Land of Wondrous Cold

The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice

Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Gillen D'Arcy Wood

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691229041, 9780691172200
• eBook ISBN: 9780691201689
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

A gripping history of the polar continent, from the great discoveries of the nineteenth century to modern scientific breakthroughs

Antarctica, the ice kingdom hosting the South Pole, looms large in the human imagination. The secrets of this vast frozen desert have long tempted explorers, but its brutal climate and glacial shores notoriously resist human intrusion. Land of Wondrous Cold tells a gripping story of the pioneering nineteenth-century voyages, when British, French, and American commanders raced to penetrate Antarctica's glacial rim for unknown lands beyond. These intrepid Victorian explorers—James Ross, Dumont D'Urville, and Charles Wilkes—laid the foundation for our current understanding of Terra Australis Incognita.

Today, the white continent poses new challenges, as scientists race to uncover Earth's climate history, which is recorded in the south polar ice and ocean floor, and to monitor the increasing instability of the Antarctic ice cap, which threatens to inundate coastal cities worldwide. Interweaving the breakthrough research of the modern Ocean Drilling Program with the dramatic discovery tales of its Victorian forerunners, Gillen D'Arcy Wood describes Antarctica's role in a planetary drama of plate tectonics, climate change, and species evolution stretching back more than thirty million years. An original, multifaceted portrait of the polar continent emerges, illuminating our profound connection to Antarctica in its past, present, and future incarnations.

A deep-time history of monumental scale, Land of Wondrous Cold brings the remotest of worlds within close reach—an Antarctica vital to both planetary history and human fortunes.

PART ONE

Beginnings

1

The Race Is Joined

On the morning of September 6, 1837, the French Antarctic discovery expedition—consisting of the twin corvettes Astrolabe and Zélée, manned by a combined crew of one hundred sixty—set sail from beneath the white cliffs of Toulon. The newspapers had declared Dumont D’Urville’s expedition doomed, and a small-boat flotilla of the crews’ families bobbed alongside the corvettes in sad procession. Mothers and wives wept openly, not without cause as it turned out. By the time D’Urville limped back to Toulon three years later, a quarter of his men had died or deserted. He himself returned a shattered man with not long to live. Seventy years before Captain Scott, Antarctica had martyred its first explorers.

Meanwhile, in Washington DC, French ambitions in the Southern Ocean—and the impressive résumé of Dumont D’Urville—were much on the minds of the Jackson administration. In the 1830s, the American frontier still lay on the oceans, rather than to the West. Andrew Jackson had leafed through the lavish volumes memorializing D’Urville’s 1828–29 Pacific discovery voyage in the Astrolabe and was enchanted by the exquisite illustrations and general air of heroic enterprise. He declared the United States would launch a discovery expedition on an even greater scale, with scientific wonders like D’Urville’s to show for it. That was in 1836. But two years later—with Jackson retired from the White House—the US Exploring Expedition still languished in port at Hampton Roads, Virginia, the victim of Navy Board infighting and general incompetence.

The French expedition had been announced to the world through the Paris newspapers in June 1837. The following summer, a few days before American commander Charles Wilkes at last gave the order for the US Antarctic squadron to depart, the dismaying news broke that D’Urville had already reached Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America, and was headed south. D’Urville had left a note of his intentions in the loneliest postbox in the world, on a hill near Cape Horn. A New England whaleship captain had found it there and dutifully brought it back to Boston. The frustrated Americans—who had been the first to announce their Antarctic ambitions—were now a full year behind the French.

But whatever the Americans’ anguish over D’Urville’s head start, it could not compare to the hand-wringing in London that summer of 1838—the first of Victoria’s reign—where managers of the world’s superpower faced the humiliation of conceding to both France and the upstart United States the discovery of the South Pole. British scientists, led by an army engineer named Edward Sabine, had long pushed for an Antarctic mission to complete the charting of Earth’s magnetic field. But Sabine had never managed to bring his quixotic plan to the attention of Her Majesty’s cabinet, let alone the prime minister’s desk.

News of the D’Urville and Wilkes expeditions changed all that. By November 1838, a South Pole expedition was the subject of urgent discussion at the palace in the presence of the young queen and her first of many prime ministers, Lord Melbourne. A meeting with the chancellor of the exchequer followed. With almost unseemly speed, a hundred thousand pounds materialized to finance the royal expedition in quest of Terra Incognita Australis. Many thought it beneath the British, as the world’s supreme naval power, to compete with French and American ships in any oceangoing enterprise. But here they were, drawn into a race to the South Pole. Once committed, there were no half measures. The Admiralty sent their best vessels—the ice-breaking ships Erebus and Terror—and a bona fide polar hero, James Clark Ross, celebrated discoverer of the North Magnetic Pole, to command them.

But even the rulers of the British Empire could not make time slow down. A distant third down the rabbit hole of the Antarctic chase, Ross reached the subtropical island of Madeira off the coast of Africa in October 1839. His officers climbed its celebrated peak for a view of the Atlantic Ocean and looked about for a small pyramid of stones—a message cairn—left by their rival Wilkes. The American’s note had been eaten by goats, but the Erebus officers learned from the locals of Wilkes’s plans to sail south that summer. With Antarctic sea ice in retreat only three months a year—December through February—the South Pole was beyond the reach of the British that season. Through no fault of his own, Ross now found himself a year behind the Americans and two behind the French. The cloudy prospect of defeat hung over him and his expedition. Reviewing his options at Madeira, Ross decided the farthest south he could venture that year would be the sub-Antarctic waters of the Indian Ocean—to Kerguelen Island, perhaps the remotest anchorage on Earth. From there he would make the long odyssey east to the Australian port of Hobart, to gain intelligence of French and American movements and scheme to outdo them by whatever means necessary.

Back in the spring of 1837, King Louis-Philippe had surprised Dumont D’Urville by approving his request for a third discovery expedition to the South Seas. But the famous explorer’s delight was short-lived. His Majesty stipulated that D’Urville include, in his three-year cruise, an attempt on the South Pole to plant the French flag ahead of the British and Americans, and chart new killing fields for struggling French whalers. D’Urville was dismayed. He admired the British polar explorers—Cook, Parry, and John and James Ross—but he would take three years in the tropics over two months in the ice.

Fig. 1.1. Posthumous portrait of Dumont D’Urville, by Jerome Cortellier (1846).—Grand Palais, Chateau de Versailles.

No one knew what lay beyond 74° south: an open sea, a continent filled with unheard-of creatures, perhaps a giant abyss? D’Urville, a man of science and adventure his entire adult life, had never seen this particular mystery as his to solve. He deferred to his hero, James Cook, who had halted before the southern ice fields sixty years before and declared it a place of horror no man would wish to penetrate.

Why the South Pole? Why now? The king, he guessed, had been reading the adventure narratives of two celebrity whalers: Englishman James Weddell and American Benjamin Morrell. Both authors offered tantalizing prospects of an ocean gateway to the antipodean pole, tropical temperatures, and virgin land beyond the moat of ice that had deterred Cook, with plentiful stocks of whales and seals.

In preparation for the voyage, D’Urville visited London to learn what he could and to acquire the latest charts and compasses from the capital of the seafaring world. The Admiralty officials he met were tight-lipped about the far south, resentful that a French expedition should presume to explore in “British” waters. On the subject of James Weddell’s voyage of 1823, however, they were suddenly eloquent. Captain Weddell was a “true gentleman,” his record-setting push to 74° south a triumph of British seamanship. The French public had devoured Weddell’s story in translation. But D’Urville, who had never heard of a gentleman sealer, was unconvinced. And as for “The Greatest Liar in the Pacific”—Benjamin Morrell—the nickname had been well bestowed. But no one at the French court had had the wit to keep these adventurers’ tales out of the hands of the king, or courage enough to tell him it was all fantasy.

On his previous two journeys around the world, D’Urville had been robust and full of hope, the emperor of his own illusions. But now he was an old man (in sea years), chronically ill, and disenchanted with the world. The long summer before the Antarctic expedition sailed, he felt himself losing sight of his destiny. In his dark moments, he felt he was leaving his beloved wife and sons for a years-long mission to the ends of Earth for an impossible reward.

D’Urville had courted Adéle Pépin in storybook style, lingering in her father’s Toulon shop while she smiled at him from behind the counter. But in their Toulon villa that summer, the veteran explorer and his wife were like a duet of doleful violins, played in separate rooms. D’Urville had used Adélie’s weakness for explorer romance against her, and touched her maternal ambition. With this third voyage, he told her, he would inherit the mantle of the great Cook. Their children’s futures would be secured as sons of a national hero. She had given in to his will—as they both knew she would—but at a cost. As the day of his departure approached, she withdrew behind her habitual veil of sorrow for the two children they had lost. Husband and wife spoke less, and although Adélie did not complain, he knew she felt that he had trapped her, that he was sealing for her a disastrous fate.

D’Urville’s anxiety at the prospect of an Antarctic voyage became the stuff of nightmares. The dream would begin with Cook and himself side by side before some great parliament, basking in the fame of their three voyages around the world. Then he would be back in the ice at the helm of the Astrolabe, in a narrow strait with dead ends fore and aft. He would shout hoarse orders to an empty deck, while the ice renewed itself perpetually ahead of him—a deadly passage with no way out. But when his official orders to sail to the pole arrived from Paris, the nightmares abruptly ceased. From the moment the old campaigner set foot on the deck of the Astrolabe, all disabling domestic feelings vanished. He became his orders. Adélie, and his sons Jules and Emile, bid him a tearful farewell on the dock. The French polar expedition launched just in time. Two weeks after the Astrolabe and Zélée set sail from the harbor, a deadly cholera outbreak struck Toulon.

How did D’Urville reconcile himself to this Antarctic mission? It being 1837, with the great age of exploration in the past and vulgar commercial interests now ascendant, the fickle French public demanded novelty. “The people like surprises,” Napoleon had said. A journey to the wild unknown of Antarctica was definitely that. But there was a nasty undertow to contend with, namely, resentment in high places. His longtime enemy, François Arago—director of the Royal Observatory and member of the Chamber of Deputies—had denounced the polar expedition as an expensive folly. D’Urville was leading his men to certain death in the ice. “When we have spent the people’s money this year to send him to the desolate ends of the Earth where there is nothing to discover,” Arago raged before the chamber, “will we then have to vote next year for funds to fetch the bodies back?”

With Arago’s prophecy of doom published in every newspaper in France, D’Urville’s recruitment drive on the Toulon docks faced a sudden crisis. He was forced to fill his complement for the Astrolabe and Zélée with novices, boys, and hangers-on. Some were too stupid or dangerous-looking to accept, even for a man-hungry captain. And most that did pass muster were rated third class—unskilled and untested—for a voyage demanding the best men. Such was the shabby reality of exploration, not mentioned in the wonderful travel narratives his wife Adélie devoured (along with half the rest of Europe). To solve his manpower problem, D’Urville petitioned the king to offer prize money: one hundred francs a man to beat Weddell’s record southing, and ten more for every band of latitude beyond it. This was a patriotic appeal the Toulonese seafaring community could not resist.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the US Navy could not boast of a Dumont D’Urville or James Clark Ross. In fact, the secretary of war, Joel Poinsett (of “poinsettia” fame), found himself unable to persuade anyone to take command of the US Exploring Expedition. His predecessor Mahlon Dickerson, an Olympian footdragger even by Washington standards, had undermined the best candidate, Thomas ap Catesby Jones, a stalemate that ended only with their twin resignations.

Captain after captain turned Poinsett down, spooked by the Jones affair and continuing bad press. A Navy mission that had begun with patriotic promise was now beset by corruption and uncertainty. The newspapers labeled it the “Deplorable Expedition,” as recriminations in Washington mounted. At last, a little-known lieutenant surveyor named Charles Wilkes had greatness thrust upon him. He hurried home to his wife Jane with the news, where they cried for joy at his snatching the prize. In light of what followed, they might have saved a few tears for the aftermath. Wilkes’s worst enemy could not have contrived a means of ascent better guaranteed to undo him in the end.

Having lost his mother early, Wilkes spent his childhood neglected by a succession of nurses and schoolmasters, who taught him useful lessons in brutality. For a while, he was boarded at the school of a Mr. Smith, in what was then the town of Greenwich, north of Manhattan. Wilkes,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Timeline
• A Note on Measurements
• Introduction: Our Glacial Earth
• Part One: Beginnings
• Part Two: Trials
• Part Three: Triumph
• Postlude: Last Ice
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Discussion Questions