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between life and death, European and Eskimo. But there was no such contrast in the interior of Antarctica, only the sublime emptiness of the ice sheet, a self-reflexive mirror. The alienness of Antarctica consisted not simply in the continent’s physical harshness but in its unrelenting cultural and biological impoverishment, a profound deprivation that could be both psychologically and physiologically unsettling.

      As Amundsen demonstrated, the Peary system by which forced marches were used to reach an explicit destination could be brought to Antarctica. Other Antarctic expeditions exploited such tactics to attain one of the south poles, although the British stayed with ponies and man-hauling for motive power. But neither in purpose nor in equipment could this system sustain long-term exploring parties on the scale necessary to systematically survey the Antarctic interior. This was more than a question of dogs versus horses versus men as prime movers of Antarctic sledges; all would soon be displaced by tractors and aircraft. For all its harshness, the Arctic had been inextricably bound up with human society for millennia and with Europe for centuries. No one had so much as passed a winter in Antarctica until Borchgrevink did it on the eve of the twentieth century. Without a biotic and cultural environment, not only was exploration more difficult, but discovery lost much of its charm. The traditional travelogue, with its abundant anecdotes about native life, was turned inward into a monologue. In Antarctica there was no society except that of the exploring expedition, no contrast between cultures, only the looking-glass Ice that reflected back, in simplified form, what was brought to it.

      The remarkable successes of the heroic age came at a tremendous cost. Exploration, like other activities brought to The Ice, was stripped to its most elemental forms, and it became almost pathologically single-minded. The great tales of Antarctic adventure—the last real sagas in Western exploration—were stories of survival. In fact, the desire to struggle, to test oneself, was apparently one of the things Western civilization brought to The Ice. The celebration of martial discipline, of self-striving, of exploration, primitivism, and physical adventure was rampant in the West. Shackleton’s recruiting advertisement in a London paper said it all: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”²² The response was overwhelming. Such men accomplished astonishing feats but often endured unnecessary hardships. Cherry-Garrard, for example, lamented that “men were allowed to do too much,” that frequently “we wasted our manpower” through requests for volunteers.²³ Other purposes than character-testing and other means than man-hauled sledges, he insisted, would have to justify future expeditions.

      Nor was this enthusiasm all a sop to popular whims, all bogus contests dreamed up by yellow journalism to sell its tabloids. The sentiments were strong among intellectuals, and the expedition leaders, supporters, and organizers were by and large intellectuals or men of education. In the United States the appeal took a slightly different form, manifest in the “strenuous life” urged by Teddy Roosevelt, the Klondike verse of Robert Service, the call for a “moral equivalent of war” by philosopher William James, and the literature of naturalism, epitomized by Jack London. “It is a source of satisfaction,” affirmed Peary on behalf of an age, “that the two last great physical adventures, the winning of the North Pole and the South Pole … should have been won by brute physical soundness and endurance, by the oldest and most perfect of all machines—the animal machine—man and the Eskimo dog.”²⁴ The Antarctic showed in this matter, as in others, an inversion: it was as though the object was not to struggle to advance a goal, but to discover a goal that would justify struggle.

      As if there were a psychological obsession among Anglo-Americans to show that they were as hardy as the explorers, pioneers, and soldiers who had first built the European empires, the heroic age was populated with sagas of a number and intensity without parallel in the exploration of other continents. Associated with the age are the various journeys of the Terra Nova expedition: the Polar Party, led by Robert Scott, perishing miserably if heroically on the Ross Ice Shelf after reaching the pole; the Crozier Party under Edward Wilson, stumbling horribly around the crevasse-ridden ice shelf off Ross Island in the course of winter journey, enduring temperatures of −75 degrees F. to collect the egg of an emperor penguin; the Northern Party under Raymond Priestley, brought by ship from Cape Adare to Terra Nova Bay, only to be stranded because of pack ice and to winter in a stone hut on Inexpressible Island, living on penguins before making a journey on foot back to Ross Island; Douglas Mawson, his other comrades dead, struggling to pull himself out of a crevasse, then outfitted with crude wooden crampons wrestling a half-sled across 150 miles of “an accursed land,” his skin sloughing off from malnutrition; the Nordenskjöld expedition, with one party marooned a second winter at Snow Hill Island, another stuck on Paulet Island, and a third, the crew of the rescue ship Antarctica which sank in the pack, meeting by chance on the ice before being removed by the first Argentine vessel to venture to Antarctica; Ernest Shackleton, pioneering a route to the pole during his Nimrod expedition, only to be forced to withdraw within 97 miles of his destination; and Shackleton again, during the Endurance expedition, trapped in the pressure pack of the Weddell Sea, watching his ship crushed within the ice, riding ice floes and small ships to Elephant Island on the tip of the peninsula, setting out in an open skiff to South Georgia Island, climbing the South Georgian Alps to reach the whaling village of Grytviken and, ultimately, to rescue his entire crew without the loss of a man. The success stories of Antarctic exploration (such as Amundsen’s lightning march to the pole) are nearly forgotten or dismissed as too simple. It was not merely what was done but how it was done that was important. The competent but prosaic Roald Amundsen seems to function chiefly as a foil for the tragic Robert Scott. Nowhere in Western literature is there a more compelling, sustained chronicle of life, humanity, and civilization reduced to their minima.

      In the end, these were sentiments as much imported to The Ice as extracted from it. The Ice reduces, distorts, reflects, and preserves, but it does not create. The heroic age did not arise solely out of Antarctica but from Western civilization’s encounter with Antarctica. The conclusion of the heroic age did not result from a change in The Ice: it came about because of new experiences in the civilization that sent out the explorers. For explorers, the celebration of the life of strenuous endeavor ended on the ice sheets of Antarctica, and for Western civilization as a whole it ended in the trenches of the Great War. It seemed pointless to carry the White Man’s Burden across the white nihilism of The Ice. Gradually, the principal actors in the drama—both the explorers and their supporters—passed from the scene or, like Mawson, retooled for a new era. The intellectual and political fervor for imperialism abated, and modernism dissolved many of the scientific and cultural ties that had sustained this mode of geographic exploration. No longer did visits to remote tribes, jungle-covered ruins, or wind-swept deserts answer fundamental questions. Even the major sciences such as geology, which had been invented to accommodate the data of continental discovery, failed to adapt to new ideas and lapsed into a moribund state, becoming tied more to the laboratory and the library than to the field.

      Exploration itself suffered a crisis of identity and purpose. On one hand, it was progressively equipped with new, mechanized technology, while on the other it lacked new lands and peoples to discover. The interior of Antarctica was simply too vast and the rewards too meager to justify further expeditions in the mode of the heroic age. The long-sought transcontinental traverse would not occur until the mid-1950s, and by then it had lost much of its meaning, not because the deed itself was different but because its context had changed. Even as the Berlin Congress proclaimed its Antarctic Year, reaffirming the value of Antarctica for geography, Max Planck published his quantum theory of black-body radiation; De Vries, Correns, and von Tschermak simultaneously announced the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics; and Sigmund Freud promised to reconstruct the basis of psychology with The Interpretation of Dreams. As Scott’s loyal party erected its memorial cross, complete with inscription from Tennyson, Niels Bohr outlined a new theory of the atom. As Shackleton engineered the escape of the Endurance expedition from the Weddell Sea, Albert Einstein elaborated the general theory of relativity. The empirical, conceptual, and philosophical foundations of modern science were experiencing their most important transformation since the seventeenth century, and the relationship of science to exploration as a mode of inquiry would, in time, share that revolution. By the 1920s a transition was underway, not only in

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