Laurie E. Eckhart

March 4, 2004 

The Romance of Failing with a Stiff Upper Lip: Gentlemen Explorers 

            Ideas of the Romantic are as fluid as society. In the 19^th century nationalism and Romanticism were growing increasingly popular. The two converged and, in the polar explorations that were so admired by society, found a strange new stage upon which to exist. Because the poles represented such a difficult challenge, both physically and spiritually, an explorer’s success began to be measured through a Romantic lens. While the definition of failure did not change, people nevertheless began to revel in failed attempts because of the unique perspectives provided by men like Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Elisha Kent Kane, and Robert Falcon Scott.  Cherry and Kane lived to write full length accounts of their experience in the Antarctic with the self-inflection that comes from distance. They both wrote with the intent that the everyday man could comprehend and find something with which to relate. Scott’s contribution is grittier; he left behind a journal chronicling the last days of trial that he and his mates endured. 

Nationalism created a strange kind of fork in the road of Romance. Gothic settings and tragic characters where no longer the only elements needed for Romance in literature. Nationalism focused attention on the intent and purpose behind the quest, suddenly simply “crossing the finish line” wasn’t quite as important as engaging the quest.  With this new focus came a new attitude, particularly among the British, but also among Americans, that in environments like the Artic and Antarctic where death is a constant threat, a sort of altruistic man must be reborn from the elements. This new man must attain a level of selflessness that would, ultimately, be rewarded by success.  Of the British John Granahan wrote in his 2002 midterm:

The British culture of the time had a tradition of gentlemanly exploration, of a “stiff upper lip,” stoic fortitude and even good humor in the face of extreme hardship. In short, nothing less than selfless heroism was demanded of the British explorers. The expectation that British explorers would endure the most frightful hardships and continue to persevere may be at least partly to blame for the lack of thoroughness in the planning of the Scott expeditions. It leads to a sense that, if there’s not quite enough food, or our depots are a little far apart or inadequately marked, or our men have to work a little harder pulling sledges, their willingness to suffer and endure will in the end, prevail.

The willingness to face suffering in the extreme, such as blisters that freeze, butter so frozen that shavings are difficult to manage and the consumption raw walrus meat, with a smile on one’s face, was a national value. Americans too had their own form of stoic selflessness. This was most evident in the eagerness of Kane to “make amends” for the mistakes he made in judging the conditions, which placed his crew in mortal danger. Though he suffered from endocarditis he never seemed to falter when it came to the care of his men, even though that care for them probably led to his own demise. Despite the fact that nearly all the men on his ship hated him, he took the brunt of the last effort to preserve their lives. In Larzer Ziff’s article “Artic Exploration and the Romance of Failure” we learn that:

Kane, with the expedition’s only remaining dog sled, shuttled back and forth across that expanse [eighty-one miles of ice] in order to relay to an embarkation point provisions, boats, and men to weak to walk. During the thirty days it took him to accomplish this transfer he himself traveled 1100 miles.

He was the only one of the group who believed that they had any chance at survival. His sense of responsibility and selflessness allowed him to, seemingly, push beyond the limits of human endurance to fulfill what he felt was right and just. This qualifies him for, at the very least, an honorary “stiff British upper lip.” The British were more than willing to claim him and his disaster though. His fateful trip to the Artic did, after all, succeed in qualifying as a successful Britishesque failure – and a rather Romantic one. There was an American, British, Spanish and Danish flag present on Kane’s funeral car.

What was so wonderful about death and explorers who returned home minus fingers and toes? The allure of these tales of freakish situations titillated a society that was starting to loosen their corsets and cravats. The absence of the maudlin and terrifying explains, in part, why Amundsen with his phenomenal preparations, and success, not only “failed to fail,” but failed to capture the public’s imagination (Ziff 71).  Misery and discomfort were not the focus of Amundsen’s journey. His story is praise for Norwegian ingenuity, but the precise way in which he led his team to victory, his innovations and determination are all to blame for his passing fame.

It is surprising that the British explorers were so brash. In the mid 18^th century Voltaire wrote Letters on England and in it he slammed France’s unwillingness to explore technology that had already been proven in England to save lives; he wrote, “It is whispered in Christian Europe that the English are mad and maniacs: mad because they give their children smallpox to prevent their getting it, and maniacs because they cheerfully communicate to their children a certain and terrible illness with the object of preventing an uncertain one (53). What accounts for the change in British society towards developing a logical approach to a problem barely a century later? The Romantic Movement could account for part of the difference; it was “a reaction against classical values, [which] emphasized creative imagination over objectivity, feeling over logic, and freedom of form over formality” (Granahan). This brings us back to the shift in focus regarding exploration and what is “success.” Why did the Americans and British believe they could throw themselves in the middle of the artic and then “MacGyver” their way to victory? Perhaps there was a latent (or not so latent) idea that creative imagination, bravery, heightened awareness and other lofty sentiments would carry them through.

            Manners, literately, made all the difference in the Polar Regions. Not manners in the sense of Miss Manners, but the general regard for fellow man that the British believed should be accorded no matter the circumstances—even unto death. The codes of conduct that made Kane, Cherry and their parties gentlemen set them apart as true Romantic figures. Edgar Allan Poe’s book Arthur Gordon Pym is set in an alternate (white) Gothic environment with plenty of traditional Gothic and Romantic markers, but the gentlemen explorers were Romantic personas set in Gothic environments. There was a unique situation created in which the Romantic was occurring within and without. There are some qualities that hint at the courtly behavior that was exhibited in medieval times. Order was maintained even in the face of death. Men held to one another and their goals even when common sense screamed at them to return to safety. If the accounts are to be believed, politeness was practiced under extreme circumstance and the men took care of each other, sometimes to their own detriment, a sense of loyalty and honor kept them from taking advantage of one another even when it might have meant survival.

            If there is an anti-thesis of the gentleman explorer, it would have to be Pym. Reading non-fiction journals written by polar explorers alongside Arthur Gordon Pym creates a strange dynamic. Both Pym and Cherry are, undeniably, in romantic environments that can be described as “haunted physical and mental spaces, the shadow of death, dark and light in physical and moral terms” (White Syllabus). What makes Pym Romantic figure doesn’t apply in the same way to Cherry. Cherry is the product of a convergence between man and nature; his physical space is a constant threat, the shadow of death is always present in the form of crevasses and frostbite, and he is literally locked in the dark.  Pym is a bumbler moving through a Gothic setting experiencing one bizarre situation after the next. The environment moves Pym’s story along while the dialogue, the process, moves Cherry’s adventure forward.

            Pym and Cherry gained entrance into the Antarctic in completely different ways. Pym is a stowaway, comfortably holed up in the cargo hold. Cherry didn’t start off as a wayward adventurer; in fact he almost “missed the boat” so to speak because he was so myopic that in his own words he “could only see the people across the road as vague blobs walking” (Alvarez). This difference sets the tone for two very different journeys to two very different Antarcticas.

            Early on in Pym’s story he begins to doubt his friend, Augustus. Pym readily admits that “throughout the whole of the next tedious twenty-four hours no person came to my relief, and I could not help accusing Augustus of the grossest inattention” (20). Not once does Cherry blame any of the men who invited him along for his suffering. If he did, he suppressed it as unworthy. Part of Pym’s tortured landscape involves the potential threat from men he considers to be his friend. Poe focused on the Romance of the environment and almost completely ignored the camaraderie between men among the harsh elements. This is not the only manner in which Pym was markedly different from the stoic explorers.

            Pym drew extreme attention to the horrors of survival. For instance, when the bird from the ship full of corpses flew overhead we read:

May God forgive me, but no, for the first time, there flashed through my mind a thought, a thought which I will not mention, and I felt myself making a step towards the ensanguined spot. I looked upward, and the eyes of Augustus met my own with a degree of intense and eager meaning which immediately brought me to my senses. (82)

 I suppose Pym becomes a Romantic figure here in the sense that he is starving and the inhumanity in his companion’s eyes brings him up short of breaking the taboo of cannibalism. He is very different from Scott, Bowers and Wilson who “were found lying side-by-side in their tent, arms peacefully folded on their chest, straight and separate, polite to the last, stopped in their tracks by a nine-day blizzard, eleven miles short of their supply depot” (Alvarez 7).  If there were every any thoughts of cannibalism in the Scott party, they aren’t to be found in the way these men were found lying together, dead. Their politeness to the very end, coupled with the tragedy of a depot merely eleven miles away, served to catapult Scott’s renown around the world. 

            Scott comments in his journal that “Bowers hasn’t quite the trick [ski drawing] and is a little hurt at my criticism, but I never doubted his heart” (106). This line doesn’t have quite as much significance unless Cherry’s account of “The Worst Journey in the World” has been read as well. In it we read that amazing feats of kindness under extreme difficulty was exercised by Cherry, Bowers and Wilson. For example, Cherry described his experience as a “ghastly journey,” and wrote that “it was difficult not to howl.” Still he comments that the trip was “made bearable and even pleasant to look back upon by the qualities of my two companions who have gone” (74).  Possibly, in the aftermath of a nightmare trip made with companions not inclined to politeness, Cherry wouldn’t have written the stirring account that he wrote. He seemed to be truly humble and he might not have been moved to spend nine years of his life committing to paper a work with little spiritual merit.

            Through Cherry’s generous descriptions of his companions a reader might begin to question the true value of human companionship in exploration. Cherry wrote, “In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South” (74). The polar explorations took men, slowed them down, and through elements beyond human control the poles reshaped men like Cherry who were willing to look closely at his fellow humans, as well as his own heart, for answers.

            Like Pym, Cherry and Scott take pains to describe the Gothic and sublime elements they encounter. Scott relates a feeling of having “ghosts about” and describes the moments before the group realized that they were on a pressure ridge, “the moon was showing a ghastly ragged mountainous edge above us in the fog” (82).  Scott flirts with the sublime when he informs the reader that Wilson was forced to fork over “30 opium tabloids apiece” to the other team members (114).  The combination of possible death when a bit of hope still remains, yet the necessity to confront the need for ending one’s own life is terrifying. When Scott reached the last entry his last thought was for his family and the family of his mates. His last request was this, “for God’s sake, look after our people” (117).  Slow death, the knowledge of inescapable imminent death, seems very sublime; it is the precipice upon which a person is rooted, unable to move, while time quickly erodes away the edge.

Scott pulls the reader into the hopeless decline of poor Titus Oates. Titus, as we find out is “wonderfully plucky” despite the pain his rotting feet give him. Scott notes that Titus “[bore] intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects” (115). This sentence might seem insignificant if it is passed over too quickly, but the restraint that the man showed is phenomenal. He stayed his fear of the inevitable out of courtesy and, maybe even, devotion to his team mates. The psychological implications are astounding. At the very end, when he and the other men know that there was no hope for him, he chose to go out into the blizzard saying only “I am just going outside and may be some time” (115).  He never returned, but his legendary pluck lives on.

             Another significant different between Pym and Kane, is the varying degrees of attitude towards natives. Poe saw natives of the Antarctic as another device in which to create fear and loathing. Pym says:

While, therefore I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention. (130)

Assuredly, Pym regretted the “unfortunate and bloody events” that occurred to his crew mates, not the inhabitants of what Pym, rather contemptuously, labels Klock-Klock. Kane was a consummate gentleman, even though he made horrible decisions, it is evident in both the way he treated his men and the Eskimos he encountered. According to Ziff:

His is the first ethnographic description of the Etah Eskimos and, remarkably for an explorer of his day, when the time for farewells arrive he was able to single out each of them by name and from his scant supplies endeavor to give a present that fit each person. (70)

That Kane didn’t make extensive notes in his log book regarding what form of exploitation would best serve his country is remarkable, that he found gifts and knew individuals by name is extraordinary.

Although Pym didn’t share many qualities with the gentlemen explorers, he wasn’t altogether completely different either. He had similar motivations. Dr. White’s American Romance syllabus states that, “a romantic hero or heroine may appear empty or innocent of all but potential or desire and a willingness to self-invent or transform.”  Pym certainly possesses the willingness to change and transform himself when he leaves behind a mother who was hysterical at the thought of her son going to sea and a grandfather who threatened to cut him off from his fortune. He is a bit of a Robinson Crusoe -- without all the brilliant insight. Cherry probably could have sympathized with Pym in his desire for adventure and a change of society. Cherry lets the reader know upfront that he greatly prefers the rigors of the Antarctic to his “dusty, dingy office in Victoria” (62).

In the end we are left wondering what is more important – the journey or the goal. As in most things, there is not, nor will there ever be, a definitive answer to that question. As a modern reader studying the polar explorations of the 19^th century, I ask you to consider what has had the most impact on you, on your life. Does the no-nonsense, practical and frankly genius approach of Amundsen send you to bed with visions of conquest and flags dancing in your head? Or do men like Kane, Scott and Cherry fill your mind with a life rife with possibilities? What’s your bag? Pure, undiluted triumph or the intangible thing that pushes men to hazard death with nothing more to show for it than a footnote in the annuals of history?