home, while hailing Peary as “America’s foremost Arctic explorer,” never mentions whether he reached the North Pole. Character indeed matters.
THE MEANING OF HEROISM changes with time and conditions. If Peary had reached the North Pole as he claimed, his efforts to defend his priority against Cook’s claim would not have offended a later generation. He would have remained the gentleman, while Cook became the cad. An earlier generation might not so readily have forgiven Shackleton’s decision to turn back a few days short of his goal, and instead expected from him the same resolve that David showed in reaching his. David’s heroism peered back toward the nineteenth century; Shackleton’s looked forward to the twentieth century. Shackleton clearly had the Victorian response in mind when he asked his wife whether she preferred a live donkey to a dead lion, yet he became the lion of the Edwardian era, as struggle replaced success for an empire in decline. Even in his day, the Duke of the Abruzzi’s heroism in setting farthest-north and altitude records seemed of an earlier age, when royals led their troops in battle and suffered at the front, but Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Rider charges and expedition heroics demonstrated its ongoing appeal.
The geography and place of heroism also changes. At least since the days of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley, ice has held a special spot in the British and American imagination, with both the poles and highest peaks exerting an intense attraction. “The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around,” Coleridge wrote in his epic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “The ice did split with a thunder-fit; / The helmsman steered us through!”40 Volume upon volume, in both fiction and first-person narratives, lined nineteenth-century European and American bookshelves with tales of heroics and hubris in the high Arctic and alpine regions. They became spaces where nature tested the mettle of men and found it as often cowardly as courageous. Their ships entrapped by the Arctic ice, explorers could face the defining choice of eating either their boots or each other. Peary could learn from the native people, while Nares did not. Shackleton and Mawson could display heroic leadership skills that became legendary, while Adrien de Gerlache and Carsten Borchgrevink all but disappear from history. After going there himself as a young ship’s surgeon, British writer A. Conan Doyle could knowingly speak of the Arctic as “a training school for all that was high and godlike in man” yet pen a story where an icebound ship’s captain goes stark raving mad and dashes after visions to his death “on the great field of ice.”41
Having reached new heights in latitude or altitude in 1909, Shackleton, Peary, and the Duke of the Abruzzi shrank and shifted the space for heroism. Once Peary or Cook made it there first, the North Pole was no longer an ultimate destination for explorers. David and Mawson wiped the south magnetic pole off the list as well. Having shown the way to the south geographic pole, Shackleton left room for Amundsen and Scott to cover the remaining miles, but their efforts—one triumphant, one tragic, both epic—caused a further retreat in the space for heroism. The duke’s altitude record and long duration at extreme heights helped to shift the focus of the climbing elite toward the Himalayas and Karakoram for mountaineering glory, with the region becoming known as “The Third Pole.” Summiting Everest, once it became open to Westerners by 1920, emerged as the ultimate goal. There, after dozens of efforts modeled in part on the duke’s K2 expedition, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay gained lasting fame for their heroic first ascent in 1953.
The edges of the earth no longer held unreached places for humans to explore. Interstices and outer spaces replaced them in the geography of exploration and adventure. Aviation, of course, offered a place for heroics before 1909, but it literally took off with improvements in aircraft during and after World War I. Amundsen quickly adopted it as a means for Arctic exploration, ending in his death during a rescue flight in 1928. The American Richard Byrd became a national hero for his pioneering flights toward the North and South Poles during the late 1920s, while Charles Lindbergh attained the status of a living legend for completing the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 21, 1927. With the refinement of jet and rocket engines following World War II, test pilots like Chuck Yeager set altitude and speed records beginning in the late 1940s, while Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and American astronaut John Glenn gained worldwide acclaim for orbiting the earth during the early 1960s. Of course, modern heroes emerge from fields such as science, technology, business, warfare, and public service that have nothing to do with exploration. Following his celebrated Arctic explorations, for example, Nansen gained added glory for his relief work with refugees after World War I, leading to his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.
The earth’s edges—north, south, and altitude—continue to attract, of course, but the ice encasing those alluring extremes has retreated as well. By their words or deeds, Peary, Shackleton, and the duke (despite their willing use of mechanical means and steam travel to get them to their starting points) eschewed modern technology in their quest to show what humans could achieve. “Man and the Eskimo dog are the only two mechanisms capable of meeting all the varying contingencies of Arctic work,” Peary declared.42 Shackleton relied on ponies and man-hauling. The duke tested the ability of humans to live unaided at high altitude. By feeding climate change, however, human technology has transformed even the earth’s edges that these men explored. The duke’s Karakoram is warming rapidly, even though a heavy covering of rubble has so far kept the valley glaciers intact. Greenland’s ice sheet, where Nansen and Peary first made their marks, has melted at the astonishing rate of nearly 270 gigatons of ice per year during the twenty-first century. The Arctic ice pack can no longer serve as a foundation for sledging from the northernmost points of land to the pole itself as it did in the days of Nansen, the Duke of the Abruzzi, and Peary. The multi-year-old ice floes that they relied on have virtually disappeared.
Whereas in 1903–06 Amundsen became the first explorer to sail through the Northwest Passage, in 2015 I lectured on the first cruise ship to take the route. The landscape remains forbidding and starkly beautiful, but warming has diminished the ice dramatically, turning adventures into commonplace trips. Both the Northwest and Northeast Passages will soon be open for commercial navigation, at least during the summer months, and I met families, some with small children, who transit them in private sailboats. Humans still do great things every day, but our times call for different types of heroics.
Even the places these explorers left behind only a century ago have changed beyond recognition. County Kildare, where the staunchly unionist Anglo-Irish Shackleton was born, is now part of an independent Irish state. The colonial Sydney of David and Mawson’s day, British to the core, has become a global city with more of its residents born in Asia than in Europe and a rapidly growing percentage of its citizens of non-British ancestry. Civil war has reduced the Duke of the Abruzzi’s once-thriving agricultural community in Somalia to rubble, while the thousand-year reign of his House of Savoy abruptly ended with a popular referendum in 1946.
Of all the places shaped by these men, only Peary’s Eagle Island home remains much as he left it. Built over several stages under Peary’s watchful eye, in retirement it became his refuge from controversy and a monument to his Arctic dreams. His desk still stands in his office facing the sea with the clock from the Roosevelt keeping time on the wall. The island’s location at “Long. 70°03'10" W”—Peary’s Columbia Meridian to the pole—appears above the main doorway with a compass image painted on the floor below. Scattered about for visitors to see, as if Peary just put them down, are faded publications with titles such as Peary and the North Pole: Not a Shadow of a Doubt and How Doctor Cook tried to pervert American History. Sitting on the front steps looking over the sea while writing these words, I can all but see the Roosevelt steaming past with its prow pointing north. “Bully,” they would shout, “give it to ’um, Teddy, give it to ’um!”43