There are many more tragic episodes in British Arctic exploration – only one of Markham’s team died – but as a vignette of the culture that sent ship after ship out in search of the polar Grail the Nares expedition would be hard to beat. It had been absolutely plain to John Ross forty years earlier that there was nothing of any commercial or national value to be gained out of the Arctic. But to see it in utilitarian terms of miles surveyed, rivers charted or the Magnetic Pole located, or money wasted, is to miss the spirit that underpinned the whole venture, from Barrow’s first expedition to the moment when, with only nine of his fifty-three crew fit for service, Nares abandoned hopes of the Pole and blasted a path out south for his ice-bound Alert. ‘In laying down their lives at the call of duty our countrymen bequeathed us a rich gift,’ Francis McClintock – the only man in Markham’s eyes to compare with Scott – said on the fiftieth anniversary of the Franklin expedition of the navy’s legacy to future British explorers, ‘another of those noble examples not yet rare in our history, and of which we are all so justly proud, one more beacon light to guide our sons to deeds of heroism in the future. These examples of unflinching courage, devotion to duty, and endurance of hardships are as life-blood to naval enterprise.’
The British were not the only ones drawn to the Arctic by Franklin’s ghost: there were Germans, Austrians and Americans – notably Elisha Kane, that most successful of self-publicists, Isaac Hayes, and the tragic figure of Charles Hall – but nothing in their history of disputed claims, alleged poisoning, desertion, mutiny and incompetence could seriously threaten British complacency. By the end of the nineteenth century explorers like the American Robert Peary and the great Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen had introduced new techniques and new approaches to polar exploration, but for Markham the only model was the unwieldy, overmanned and ill-equipped British expedition perfected during his youth, the supreme virtues those British virtues of endurance, courage, discipline and duty that had taken his cousin Albert to the empty triumph of his farthest north. ‘In recent times much reliance has been placed upon dogs for Arctic travelling,’ he told a Berlin audience in 1899, in defiance of all that skis and dogs had done to revolutionise polar travel, ‘yet nothing has been done with them to be compared with what men have achieved without dogs. Indeed, only one journey of considerable length has ever been performed in the Arctic regions, with dogs – that by Mr Peary across the inland ice of Greenland … and all his dogs, but one, died, owing to overwork, or were killed to feed the others. It is a very cruel system.’
In the greatest of all polar books, The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard called polar exploration ‘at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised’, but for old Sir Clements, comfortably ensconced in Ecclestone Square with his blank maps in front of him, that was the whole point of the poles. There is no doubt that his interests in exploration and geography were as genuine as Barrow’s had been, and yet it was the purity and the misery of the adventure that seduced him, the opportunity it offered the chivalry of England to test itself in a quest that united pointlessness, patriotism and personal heroism in ways that nothing before the Somme would ever equal.
Above all – and again here is an echo of Barrow – it was the opportunities exploration offered the young naval officer to distinguish himself in peacetime that drew Markham’s eyes to the ice. Even he could see that in the age of the great pre-Dreadnoughts seamanship of the old school was of only limited value, but at a time when professionals, politicians and journalists were all exercised by the problems of a peacetime navy, Markham saw in the challenge of polar exploration an answer that united his own faith in youth with the demands of the nation. ‘Although it is not the same work as is required in general service,’ he wrote in 1900 to George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer and just the sort of ‘inimical’, half-foreign, and half foreign-educated financier most in need of a lecture on the traditions of the Royal Navy and the virtues of man-hauling, ‘the work involved in the stress of contest with the mighty powers of nature in the Antarctic regions, calls for the very same qualities as are needed in the stress of battle.’
A muted, but real, sense of national disappointment at the failure of the Nares expedition to return with any real achievement to its credit had effectively forfeited Britain’s interest in the north to other nations, but that still left the south. In the mid-1880s a committee including Markham had been set up by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in order to promote a government-funded expedition, but it was not until 1893, when he became President of the RGS, that Markham at last had the position, contacts and institutional clout to push his interests successfully.
It was a long and stubborn fight, involving lobbying, fundraising, begging and bullying, but the man and the hour were well matched. In 1887 the Treasury had turned down the BAAS request with barely a second thought, but by the middle of the 1890s national, maritime, commercial, patriotic and scientific interests were all beginning to converge on the Antarctic region as an essential theatre of future exploration. There were outstanding questions of meteorology, geology, marine biology, geodesy, currents, tides and atmospheric electricity that only an expedition could answer, but above all it was in the unresolved navigational problems of the southern oceans that Markham saw the sprat to land his mackerel. The key to these navigational problems lay in a fuller understanding of terrestrial magnetism, and for the fifty years since Sir James Ross’s voyages the position of the South Magnetic Pole had effectively been ‘lost’, making it impossible for scientists to verify for the southern hemisphere Carl Gauss’s calculations for predicting the forces of the earth’s magnetic field.
Interesting as these questions were to Markham, however, and willing as he was to play the scientific card when it suited, they took second place to the limitless opportunities for geographical exploration that the Antarctic regions offered. It is almost impossible now to grasp just how little was then known of the region, and for an Englishman imbued, as Markham was, with a deep scepticism of anything in the way of exploration not carried out under the aegis of the Royal Navy, the short history of Antarctic discovery was shorter and more problematic still.
The history of cartographic fantasy had a long and colourful pedigree, but in British eyes it was only with James Cook’s voyages of the 1760s and 1770s that the age of speculation ended and polar exploration in any modern sense began. Before Cook’s discoveries it was still possible to believe in the existence of habitable regions of unknown size in the south, but once he had become the first navigator to cross the Antarctic Circle and circumnavigate the globe in a high southern latitude, the limits and nature of any such continent were fixed. ‘The greatest part of this Southern Continent (supposing there is one),’ Cook had written, with the authority of a sixty-thousand-nautical-mile journey behind him, ‘must lie within the Polar Circle where the sea is so pestered with ice that the land is thereby inaccessible. The risk one runs in exploring a coast in these unknown and icy seas, is so very great, that I can be bold to say that no man will ever venture [by sea] farther than I have done, and that the lands which may lie to the south will never be explored. Thick fogs, snowstorms, intense cold and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous one has to encounter, and these difficulties are greatly heightened by the inexpressibly horrid aspect of the country, a country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays, but to lie forever buried under everlasting snow and ice.’
For almost fifty years there was nothing to suggest that Cook would be proved wrong, but in the first half of the nineteenth century the drive of the whaling and sealing men and the journeys of Bellinghausen, D’Urville and the American Wilkes in 1840 began a piecemeal discovery of southern land. By the time that Wilkes returned to civilisation something like a seventy-degree arc of the Antarctic Circle south of Australia had been claimed, while farther west detached sightings of Kemp Land, Enderby Land and –