Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler

talking. William Roberts kept coming into my mind. I wondered what had brought him to the bottom of the world. As a cook, it could hardly have been a career move. At the turn of the century a great number of men had signed up to go south. Many did it for money. Carsten Borchgrevinck, who stood on the cusp of the Heroic Age and whose expedition was the first to winter on the continent, wrote in 1900, ‘The Antarctic may be another Klondike . . . there are fish – fisheries might be established . . . here is quartz in which metals are to be seen.’ Some British explorers claimed to be motivated by national rivalry, and an entrenched belief that it was Britain’s right to be first. Others had demons to escape; but they probably found them waiting on the ice. Scott’s geologist on the Terra Nova , Frank Debenham, wrote, ‘Man strives for complete knowledge of his world just as a small boy climbs an apple tree even if there is no apple at the top.’
    In addition, after all those long, hard centuries, it was widely believed that man had attained the most alluring geographical goal on earth. He had reached the North Pole. Just as people tired of the moon after 1969, in 1909 eyes sated on the north turned in another direction. They looked south.
    As Scott noted in his diary, the bloated body of Arctic literature contrasted sharply with the skeletal material on its southern counterpart. At the beginning of the Heroic Age an editorial in the Daily Express commented, ‘The South Pole has never caught the popular imagination as its northern fellow 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 imperialism. 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 Pacific 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 struggling 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