The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration
Michael D. Robinson
Abstract
The writings of polar explorers, those fur-clad figures of lithographs and daguerreotypes, have attracted much attention from scholars for the past twenty years. While explorers described the polar world as a place of solitary adventure, scholarship has shown something different. The high latitudes were alive with plants, animals, and—in the Arctic—peoples with complex cultures adapted for extreme conditions. Far from being solitary figures, explorers depended upon networks of people at home and in the field: commercial patrons and advertisers, urban readers and lecture goers, and Inuit hunters and guides. While scholars have made good use of explorers’ published writings, Hester Blum observes, they have not given much attention to the printed ephemera of expeditions: the shipboard newspapers, menus, and playbills that crewmembers produced for themselves. Nor have they examined other ephemeral writings—messages buried in cairns, hoisted on silk balloons, or stuffed into bottles cast at sea—by which explorers attempted to communicate with the outside world. These texts read very differently from the heroic, embellished prose of published narratives. Polar crews had no interest in reading about the sublimity of the polar world; their newspapers were filled with lighthearted jokes and satires. Here, officers recognized, was an activity useful in focusing the attention of idle men during the grim months of winter.