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COMMENTARY
June 3, 2007
Testing
With the summer approaching, and the scientific likelihood of hemispheric warming, I find my thoughts often turned to marine subjects, though not, strangely, to the Law of the Sea, that topic through which political pundits have traditionally established their credentials as terminal bores. Rather, it is the prospect of polar exploration that most intrigues me. Not that I have such a prospect in view. I am pinned to the temperate-zone ground by a thousand little bureaucratic threads -- to explain these to my reader would be like briefing him on the Law of the Sea -- but one may still read.And the books I recommend, for summer, are the memoirs from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Anyone could find a selection of them in an old-fashioned, small-town public library. But since these no longer exist, I recommend the book bins in flea markets and at Sally Anne and other thrift stores. At the moment I have the authority to especially recommend: The Voyage of the “Discovery,” by Capt. Robert Falcon Scott (1905); Antarctic Adventure, by Sir Raymond E. Priestley (1914); The Home of the Blizzard, by Sir Douglas Mawson (1915); The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922); Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, by George Seaver (1933); and, Ice Bird, by David Henry Lewis (1975). A fuller list would aggregate works by and about Norwegians (especially Farthest North, by Fridtjof Nansen), Americans, Frenchmen, and that wonderful Argentine, Vito Dumas. The literature is rich, for the sort of man attracted to the rigours of survival in the Antarctica and its surrounding seas (or in the earlier exploration of Canada’s Far North) tended to acquire, by self-education, all of the facilities of a good writer, including, crucially, precise observation and moral seriousness. The most recent of these books, Ice Bird, is perhaps the best starting point for a younger reader of today, for it describes a solo voyage in a tiny steel-hulled yacht, from Sydney, Australia through the Roaring ’Forties, and Furious ’Fifties, then above 60 degrees south latitude, around the ice pack of the Quiet Continent, to Palmer Base on the Antarctic Peninsula, and after extensive repairs, on to Cape Town in South Africa -- done little more than a generation ago. In the course of this voyage, the author (1917-2002), a medical doctor, and lifelong yachtsman -- and, via the accident of an eccentric upbringing, a pioneering scholar of ancient Polynesian principles of navigation -- was capsized thrice, repeatedly dismasted, and had many other thrills. For the open waters of the Southern Ocean are teased by globe-encircling westerlies that often reach hurricane force, and build waves that have been recorded above 30 metres (or 100 feet; Lewis’s Ice Bird was, for comparison, 32 feet in overall length). He endured these inconveniences in waters cold with ice, quite literally thousands of miles from the possibility of rescue, and anyway with a radio that gave out shortly after he left home. Like his predecessors of the heroic age in Antarctic exploration, he simply found ways to adapt, survive, and continue, that no human being had ever tried before. The spirit that drives such men is immortal, and I am confident it will resurface after cold spiritual dunkings so long as our race (the human one) endures. It is the precise opposite of the bureaucratic spirit, that as readers may know, I tend to despise. Which is not to say the tyrants of mediocrity do not also have their place in our past, present, and future. Or that those who live under the iron law of safety have not also created their subsidiary literature, belittling the accomplishments of their betters, while wrapping the dead giants’ feet in clay. A “mechanical age” succeeded upon the heroic one -- when the sailing vessels and dogsleds were obviated by heavy metal ice breakers, motorized tracked vehicles, and aircraft -- yet this has also produced men of fine stature, from Robert Edwin Peary to Sir Vivian Fuchs. There is always scope for further accomplishment among those who are truly alive. Scientific curiosity was the compelling external motive behind the explorers of the last century or more; but does not capture the spirit shared by men from as early as Magellan to as late as Lewis. The word “adventure” comes closer to the heart of it, yet remains too vague. The desire to test themselves against a frontier of the unknown animates them all, yet is seldom mentioned. As a male I think, very proudly, “boys will be boys.” David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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