Chauncey Loomis

Debunking explorers seems to have become a popular pastime. In recent years, Oliver Ransford has diagnosed David Livingstone as a manic depressive, Dennis Rawlins has discredited Robert Peary’s claim to the North Pole, and William McKinlay has proved that Vihjalmur Stefansson was a selfish cad. Debunking probably was inevitable. These men were all of the heroic age of exploration that began in the mid-19th century and ended at the beginning of the First World War. Explorers of any age are likely to be enveloped in romantic haze, but during that period they seemed almost superhuman.

Most of Tryggve Gran’s Antarctic diary is dull reading, but the fault is not altogether Gran’s. An airline pilot once said that flying is months of sheer boredom, moments of sheer terror, and the same can be said of expeditions. Much time on expeditions is spent waiting: waiting for the weather to change, for the expedition leader to make up his mind, for the other party to arrive, for supplies, for the ship, the airplane or the helicopter; when it isn’t waiting, it’s plodding, climbing, sailing or paddling in great discomfort, often with all sense of purpose gone. At one point in his diary Gran remarks: ‘It is difficult to keep a diary. This life is of little interest; one day is just as monotonous as the next.’ He did have moments of terror, however, and after falling through ice into the waters of McMurdo Sound, he exclaims almost with relief: ‘There is something to write about for once!’ Indeed he does write effectively about crises, but he had neither the verbal craftsmanship nor the quick sensibility necessary to transform the stuff of tedium into something interesting.

Late Medieval philosophers, knowing from their study of Classical cosmography that the earth is a globe, often speculated about what lay at its poles. Most believed them uninhabitable, ‘the darkling end of a failing world’ in the bleak words of Adam of Bremen. According to Cardinal d’ Ailly, ‘at the Poles there live great ghosts and ferocious beasts, the enemies of man.’ Opinion was divided, however, and if some Medieval philosophers believed the Arctic must be a hell, others believed it must be a heaven. Roger Bacon thought that north beyond a rim of ice at the Arctic Circle was a paradise where flourished the Hyperboreans: ‘a very happy race, which dies only from satiety of life, attaining which it casts itself from a lofty rock into the sea’.

I admire mountain, rock and ice-climbing from a respectful distance. When young and foolish, I tried it. I even went up what some experienced climbers call ‘the milk run’ to the peak of Matterhorn, but that climb was my last: all the way up I visualised Lord Francis Douglas coming down the way that he did in 1865 – straight – and it spoiled the trip for me. Soon after I read a book entitled Alpine Tragedy. Its most telling point was made in a series of photographs of the great Alpine peaks: etched down their crags were dotted lines ending abruptly in horrid little X’s marking places where the various tragedies were simultaneously fulfilled and terminated. That cured me for good.’

Almost fifty years ago the French ethnologist Gontran de Poncins published his international best-seller Kabloona, an account of his year-long stay with the Netsilikmuit, the Seal Eskimos of Canada’s central Arctic. Early in the book he described a haunting scene. Wrapped warmly in a sleeping-bag, he had fallen asleep in an igloo that three Eskimo hunters were generously sharing with him. He awoke to see the hunters on their knees, weirdly illuminated by an oil lamp and casting grotesque shadows on the icy walls. After a few moments of nightmare between wake and sleep he remembered where he was, then he realised that they were gorging on seal meat: ‘The smell in the igloo was of seal and of savages hot and gulping. From where I lay their faces appeared to me in profile glistening with fat and running with blood; and with their flattened crania, their hair covering their foreheads, their moustaches hanging low over their mouths, their enormous jaws, they inspired in me so ineradicable a notion of the stone age that I think always of this scene when I read or hear of pre-historic man.’ Such a passage obviously could not be written today. We are far too self-conscious and guilty about our ethnocentrism ever to admit to such a reaction even if we had it. The word ‘savage’ alone would be beyond the pale, more embarrassing than any four-letter word. Under the severe tutelage of anthropologists and in the long shadow of Claude Lévi-Strauss, we are losing our cultural arrogance – or, perhaps the same thing, our cultural innocence. A good thing, too: the main point of innocence is to lose it, and this particular innocence deserves to be lost. Ethnocentrism has taken excessively disagreeable and destructive forms.’