north pole The Earth series traces the historical significance and cultural history of natural phenomena. Written by experts who are passionate about their subject, titles in the series bring together science, art, literature, mythology, religion and popular culture, exploring and explaining the planet we inhabit in new and exciting ways. Series editor: Daniel Allen In the same series Air Peter Adey Meteorite Maria Golia Cave Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher Moon Edgar Williams Clouds Richard Hamblyn Mountain Veronica della Dora Comets P. Andrew Karam North Pole Michael Bravo Desert Roslynn D. Haynes Rainbows Daniel MacCannell Earthquake Andrew Robinson Silver Lindsay Shen Fire Stephen J. Pyne South Pole Elizabeth Leane Flood John Withington Storm John Withington Gold Rebecca Zorach Swamp Anthony Wilson and Michael W. Phillips Jr Tsunami Richard Hamblyn Ice Klaus Dodds Volcano James Hamilton Islands Stephen A. Royle Water Veronica Strang Lightning Derek M. Elsom Waterfall Brian J. Hudson North Pole Michael Bravo reaktion books For my parents, Nicolette and Paul Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2019 Copyright © Michael Bravo 2019 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 008 8 Contents Preface 7 1 The Upward Gaze 18 2 Holding the North Pole 46 3 The Multiplication of Poles 79 4 Polar Voyaging 103 5 Polar Edens 136 6 Sovereigns of the Pole 169 7 Mourning Antaeus 194 references 225 select Bibliography 239 Acknowledgements 241 Photo Acknowledgements 243 Index 245 Preface Why does the North Pole matter, when most of us will never visit it and know almost nothing about it? In this book I will treat the mysterious power and allure of the North Pole in a way you will not have seen before. I offer the reader a way to understand why the North Pole truly matters to anyone who knows that our home, planet Earth, is a globe. Many of the explorers who dedicated their lives to unlocking the secrets of the poles were not merely the hardy lovers of precarious adven- ture or the ardent national heroes they have often been made out to be. A lifetime of knocking on the door of the North Pole led explorers themselves to reflect deeply on the nature of their endeavour, and to appreciate that theirs was a personal and moral quest more clearly rooted in paradox and ambiguity. What had been widely regarded as one of the most coveted geograph- ical goals on Earth – perhaps even the ultimate prize – became a metaphor and possiblly also a quest for the nature of geographical knowledge itself. One of the surprises for me while researching this book was to discover how much time late nineteenth-century explorers like Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Peary and Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld dedicated to studying the work of polar navigators and natural philosophers of past centuries. The very idea of seeking the North Pole so beguiled these explorers that they felt compelled The Eden frontispiece to search for a deeper history of the poles in which their own to Fridtjof Nansen’s polar endeavours would make sense. Seldom was there agree- In Northern Mists (1911). ment among them about a single definitive or correct approach 7 north pole or method for attributing significance to the North Pole, but they agreed on one thing, and that was the need to place explor- ation in both a historical and philosophical context. In the nine- teenth century, beginning with John Barrow, the architect of the British programme of polar expeditions, researching and writing polar history became integral to their understanding of polar exploration itself.¹ For that reason, this book does not aim to tell a linear story charting the attempts of successive expeditions to reach the North Pole. Like the threads running through their own lives, these explorers and philosophers recognized that the character of the North Pole, and of polarity itself, was paradoxical. Spatially, when standing at the North Pole, every direction faces south. Temporally, the North Pole is timeless and has to this day no allocated longitude or time zone. This is no coincidence: the North Pole can be thought of as the origin of time because all lines of longitude, which define time zones, pass through the North Pole. Emperors and philosophers through the centuries have recognized the North Pole’s special significance as a point that defines global time, but is not itself subject to it. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, this intersection of worldly and mythical time has held a powerful attraction for those concerned with religious or political power. Answering simple questions about the North Pole proved very difficult in the time of the ancient Greeks, and even more so for our early modern astronomers, mathematicians and phil- osophers. Was our earthly North Pole a unique point in the universe or just a fictional cartographic point that could be projected on an unlimited number of celestial bodies? How was the behaviour of a compass needle attracted by the magnetic pole linked to the geographical pole? Was the polarity of a magnetized iron needle or a spherical magnetic rock (called a lodestone) operating on the same principle as the Earth’s mag- netic attraction? Navigators were the ones to pay a very real price for these very abstract but real philosophical questions. The teams of expedition after expedition in the high Arctic struggled to determine their location and bearing when their compass 8 Preface needles began to circle or wander limply and aimlessly, pointing one way one moment, and another way the next. This uncertainty threatened their confidence as reliable navigators and observers, and frequently left them unsure of their bearings in dangerous ice-filled waters. In the chapters that follow, readers will be able to identify with the struggle of navigators and philosophers to make sense of the strange powers of the North Pole. The story of the North Pole is more like a cosmographic prism than a straightforward story of discovery through the march of time. It has refracted our understanding of the planet on which we live and the quest to master our knowledge of who we are. In this way, we can answer the question that motivates this book: why has the North Pole mattered, and to whom? The story being told in this book is an original account, much of it based on previously unpublished research. My debts to a number of distinguished early modern scholars in the his- tory of science and historical geography are if anything greater as a result. When I began this book, I originally set out to write about the Earth’s geographical North Pole, and also to make some space for the North Magnetic Pole. What I hadn’t realized was that there can be no history of our North Pole without first understanding the celestial poles, which for many centuries were viewed as divine and central to the design of the universe. The Earth’s poles received scant attention by comparison, and were deemed in Aristotelian thought to be like the Earth itself, a corrupt pale shadow of their divine counterparts. Had history stopped with the Aristotelians, there might have been no book to write. Fortunately, the Neoplatonists of the Renaissance, bit- terly opposed to the Aristotelians, viewed the Earth and the heavens as moving harmoniously. The purpose of cosmography in the sixteenth century was to study and understand these har- monies, and it is only then that the Earth’s geographical pole began to be an object of special interest. For readers who, like me, anticipated a book that jumps head first into a discussion of early myths about the Earth’s poles, I apologize. The story of our terrestrial pole or poles is inseparable from the history of astron- omy and needs to begin with the heavens and our earthly 9