South Pole Read online

  World map after Macrobius, 1492.

  While some maps featuring a large southern continent leave it essentially bare or seize on the extra space to add text and illustrations related to the map as a whole, others fill the unknown area with speculative topography, flora, fauna and human inhabitants. One late sixteenth-century Flemish polar projection has mountains and trees near the Pole.8 Another Flemish cartographer of the same period, a Jesuit missionary living in China, put a blue giraffe in high southern latitudes, with the Pole occupied with what looks like a crocodile.9 An Italian world map from around 1530 shows a continent ringing the Pole at a latitude higher than the Antarctic Circle, featuring ‘a profusion of named rivers, capes, cities and ports’.10 On other maps an otherwise empty Pole is marked by a cherub conventionally personifying the south wind, ‘Auster’. The place itself is given the name ‘Polus Antarcticus’ or ‘Meridies’. The latter was a term used to signify the ‘furthest known point south’, deriving from the Latin medidies, or midday – the point when, in the northern hemisphere, the sun is due south.11

  Oronce Finé’s double cordiform map of 1531 showing the polar regions.

  European maps were not, of course, the only way of expressing an awareness of or speculation about Antarctica and the South Pole. The northern and southern terrestrial poles are described in ancient Indian epics, and the sixth-century Indian astronomer Aryabhata argued that ‘the South Pole was surrounded by oceans … while the North Pole was surrounded by a landmass’.12 The famous map produced in 1513 by the Turkish cartographer Piri Reis and rediscovered in 1929 generated excited speculation that the coastline of its southernmost landmass accurately depicted the outline of the Antarctic continent in a much earlier, ice-free state. Explanations involving extraterrestrials or ancient civilizations (both of which feature prominently in twentieth-century Antarctic mythology) inevitably followed. The cartographic historian Gregory McIntosh argues convincingly that Reis’s landmass is simply part of the tradition of a southern Terra Incognita and bears only a superficial resemblance to the Antarctic continent.13

  Indigenous people living in the far south could actually see the celestial pole that the ancient Greeks hypothesized, although they lacked the conveniently bright Pole Star visible in the north from late antiquity. While Aboriginal Australians may not, prior to European contact, have identified the Pole itself, the Aranda and Luritja tribes of central Australia recognized that ‘stars within a certain distance from the south celestial pole never fall below the horizon’.14 People living in the far south of South America passed down mythological narratives that described a permanently frozen southern region.15 Often cited in Antarctic exploration histories is the Rarotongan legend of Ui-te-rangiora, a seventh-century navigator who sailed south, encountering a foggy, frozen, berg-strewn environment. Ui-te-rangiora may have met icebergs at the latitude of Aotearoa/New Zealand, although the account does suggest an awareness (possibly influenced by European encounter) of frozen regions to the south. Another oral tradition tells of the Polynesian explorer Tamarereti who went south to investigate auroral phenomena: according to the researcher Turi McFarlane, it is ‘universally accepted in the Maori world that upon return Reti’s canoe … brought back with it certain understanding of the physicality of the Antarctic region’.16

  European mythology of the poles is likewise intertwined with maritime legend, drawn largely from the north and only later applied, through the logic of symmetry or opposition, to the south. When the sixteenth-century Swedish writer Olaus Magnus advised sailors to use wooden, not iron, pegs when building their vessels, he was following a speculation found as far back as Ptolemy: that the North Pole was surmounted by a magnetic mountain (the distinction between geographic and magnetic poles was still developing at this time).17 More than three centuries later the novelist Jules Verne wrote an Antarctic narrative, Les sphinx des glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, 1897), in which the climax was the revelation of a huge magnetic rock near the South Pole. Unsuspecting sailors could be pulled towards the Pole not just by a massive magnet but also a huge whirlpool. The legend of a North Polar whirlpool can be traced to the lost fourteenth-century manuscript Inventio fortunata, whose author may well have drawn on Norse mythology.18 Like the magnetic mountain, this feature can be found on some Renaissance maps. One early seventeenth-century Italian cartographer, probably expanding on an idea expressed by Plato, describes water flowing into the Earth at both poles.19 Later in the same century, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in his Mundus subterraneus put forward a theory that the globe acted like a human body, with the waters sucked in at the Arctic, passing through the Earth where anything useful is extracted, with the remaining waste being ejected at the South Pole.

  There was, it seems, a pressing need for the poles to be marked by something spectacular, whether mountains or whirlpools. Although the British explorer James Clark Ross, reaching the vicinity of the Magnetic North Pole in 1831, knew what to expect, it still seemed somehow surprising that the site was so unremarkable:

  We could have wished that a place so important had possessed more of mark or note. It was scarcely censurable to regret that there was not a mountain to indicate a spot to which so much of interest must ever be attached; and I could even have pardoned any one among us who had been so romantic or absurd as to expect that the magnetic pole was an object as conspicuous and mysterious as the fabled mountain of Sinbad, that it even was a mountain of iron, or a magnet as large as Mont Blanc. But Nature had here erected no monument to denote the spot which she had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers …20

  The same held true in the south: novelists over the centuries have been eager to mark the South Pole. They have adorned it with vortices and giant lodestones, but also more unusual features, natural and artificial: an ice mountain, a magnificent fountain, the town hall of a polar city, a sea channel to a sister Earth, a cosmic channel to the planet Mars.

  The most enduring myth, a variation on the whirlpool legend, was a polar hole leading to an interior, perhaps inhabited, Earth. While speculations on the Earth’s hollowness were long-standing (Edmond Halley’s contribution is mentioned in the previous chapter), the idea grew significantly in popularity – and notoriety – through the energetic campaigning of the retired U.S. Army captain John Cleves Symmes Jr. In a series of pamphlets starting from 1818, Symmes developed and promoted his model of a habitable inner Earth accessible via holes thousands of miles across at both poles, each surrounded by a ring of ice. His South Pole, then, was like an icy version of the southern ring continent, with an enormous hole in its centre. While most people were understandably sceptical, Symmes nonetheless had his advocates; furthermore, the idea gave new impetus to the vortex myth and raised imaginative possibilities that were exploited by novelists throughout the following centuries, most prominently Edgar Allan Poe.

  While many polar legends relate to both poles, the dominant convention of north as ‘up’ had more than just cartographical implications. Describing the celestial poles in his Georgics, the ancient Roman poet Virgil writes: ‘One pole is always high above us, while the other deep below our feet sees dark Styx and the spirits of the dead.’21 Indian cosmography attached similarly negative resonances to the South Pole. Ancient Hindu texts established a disc-shaped model of the cosmos, with the sacred mountain Meru at its centre. When this model was transferred to a globe, Mount Meru was placed at the North Pole; the South Polar region was labelled Sumeruvadavānala, with ‘Sumeru’ an ‘alternate form of Meru, the axis that penetrates the earth from pole to pole’, and vadavānala signifying ‘a subterranean fire that issues forth from a cavity under the south pole’.22 Aryabhata, who had access to early globes, believed the South Pole to be ‘akin to hell’.23 Kircher’s model of the Earth, with the North Pole as the ‘mouth’ of the planetary body and the South as its opposite, is similarly hierarchical, putting the latter ‘in a most undignified position’, to use Joscelyn Godwin’s phrase. Godwin, a scholar of occult histor
y, goes on to summarize this polar polarity:

  This illustration appeared in an article about Symmes’s theory published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in October 1882.

  The mythology surrounding the North Pole has tended to be positive: it is always the Arctic that is imagined as the location of the endless springtime and the cradle of noble races. The Antarctic, on the other hand, is negative: it evokes tales of gloom and destruction, and is populated by primordial horrors, or else by their recent representatives, the Nazis.24

  Where Kircher likens the poles to bodily orifices, another tradition views them as portals into the self. The contemporary writer Victoria Nelson notes a ‘long-standing human tendency to see inner psychological contents – images of wholeness, and ultimately of the self – reflected back from the larger physical contours of our planet’. The poles become ‘the orienting loci of the psyche, but by the same token they are also the least known, the farthest from consciousness’, with the South Pole the more remote of the two. The narrative pattern of the southern journey is then ‘an archetypal sea trip from a bustling port (consciousness) to Terra Australia Incognita (unconsciousness), where a transcendental encounter takes place that initiates either the integration of the self or the possibility of psychic (and physical) annihilation’.25

  The conflation between psyche and South Pole – and the possibility of madness inherent in this nexus – is given visual expression in a scene from John Carpenter’s classic Antarctic horror film, The Thing (1982).26 Set in a remote inland American station at the onset of winter, the film follows the growing paranoia and claustrophobia of a small group of expeditioners as they deal with an alien being that, having entered the camp in the innocuous form of a sledge dog, attacks and exactly impersonates them one by one. The radio operator, nicknamed ‘Windows’, is unable to deal with the uncertainty of who is what. He frantically arms himself against the others and has to be talked down at gunpoint by the commander. Eventually, in an attempt to determine who is human and who is alien, the men devise a blood test. The second man to be tested, Windows backs towards the wall as he waits for his result, looking up with worried, glowering eyes. Pinned up behind him on the wall, its outline framing his head, is a map of the Antarctic: it is as if the continent, as much as the Thing, may have somehow got inside him.

  Still from The Thing. Dir. John Carpenter (1982), Universal Pictures.

  The same joining of continent and (un)consciousness is given more positive visual expression in the art of the Canadian Philippe Boissonnet, who travelled to Antarctica with the Argentinian national programme in 2007. Images from his series The Disenchantment of the World (Atlas), part of his installation This Strange Lightness of the World, exhibited in Buenos Aires in 2008, play on the nexus between cartography and psychology: one shows a bald man with a south polar projection map drawn onto his cranium. Another shows a mirror image of the man, so that his body blurs into itself, the Arctic on one bald head, the Antarctic on another – a postmodern version of Finé’s cordiform world map.

  Antarctic explorers both past and present certainly talk in terms of an inward journey – the expedition as a voyage of self-discovery has become a polar platitude. A favourite aphorism repeated in memoirs and narratives is Ernest Shackleton’s reflection: ‘We all have our own White South.’ The quotation itself may well be mythical, as its source, if it exists, is never supplied.27 It is nonetheless echoed by many contemporary polar travellers. The British adventurer Ranulph Fiennes asserts: ‘there is something of the South Pole in the hearts of all of us.’28 The Norwegian Erling Kagge concurs: ‘My travel across a part of Antarctica became more of a travel into myself, than to the pole itself … I believe everyone should find their own south poles.’29 ‘You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic’, muses an old imperial explorer more ominously in Thomas Pynchon’s novel V (1963). Seeking to ‘stand at the dead centre of the carousel, if only for a moment; [to] try to catch my bearings’, he finds at the Pole not the integration of the self but ‘Nothing … a dream of annihilation’.30

  Philippe Boissonnet, In-Between (Atlas’ Rescuing), ink-jet printing on artist canvas, edition of 3/3, 2008.

  In the title of his first expedition narrative, The Heart of the Antarctic, Shackleton identifies the Pole as the affective, if not the literal, centre of the continent. By his time it was well accepted that the Pole would harbour no open sea, no stupendous vortex, no magnetic mountain – just a featureless point on a plateau. Mythologies no longer focused on what marvellous thing might be located there, or what unimaginable insights it might offer, but rather on the meaning of having reached the point: the symbolic achievement of full geographic mastery. The Pole was the ‘last frontier’, the ‘end of the Earth’, the ‘last place on Earth’. While this ‘last’ was technically disposed of by Roald Amundsen, it lingered in the sense of ‘most remote’, ‘most isolated’, ‘most extreme’. Later in the century, with rising environmental consciousness, Antarctica became the ‘last wilderness’. In post-apocalyptic films and novels, it is a ‘last refuge’ in a devastated world and/or a ‘last hope’ for a new one.

  The mythology of the South Pole as the ‘last place’ is so pervasive that many would find it difficult to recognize it as a mythology rather than a literal fact. The cultural critic Elena Glasberg argues that the ‘place-ideas’ attached to the continent and the Pole ‘had more to do with coincidence than any necessary properties of place’. There are parts of Earth less habitable, less explored, more difficult to get to – she points to certain mountainous regions and the ocean depths; deep cave systems are another example. Due to historical circumstance, however, ‘the South Pole as the last place on earth has been invested with the aura of transcendence and promise of the completion of knowledge’. Since this completion is never possible, ‘geographical attainments in fact only led to further attempts, arrivals, gestures of closure’.31 One obvious example of the attainment of the ‘end’ merely producing a new stream of arrivals is the many polar traverses made in the ‘footsteps’ of famous explorers.

  A novelty South Pole licence plate.

  More than a century after Amundsen’s team calculated that they had arrived in the vicinity of the Pole, new mapping and visualization technologies have inevitably altered perspectives of the continent and its symbolic centre. There is now a webcam at the South Pole and you can see images of various parts of the scientific station on Google Street View. When you turn to Google Earth, however, problems occur: the area around the Pole, including the station itself, is just a grey-white pixelated mess. Online conspiracy theorists inevitably link this anomaly to the hollow earth, aliens and the CIA. Geospatial experts point to the absence of high-resolution satellites that pass over the poles, as well as the process Google uses to map its imagery onto a virtual globe, which preferences accuracy at the equator, and produces a low resolution south of around 82 degrees. We are back, in a sense, where this chapter started, with maps that favour the middle of the Earth and push the South Polar region off the bottom. In the digital age 90 degrees south continues to create problems for conventional cartographic representations.

  Andy Smith’s image Polar Sky, created for the endpapers of the book In Search of the South Pole (2011), incorporates words used by explorers, scientists and travellers to describe the Pole.

  Humanity’s representation of the South Pole remains the same in another way, too: it is still on the ‘bottom’ of the Earth. Among the most famous photographs of our planet from space is Earthrise, one of several similar images taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. There was a problem, however, with the original colour photograph that offered the best image: the astronaut had taken it as he saw it, with the moon’s surface in the vertical plane, meaning that its shadow over the Earth (positioned to its left) was also roughly vertical. To make the image a ‘moonrise’ it had to be rotated 90 degrees, so that the moon’s surface was horizontal; but this put the Earth itself ‘on its side’. In late 1972 another influential image t
aken from space, by the Apollo 17 astronauts, entered into circulation. Where Earthrise shows an Earth half in the moon’s shadow, this one showed the whole of one side of the sunlit planet, with Africa and the Arabian Peninsula in the upper part of the globe and Antarctica, under swirling clouds, clearly visible beneath. Moreover, it was taken with the Earth’s axis in the vertical – although, with no other object in the frame, it could be rotated at will anyway. Known as The Blue Marble, this image became ‘perhaps even more iconic’ than Earthrise.32 This was closer to the Earth that people recognized from maps: ‘no other photograph ever made of planet Earth has ever felt at-once so momentous and somehow so manageable, so companionable’.33 The impact of this image on environmental understandings of Earth – as something holistic, isolated and vulnerable – is frequently remarked. Less often acknowledged is the fact that, in the version of The Blue Marble originally taken from the spacecraft, the South Pole is on top.

  The Blue Marble, original orientation.

  3 Polar Imaginations

  ‘On this 21st day of March 1868, I, Captain Nemo, have reached the South Pole and the 90th degree, and I take possession of this part of the globe, now comprising one-sixth of all the discovered continents.’

  ‘In whose name, captain?’

  ‘In my own, monsieur!’1

  It is both ironic and fitting that the first official claiming of the South Pole in literature should be made in the name of ‘Nemo’ – Latin for ‘no one’. The mysterious and misanthropic submarine captain of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1869–70), who normally avoids stepping on land, makes an exception of the small islet he discovers at the Geographic Pole, on the basis that it has not yet been sullied by a human foot. A political subversive, he refuses to claim this land for a nation, empire or sovereign, instead planting his own black flag with a golden ‘N’ as the sun sinks below the horizon at the autumnal equinox.