"Ninety Degrees North" by Fergus Fleming

This is a sort of sequel to Barrow's Boys, a book about the search for the North West Passage, interspersed with various explorations in Africa.

Fergus Fleming brilliantly describes the expeditions that attempted to reach the North Pole starting with Kane and ending with Amundsen's airship expedition. He chronicles the hardships and the hardships and the hardships willingly faced by what seems to have been a group of lunatics. It’s not just the cold:

• “When a group of men were walking together their breath enveloped them in a cloud of fine ice needles which rendered them almost invisible. Their progress was accompanied by a curious tinkling noise ... caused by their frozen exhalations falling to the ground.” (C 8)
• “Payer ... also noted the clinical effects of intense cold on the human body: he stopped sweating; his nose and eyes ran; he felt an increased to urinate and when he did so the urine was bright red; he suffered initially from constipation and then, after a few days, from diarrhoea; his beard became bleached.” (C 8)
• “The boxing matches had to be cancelled because the combatants were unable to see each other through their breath.” (C 10)
• “It was so cold that snow fell within Sverdrup’s sealed tent.” (C 17)
• “Boiling soup solidified before the bowl could be emptied.” (C 18)

Other hazards include::

• literally deadly boredom: “Dr Henrik Blessing experimented with morphine and gradually became an addict.” (C 13)
• frostbite,
• drowning,
• starvation: “If Dore had wanted a model to stand for Famine, he might have drawn Meyer at that moment and made a success” (C 9),
• Lots and lots of scurvy: “As previous expeditions had found that ordinary lime juice froze in its bottles and burst them, the Navy had supplied Nares with a concentrated version. The concentrating process involved boiling the juice in a copper kettle. Copper leaches Vitamin C and heat destroys it.” (C 10)
• self-poisoning: “The liver of a polar bear is the only known toxic source of vitamin A” (C 2),
• poisoning by person or persons unknown:“The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are very like those of a stroke - weakness,, vomiting and sometimes mania. Arsenic tastes sweet and causes a burning sensation in the stomach. The victim has an erratic pulse, vomits and becomes dehydrated - leading to intense thirst. Hall had exhibited every one of those symptoms.” (C 9) leading to a murder mystery whodunnit within the main narrative,
• attacks by bears,
• and a murder by shooting.

And still they returned.


It starts by telling us about John Symmes who never went to the Pole but lectured that it hosted a hole leading to seven concentric rings at the centre of the earth; 25 US senators backed an expedition to discover this: “It was common knowledge that the polar regions were cold and icy places. Where Symmes’s globe departed from the norm, however, was in its countersunk holes which represented the Poles themselves. These, according to Symmes, were gateways to a series of seven worlds that nestled within each other like the layers in a Chinese sphere. Sufficient sunlight poured through the holes to sustain a pallid form of life.” (C 1) “In 1885, the Revd William F. Warren published a work called ‘Paradise Found, in whose 500 pages he stated that the hole at the Pole led to the Garden of Eden. ... William F Warren was President of Boston University.” (C 13)

Then followed a number of attempts to force a way through the pack ice around Greenland or, alternatively, above Spitzbergen. Nansen in the Fram attempted to let the pack ice drift him to the Pole. Finally two rival explorers tried a quick dash using sledges. Cook and Peary both claimed to have reached the Pole. Cook’s claim swiftly fell apart under scrutiny (he was discovered to have lied about conquering Mount McKinley); Peary’s was accepted although he too had a history of making geographical claims that were later shown to be false; it seems likely both were lying.
“Robert Edwin Peary was undoubtedly the most driven, possibly the most successful, and probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration.” (C 16)Discovering a tribe of Eskimoes whose source of iron was three meteorites they regarded as holy, he stole them.
 
Did Peary lie? It seems probable that he did:

• He had promised to take Bartlett with him to the Pole but on the last stage sent him back; this meant he was the only person able to take navigational measurements to ascertain when the Pole was reached. (C 20)
• The speeds he claimed for the last stage of the journey (50 miles per day) were faster than anyone else had ever achieved. “If one accepts that there was no southward drift during those four days ... if one accepts that there was no longitudinal drift either ... if one accepts that he encountered no pressure ridges on his bee-line zip to the Pole, and if one accepts his latitude readings (written in an authentically shaky hand), then, and only then, could Peary have done what he did.” (C 20)
• He came back even faster ... if he got to where he claimed he had done. “The distances of almost sixty miles per day which he claimed for the southern journey are fantastical. Unless Peary was a superman - and Henson, Egingwah, Ootah, OOqueah and Seeglo were supermen too - he could not, by his own evidence, have done it.” (C 20)

There are sledgers, sailors, skiers and balloonists. Each method has horrors: “When Andree climbed aloft to defecate, Fraenkel and Strindberg watched the altimeter only partly in jest - they themselves had taken to spitting out of the door to lighten the load.” (C 15)

Other wonderful moments:

• “He was going to die anyway, he decided, so why waste time being ill at home. (In fact, he was just as ill abroad, catching every regional illness available, and in Mexico was speared in the abdomen.)” (C 1)
• “Kane’s narrative contained images so sharp that they all but bit his readers’ fingernails for them.” (C 1)
• “Kane ... acquired a trophy lover - an odd one. Margaret Fox was a spiritualist, an archetype of the breed, whose double-jointed toes rapped out in darkened rooms messages from beyond the veil. Kane also began to harbour delusions of grandeur. ‘You are not worthy of a permanent regard from me’, he told Margaret, in an unorthodox display of affection.” (C 1)
• “He was told to watch the aurora borealis, to make pendulum experiments to determine the force of gravity in different latitudes, and to record the variation and dip of needles. He was to measure the tides, currents, soundings, bottom-dredging and density of seawater. He was to register temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind velocity, rainfall, the form and weight of hailstones, the character of snow, the speed of glaciers, the frequency of meteors, the presence of ozone, and ‘electricity in all its multiform developments.” (C 9)
• “He doubled over and began to make involuntary hacking noises which at first puzzled him. On recognizing the dormant reflex he hacked all the harder ... as for the first time in six months he heard the sound of his own laughter.” (C 9)
• “James Gordon Bennett ... was one of the richest men alive. On a personal level, he was slightly revolting.” (C 11)
• “The Primus stove ...turned paraffin into gas, thereby utilizing the smallest amount of fuel to produce the greatest heat. It required pumping and gave off a disturbing roar, but was so safe that Scandinavian market women kept one under their skirts to keep off the chill.” (C 13)
• “Why was I given a Titan’s longings and then formed like an ordinary worker ant?” (C 13)
• “With the exception that Johanssen changed his underwear for the first time in four months, their existence was much the same as before.” (C 13)
• “He ... addressed the problem of how many hard-boiled eggs a man could eat at a sitting. Booking a table at a restaurant, he went in and ordered forty of them, with bread and butter and milk. The waitress asked with a straight face whether he wanted anything else.” (C 14)
• “That, however, was one of the less pleasant characteristics of the age of heroes: who was never room for more than one.” (C 14)
• “A number of supply depots had been arranged to assist a possible retreat ... Jackson had left among other things, eight gallons of Dewar's Scotch whisky.” (C 15)
• “When he shouted ... drops of sweat evaporated visibly on his neck.” (C19)
• “Preparing for such an enterprise was something for which Amundsen was ill-suited, involving as it did a knowledge of machinery and a sound grasp of business, two qualities which he lacked outstandingly or which, as he preferred to put it, he had not had time to acquire.” (C 22)

Beautifully written. If you ever feel the wanderlust read this book. Then go on a package to Tenerife instead. 

November 2020; 425 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, reviewed in this blog, may be found here.