The Heroic Façade, Polar Exploration and the Human Truth

“ Blindly, but doggedly, they stumbled onward, silent in their agony, brave to the last when worn-out nature gave way and they sank down, one after the other, till none was left alive, and only the still figures, lying face downwards on the frozen snow, bore mute witness of how they had neither faltered nor wavered in their duty, but had died, as Britons always should die, true to the end. ”

“ They met in the holy cause of benevolence and human sympathy, to battle with the elements beneath the Arctic Circle; and the chivalric heroism which the few stout hearts of the two nations displayed in that terrible conflict, redounds a thousand-fold more to the glory of the actors, their governments, and the race, than if four-score ships, with ten thousand armed men had fought for the mastery of each other upon the broad ocean, and battered hulks and marred corpses had gone down to the coral caves of the sea, a dreadful offering to the demon of Discord. ”

“ To come nearer home, where, too, would be the British Empire? In my eyes the bravest and most heroic of human beings are the Antarctic and Arctic explorers, who have to and moral possess the very highest qualities in man—physical courage, endurance under terrible privations in terrible climates, resource, absolute self-control, and unselfishness; their daily life when marching in that terrific cold is the constant practice of the most heroic endurance and bravery, beside which the most daring deeds of bravery on the field of battle are but child's play. ”

“ If we took no account of the fields of trade opened by our Arctic explorers, if we thought nothing of the wants of science in comparison with the lives lost in supplying them, is not the loss of life a gain, which proves and tests the fortitude of noble hearts, and teaches us respect for human nature? All the lives that have been lost among these Polar regions, are less in number than the dead upon a battle-field. The battle-field inflicted shame upon our race—is it with shame that our hearts throb in following these Arctic heroes? ”

“ If these lessons of heroism and devotion to duty are learned and practised by the young men of to-day, then that lonely fourfold grave under the Arctic sky will prove to be one of the bulwarks of the nation. ”

“ And when at last he emerges into the twilight land which lies between the domains of legend and history, he becomes, after the immemorial habit of the myth, the nucleus round which are concreted innumerable traditions of warlike enterprise and religious animosity—the spontaneous products of a time when the instincts which underlie both are in a state of preternatural excitement. ”

“ But, whatever the episodes of our four historic centuries may furnish to the poet, painter, dramatist, or legend-building idealist of the future, it is certain that we are not devoid of myth and folk-lore. Some characters, prosaic enough, perhaps, in daily life, have impinged so lightly on society before and after perpetrating their one or two great deeds, that they have already become shadowy and their achievements have acquired a color of the supernatural. ”

“ In sledging responsibility and physical work are combined to an extent seldom if ever found elsewhere.
His was a subtle character, full of lights and shades.
England knows Scott as a hero; she has little idea of him as a man. He was certainly the most dominating character in our not uninteresting community: indeed, there is no doubt that he would carry weight in any gathering of human beings. But few who knew him realized how shy and reserved the man was, and it was partly for this reason that he so often laid himself open to misunderstanding. ”

“ All around were signs of a camp, which to the filmed eyes of the explorers were the tokens of their failure to be first.
“It is a terrible disappointment,” wrote Scott in his diary, “and I am very sorry for my loyal companions. Many thoughts come and much discussion have we had. To-morrow we must march on to the Pole, and then hasten home with the utmost speed we can compass. All the day dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return.”
And the next day the Pole was reached, and from out its solitude and austerity the great explorer cried:
“Great God! ”

“ Of all the many expeditions which have set forth to the Polar regions, none was more tragic than that commanded by Captain Robert F. Scott. In practically the hour of his triumph he failed, because, no matter how efficient an organisation, no matter how far-sighted policy and arrangements may be, there is always the uncertain human element; there comes the point when human endurance can stand out no longer, when the struggle against the titan forces of Nature cannot be kept up. ”

“ A water sky, a land blink, or some other sign, indicative of land or open water, is constantly before us and these are, to the polar explorer, like the Star of Bethlehem to the children of Israel. They perpetually urge us on. We burn down the fires and wait impatiently for better success on the morrow, feeling always that we have won our success, thus far, by our own hard efforts, and by the same methods we hope to master the barriers now walled around us. Pressing ice, blasting head winds, blinding snow squalls, and all the worst elements of sea and weather combine to bewilder and defeat us. ”

“ Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. ”

“ The usual result is constant slurring criticism which is sure to have its effect upon other members of the expedition, and opposition either direct and active or sullen and passive.
The last man of all is the one who is always wondering whether he will ever get back home or not, and is constantly congratulating himself as a hero because he is in the terrible polar regions and still alive. ”

“ Through a rift in the clouds glares a red flash of light, like an angry, blood-shot eye. He turns and meets the sinister sunbeams with a steady eye, in which a fiery gleam is reflected, as though bidding defiance. As they glare at each other, this man and this spectre, the curtain is drawn and all is dark."
This we know, that with loyalty and solidarity these heroic men kept fast in their path of daily duty, facing unflinchingly cold and disease, exhaustion and starvation, and, as has been truly said, they thus "forged the last link of the northwest passage with their lives." ”

“ In considering the record of past failures in the arctic regions—for,in spite of the magnificent heroism displayed,they were nothing but failures—two points stand out clear and distinct, viz., that the pole will never be reached in ships, and that it can never be reached by any such parties as have hitherto been sent out. The men who so freely risked their lives were not to the manner born, and what they were called upon to endure was so violently opposed to all their ordinary experience that they were heavily handicapped at the very start. ”

“ FROM BREMERHAVEN TO TROMSOE.
1. He who seeks to penetrate the recesses of the Polar world chooses a path beset with toils and dangers. The explorer of that region has to devote every energy of mind and body to extort a slender fragment of knowledge from the silence and mystery of the realm of ice. He must be prepared to confront disappointments and disasters with inexhaustible patience, and pursue devotedly his object, even when he himself becomes the sport of accident. That object must not be the admiration of men, but the extension of the domain of knowledge. ”

“ A break in the ice may have precipitated them into a channel; cold may have overcome them as they slept; moving hummocks may have overwhelmed them, or a sudden snow-storm may have caused them to lose their direction, and have led them into dangers they were not able to escape. When no trace could be found of them, and no vestige of their outfit discovered on the ice, or the islands, there was only one thing the survivors could realise, and that was that their comrades had gone out of the world in silence, in mystery, and in sacrifice to the knowledge of humanity. ”

“ Surrounded by almost every conceivable difficulty and danger, Arctic research has witnessed and developed more genuinely heroic skill and enterprise than has been needed or found in the exploration of any other portion of our globe. With all its dangers the North Polar world possesses a rare fascination for the adventurous, and has something to offer in palliation of its monotonous desolation. The yet unknown must always have charms for the greatest minds, even though it should prove practically unknowable ”

“ The effort has often been made to prove the necessity of continued polar exploration after the failure of so many attempts and the loss of so many brave lives, but the reasons brought forth were always those referring to the probable utility of new undertakings. It is not the proper way to defend a scientific work to point out the direct advantages which may be gained by it. Science itself has the right to ask any devotion of man for its purposes. ”

“ In fact, in Polar exploration especially, people are beginning to see the comparative uselessness of such journeys, and rarely can any Polar expedition get money unless the leader announces that such and such scientific investigations are to be made by a staff of experts, and that such and such scientific results are likely to accrue. ”

“ Six or eight scientific men would not be too few to form the scientific staff, and they must be provided with at least two laboratories, a scientific storeroom, and photographic room. The leader himself being well acquainted with conditions of work in the Polar Regions, it is not essential that the scientific staff should be, but it would be an advantage that his chief-of-staff had some ice experience, and that he should be able to take up the reins in the event of the serious illness or death of the leader. ”

“ The myths shaped out of those endless analogies between man and nature which are the soul of all poetry, into those half-human stories still so full to us of unfading life and beauty, are the masterpieces of an art belonging rather to the past than to the present. The growth of myth has been checked by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of proportions and specimens—it is not only dying, but half dead, and students are anatomising it. In this world one must do what one can, and if the moderns cannot feel myth as their forefathers did, at least they can analyse it. ”

“ Those weird tales which to us are puerility or poetry, according as we please to regard them, were to their believers history, science, and religion. Yet this effort, which continues from the beginning to the end, is not valueless; in it is embodied the soul of human progress. Without mythology, the only door at once to the ideal and inner life of primitive peoples and to their heroic and historic past would be forever closed to us. ”

“ Certainly, in our day, the love and practice of truth have grown obsolete; dramatic pieces and works of fiction, indeed all kinds of literature, especially biography, and even history, combine to outrage truth with impunity; no compunction is felt in transforming great characters into monsters, and monsters into heroes. People are no longer astonished that travellers' narratives should be like poems, good or bad, works of imagination full of anachronisms, exaggerations, impossibilities, making the sea take the place of mountains, and putting mountains where the sea should be. ”

“ Like lichens on rocks, myths have grown about that time; but the myth is worth preserving for the sake of the germ of truth which gave it birth. Historians sometimes tell the truth, not always the whole truth, certainly never anything but the truth, and nothing is to be despised which gives a peep at the life as it really was. For complexion of the times, the local colour of its action, there can be nothing like the tale of the veteran, of the white-haired, dim-eyed survivor, whose quaking voice tells out the story of that eventful day. ”

“ And now the myth-less man remains eternally hungering among all the bygones, and digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig for them even among the remotest antiquities. The stupendous historical exigency of the unsatisfied modern culture, the gathering around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge—what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical source? ”

“ The formulas of myths and folk-tales, if we disregard the particular incidents that form the substance with which the framework is filled in, are almost exclusively events that reflect the occurrences of human life, particularly those that stir the emotions of the people. If we once recognize that mythology has no claim to priority over novelistic folk-lore, then there is no reason why we should not be satisfied to explain the origin of these tales as due to the play of imagination with the events of human life. ”

“ Educated men do not now consider it honest to make fictitious history in this way, but people of untrained mind, in what is called the myth-making stage, which has lasted on from the savage period and has not quite disappeared among ourselves, have no such scruples about converting their guesses at what may have happened, into the most lifelike stories of what they say did happen. ”

“ War is surrounded with glamour, by tradition, by Homer and the Old Testament, by early education, by elaborate myths as to the importance of the issues involved, by the heroism and self-sacrifice, which these myths call out. Jephthah sacrificing his daughter is a heroic figure, but he would have let her live if he had not been deceived by a myth. Mothers sending their sons to the battlefield are heroic, but they are as much deceived as Jephthah. ”