The Conquest of the Poles

The Conquest of the Poles by Roger Pocock

The Conquest of the Poles, by Roger Pocock, traces the long history of Arctic exploration before focusing on the dramatic final push to reach the North Pole. The narrative opens by describing the North Pole itself as a purely abstract point, invisible and immovable, beneath which an ice-field drifts over an unfathomed sea, and above which the polar star and constellations make their endless circuits across six-month days and nights. The attempts to reach this point, the text explains, began during the reign of Henry VIII, when Master John Davis sailed up the Greenland coast to a great cliff he named Sanderson's Hope, still more than eleven hundred miles from the Pole. From those beginnings, the narrative traces a succession of national rivalries. Barentz carried the Dutch flag a little farther north, Hudson returned the lead to Great Britain, and for two hundred seventy-six years the British flag went unchallenged from victory to victory. Then Lieutenant Greely of the United States Army beat Britain by four miles at the cost of nearly his entire expedition, which was destroyed by famine. Doctor Nansen broke the American record for Norway, only to be beaten in turn by an Italian prince, the Duke d'Abruzzi. Meanwhile the American naval officer Peary had begun a remarkable course of twenty-three years of special training. In 1906 he broke the Italian record, advancing across the ice of the Polar sea with dog-trains until wide lanes of open water forced him to retreat at two hundred twenty-seven miles from the Pole, nearly perishing before he regained his base. Peary's methods are described in detail. His ship, the Roosevelt, was of his own invention, built for ramming ice-pack, and crewed by Newfoundlanders trained from boyhood in the Labrador seal fishery. His exploring officers were Americans trained to live and travel as Eskimos, using native dress, dog-trains and snow houses. He hired the most northerly Eskimo tribe and over many years educated its best young men to obey him exactly and adopt his improvements. He maintained hunting parties to accumulate vast stores of meat and skins, women to make clothing, two hundred fifty huskie dogs, and sleds of his own design. Over twenty-three years he perfected details as small as how to boil tea in ten minutes, saving ninety minutes a day for actual marching. The Roosevelt forced a passage through the channel leading from Baffin's Bay into the Arctic Ocean, then crept between the ice-field and the coast of Grant Land, with Captain Bartlett in the crow's-nest coaxing and shouting at the ship as she butted through the floes. The vessel was finally blocked seventy-five miles short of Cape Columbia, the most northerly headland, and the stores were carried there overland. After a winter of preparation, on March the first the dash for the Pole began. Because no party could carry provisions for an eight-hundred-mile return journey and there were no islands to use as advanced bases, Peary devised a relay scheme. Doctor Goodsell marched to Camp A, unloaded his stores, and returned. Mr. Borup used those stores to reach Camp B and turned back. Professor Marvin reached Camp C and turned back. Captain Bartlett reached Camp D and turned back. With the stores at Camp D, Peary set out on the last one hundred thirty-three miles with his negro servant and four Eskimos, his sleds fully loaded and his party reduced to the fittest men and fewest mouths. All the native parties reached the coast safely, though Professor Marvin was drowned. The text raises the question of whether it was entirely sporting to send Captain Bartlett back at the last stage, denying him any share in the final triumph, and notes that Bartlett made no complaint and in his cheerful acceptance cut a better figure than even Commander Peary. The ice over those final miles was not flat but heaved into sharp hills, broken cliffs and labyrinthine reefs, the whole pack drifting southward, breaking into mile-wide lanes of open sea, with frost at times twenty and thirty degrees below zero. As Peary neared the Pole, the sky cleared and gave him brilliant sunlight, allowing him to take repeated observations until he found himself within five miles of ninety degrees north. A ten-mile tramp proved he had passed the apex of the earth, and five miles back he made his final tests. On the summit of a berg-like hill of ice, as close as his instruments could determine to the exact north end of the earth's axis, he hoisted a tattered silken flag, a gift from his wife carried for fifteen years. The record he left bore the date April the sixth, 1909, declared his observations to indicate the North Polar axis of the earth, and formally claimed the entire region for the president of the United States. Before Peary returned to the world, a Doctor Cook appeared from the Arctic claiming also to have reached the Pole. He was received with celebration in Greenland and welcomed with a banquet by the Danish Geographical Society, but Peary on his return proclaimed Cook a liar. The text notes that in England Peary's honor was not doubted, though it was felt that his public denunciation of his rival fell short of the dignity expected of brave men. Cook's record of frauds is mentioned, though the text allows that he was entitled to a fair hearing from men of science. The text concludes by measuring Peary against the standard set by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who first conquered the Northwest Passage and then, on a route unknown to him and with scant equipment, won the race to the South Pole against the well-equipped British expedition of Captain Scott. Amundsen's victory is attributed to sheer merit and the loyal devotion of his comrades, and his return to Norway under a disguised name to avoid public triumph, together with his generous tribute to his defeated rival, leads the text to name him the greatest hero, finest adventurer and most perfect gentleman of the modern world.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1920 · Genre: Adventure, Biography, History · 2,442 words

First lines

A. D. 1911

The North Pole is only a point on the earth's surface, a point which in itself has no length, breadth or height, neither has it weight nor any substance, being invisible, impalpable, immovable and entirely useless. The continents of men swing at a thousand miles an hour round that point, which has no motion. Beneath it an eternal ice-field slowly drifts across the unfathomed depths of a sea that knows no light.

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polar exploration · arctic · antarctica · geographical discovery · adventure · historical narrative · north pole · south pole · exploration history · extreme environments · expeditions · survival

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The Conquest of the Poles is listed on Textopian as a short story by Roger Pocock, dated 1920 CE.

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