Senator Clay Davis:
“...Let me tell you
something, man.
My neck of the woods, it's a jungle out there.
Everybody living hand to mouth, improvising, hustlin', make
do with as little as you can imagine.
Hell, that, uh, that TV show, what's that,
"survivor"? Man, they want some good contestants, they need to come around
westside.
Folks I know? Oh, we'd do great on that show.
Practice every damn day of our lives.
Hell, and "fear factor"? Oh, sheee-- Don't even
get me started....”
(The Wire, Season 5, Episode 7)
'Landing the Treasures, or
Results of the Polar Expedition!!!'
Artist: George Cruikshank
J W M Thompson,
review of 'I May Be Some Time:
Ice and The English Imagination' by Francis Spufford:
"This remarkable book is difficult to classify exactly.
Ostensibly it is a study of the exploration of the polar regions, the history
of which is rich enough in drama, suffering and pathos to fill a hundred books.
But to describe it as just that would not convey its quality. As Francis
Spufford remarks, when people read of those fearful expeditions to the North or
South Pole or in search of the Northwest Passage — terrible tests of endurance
that were often fatal — the natural question to ask is, why? What impelled
people to pay such a price for such intangible prizes? In seeking the answer
Spufford ranges across social history, literature, economics and mythology; the
result is a kind of ‘secondary’ history of a strange aspect of our national
past, an imaginative account, which glows with knowledge and understanding. As
the man in Tristram Shandy said, there is a Northwest Passage to the
intellectual world; and Spufford, by choosing to view history from this
oblique, unusual angle, has been far more successful than most of the
terrestrial explorers of whom he writes.
There is a famous painting by Millais called The Northwest
Passage; it was the hit of the 1874 Royal Academy spring show, and was praised
by the explorer Sir George Nares for ‘influencing the spirit of the nation’.
Like the same painter’s Boyhood of Raleigh, it seized the mood of patriotic
pride in which the public admired British sailors and polar explorers. Shortly
afterwards Nares himself set off on that century’s last attempt to reach the North
Pole. The expedition was, alas, an ignominious failure. The general view
however, if not expressed quite so crudely, was that failure was somehow a
necessary part of the polar story; heroes were heroes, whether or not they
reached their goals. In his dying moments Captain Scott wrote in his diary: ‘I
do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure
hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever
in the past.’
The idea that the deaths of brave men were justified by such
a patriotic demonstration took root in the popular mind, along with the
affecting narrative contained in Scott’s diary; even today few people are
unfamiliar with that story, and its record of the self-sacrifice of Captain
Oates which has given this book its title.
It is true that there often have been dissenting voices. One
sardonic view of the business found early expression in a satirical print by
Cruikshank entitled Landing the Treasures, or Results of the Polar
Expedition!!! This shows the triumphal march up Whitehall of a naval party who
have all lost their noses through frostbite. The leading officer wears a paper
nose, for dignity. The ‘treasures’ include such items as ‘Worms found in the intestines
of a Seal’ and a walking stick ‘North Pole’. The whole affair is lampooned as a
futile venture, only to be applauded by the ignorant mob.
More recent critical comments have fixed upon the technical
shortcomings of many of the explorers, as well as noting what Spufford calls
the ‘bizarre gratuitousness’ of polar exploration. The reaction to such
dismissive writings is more complicated than the simple patriotic fervour which
the various expeditions originally aroused: ‘The news that Scott, like Franklin
before him, probably died of incompetence does not affect an attraction to his
story which centres on his bearing in the face of death. Maybe it even
strengthens the attraction in some ways.’That, of course, is true, but it does
not disguise the really rather astonishing degree of ‘incompetence’ which
exists within these epic tales of courage.
Why that should have been so is an essential part of
Spufford’s study, involving such considerations as imperial assumptions of
superiority, nostalgia, disdain for lesser breeds, and so on. Sir John Franklin
and his party perished in a hopeless quest for the Northwest Passage, freezing
or starving to death before they had gone very far, and yet the territory they
were crossing supported a native population who knew perfectly well how to
survive there. Because the Eskimos were not thought by superior Europeans to be
worth consulting, a hundred or so men were lost. In much the same way the Scott
expedition took little account of Eskimo experience. Amundsen, on the other
hand, did not share these assumptions; trained by Eskimos and equipped with
their dog teams, he glided smoothly to the South Pole, leaving there a
Norwegian flag to greet the struggling British party, hauling their own
sledges, when they finally arrived.
Spufford supplies a gruesome detail to illustrate the
cultural gulf that isolated the explorers from more knowledgeable peoples. In
1897 Peary took a party of Eskimos back to the United States, where they soon
sickened and died, victims of bacteria which did not exist in their antiseptic
homeland. ‘The flesh was rendered off their bodies, and their skeletons,
articulated with wire, were displayed in the Museum of Natural History, as
further examples of Arctic fauna among the walrus tusks and the stuffed seals.’
The creation of national heroes was not, evidently, to be achieved by dealing
with such lesser beings...." (italics above mine)
