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commented, 'The South Pole has never caught the popular imagination as its northern fel-
low has done . . . it is inconveniently distant from any European base, so its environment remains a
kind of silence and mist and vague terrors.' Arctic discovery dated as far back as the late Norsemen
who performed epic feats of discovery in Greenland and beyond, and by the nineteenth century the
far north constituted another space on a map to be painted with the queasy colours of British im-
perialism. The loss of Sir John Franklin's fleet as it searched for the elusive Northwest Passage in
1847 had ignited the imagination of the nation and stoked the ideal represented by glorious death
in remote spots in the service of the motherland. It spawned a whole colony of art, too, notably
Edwin Landseer's famous 'Man Proposes, God Disposes', depicting a pair of polar bears gnawing
at the remains of a sailing ship, and Frederick Church's 'Icebergs'.
Until Captain James Cook set out on his second voyage in 1772, Antarctica had been little more
than a shadow crouching on the white horizon of the European imagination. Seafarers had charted
sub-Antarctic islands which they surmised were the great southern land, but nobody really had the
first practical idea what, if anything, was down there. Before Cook, it was a myth. It had always
been a myth. The ancient Greeks looked at the winds and the oceans and
sensed
that it was there.
Conceiving as they did of a balance in nature, they decided that the
arktos
, the bear in the north,
must therefore be balanced by an
anti arktos
in the south. Simple!
In
AD
150 Ptolemy drew a continent on his map called
Terra Australis Incognita
, the Unknown
Southern Land, and the existence of an Antarctica became fixed in the collective geographic mind.
The fires Magellan saw burning on Tierra del Fuego in 1520 fuelled the notion of a great land still
further to the south. If people lived that far down, why not further? When Drake got round Cape
Horn in 1578 he declared there was nothing beyond it, because he could see the union of the Pa-
cific and the Atlantic. None the less, Plancius's Planisphere, published in 1592, shows both the
continent and
circulus antarcticus
. Plancius, Mercator and the other medieval cartographers strug-
gling to make sense of it all interpreted medieval theory in the light of Spanish and Portuguese
voyages. They decided, on at best flimsy evidence, that this land must be very big, mightily hard
of access - and populated.
From the sixteenth century on, at least until Cook's second voyage, cartographers were kept
busy lopping off bits of Antarctica which didn't exist, like pruning an unruly tree. One cartograph-
er, Oronce Fine, gave the continent the snappy name
Terra australis nuper inventa sed non plene
examinata
(the lately discovered but not completely explored southern land). This failed to catch
on. The ghostly image of a fertile, wealthy Shangri-La was finally laid to rest by Cook in the latter
part of the eighteenth century. His second voyage made all the Antarctic exploration which had
gone before him look insignificant. He discovered that there could be no people there after all; it
was too cold. The myth died. They were hoping for fertility and riches, the land of their dreams,
and all they got was an interminable icescape.
∗
We landed again shortly after leaving the two beards. The Kiwis refuelled the Squirrel from a drum
line, eyed beadily by a line of skuas, the ugly brown migratory gulls ubiquitous around the coast
of Antarctica in summer. The fuel cache was located on the edge of the continent itself, a hundred
