I.

Introduction

Polar Exploration, history of European and American attempts to reach the North Pole and the South Pole, and the exploration of the surrounding Arctic and Antarctic regions.

In the 1400s Europeans set out to explore the world, launching the great Age of Exploration. Europeans eventually mapped most of the globe. However, the polar regions remained a mystery. For centuries Europeans imagined—and to some extent, feared—what would be found there. The Age of Exploration had long since begun by the time explorers set their sights on reaching the poles. It was not until the 18th century that explorers ventured with any real success into the Arctic polar region. Antarctica, the last continent to be discovered, remained hidden behind barriers of fog, storm, and sea ice until it was first sighted in the early 19th century. Even today it remains largely unexplored.

The dangerous and inhospitable conditions of the polar regions demanded a special breed of explorer—those willing to risk their lives in the pursuit of knowledge and glory. While most survived against all odds, some performing seemingly superhuman feats, many lost their lives as well. As Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen wrote, “Nowhere has knowledge been purchased at greater cost of privation and suffering.”

For some ambitious and courageous explorers, the adventure outweighed the danger. During the so-called Heroic Age of exploration, from about 1900 to 1916, scientific curiosity and nationalistic rivalries often intermingled as motives. British explorer Ernest Shackleton summarized his motives for leading his second expedition to Antarctica in a 1909 National Geographic article: “Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure, some have the keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others again are drawn away from the trodden paths by the ‘lure of little voices,’ the mysterious fascination of the unknown. I think that in my own case it was a combination of these factors that determined me to try my fortune once again in the frozen south.”

II.

The Polar Terrain

The polar regions can be narrowly defined as the areas on the globe within the Arctic Circle (latitude 66°33’ north), which surrounds the North Pole, and within the Antarctic Circle (latitude 66°33’ south), which surrounds the South Pole. The Arctic and Antarctic regions encompass somewhat larger areas when more broadly defined according to temperatures and terrain.

The polar regions share features such as barren landscapes, extreme cold, and dark winters. The Arctic region consists of the Arctic Ocean surrounded by land masses, including a maze of islands known as the Arctic Archipelago above North America. The ocean’s permanent ice cover changes with the seasons and is in constant movement with the currents. Due to breaks, called leads, in the ice floes (sheets of floating ice), it is not possible to reach the North Pole in a continuous line over the ice.

The Antarctic region comprises a continental land mass, Antarctica, which covers an area of 14 million sq km (5.4 million sq mi). The continent is covered by an ice sheet with an average thickness of 2,160 m (7,090 ft), although it is more than twice as thick in some places.

III.

Early Exploration

The Arctic regions of North America and Siberia (a vast region in Asia) have been populated since ancient times by indigenous peoples such as the Inuit. The Greeks of the 4th century bc were aware of the Arctic. The first Europeans to explore and settle lands in the region were the Vikings, whose own lands in Scandinavia reached into the Arctic. The Vikings, skilled navigators at sea, discovered and began to settle Iceland, which borders the Arctic Circle, in about ad 860. (According to some accounts, a colony of Irish monks was established there first, in the early 800s.) Sailing from Iceland, Vikings discovered the large ice-covered island they named Greenland, situated between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans. Erik the Red established the first Viking settlement there in about 985. By the early 1400s, however, the settlements in Greenland had vanished, and all European contact with North America had been lost.

IV.

The North Pole

A.

The Northern Sea Passages

European interest in reaching and exploring the North Pole emerged gradually out of a stronger desire: to find new sea routes for the conduct of trade. From the late 15th century, Spain and Portugal controlled the southern sea routes between Europe and Asia. English and Dutch ships were barred from using these routes to reach ports of trade in Asia. Northern Europeans thus sought alternate sea routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans by way of the Arctic Ocean, thereby reaching Asia. The sea routes they sought came to be called the Northeast Passage (now known as the Northern Sea Route), north of Russia, and the Northwest Passage, above North America. These terms refer to any route through the areas concerned, rather than any particular route.

The search for a northern sea route began in the late 1490s with the voyages of Italian explorer John Cabot, sailing on behalf of England. Cabot navigated a northern route across the Atlantic and in 1497 became the first European since the Vikings to reach North America, which he initially believed to be Asia. Thereafter, finding a northern sea route captured the imagination of many famous explorers, including Sir Martin Frobisher, John Davis, William Baffin, Henry Hudson, and Sir John Franklin.

For centuries the Northwest Passage remained elusive in the ice-choked maze of islands, straits, and bays of the Arctic Archipelago. Each expedition built on the knowledge gained before, and the area was charted in the process. However, all attempts failed, and some ended in disaster, until Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made the first complete transit of the Northwest Passage from 1903 to 1906. Finding a passage north of Russia was similarly challenging, and it was not until the 1870s that a complete Northeast Passage was finally navigated by Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld.

B.

Heading for the North Pole

In the late 1700s—still long before the route of either of the two northern sea passages had been found or navigated—an expedition was mounted specifically to reach the North Pole (located at latitude 90°). It was launched in 1773 by the British Navy, which would be one of the most prominent players in the exploration of both poles over the next 140 years, and led by Captain Constantine Phipps. Sailing due north from Britain in the Racehorse, Phipps reached the edge of the Arctic pack ice at a latitude of 80°48’, to the northeast of Svalbard, a group of islands located about midway between Norway and the North Pole. Phipps set a “farthest north” record that held for 33 years. (Meanwhile, his colleague Captain James Cook, on his second great voyage, was penetrating deep into the Antarctic Circle.) Phipps made valuable scientific and natural history observations but found that his way to the north was blocked by an impenetrable shield of ice. This expedition also happened to be the first important voyage of Horatio Nelson, then a teenage midshipman, who later became a famous naval commander.

For a time the quest for the pole was abandoned, until the Hydrographic Department of the British Royal Navy, established in 1811, started to carry out scientific surveys to make navigation safe for commercial shipping and, with an eye on national supremacy, to consider means of keeping Russian influence to a manageable level. The motivating force behind the British navy’s enthusiasm for Arctic exploration was the idea of naval secretary John Barrow, Jr., that beyond the visible barrier of ice there existed an “Open Polar Sea,” devoid of ice. Although the idea was not backed up by any evidence and defied reason, it influenced British and American exploration of the area for most of the 19th century.

An enormous exploratory effort that linked the search for the Northwest Passage and an attempt to reach the North Pole was initiated in 1817 by a report from William Scoresby, a whaling captain and noted expert on Arctic conditions. The report asserted that the northern seas were unusually free of ice, although the experienced Scoresby never himself believed in the Open Polar Sea theory. (The lack of ice he noted was only temporary, possibly related to the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.)

In 1818 John Franklin commanded one ship of an expedition attempting to sail toward the pole from Svalbard—essentially a repeat of Phipps’s expedition, and with the same result. (In 1845 Franklin launched an expedition to find the Northwest Passage that ended with the deaths of both Franklin and his entire crew of 129 officers and men.) In 1827 William Parry, who had already led expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, commanded another attempt on the pole from Svalbard, this time landing on the ice pack and hauling sledges northward. Although the sledging party set a new record, reaching latitude 82°45’ north, it had to turn back nearly 800 km (500 mi) short of the pole. The expedition learned many lessons about the rigors of polar exploration: Reindeer were useless as draught animals; heavy wooden boats converted into sledges were cumbersome and exhausting to haul; the crew’s food rations were inadequate for the enormous physical demands; and the continual drift of the Arctic ice carried the explorers back nearly as fast as they advanced. However, few subsequent Royal Navy expeditions heeded these lessons.

In 1829 James Clark Ross, second in command on Parry’s expedition and nephew of Sir John Ross (who led expeditions in 1818 and 1829 in search of the Northwest Passage), established a landmark in polar exploration when, at a spot on the Boothia Peninsula, he discovered the magnetic North Pole. Discovery of the magnetic pole, the location of which varies with time, was essential in helping navigators to accurately calibrate readings from their compasses.

Attention then turned to the idea of reaching the North Pole from North America, this time with American explorers in the vanguard. In 1853 Elisha Kent Kane led an expedition to penetrate Smith Sound and try to find a way through the narrow channel separating Ellesmere Island from Greenland to the hoped-for open sea beyond. He got as far as a widening of the channel, later named Kane Basin, before failing supplies and rancor among his crew forced him to retreat two years later. In 1860 Isaac Israel Hayes led an expedition to the same area and traversed farther, on foot, into the Kennedy Channel. In 1871 Charles Francis Hall led an expedition that sailed beyond any point previously reached by a ship, to latitude 82°11’ north, pushing beyond Kennedy Channel to the widening that came to be known as Hall Basin, where he died that year.

The final breakthrough to the shores of the Arctic Ocean west of Greenland came in the last British naval expedition to the Arctic in the 19th century, led by George Nares in 1875-1876. In the Alert he reached latitude 82°45’ north, on the northern shore of Ellesmere Island via a strait separating that island from Greenland, later named Nares Strait in his honor. Sledging parties from the expedition traveled as far north as 83°20’ before turning back, again exhausted by a generally poor diet (which induced scurvy), unsuitable clothing, inadequate snowshoes, and overly heavy sledges. Nares’s attempt on the North Pole failed, but valuable scientific work was done, with geological and natural history specimens being collected. In 1881 the otherwise disastrous expedition led by Adolphus Washington Greely, in the same area, managed to add some distance to the record, reaching latitude 83°24’ north.

In 1879 American explorer George Washington De Long attempted to reach the North Pole from another direction, sailing the Jeannette into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait and heading north. His ship became stuck in the ice off Siberia, drifted for 21 months, and was finally crushed by the heavy pack ice. Several years later, remains of the Jeannette were found in an ice floe off the coast of Greenland. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen realized that the remains could have drifted with the ice floes to a point near the North Pole. He reasoned that if an ice floe could drift across the polar region, a ship could too. To test his theory, he custom built a ship, the Fram, and allowed it to become frozen into the Arctic ice pack. During the 1893-1896 expedition, Nansen realized the drifting ice would not carry the ship all the way to the North Pole and set out with sledges on foot. He reached a record latitude 86°14’ north, but that was still 416 km (258 mi) short of the pole.

C.

On Top of the World

The final steps in the quest to reach the North Pole were taken by the Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary. Both were professional explorers who learned survival lessons from the Inuit, a people indigenous to the Arctic region. These two explorers traveled light, hunted where they could, used dogs to haul sledges, and wore Inuit-style fur and hide parkas.

Peary, a veteran of six Arctic expeditions between 1891 and 1909, was driven by the desire to become the first man to the reach the North Pole, which he saw as both a patriotic duty and a divine right. In February 1909, then aged 52, he set out on a last and desperate attempt to fulfill his ambition. His expedition included 24 men with 19 sledges and 133 dogs. As members of the expedition cleared the trail, erected tents, laid provisions, and then turned back (the so-called “Peary System”), Peary was enabled to speed on, traveling with only Matthew Henson and four Inuit. Peary later claimed that they reached the pole on April 6, 1909. In the end, it was a victory of planning and organization as much as courage and endurance.

However, as Peary was traveling back to announce his victory, he heard news from Inuit on the Greenland coast that a white man and two Inuit in advanced stages of exhaustion had passed by earlier. The white man, Frederick Cook, had reported that he had come from the North Pole, which he claimed he had reached on April 21, 1908, almost a year before Peary. Cook’s claim was subsequently discredited by scientists, although he received popular acclaim, and Peary’s records were accepted as genuine. However, the two rival claims have never been entirely satisfactorily resolved, and neither can now be proved. Peary’s is more generally accepted, as it had more corroborating testimony and was more intrinsically likely, given his extensive experience, meticulous planning, and extremely well-resourced expedition. However, inconsistencies in his account and the seemingly impossible speeds necessary for Peary’s account to be true mean that in all probability even he fell somewhat short of the pole.

The first fully attested, scientifically accredited achievement of the pole over the ice was that of Wally Herbert’s British Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1968-1969. Herbert and his team trekked 6,115 km (3,800 mi), across the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to Spitsbergen (now Svalbard), and reached the North Pole on the 60th anniversary of Peary’s disputed expedition.

D.

The North Pole by Air

After Peary, it seemed that the only new thing left to do at the North Pole was to try different ways of getting there. The first attempt to fly in the Arctic was made by a Swede, Salomon Andrée, who in 1897 took off from Svalbard in a balloon called the Eagle. A message brought back to base by carrier pigeon reported that everything was going well and latitude 82° north had been reached. Thereafter nothing was heard of Andrée and his companions, and 33 years later their bodies were found at a camp on White Island, in the eastern part of the Svalbard archipelago. The balloon had apparently lost height owing to the accumulation of ice on it.

In 1925 the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who by that time had already become the first to navigate the Northwest Passage and to reach the South Pole, attempted to become the first to fly over the North Pole. He was accompanied by the wealthy American Lincoln Ellsworth and four other companions, taking off in May from Svalbard in two amphibious airplanes. They were forced to land at about latitude 88° north, just shy of the 90° mark at the pole. A year later, Amundsen and Ellsworth tried again, accompanied by the Italian explorer and engineer Umberto Nobile. This time they successfully flew over the pole in the Norge, an Italian airship designed and piloted by Nobile, on a flight from Kongsfjord, Svalbard, to Teller, Alaska. The flight took them across the Arctic Ocean and covered 5,460 km (3,390 mi) in three days (May 11-14). An airplane flight some days previously by Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett is now known not to have reached the pole, contrary to their claim at the time.

The next milestone was a flight by Sir Hubert Wilkins and Carl B. Eielson across the Arctic Ocean from Point Barrow in Alaska to Svalbard, via the north coast of Ellesmere Island, in April 1928. The following month Nobile tried to take another airship, the Italia, to the pole and moor it there. The plan had to be abandoned because of ice buildup, and on the return journey the airship lost height and struck the ice. Some occupants were lost while others, including Nobile, were stranded on the ice. Nobile was located and saved, but Amundsen, flying in a French aircraft on a rescue mission from northern Norway, disappeared. His crashed aircraft was discovered some months later, bringing a tragic end to a brilliant career in polar exploration.

The North Pole was first reached by hot-air balloon in June 2000. A British explorer, David Hempleman-Adams, set off from Longyearbyen, in northern Norway, in a wicker basket suspended beneath a Roziere helium and hot-air balloon. He flew within 21 km (13 mi) of the North Pole and also became the first balloonist to fly solo across the Arctic Ocean.

V.

The South Pole

Until the scientific exploration of the southern seas in the 18th century, the belief persisted in European civilization that there was a great southern continent, Terra Australis. Believed to be similar in size to Asia, it was deemed necessary in order to “balance” the land in the northern hemisphere and prevent the world from toppling over.

Ferdinand Magellan and Francis Drake, the first to make voyages in the region south of Cape Horn (the southernmost point of Africa), realized that Tierra del Fuego (the archipelago just south of South America) was probably an island and not the northern tip of a southern continent. However, they were not believed, and maps continued to show it as the northern headland of an enormous landmass extending southward. The first explorers of the Pacific were the Spanish, approaching from the east, and the Portuguese, from the west, followed by the Dutch, who were the first Europeans to sight Australia and New Zealand. Not until the time of Abel Tasman and Frans Visscher in the first half of the 17th century, however, was it accepted that Australia was not part of this enormous southern continent, Terra Australis.

Undaunted, the British and French, after the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), stepped up their efforts to lay first claim to any southern lands. It was Captain James Cook who finally demolished the myth and revealed the existence of the true continent of the southern hemisphere—Antarctica. During the second of his great voyages, in the Resolution and the Adventure, Cook sailed around the world, through icy, stormy seas, in high southern latitudes, crossing the Antarctic Circle three times. Although Cook did not sight the Antarctic continent, he did discover the islands of South Georgia and some of the South Sandwich Islands. He was confident enough to write (on February 21, 1775) that there had been “a final end put to searching after a Southern Continent,” but that it was probable that he had seen part of “a Continent or large tract of land near the Pole.” In other words, he found that there was no all-encompassing great southern land, but a polar continent and another, smaller land mass, Australia. Thereafter, until well into the 19th century, the southern seas were plundered by British and American sealers (seal hunters), who were the first to eventually make landfall on Antarctica.

A.

Approaching the Continent

In 1820 three different expeditions came into contact with the Antarctic mainland. British naval officer Edward Bransfield sighted the northwestern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula on January 30. In February the Russian expedition of Fabian von Bellingshausen was the first to cross the Antarctic Circle since Cook. He improved on Cook’s record in distance covered within the Antarctic Circle, but like Cook sailed to within sight of Antarctica without the satisfaction of positive discovery. In November 1820 American sealer Nathaniel Palmer sighted part of the peninsula not far from where Bransfield had sailed.

In 1821 American sealer John Davis landed on the peninsula. In 1822-1824 British navigator James Weddell sailed farther south than anyone before him, reaching latitude 74°15’ south in the great coastal indentation now called the Weddell Sea.

The first undisputed sighting of the Antarctic mainland was by the Royal Navy captain John Biscoe in 1831. Other discoveries in the Antarctic included those of John Balleny, who discovered Balleny Island in an 1838-1839 expedition; Jules Dumont d’Urville, who found and named the Adélie Coast in 1840; and American naval officer Charles Wilkes, who charted the coast of Antarctica now named Wilkes Land while leading a U.S. government expedition from 1838 to 1842.

British explorer James Clark Ross, who had discovered the location of the magnetic North Pole in 1831, circumnavigated Antarctica in an expedition from 1839 to 1843. He discovered Victoria Land, Ross Island (naming its great volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror after his ships), the Ross Sea, and the “Great Ice Barrier” (now known as the Ross Ice Shelf). The HMS Challenger became the first steam vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle while on a scientific expedition conducting oceanic research from 1872 to 1876.

In 1897-1899 Belgian naval officer Adrien Gerlache de Gomery led the first expedition to Antarctica with the purpose of scientific observation. His ship, a retrofitted Norwegian-built whaler he named the Belgica, had an international crew that included Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (who would later become the first to reach the South Pole) and American explorer Frederick Cook (who had claimed to reach the North Pole in 1908). The Belgica became trapped for more than 13 months in the pack ice of Bellingshausen Sea, around latitude 71°30’ south, involuntarily becoming the first expedition to winter south of the Antarctic Circle.

B.

The Heroic Age

Norwegian-born explorer Carsten Borchgrevink led the first expedition to winter on the Antarctic mainland. Borchgrevink’s British-funded expedition sailed on the Southern Cross, a powerful converted Norwegian whaler, and made landfall at Cape Adare in February 1899. There they set up a base for the 10 men who would stay the winter. They also mapped the coast of Victoria Land and the Ross Sea. The Southern Cross left in March, as the complete darkness of the southern winter approached. After the ship returned in January 1900, Borchgrevink and William Colbeck, a British naval officer and navigator, explored the area around Mount Erebus and Mount Terror. Using sledges and dog teams—the first Antarctic expedition to do so—they established a “farthest south” record of latitude 78°50’ on the Ross Ice Shelf, and thus opened the way to the South Pole. Despite these successes, the men had endured extreme hardships during the long, dark winter, and one had died from illness. One of the party, Tasmanian physicist Louis Bernacchi, wrote in his diary, “May I never pass another twelve months in similar conditions and surroundings.”

This expedition and the turn of the 20th century ushered in the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, when scientific curiosity and nationalistic rivalries intermingled as motives. The idea of a Heroic Age of exploration was promoted by Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, under its president Sir Clements Markham, and the Royal Society, represented by John Murray. Under their sponsorship, the British National Antarctic Expedition sailed in 1901 in the Discovery, under the command of an unknown and inexperienced torpedo officer in the Royal Navy, Robert Falcon Scott, the personal choice of Markham. Also on board were three other naval officers and two officers of the merchant marine, one of whom was Ernest Shackleton. The physicist Bernacchi, recruited for his previous Antarctic experience and scientific knowledge, also joined the expedition despite his earlier misgivings.

Scott, with his companions Ernest Shackleton and the expedition’s doctor, Edward Wilson, trekked 320 km (200 mi) across the Ross Ice Shelf toward the South Pole, achieving a record latitude of 81°17' south, 800 km (500 mi) from the pole and farther south than any previous attempt. Difficulties with the dog sledges and an outbreak of scurvy forced them to turn back. Later, Scott made a second sledging journey up the Ferrar Glacier and on to the Polar Plateau, reaching an altitude of some 2,750 m (9,000 ft), having traveled 1,165 km (725 mi) in 59 days. Shackleton, suffering from scurvy, was reluctantly evacuated on a relief and supply ship, the Morning, in March 1903, but would later establish a great polar career. Scott’s expedition remained in Antarctica until February 1904, amassing valuable new scientific and exploratory information. By the time they left, Scott was already determined to lead a second expedition to Antarctica.

C.

International Competition

Also working in Antarctica at the same time were German, Swedish, Scottish, and French expeditions, led by, respectively, Erich von Drygalski, Otto Nordenskjöld (nephew of the Arctic explorer), William Spiers Bruce, and Jean-Baptiste Charcot. Shackleton returned to the Antarctic in 1907 aboard the Nimrod. This expedition made the first ascent of Mount Erebus, putting six men on the summit (3,794 m/12,448 ft above sea level); sent three men including Douglas Mawson on a journey that located the magnetic South Pole; and nearly reached the geographic South Pole itself. The latter journey was undertaken by Shackleton, J. B. Adams, Eric Marshall, and Frank Wild, who took with them four ponies, four sledges, light equipment, and provisions for 91 days. Blizzards, shortage of food, and dysentery terminated their attempt, but they did achieve a great advance (to latitude 88°23’ south) on the previous record, and got to within 179 km (111 mi) of the pole before Shackleton wisely and courageously insisted they turn back.

D.

The Race to the South Pole

Much has been written about the “race to the pole” between British explorer Scott and Norwegian explorer Amundsen. Circumstances brought the two explorers to Antarctica at the same time, and with the same goal. Both struck out for the South Pole in October 1911. Amundsen left his winter quarters at the Bay of Whales, an indentation in the Ross Ice Shelf, with four Norwegian colleagues and dog-hauled sledges. They found a completely new route up the Axel Heiberg Glacier and became the first to reach the South Pole, on December 14, 1911. The entire party returned safely to their base.

Scott and his team of four other men set out from McMurdo Sound without the assistance of dogs to haul their sledges. They reached the pole on January 17, 1912, only to find the Norwegian flag staked there. It was a desolate enough place to have struggled to attain without, as Scott wrote, the “reward of priority.” On the return journey, all five men in Scott’s party died from starvation and exhaustion, only 18 km (11 mi) from a depot of supplies. There were a number of causes of the disaster, including Scott’s decision to not use dogs, which had greatly aided the speed and efficiency of Amundsen’s expedition, and to conduct scientific research, loading his sledge with some 16 kg (35 lb) of rocks and fossils he had quarried out of the Beardmore Glacier.

E.

After Reaching the South Pole

Antarctic exploration after the conquest of the pole continued to provide new challenges. In 1911-1912 Wilhelm Filchner led the German South Polar Expedition, discovering the Luitpold Coast and the Filchner Ice Shelf. From 1911 to 1914, the Australian expedition led by Douglas Mawson in the Aurora explored the area between Victoria Land and Kaiser Wilhelm II Land. During a long sledge journey, Mawson’s two companions died and he struggled back to Cape Denison, dragging half a sledge, the other half of which he had discarded to lessen his burden.

In 1916 the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which was to attempt a crossing of the continent, set sail in the Endurance under the leadership of (then Sir) Ernest Shackleton. Before even reaching shore, the ship became stuck in the ice of the Weddell Sea and eventually sank. Shackleton and five men made a heroic journey of 1,280 km (800 mi) from Elephant Island (one of the South Shetland Islands) to South Georgia, in an open boat only 6 m (20 ft) long, to get help. Shackleton reported that the voyage was “one of supreme strife amid heaving waters” in the Southern Ocean, which “lived up to its evil winter reputation.” They then made a hazardous traverse of the mountainous island to a remote whaling station on its far side. Their heroic and successful rescue effort was a remarkable feat that established Shackleton’s courage and leadership qualities forever in the history of polar exploration. Known affectionately to his crew as “The Boss,” Shackleton never lost a human life.

Aircraft were used to explore the continent from the 1920s and 1930s. In the same period American interest in the Antarctic revived. Richard Byrd established the Little America camps near the Bay of Whales, wintering alone as well as making important flights across the continent. A first flight over the South Pole was made on November 29, 1929, by Byrd and Bernt Balchen. In November 1935 Lincoln Ellsworth (who ten years earlier had been on the first flight with Amundsen over the North Pole) made the first airplane flight across the Antarctic, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea.

Large-scale, systematic exploration of the continent began after World War II (1939-1945) with American mapping operations, the activity climaxing in the International Geophysical Year (IGY, 1957-1958), when many important expeditions were mounted, including the long-postponed first crossing of the continent, undertaken by the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Sir Vivian Fuchs and including Sir Edmund Hillary among its members. They completed their journey, in snow tractors, in 99 days.

In 1961 many of the countries involved in the IGY expeditions signed the Antarctic Treaty, which preserved the continent from commercial development and dedicated it to scientific research. By the end of the century there were permanent scientific bases in Antarctica manned by personnel from a dozen different countries and cooperating in the cause of research. Since the Antarctic Treaty, many expeditions have sought to reach the poles, or explore the polar regions, in new ways, experimenting with different sources of locomotion and different levels of outside support. British explorers Ranulph Fiennes and Charles Burton used snowmobiles during the Transglobe Expedition of 1972-1982, in which they became the first explorers to reach both poles on a single circumnavigation of the globe.

VI.

Competing Approaches to Exploration

One of the constant elements in the story of the exploration of both polar regions is the contrast between two essentially different views of how to go about the process of exploration. One approach fought against the natural environment, while the other sought to work within its limitations.

Some European explorers took a pragmatic approach, realizing they could learn life-saving techniques from the Inuit people who had lived successfully in the hostile Arctic environment for millennia. The first Europeans to learn from the Inuit were fur traders, whose interests were in commerce rather than glory. Later, explorers such as Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and John Rae employed Inuit-based survival skills that often eluded their navy-trained contemporaries. The great Scandinavian explorers, fostered in the ascetic Nordic tradition of outdoor activities in a harsh environment, also adapted easily to this pragmatic approach. Toward the end of the 19th century, their American colleagues began to follow suit.

One of the leading exponents of this approach to exploration was the Canadian-born American anthropologist Viljalmur Stefansson. From 1906 to 1918 he traveled thousands of kilometers surveying and mapping in the high Canadian Arctic, studying the Inuit people and living almost exclusively off the land and sea. Although emulating the Inuit life had obvious logical advantages, it also had clear limitations for Europeans who had not grown up in the harsh Arctic environment. Wally Herbert and his team on the British Trans-Arctic Expedition (1968-1969), sledging with dogs that they fed a diet of pemmican, encountered only 3 polar bears, 12 ringed seals, and 20 birds in 5 months on the ice. They felt it “very fortunate that we had not trusted in Stefansson’s theory and relied solely on hunting in order to survive.” Traveling so far from land over the ice, however, they were encountering problems that not even the Inuit would have.

British explorer Scott exemplified the opposite approach to exploration, which was rooted in the tradition of the Royal Navy. Scott firmly believed that one ought to reach the pole on foot and unaided. In this “purist” approach he reflected the Royal Navy’s attitude that using the travel and survival techniques of the Inuit people was somehow cheating, and that the test of character involved in doing things the traditional naval way was more important than a successful outcome—even if it meant the explorers had to endure appalling and completely unnecessary hardships. This attitude had led directly to the deaths of hundreds of explorers during the 19th century, and it contributed to Scott’s own death.

The difference in the two approaches is also evident in the explorers’ attitudes toward using animals. Scott was reluctant to use aids such as sledging dogs, and his inexperience with using them led to disappointing experiences that only strengthened his opinion. Using dogs inevitably meant killing some to feed the others, and Scott regarded this necessity as extremely cruel rather than practical. In contrast, Norwegian explorer Amundsen put sledging dogs “first and last,” valuing and caring for them during their lives and, when the time came, unhesitatingly using them for food to speed the party on its way.

In the end, it was the Inuit-based approach that proved most successful, not only in reaching both poles first, but in doing so with far less hardship and loss of human life. However, the naval tradition, which reached its apotheosis in the Heroic Age expeditions in the Antarctic, provided at least a part of what it set out to do: It tested the character of those involved to the limit, and set examples of courage, determination, and self-sacrifice that still haunt the imagination today.