Ashley Salter

Animals in Exploration Literature

Seemingly everywhere people have ventured, all across the planet and into space, animals have been a part of their journeys.  From sled dogs at the South Pole to chimpanzees in orbit around the earth, animals have gone everywhere that humans have.  From polar bears in the Arctic to penguins in the Antarctic, explorers have also encountered animals during their adventures.  When explorers write about these animals they often reveal facets of their own personalities and motives.  By writing about “the other,” the animal, they also write about human hopes, fears, and foibles. 

In a survey of animals in Romantic writing, Christine Kenyon-Jones examines various functions of animals in some classic literary texts.  She finds more variety than continuity.  “Animals not only mean very different things to different people, even within a defined historical period,” she writes, “but they are also used in widely different technical ways by individual writers and artists: as symbols, metaphors, rallying points, emotional supports, means of defining the human, insults, the subject of humour and wit, and objects of veneration” (6).  Exploration literature, which often exhibits the influence of Romanticism, holds similar variety in its portrayals of animals.

Animals in exploration texts perform several different functions in relation to the explorers.  Their roles vary from companions accompanying human explorers to adversaries encountered during the journey to explorers in their own right.  Sometimes animals are the purpose of the journey, and sometimes they are a useful tool for helping the explorer reach her destination.  They are variously friends, foes, equipment, explorers, and the impetus to explore. This essay will trace these five functions of animals through accounts of both terrestrial and celestial exploration, through both nonfiction and fictional texts.  The journey begins with Antarctic expeditions. 

The South Pole was a destination of interest and excitement for adventuring types in the early twentieth century.  Members of early expeditions to Antarctica authored some classic exploration texts. These texts include the journals of Englishman Robert Falcon Scott and Norwegian Roald Amundsen, the two men who competed to reach the South Pole first.  Amundsen won the race to the Pole, and his team survived the return journey.  Scott’s team, although more has been written about them, came in second and perished on the way back.  One crucial difference in the two expeditions was the extent to which animals were utilized. 

Scott took ponies and dog teams with him to Antarctica, but no animals accompanied the Englishman and his team on the final miles of the journey to the Pole.  This is recounted in a novel called The Birthday Boys, one of several texts inspired by the failed Scott expedition. Titus Oates, a member of Scott’s five-man team, is the narrator of one segment of the novel.  Author Beryl Bainbridge has him express a number of thoughts about the animals involved in the two competing expeditions.  He explains how the last of the ponies were shot when the team found themselves at the foot of a glacier the animals would not have been able to cross.  Oates feels for the ponies who were whipped to keep them moving over a surface they were unsuited to travel upon (347).  When the team nears the Pole, the first unmistakable evidence that they have lost the race is a series of sledge tracks and paw prints in the snow.   Some of Scott’s men are angry and call Amundsen’s team “poor sports, sneaks, not worth bothering about.  When the story came to be told our feat of manhauling would be seen as the greater triumph” (360).  These men are sensitive to the fact that the journey they completed on foot is one Amundsen traveled by dog sled. 

Oates mentions “Scott’s mistrust of dogs” as one of the reasons the expedition has been “a catalogue of disasters and miscalculations” (347-348).  He discusses some tensions about Scott’s leadership style and choices he made for the team: “I still couldn’t fathom why [Scott] had been so stupid as to disregard the overwhelming opinion that dogs were the only form of Antarctic transport” (365).  The implication in this fictionalized account is that the use of dogs decided who won the race to the South Pole. 

Comments in Amundsen’s journal suggest he would agree with Oates (as he is portrayed in Birthday Boys) that  choosing to include dog teams as an essential piece of equipment pushed one team to success, and could, perhaps, have saved the other team from starvation. Scott’s ponies and dogs were, in the opinion of one team member, “‘hardly the best animals money could buy’” (347).  Amundsen’s dog teams were, however, the best that could be obtained, and were carefully chosen by a knowledgeable person. 

In the second chapter of his account, Amundsen discusses the purchasing of equipment and other preparations for his expedition.  “The greatest difference between Scott’s and my equipment,” he writes, “lay undoubtedly in our choice of draught animals.  We had heard that Scott, relying on his own experience, and that of Shackleton, had come to the conclusion that Manchurian ponies were superior to dogs along the Barrier.  Among those who were acquainted with the Eskimo dog, I do not suppose I was the only one who was startled upon first hearing this.”  Amundsen goes on to enumerate the reasons why he believes dogs are particularly well suited to Antarctic travel.  These include dogs’ ease in crossing the numerous snow-bridges, the ability to pull a dog out of a crevasse by his harness if he falls in, and the fact that dogs do not have to be left behind or killed at the foot of the glacier as ponies must be.  He notes in the initial summary of his journey that the dog teams made very good time even across slopes.  At one point, they covered 440 miles in only a few days.

At the end of a day’s work, Amundsen writes, the dogs were always taken care of first.  “When we had provided for the dogs, we thought of ourselves.”  The team actually turns back after an attempted September start, because the dogs are losing weight and suffering from the low temperatures.  He notes that the men, bundled in fur clothing, could have continued.  They decide to wait for spring in order to accommodate the dogs.  But such concern is not the kind a pet owner might feel for a beloved companion.  It is the concern a person has for valuable property or for the supplies that will safeguard his survival throughout a dangerous journey.

Amundsen devotes two paragraphs to one additional reason he used dogs for the expedition. Sled dogs were a calculated part of his strategy for making the Pole.  He took a total of 110 dogs with him to the Antarctic.  Fifty-two of these dogs, pulling four sledges, started for the Pole with him in October.  In January, during the return trek from the Pole, he records a remaining tally of two sledges and eleven dogs.  He details his tactics in the chapter about preparations:

And then there is the obvious advantage that dog can be fed on dog.  One can reduce one’s pack little by little, slaughtering the feebler ones and feeding the chosen with them.  In this way they get fresh meat.  Our dogs lived on dog’s flesh and pemmican the whole way and this enabled them to do splendid work. 

And if we ourselves wanted a piece of fresh meat we could cut off a delicate little fillet; it tasted to us as good as the best beef.  The dogs do not object at all; as long as they get their share they do not mind what part of their comrade’s carcass it comes from.  All that was left after one of these canine meals was the teeth of the victim – and if it had been a really hard day, these also disappeared.

The language in this passage carries mixed emotions.  Enjoying a dinner of dog fillet and declaring the dogs don’t mind eating their own suggest a callous attitude.  Yet Amundsen also calls the slaughtered animals “victims.”  This may represent a limitation of the translation from Norwegian or could represent actual mixed feelings on the part of the explorer.

For Scott and Amundsen, animals were tools of exploration.  They were part of the equipment purchased to make an expedition.  I don’t deny that Scott’s men felt sad shooting the ponies at the foot of the glacier or that Amundsen and his team felt some affection for the dog teams they traveled with, but these animals were not pets, friends, or furry companions making a trip with their humans.  Two expeditions that occurred more than half a century later do feature animals in the roles of friend and companion.

Early Antarctic exploration was conducted by men.  More recently, two women have completed journeys of exploration.  Each of them was accompanied by at least one animal.  In 1988, Helen Thayer, an accomplished mountain climber and adventurer, undertook a solo ski trip to the magnetic North Pole.  Thayer planned to make the journey alone despite the Inuit who urged her to take along a dog team.  On the day before she began her trip, she relented and agreed to take a single dog whom she named Charlie.  In the late 1970s, Robyn Davidson traveled across the Australian Outback with four camels and her dog, Diggity.  Both women published book-length accounts of their journeys.  Judging from these texts, the most prominent role animals played in their explorations was that of friend, companion, or pet.

Davidson’s camels could easily be compared to Amundsen’s dog teams.  They are necessary equipment for her trek across the Outback.  She apprentices herself to a man who trains camels in order to learn about the animals who will carry her and her supplies during the journey.  But the way Davidson writes of the camels does not draw attention to their function as tools of exploration.  Rather, they almost become pets.  They are large, furry friends going on a long hike with her.

Davidson’s camels seem most like pets when she explains their behaviors by attributing to them human motives.  Kurt, the “camel-man” for whom Davidson goes to work, has eight animals.  She quickly decided that each camel had a “distinct personality.”  She catalogues these personalities:

Biddy was the matronly grande dame of cameldom and infinitely superior to anything merely human; Misch-Misch was the highly-strung, vain young aristocrat; Khartoum was the likeable nervous wreck; Ali was the sad and stoic clown; Fahani was a poor senile old lady; Aba was the backward child having trouble with puberty; and Buddy was the eternal practical joker.  Dookie was the camel born to be king.

Davidson is at least partially aware, in the same casually self-deprecating way she composes the entire narrative, of how she is portraying the camels.  “I loved them all with an anthropomorphizing devotion,” she writes (36).  Later, however, when other people observe her tendency to portray the camels as human, Davidson denies it.  “My friends were falling in love with them as much as I was, though they wrongly accused me of projecting human attributes on to them,” she writes (86). 

Thayer similarly projects human motivations onto her canine companion.  Charlie was a ninety-four pound Husky-mix who had been trained to warn his Inuit village of approaching polar bears.  When Thayer first meets Charlie and purchases him for 100 dollars, he has known only the “harsh life” of an Arctic dog.  Such dogs are hardly pets.  Thayer describes the life of a dog among the Inuit: “A piece of frozen seal meat is tossed to them two or three times a week and they chew ice while living tied to a four-foot chain.”  When Thayer begins to fuss over Charlie and treat him like a pet, the villagers warn her that she will spoil him (15-16).  Several days into their journey, Thayer awakes and exits her tent.  She sees Charlie, sleeping, with accumulated snow on his back.  She has to remind herself that he is used to such conditions, that he knows how to turn his back to the wind and curl up for warmth, that these dogs are “strong and durable.  They are survivors in the best sense of the word” (65). 

Thayer falls into some of the more sentimental habits of pet owners everywhere.  She talks to Charlie, hugs him, worries about him being cold, and even allows him to sleep in her tent.  Charlie, adapting rapidly to his new role as pampered pet, crawls into her sleeping bag.  She has quite a time removing him – he weighs nearly as much as she does.  The pattern of behavior that best illustrates Thayer and Charlie’s relationship as one between animal lover and beloved pet is the sharing of “people food.”  Charlie hauls his own sledge carrying enough dog food to last him the month that the journey takes.  However, Thayer can’t resist him when he begs for her peanut butter cups and crackers.  She relents, of course, hesitating only long enough to wonder if a little chocolate can actually hurt him.

Davidson treats her dog, Diggity, with the same indulgence and ready ability to observe human motivations in her canine behaviors.  One afternoon when she becomes lost, she looks to Diggity to lead her back to camp and the camels, but she’s not sure the dog will do so.  After a few moments of suspense, Davidson sees this from Diggity: “She immediately grasped the situation; you could see a light bulb flash above her head [. . .] She had understood something and she was proud of it” (209).  Davidson interprets the dog’s behavior to mean she is thinking, understanding, and even feeling proud. 

As with the camels, Davidson is aware to some extent of the precariousness of how she portrays Diggity.  She elaborates on her habit of attributing to the dog the capacity to think and understand.  “I am quite sure Diggity was more than a dog, or rather other than dog,” she writes.  “She combined all the best qualities of dog and human and was a great listener.”  Then she becomes mildly self-deprecating again.  “I have admitted a weak point,” she writes.  “Dogs.”  She goes on to explain how this is often viewed as a weakness: “Animal lovers, especially female ones, are often accused of being neurotic and unable to relate successfully to other human beings.  How many times had friends noted my relationship to Diggity, and, with that baleful look usually associated with psychiatrists, said, ‘You’ve never thought of having a child, have you?’” (210).  Her possibly “neurotic” attachment springs to mind when Diggity becomes poisoned by strychnine.  Davidson is beside herself with grief.  “This couldn’t be happening.  She was my little dog and she couldn’t be poisoned” (224).  But she gains control of her emotions and shoots the doomed and suffering Diggity.  She even resists most of the urge to “ritualize” and bury Diggity’s body.  She only covers her with a handful of leaves.

These interactions with dogs are some of the most revealing characterizations of Thayer and Davidson.  Perhaps because they are women, or perhaps because they are writing decades after Amundsen, they seem like a very different kind of explorer.  Their love for animals frequently eclipses other elements of the exploratory journey.  Humanity’s basic relationship to animals is also being explored.

Animals are not always friends to these two women.  Other animals appear as foes or threats to their safety.  During Thayer’s journey, Charlie protected her during encounters with polar bears.  The bears were a serious concern from the inception of Thayer’s plan to ski to the magnetic Pole.  Before the trip she trained with several Inuit, learning how to survive when she inevitably faced bears during the trek.  She took along a rifle and a flare gun.  She also ate a vegetarian diet so as to avoid drawing bears with the smell of meat (12-13).  Bears appeared regularly during the trip.  Thayer deals with two lone adult bears plus a mother with cubs during one tiring day of her expedition.  The biggest dilemma she faces concerning the bears is the realization that she may be forced to kill one.  She wonders if that shouldn’t make her reconsider going on the trip.  Charlie ensures that she never has to shoot one with the rifle.  She finds that Charlie’s vicious barking and well-aimed, deterring shots from the flare gun are her best defenses (41).

Davidson’s animal adversaries include snakes, cockroaches, and wild camels.  She writes that the roaches bothered her more than the snakes.  She shared her bedroom in Alice Springs with both animals.  She writes about putting down “large quantities of poisonous powder [for the cockroaches], something [she] would not normally do, but they thrived on it.  They ate it, chomp chomp chomp, for breakfast, lunch and tea and continued to grow like mutated monsters” (82).  Diggity helps chase away any of the snakes seem threatening.  After they continue to crawl out from under her bed, Davidson blocks all the holes where they might enter the room. She still doesn’t sleep well.  In the Outback, Davidson faces essentially the same dilemma as Thayer when she encounters four wild bull camels.  She writes, “But the difficult thing is, I like camels.  I don’t like to hurt camels” (201).  She uses a warning shot, thrown rocks, and “crafty anti-camel manoeuvers” to elude her foes.

The adversarial relations described above illustrate how fear of animals can shape exploration.  Animals have also been the inspiration for journeys.

Animals-as-tools may be the dominant motif for animals in Antarctic exploration texts, but, in at least one case, animals have also been the purpose of explorations near the South Pole.  A side trip to learn about Emperor Penguins is the basis for Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir The Worst Journey in the World.  A member of the larger group which accompanied Scott to Antarctica, Cherry-Garrard was not one of the men who accompanied the leader to the Pole.  He was, however, one of a three-man team that sought out the penguins’ only known rookery.  He summarizes some of the interesting facts that were known about the Emperor penguin.  This flightless bird, he writes, “never steps on land even to breed.  It lays its eggs on the bare ice during the winter and carries out the whole process of incubation on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet, pressed closely to the lower abdomen.” 

The Emperor was deemed a worthy reason for the difficult winter journey Cherry-Garrard and his companions undertake, because it “is probably the most primitive bird in existence.”  The team was interested in obtaining samples of the penguin’s eggs so scientists could study the embryology.  Cherry-Garrard speculated, “The embryo of an Emperor may prove the missing link between birds and the reptiles from which birds have sprung” (63).  Scientific inquiry about the animal compelled this small team to engage in exploration.

After reaching the part of Cape Crozier where they believe the Emperors to be, the men spend four days setting up a camp and trying to find a safe way around crevasses and ridges to search for the rookery.  One of these days ends with the frustration of knowing the penguins are near, but having to turn back because little daylight is left.  “And then we heard the Emperors calling,” he writes.  “Their cries came to us from the sea-ice we could not see, but which must have been a chaotic quarter of a mile away.  They came echoing back fro the cliffs as we stood helpless and tantalized” (92). 

When Cherry-Garrard relates the first sighting of the Penguins, he observes that, in that moment, the impending nightfall concerned them more than their discovery.  Writing his memoir, he is able to look back and comment of the importance of that moment.  “After indescribable effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science: we were turning theories into facts with every observation we made” (95).  They collected five eggs with the hope that “specialists at home might cut [the embryos] into microscopic sections and learn from them the previous history of birds throughout the evolutionary ages” (96).  Ironically, the museum curators to whom they took the three eggs which survived the journey were uninterested.

Animals were closely involved with the acquisition of human’s knowledge about the universe beyond Earth.  Animals preceded humans into space; they were the first astronauts.  Before space flight was deemed a safe endeavor for humans, mice, dogs, monkeys, chimpanzees, and other animals were launched toward the stars.  The Soviet and American space programs fundamentally differed in their choice of animal astronauts.  Where the Russians favored dogs, the United States preferred to use monkeys and, especially, chimpanzees. 

A Soviet dog named Laika became the “first living creature in space” in November 1957 (Sigsbee).  She was launched before the capability to recover a rocket was developed.  She died in space less than a week later, but “her dead body circled the earth for more than two thousand orbits before Sputnik II plunged back into the earth’s atmosphere and burned up” (Bergwin 93).   The Soviets conducted more than forty additional test flights involving dogs between 1949 and 1959.  The favored mixed breed dogs because they felt “the purebred dog would be more sensitive to temperature changes and would not adapt himself easily to varying conditions and environments” (107).

The U. S. sent up only mice before the technology for recovering animals was established (39).  Between 1958 and 1961, the American program put at least five monkeys and two chimps into space (Sigsbee).  The U. S. Army favored chimpanzees for their intelligence and ability to learn tasks that had to be completed in the capsules (Bergwin 18).  The Soviet rationale for use of dogs turned on the fact that more was known about the physiology of canines and about exactly how they compared to humans.  The U.S. had to learn about chimpanzees as they went.  They benefited from using an animal who, ultimately, was much more similar to man, and provided extremely useful data for eventually putting humans in space (60-1). 

Dogs and chimpanzees can easily be seen as tools of fledgling space exploration.  Their presence in space was a necessary experiment, a cautious precursor to humanity’s own space exploration.  But the way these dogs and chimps are written about reveals another role they played.  They are called “astronauts” rather than “test subjects” or “lab animals.”  They all had names.  The modern researcher can find pictures of most of them and anecdotes about many.  The animal astronaut couldn’t keep a journal or write her memoirs after returning to earth, but, like human explorers, she has traveled to new places, experienced arduous journeys, had remarkable adventures.  She is much more than an accessory to human exploration.  She is an explorer.

Acknowledgment of an enhanced role for animals in space demands a closer look at the animals involved in terrestrial exploration.  Couldn’t they also be considered explorers in their own right?  Aren’t they more than the equipment and pets of the people they traveled with?  Asking these questions, I risk sounding like the supposedly neurotic animal lovers Davidson refers to. 

Yet one scholar has developed an explanation of how dogs and other animals play larger roles than we often think.  In her essay, “Good Dog,” Karla Armbruster investigates human expectations for the behavior of canine companions.  She notes that we expect “good dogs” to always act domesticated.  What we expect from pets, she asserts, is renunciation of wildness and affirmation of their domesticated status.  “Good” is equated with domesticated or cultured; the term is antithetical to wild or natural.  She traces this paradigm in poetry, fiction, and popular film.  It is rooted, she argues, in “Western ideas about the relationship between nature and culture and in our resulting conflicted feelings about wildness” (366). 

This parallels Kenyon-Jones’ observation that we sometimes categorize and place value on animals “as a critique or reinforcement of the human order” (1).  In other words, what humanity says about animals says much about humanity.  In light of Armbruster’s arguments, the prevalence of animals in exploration literature seems highly appropriate.  Explorers face nature at its harshest and most threatening.  The bitter cold of Antarctica, the intense heat of the Australian Outback, vicious bears in the Arctic, the frightening unknown reaches of space – these are nature’s challenges to human order.  How the explorers portray those animals, the functions they admit the animals serve, represent the effort to reassert that order.

Works Cited

Amundsen, Roald.  The South Pole: an Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition in the “Fram,” 1910-1912.  Trans. A. G. Chater.  London: J. Murray, 1912.  Project Gutenberg.  6 May 2004.  < http://www.gutenberg.net/etext03/8tsp1210.txt>

Armbruster, Karla.  “‘Good Dog’: The Stories We Tell About Our Canine Companions and What They Mean for Humans and Other Animals.”  Papers on Language and Literature 38.4 (2002): 351-76.

Bainbridge, Beryl.  From The Birthday Boys.  Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York: Thunder’s Mouth/Balliett, 1999.  345-368.

Bergwin, Clyde R. and William T. Coleman.  Animal Astronauts: They Opened the Way to the Stars.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1963.

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley.  From The Worst Journey in the World.  Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration.  Ed. Clint Willis.  New York: Thunder’s Mouth/Balliett, 1999.  59-99.

Davidson, Robyn.  Tracks.  New York: Vintage Departures, 1980.

Kenyon-Jones, Christine.  Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-period Writing.  Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2001.

Sigsbee, Kristine.  Animal Astronauts.  5 April 2004.  <http://ham.spa.umn.edu/kris/animals.html>

Thayer, Helen.  Polar Dream: the First Solo Expedition by a Woman and Her Dog to the Magnetic North Pole.  Troutdale, OR: New Sage, 2002.