THE RACE TO THE WHITE CONTINENT: Voyages to the Antarctic
By Alan Gurney
Norton, 320 pages, $26.95
The middle period of the exploration of Antarctica–between the voyages of Capt. James Cook and the well-known “race to the South Pole”-has until recently been neglected in the continent’s popular history. Authors have focused instead on the deadly competition between Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott, as well as the heroic survival story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition.
But during the two years from September 1837 to September 1839, three competing expeditions set out from France, the U.S. and Britain, each with the goal of discovering whether a continent did indeed exist at the bottom of the globe. Cook had surmised that a large body of land, perhaps even a continent, lay behind the veil of pack ice, but he was never able to find it.
The account of these rival national expeditions at the dawn of Antarctica’s history is an absorbing tale, and in “The Race to the White Continent,” Alan Gurney tells it well.
The book, however, does not get off to a quick start. The early chapters, covering nearly 100 pages, are a detailed introduction to the whaling and sealing cruises and hydrographical surveys of Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific that preceded the voyages to the Antarctic.
Still, there are interesting diversions. Gurney, author of “Below the Convergence: Voyages Toward Antarctica, 1699-1839,” paints a vivid picture of early exploration ships setting off on long ocean crossings as “floating farmyard(s)” carrying fowl and livestock to provide eggs and fresh meat. He explains how warring nations issued passports for their opponents’ vessels on peaceful voyages of exploration, “a civilized custom,” he notes, “that ended, like many other civilized customs, with Napoleon.” And he reprints the grisly description by a New Zealand missionary of the cannibalistic Maoris’ method of creating shrunken human heads, which were held in esteem by Maori warriors and European curio collectors.
Once the three contenders weigh anchor and raise their mainsails, Gurney’s narrative begins making headway.
First to depart in search of the Antarctic continent were the French, led by Jules Sebastien Cesar Dumont d’Urville, who had already earned a footnote in history by helping obtain the ancient Greek sculpture “Venus de Milo” for the Louvre. With his two ships, Astrolabe and Zelee, Dumont d’Urville discovered land below the polar circle, honored his long-forsaken wife by naming it Terre Adelie for her, and claimed the newfound territory for France. At the possession ceremony held on a skerry off the icebound coast, an officer who had anticipated success produced a bottle of bordeaux, and glasses were raised to the king.
The unhappy American expedition, under the command of Charles Wilkes, sailed in a squadron of six ill-fitted ships that were soon separated. One, Sea Gull, was lost with all hands off Chile. But in his flagship, Vincennes, Wilkes traced the Antarctic coast for nearly 1,300 miles and, after returning to Sydney, announced the discovery of an Antarctic continent.
By far the best-prepared–and most successful–of the three was the British expedition, led by Scotsman James Clark Ross. With his government firmly behind the effort, Ross had first-rate officers and provisions and two reinforced ships, Erebus and Terror. After four days of plunging through heavy pack ice that would have punctured any other vessels then afloat, Ross’ ships broke clear to open water and became the first to see what is now called the Ross Ice Shelf, which blocked any further progress: “We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the cliffs of Dover,” Ross wrote. But the expedition reached a record–farthest south, 78 degrees 10 minutes south latitude, which stood for more than half a century.
None of these three expeditions, incidentally, “won” the race to discover the white continent. An earlier explorer, Russian Fabian von Bellingshausen, turned out to be the first recorded person to see Antarctica, sighting “an icefield covered with small hillocks” on Jan. 27, 1820, but without realizing the significance of his discovery. Three days later, British naval officer Edward Bransfield sighted the Antarctic Peninsula, which one of his midshipmen called “a prospect the most gloomy that can be imagined.”
A former yacht designer, Gurney achieves his most appealing immediacy when writing about ships and the sea:
“The aft great cabins of eighteenth-century sailing ships were the most noble interior spaces ever created by shipbuilders. Airy and light, these were no blocky cuboid compartments but ones full of subtle curves from the tumble home of topsides, camber of beams and deck, and dappled with water-reflected light bouncing through the curved sweep of stern windows. . . . In some large ships the captain or admiral–for these were his quarters–could walk out on the balustraded stern gallery, sniff the ocean breeze, contemplate the bubbling wake.”
Gurney also limns exceptionally well the misery that was shipboard life in the early 19th Century, particularly in polar exploration. Not only was the preserved food often rancid, the clothing issue inadequate and the navigation extremely dangerous, but the hull and deck of at least one ship, Gurney tells us, “leaked at every seam, reducing the spartan accommodation to a sodden and stinking slum; the men wrapped their feet in blankets, so useless were their boots.” Aboard another vessel, officers were “driven from their cabins by voracious cockroaches that ate leather and skin from feet and even drank the inkwells dry.” Reluctant to venture forward during blizzards to the heads at the bow of their ships, men instead turned the bilges into their toilets.
Discipline was equally brutal. A young prisoner of the penal colony at Sydney made a horrible mistake when he stowed away aboard one of Wilkes’ ships. Though just a “youngster,” he was returned to Australia after the Antarctic cruise to face his sickening punishment: 105 lashes at the triangle. The last five cuts, Gurney writes, “were laid across his dead body.”
The end of all this exploration was a frozen world as alien as another planet. The blacksmith aboard Erebus wrote of the crew’s astonishment at the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating glacier-end the size of France: “All hands when they Came on Deck to view this most rare and magnificent Sight that Ever the human Eye witnessed Since the world was created actually Stood Motionless for Several Seconds before he could Speak to the man next to him.”
“The Race to the White Continent” at times leaves the regrettable impression that it was too-hastily produced. Nearly two dozen proofreading slips tarnish the text, and two of the notes numbered in the text are never explained. There are a few factual errors: The coasts of Australia are switched in the description of one surveying voyage; the direction a ship sailed from the Antarctic Peninsula to Deception Island is reversed; the name of New Zealand’s present-day Antarctic base is incorrect.
Another disappointment: The book lacks acknowledgement of the many passages for which the author owes an often-considerable debt to one or another of his 161 bibliographical sources. Occasional footnotes need not have unduly interrupted Gurney’s absorbing narrative.
