Virtuous Calamity

Stories of polar exploration are filled with stoic heroism. But what's so courageous about icy shipwrecks, corpses, and dogmeat dinners?

A A A Comments By Brad Zellar Wednesday, Jan 20 1999

...continued from page 5

"What is it you want?" naturalist Erasmus Wells demands of expedition leader Zeke Voorhees late in the Narwhal's journey.

"I want my name on something," Voorhees replies, "...something big--is that so hard to understand? I want my name on the map."

If you could see me now: Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 28 men spent 10 months trapped on board the Endurance (above) in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. This image was captured by expedition photographer Frank Hurley.

More About

Like this Story?

Ultimately, however, the most damning words in The Voyage of the Narwhal are those from Thoreau's Walden that Dr. Jan Boerhaave scrawls in the journal left behind after his death on the ice: "What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world, to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him; that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific ocean of one's being alone."

Finally, there is no getting around the fact that all these men who muddled around at the ends of the earth were, at the least, masters of the most challenging sort of sublimation. And masters perhaps of nothing but that.