The Ice Balloon. Alec Wilkinson

no nation managed more, or got beat up worse, in the Arctic than the British, the losses coming partly from a willfully romantic attitude and partly from pridefulness. A famously skilled British sledger of the nineteenth century, Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, who had looked for Franklin, gave a speech on sledging in which he described the British sledger undertaking a journey in the Arctic as characterized by a “strong sense of duty, and an equally strong determination to accomplish it—dauntless resolution and indomitable will; that useful compound of stubbornness and endurance which is so eminently British.” Before Franklin disappeared explorers frequently went to the Arctic and had terrible things happen to them, but often they returned and were heroes. After the Arctic erased Franklin and his ships and crew, the British were less keen about what benefits might be had from going there. (By the time the Northwest Passage was completed, in the late nineteenth century, it was useless from being so difficult to navigate. Furthermore, depending on how much ice there was and where it was concentrated, the passage wasn’t even in the same place every year.) Almost as a nation the British seemed to feel that the Arctic, having been paid the compliment of courtship, had not played fair.

      The difference between the Arctic and the tropics, the other blanks on the period’s maps, is one of conception. Each drew a somewhat different type. Discoverers in the tropics were geographers, missionaries, seekers after mineral wealth, or pursuers of stories left in the archives of Spanish exploration about cities of gold. The formidable threats they faced—natives, disease, parasites, unholy heat, antagonistic creatures—were an alliance of resistance. To the European the place was a clotted mass of hazards, a closet in which disaster came at you in waves, whereas the Arctic was the open plain, the desert, the spaces where God and the wild spirits roamed.

      In the mind of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Arctic was a region of severe—even sacred—purity, and the terms of life there were different from those of any more temperate place. In a year, to begin with, it had only one day and one night. Absence defined it. The palette of dangers was reduced to two: cold and starvation. No secondary antagonists such as poison arrows or insects or parasites or diseases intervened, unless in the case of scurvy, which was caused not by an agent native to the ground but by poor nutrition. (Fresh meat, it turned out, protected the Eskimos, but the Europeans relied mainly on lemon juice and the less effective lime juice.)

      The path in the Arctic had two ends: arrival or death, which of course was its own arrival. And it was imagined to be the cleanest death, nearly conceptual, a wasting away slowly, an exhaustion relaxing into sleep, it was said; a perishing, an erasure, which was essentially different from a mauling or a withering amid fits of fever or the weakening effects of a larva or a parasite that had worked its way through the bloodstream and the body. A man was believed to have his wits in the Arctic until nearly the end. It was a godly place, fierce and unknowable, the spooky and capacious territory of the imagination. Onto its blackness any idea could be projected. Men who went to the Arctic enraptured, who saw God in the austerity and the otherworldly ice, were often disabused by the experiences they had there, though. A holy-minded American explorer named Charles Hall, viewing the frozen body of a comrade, wrote in a journal, “O, My God, Thy ways are not our ways!”

      Finally, while exploration in the tropics might be a treasure hunt, the Arctic offered no riches that could be held in one’s hand. In the Arctic what prizes might be obtained would fall mostly to others—the route one found would be traveled. The science one might work would be for selfless gain, and was more likely to be specific than practical, since the conditions of the landscape—a region of ice, not land—were duplicated nowhere else. Certainly one’s name would be revered. One would get a statue. One could leave the names of one’s family and sponsors and friends on the landscape, although that wouldn’t necessarily fill a bank vault.

      In 1881 a member of a British Arctic expedition, describing the allure of the frigid places, wrote, “It seems to us certain that the Arctic world has a romance and an attraction about it, which are far more powerful over the minds of men than the rich glowing lands of the Tropics.”

      The pole was the chaste and pitiless heart of a god-dwelling region. People thought of the tropics and saw golden cities. People thought of the cold territories and shuddered.

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      Why did they go, then, this parade of fanatics heading for the deep places? You have to wonder. What they did was so extravagant that their impulses can’t be assumed to have been those of an ordinary citizen, even allowing for the differences between our period and the ones they lived in. It is no observation of my own that the nineteenth century was the last to have been receptive to the enactment of myths, to see the footprints of larger, ineffable beings laid out like dance steps on the map and to feel them wandering through their art and writing. The last to pursue their models and outlines and to feel the rightness of embodying them. Selfless heroism, and the public pursuit and praise of it, reverberates throughout their centuries. The walls of the known, the boundaries, were closer at hand. It was as if the restraints that men felt in sociable life made them feel compelled to rush into the wild.

      Who were they? Not a single type but a multiplicity. A procession of thrill seekers, god chasers, romantics, pragmatists, visionary dreamers, nomads, criminals hiding where they thought no one would look, withdrawers from more complicated lives, penitents, mourners, long-shot followers, defeated characters hopeful of redemption, careerists, misfits, and malcontents ill at ease anywhere but the solitary places. Add to them brooders. And self-testers, anxious and feeling vital only when facing a challenge; men whose neurology was sufficiently deadened that only the most profound experiences could stir them. Upright men who adhered courageously to the highest codes of conduct, while marked for death. Devious men who took money from patrons to find Franklin when their intent was to get to the Arctic to find the pole. Ambitious men avid for attention and profoundly receptive to impulse. They set themselves a forbidding task, and came back or didn’t, the way heroes do in legends, and in children’s books, too.

      Very few of them were adequate self-explainers. Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, to sudden insights and epiphanies, often can’t explain himself well. Such people act because the gesture feels right, or because they feel provoked, convinced by the obscurity, the persistence, and the vitality of their desires, the self-persuading and incontrovertible correctness of something they see in a vision. “The history of polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of the unknown over the mind of man, perhaps greater and more evident here than in any other phase of human life,” one of them, Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian, wrote.

      No explorer says, I’ll go a little farther than the one who went farthest. He declares for the pole or its equivalent, and he breaks down and turns back or dies sometimes just short of, or just past, where the last mark stood—sometimes merely from luck, bad weather, poor planning. And sometimes determination and a rigorous constitution assert themselves in the vacuum created by hopelessness.

      “At least I shall have made my mark on the world,” Adolphus Greely, an American explorer, wrote, before leaving on a journey that had a hideous outcome. Nansen’s explanation was drawn from that part of the landscape where romance and mysticism merge. During the Arctic night, aboard a ship stuck in the ice, he wrote, “What demon is it that weaves the threads of our lives, that makes us deceive ourselves, and ever sends us forth on paths we have not ourselves laid out, paths on which we have no desire to walk? Was it a mere feeling of duty that impelled me? Oh, no! I was simply a child yearning for a great adventure out in the unknown, who had dreamed of it so long that at last I believed it really awaited me; and it has, indeed, fallen to my lot, the great adventure of the ice, deep and pure as infinity, the silent, starlit polar night, nature itself in its profundity, the mystery of life, the ceaseless circling of the universe, the feast of death, without suffering, without regret, eternal in itself. Here in the great night thou standest in all thy naked pettiness, face to face with nature; and thou sittest devoutly at the feet of eternity, intently listening; and thou knowest God the all ruling, the centre of the universe. All the riddles of life seem to grow clear to thee, and thou laughest at thyself that thou couldst be consumed by brooding, it is all so little, so unutterably little…. ‘Whoso sees Jehovah dies.’”

      Spoken straight from the unconscious,