Chapter III: Are Explorers to Join the Dodo?

There are few who will not admit that exploration is a Good Thing (we do not here deal with those who question its economic importance, and so on). In this chapter we offer proofs that exploration can remain durable after the last island has been discovered.

With so much recent flying over seas previously unknown, and no land discovered on any of the flights, the commentators are beginning to worry about the end of the romantic Age of Exploration, and the possible extinction of the Columbus family. Are there to be no more explorers, they ask, or, at least, no more Great Explorers?

Waiving the question of whether it matters much if the tribe of Columbuses does perish, we have encouragement, of a sort, in a study of the inside history of exploration, by which we see that nearly all the most famous explorers came into their greatest fame through misunderstanding, or through the planned or accidental fruits of publicity. That is good news for those who want us to have Great Explorers in future. For there is always room for more misunderstandings, and surely the arts of publicity are not on the wane. The Columbuses should, therefore, be able to flourish among us yet awhile. Their last fade-out will come only when mankind ceases to delight in being humbugged.

For those who want new Columbuses hereafter, there is nothing more encouraging than the story of Christopher Columbus himself. If there were any such thing as an abstract greatness in discovery, then surely _the_ discoverer of America would not have been Christopher, but the first human being who stepped ashore on the continent, or who first saw it from a distance (I rule out of court the beasts that were ahead of the humans, since the institution of fame has never been developed among them).

This first human discoverer came thousands of years ago, and may have been a Negrito or some sort of Negroid person. He may have resembled a kind of Chinaman, or perhaps he was a good deal like some modern Europeans. (In that case the Nordics would assume, _a priori_, that he must have been a Nordic, or at least an Asiatic proto-Nordic, in whom their coming greatness was already foreshadowed.) One more assumption is that the discovery probably took place across Bering Straits or along the Aleutian chain, though some contend that it may have been from island to island across the South Pacific.

But we are really perverting the meaning of “discoverer” by this talk of Negro or Mongol, for by immemorial practice the use of that word is confined to Europeans. No place is discovered until some European finds it. It might be safer to narrow down still farther the meaning of “discoverer,” for there are books claiming that a kind of European (in the sense of coming from Europe) really found North America in very ancient prehistoric times. These would not have been adequate discoverers, for they probably resembled Eskimos, and no one would suggest that a place was discovered when the first Eskimo found it--even if he came from Europe.

We do not arrive at a proper competition in claims of discovery until we begin to discuss whether the Irish found America. They have enough political and other prominence--in fact, they are the next most fashionable whites after the Nordics. Still, merely being Irish is not enough, for what we really mean by a Great Discoverer is a European who was hurrahed while living or at least haloed reasonably soon after he died. The Irish discoverer, if there was one, does not meet these requirements. The Irish themselves never tried to make much of him until recently, when they became ambitious for setting up a rival to Columbus. Greatness does not sit very securely on even the most deserving dead man unless, as said, he develops a cult soon after his real or alleged deeds.

After the Irish, we come to more formidable discoverers, for we know their names and they have the advantage of being Nordic--Gunnbjorn, who first of known Europeans sighted the American island of Greenland, probably around the year 900; Eric the Red, who colonized Greenland following 982; and his son Leif the Lucky, who visited the American mainland in A.D. 1000. There are no scholars and few intelligent laymen who dispute the records of Eric and his son Leif, but still most of them agree that they were not the real discoverers of America, even though the Papacy followed soon and effectively in their footsteps by establishing churches in Greenland about 1050, maintaining them for 400 years, and encouraging the knowledge of the Western World to spread throughout Europe by way of the learning that bound together the medieval monasteries.

Christopher Columbus is _the_ discoverer of America chiefly because he and what he was supposed to have done got the right advance publicity. Marco Polo and others had reminded Europe afresh of the riches of the East. Desert raiders, fairly well press-agented for those days, were making more dangerous the overland routes which had always been difficult. Prince Henry the Navigator and his group had finally worked out an eastward seaway by rounding South Africa, but the way was stormy and tedious. Everybody wanted an easy and cheap eastward route. For centuries many had been trying and the public interest was constantly getting more and more inflamed.

Then, at the psychological moment, Columbus sailed westward for the East, with all his other publicity advantages strengthened by fashionable royal backing. He struck land, and at first everybody thought he had discovered a short route to the wealth of the Indies. A little later doubts arose, about which people argued violently, and the arguing was quite as good for advertising as the previous harmony of acclaim. Before the legend died that Columbus had found Asia, other legends about gold and jewels and fountains of youth had grown up to take its place. There never was a let-down of publicity until colonies developed, and America became wealthy in her own right.

As a result of the centuries of advertising that thus went before the rise of historical scholarship, it is hopeless now to try to disturb the preeminence of Columbus by publishing the truth about all the discoverers who preceded him. Folklore has gathered about him until he is almost as safe in his historical shrine as if he had never existed, like some god or demigod. When a well-known character is securely mythical he has such permanence as our world can give. Hercules is more famous now and his achievements are more widely known than ever they were in the days when a handful of Greeks believed in him. Little Red Riding Hood is better known than Queen Elizabeth, more safely immortal than Mary Baker G. Eddy. If fame depends on any achievement at all, it depends only on publicity achievement.

Greatness in the field of discovery can be acquired today or tomorrow by the same publicity methods that worked for Columbus. That such modern greatness happens to have been secured most often by men who deserved well and worked honestly, is really beside the point. For others who deserved as well and worked as honestly are now forgotten, or else were never known to the public at all.

The most striking case in point is that of Admiral Peary. For integrity, ability, courage, persistence, and many other admirable qualities, he had few equals. He discovered or elucidated several laws of nature that are of permanent value to science, and he widened the horizon of geography. Theories of the wind circulation of the globe, for instance, hinge in considerable part on Peary’s work in Greenland. Now that we are flying, and especially when we begin to fly more with dirigibles, to understand the winds has become crucially important. Peary is a world benefactor in helping us to that understanding, but it is reasonably certain that his fame will not thereby be appreciably increased. Geographers are nearly unanimous in holding that his biggest achievement was determining that Greenland is an island. Also, his demonstration that the north end of Greenland, now called Peary Land, is free of snow in summer, and that it supports plant and animal life the year round, was a death blow to the old theory that if lands were only far enough north they would be sure to be covered with ice. But in spite of all these things, Peary’s greatness has been made to depend almost solely on his having been first to reach the North Pole. With all his real worth, Peary would not have become an immortal had the North Pole not been a well-advertised place. He rode in on its publicity.

A side issue is that the public will not usually consider a man great unless he has done something which it can visualize. Children play with tops and we have all seen vehicles running on wheels, so we think we know what is meant by the axis of the earth. We translate axis into axle, visualize a top or a wheel, and imagine that we understand about the North Pole. It is one end of the axle on which the earth spins like a top or wheel. Accordingly, we think we can understand and value properly the achievement of the man who first got there.

But what most people knew about the North Pole until recently was an understanding as far from reality as it was clear. By an artificially simplified theory of the nature of the earth, they had arrived at the conclusion that this pole had many remarkable qualities beside being the end of the axle of the earth. It was discussed as if it were the coldest place on earth, the center from which the cold winds were distributed, the hardest place to reach, and the one toward which the magnetic needle pointed. It was supposed to be at least five poles in one--Cold Pole, Wind Pole, Pole of Inaccessibility, Magnetic Pole, and North Pole. We now know that the coldest place is more than a thousand miles from it, the wind center nearly a thousand miles, the hardest point to reach about four hundred miles away, and that the magnetic needle points toward a district in Canada that is much closer to the nearest railway station than it is to the North Pole.

However, during the long time when the North Pole was still supposed to possess the qualities of all the other poles, it became so famous and acquired such a hold on the public imagination that if you were now, by knowledge and argument, to strip away from it one by one all of its supposed attributes of greatness you would not detract appreciably from its fame--just as Pike’s Peak remains the most famous mountain in Colorado although more than twenty peaks in that state alone are higher--just as Hercules will always be more famous than any real strong man--just as Columbus will remain the great discoverer of America no matter how many earlier discoverers history may soundly establish.

Peary seems to have agreed with Cicero that to be ambitious for the immortality of your name is among the greatest of human virtues. Furthermore, he wanted the glory for his associates and for the flag of his country. So he went to the North Pole and became immortal. It was not the most difficult of his achievements nor the most important scientifically. But it had the necessary advance publicity, and the proper follow-up.

In fact, the North Pole has a superfluity of popular reputation, enough to make many explorers famous. Byrd will probably become immortal for having been the first to fly there, and Amundsen for having been the first to fly there in a dirigible. No motor vehicle yet devised is likely to travel effectively over the floating ice north of Spitsbergen, but if such is built it is likely to make its driver semi-immortal for having been the first to visit the North Pole by automobile. This Pole is doubtless reachable by submarine, and the first man who goes there that way will become still another fixture in history. And so on for several firsts by new methods.

These will all be international immortalities. National immortalities will fall to the first Frenchman, the first Japanese, the first Siamese.

If you want to find out how much glory a man gets for doing a hard thing that is little advertised, just check up on the credit Amundsen received for flying over the Pole of Inaccessibility. That pole is at least as much harder to reach than the North Pole as the top of Mount Everest is harder than the highest point yet climbed. But, you will discover, the applause of the world for Amundsen’s Inaccessibility Pole achievement was only a faint echo of what he received a few hours earlier for the North Pole. Although he was the first man to do the most difficult thing possible on our earth from the point of view of exploration, he got out of it far less than for being the third man to visit an easier place that was better advertised.

True enough, this North Pole flying immortality does not depend entirely upon the publicity of the North Pole. Some of it rests in considerable part on the publicity value of the airplane. Unless it be swimming,[1] nothing has a better press now. Just imagine the vaudeville salary of the first man to swim to the North Pole!

Close beside the North Pole and the airplane in publicity value is femininity, as used recently, for instance, in the Channel swims. Thus we may one day have immortality for the first woman who goes to the North Pole, then for the first mother of a family, and eventually, when we get a little more advanced, for the first divorcee. And think of the first visit to the North Pole by Siamese Twins! (A later set of them could be the first to marry there, perhaps in an airplane.)

If and when the public gets fed up on the North Pole we could no doubt, by suitable publicity, convince them that the Pole of Inaccessibility is really more interesting because more difficult. Hereupon vast glory will come to the first man to fly there in an airplane, to the first to walk there, the first to motor there, and so on. Then would come the first debutante to go there, the first mother of a family, and so on, with no limit other than that set by the arts of publicity.

A further encouraging thing about geographic discovery is that people are forgetful of details, although they remember generalities.

* * * * *

After more than three hundred years of heralded search, the Northwest Passage has become permanently famous. Then it was discovered by Sir John Franklin in 1846, but nobody knew about that and gold medals were awarded to Sir Robert McClure for discovering it in 1853. The world resounded with McClure’s glory for a while.

The great public had forgotten about even McClure, but still remembered that there had been a search for a passage, when, in 1903, Amundsen sailed west from Norway. Three years later, when the job was done, some newspaper man misunderstood Amundsen’s announcement that he had navigated the Northwest Passage and put a story on the wires that he had discovered it. The public hurrahed for the discovery even louder than they had done in the case of McClure half a century before, and most people think even now that Amundsen discovered the Northwest Passage. Why not, if Columbus discovered America?

That it is not the first discovery, but rather the best advertised discovery that counts, was proved to me from my own career. For, in so far as I am known at all, I am generally known as the discoverer of the “Blond” Eskimos. But the first traveler to report a strangely blond people in the Arctic was not I, but Nicholas Tunes 256 years ahead of me--in 1656. This seems to have been in Baffin Island, far from my locality. But in my own district, without attracting much attention, European-like Eskimos had been reported in the following order: by Sir John Franklin in 1824, by Dease and Simpson in 1837, by Captain Charles Klinkenberg in 1906, by Captain William Mogg in 1908, and lastly by me in 1911. The report that created a furore was my second, given out in 1912.

That none of these reports about a European-like people in the Arctic produced an appreciable stir in the world was apparently either because the public did not know of the possible romance behind them, or else failed to make the proper connection. They certainly did know of the romance in 1911, but they failed to see its relation to my report, even though it was published in the London _Times_, a paper that commands much attention. But in 1912 the same report was dressed in newspaper extravagance and joined up by the reporter with the tragic drama of the colony of 5000 Europeans who disappeared from Greenland in the Middle Ages. There was better reason for connecting the report of Tunes with the lost colony than with mine, and at least a reason equal with mine of 1912, for connecting those of Franklin, Simpson, Klinkenberg and Mogg, and my own report of 1911, but it simply was not done. The achievement of making the same discovery was presumably a little less each time it was made, yet more glory resulted from the last one than from all the others put together--because the right publicity note was struck.

The connection once made with a topic of high publicity value (involving also a misunderstanding similar to the supposition that Amundsen had discovered the Northwest Passage), the “Blond” Eskimo story swept the world and has not yet been forgotten after fifteen years--in fact, shows no signs of fading.[2]

In view of how often America, the Northwest Passage, and the “Blond” Eskimos were discovered before the hero came along who got the maximum publicity out of each, we have little reason to be depressed, thinking that the glamor of discovery is about to fade. When the first man has climbed Mount Everest, the first woman can do it, and then the first mother of a family; when the first airplane has flown over Everest, there is still room for the first dirigible. You can go to Northwest Australia this year and visit a black family who have never seen a white man; next year you can capitalize the same family by taking a woman to see them, for they will never before have seen a white woman. Then will come the turn of the first mother of a family, who really should take one of her children with her. There would be a tremendous thrill in the cannibalism angle. To make the front pages it would not be necessary to have the baby actually cooked and eaten.

It may seem for the moment absurd that we shall ever be as excited again as we were recently over the North Pole, the Northwest Passage, or the “Blond” Eskimos. But the wisest guessers frequently guess wrong, and especially about news. During the last several years I have read many estimates of the journalists of New York; none of them have failed to put Mr. Carr Van Anda high as a judge of news, and most of them have put him at the very top. Yet, in 1912, Mr. Van Anda said to me that, with the North Pole found and the Cook-Peary controversy settled, the Arctic would never again occupy much space on the front pages of the New York papers. But in 1926 he either himself directed or was present while someone else directed that the entire front page of the New York _Times_, along with several of the inside pages, should be given over to the North Pole, first for the second party to visit it and a few days later for its third visitors.

I doubt if Mr. Van Anda would prophesy as confidently today as he did in 1912 that twenty years from now the North Pole will occupy little space on the front page. And who knows but the public may forget Amundsen as they did McClure, so that a new discoverer of the Northwest Passage may ride in on a new wave of hurrahs? Some explorer with a good press may be able to get the same result sooner by flying the Passage, or swimming it. A new man may in time get new renown out of my “Blond” Eskimos as I did out of Franklin’s. The “Tunnit” remains of Labrador were discovered for perhaps the tenth time in 1926, and the tenth discovery (if it wasn’t the twentieth) won more glory than any preceding it. Judging from past records, those “Tunnit ruins” could be found again with even greater _kudos_ about 1946. And so on for many thrilling discoveries.

It is, then, the best of discovery methods to find a thing over again after just enough years so that the public has nearly, but not quite, forgotten. Next best, as a perpetual device, is to search again and again for a thing never found. The interest created is not so intense as in the case of a repeated discovery, but there is the compensating advantage that you can search perhaps three or four times more often--you get passable results say once every five years for the repeated search method; effective rediscoveries need at least twenty-year gaps.

One of the best examples of perpetual search and resulting publicity is the quest for an Arctic continent.

Through various theorizing it had been pretty well established a century back that a great land mass spread across the northern polar sea. It was the Arctic Continent or Polar Continent. The corner towards Europe and America had been found and was called Greenland. The corner towards Asia had been seen by natives looking north from northeastern Siberia but had as yet no well recognized name.

Just for walking to the North Pole it seemed best to climb upon the continent at the Greenland corner. But sailing might be easier, and there was known to be a lot of water north of Alaska. So it appeared logical to sail up through Bering Straits, coast along the east side of the land seen by the Chukchis. This would presumably take you into a deep bay. When you got to the head of it you would just anchor your ship in some harbor and walk the rest of the way to the Pole.

Meantime the land seen by the Chukchis had also been seen by the British--by Kellett in the ship _Herald_, so that an island was named after the ship and a greater land seen to the northwest after the captain. A modicum of fame resulted from this discovery.

The first attempt to pick up the east coast of Kellett Land and sail north into the polar bay was by the American De Long in 1879-81. Instead of sailing much, however, he was caught among eddying floes that with the autumn frost solidified around his ship and carried him drifting to the northwest across a corner of the theoretical continent, amputating Kellett Land--the piece now called Wrangel Island. The expedition made notable discoveries and was successful in adding to our knowledge as well as to the record of well-conducted adventures, but it ended in personal tragedy for De Long and a third of his men. Some of the interest which the world gave De Long was through the bearing of his work on the discovery of the Arctic Continent.

A series of notable attempts to walk over Greenland to the North Pole was made by Admiral Peary. The result was one of the greatest geographic achievements of the last hundred years, the determination that Greenland does not run to the Pole, but is an island. De Long had made a small amputation; Peary now made a large one. The Arctic Continent had contributed materially to his fame.

The work of many expeditions to the north of central and western Asia, notably the voyage of Nansen, cut farther into the theoretical continent and the chance became small it could contain the North Pole. In 1909 Peary marched from Ellesmere Island to the Pole, the whole distance over floating ice, and took a sounding at the Pole showing the water two miles deep. No shore of the dwindling continent was therefore likely to be very near the Pole. Peary thought, however, that he had seen land to the northwest of the north tip of Heiberg Island, which might, of course, be a foreland on the continent. This was named Crocker Land.

So the two greatest explorers of their time, Nansen and Peary, had profited materially in popular acclaim and in more enduring reputation through the bearing of their work on the Arctic land mass concept.

The interest in the elusive polar land had grown enough by 1905 that an Englishman, Harrison, organized an expedition the chief purpose of which was to search for the continent to the north of Alaska. He might have done something, for he was a good man himself and had with him one of the finest northern travelers, Hubert Darrell, whose quality can be measured from Hanbury’s book, _Sport and Travel in the Northland of Canada_, London and New York, 1904, one of the great travel stories, an account of an expedition shared in by Darrell. But there was now a whaling fleet at Herschel Island. Whalers and Eskimos alike were sure that anyone was crazy who tried to travel afoot over the sea ice to the northwest, and, strangely, were apparently able to convince Darrell. Harrison stuck to his ideas but could get no one to go with him. Therefore, his book, _In Search of a Polar Continent_, London, 1908, has in a way a deceptive title--the search was never started. But it had a good name. The Polar Continent, through being much sought after and never found, had become a thing to conjure with.

There was a receptive popular audience when there appeared in Washington a scientific study by R. A. Harris which, in the opinion of the author and of many others, came near proving that there was a continent. The land’s dimensions and the situation of its corners were pretty well determined by deductions from what he thought to be reliable tidal observations taken at a few northerly points.

Between wish thinking and mathematics the continent grew substantial and for the first time had a name, Harris Land. The other names had been for just corners--Greenland, Kellett, Crocker; this was a name for the whole land, now shrunken but still spoken of as a continent. In size it still more or less deserved the name.

Our 1913-18 expedition had somewhat better luck than Harrison’s. The whalers and Eskimos were not able to talk us into believing that we could not travel over the sea ice far from land and live by hunting. Between sledge journeys and the drift of one of our ships (the _Karluk_, Captain Robert A. Bartlett master), we made further inroads upon the continent. More serious, we took soundings of 1386 meters without bottom near some of the farthest points we reached. However, to the northwest of the Ringnes Islands where, on one occasion, we were forced to turn back less than 100 miles from shore the soundings were only around 500 meters, and there seemed possibility of land.

Between driving Harris Land from some of its outposts north of Alaska and finding what might be signs of it northwest of the Ringnes Islands--between these achievements our expedition got a whole lot of _kudos_ out of the Arctic Continent.

A year after we started our work in the sea north of Alaska, Donald MacMillan attacked the problem and sought the theoretical continent under the name of Crocker Land. He started out from Cape Thomas Hubbard, Heiberg Island, whence it had been seen and tentatively located by Peary. MacMillan returned without seeing land but there was no assurance that it might not be hidden a little way beyond, for the expedition had taken no deep soundings near its farthest. It was, therefore, possible to speculate after the return that perhaps the farthest point might have been over very shallow water, the land therefore possibly only a bit farther on, concealed by clouds.

So between our shallow soundings, MacMillan’s absence of them, and Peary’s report that land had been seen, there was an interest growing keener with the number of searchers and the publicity of each.

The interest remained keen and there was much talk of the undiscovered continent when Amundsen, Ellsworth and Nobile flew in 1926 from Spitsbergen to Point Barrow by way of the North Pole. They saw no land and would have divided the theoretical continent into approximate halves but for the saving report that for portions of the journey between Peary’s farthest (the North Pole) and Alaska the weather had been so thick that they had not been able to see what lay beneath. This, said the commentators, still left a chance that they crossed fairly wide stretches of low snow-covered land. The continent still lived.

In 1927 Wilkins and Eielson flew 550 miles northwest from Point Barrow and took at their farthest point the deepest sounding ever recorded in the polar sea, 5440 meters. The flight itself removed land possibilities through a wide space. The sounding was a cause of further discouragement to the geographers, but the public didn’t mind. So far as they were concerned the Continent was merely elusive, rather clever at hiding itself.

In 1928 Wilkins and Eielson crossed from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen. They went some 200 or 300 miles out of their way to avoid the North Pole, for three assigned reasons--they wanted to avoid the sections which had been visited by previous explorers; they did not want to be suspected of a play to that gallery which was still interested in the North Pole; and they wanted to cross the area within which, for reasons we have just given in dealing with the Peary, Stefansson and MacMillan expeditions, there seemed the best chance of finding land. The newspaper files show there was a great deal of speculation as to whether they might find the Arctic Continent. There was also talk of checking up on the observations of Dr. Cook who had reported one or more lands to the west of the course he described himself as having followed back from the North Pole in 1908.

Wilkins took a course which was for a time approximately halfway between the areas explored by our 1913-18 expedition and those seen by Amundsen. Then he swung toward skirting the district explored by MacMillan, and so on to Spitsbergen, without seeing land. However, he was forced to admit that for portions of the flight they, like Amundsen, had been unable to see what lay beneath. The speculators said there still remained the possibility of the Arctic Continent. There was talk that somebody really must go and settle the question of the Continent.

Between what is reasonably inferred from the soundings and from the visual report of travelers there is, however, small chance now for an undiscovered land in the Arctic bigger than Cuba. Islands from that size down are possible, though not probable. But the interest in what is now beginning to be called the lost continent still continues. There will probably be plenty of talk about it next time anybody flies. Anticipating discussions have already speculated on the chance that the next flyer may discover “a lost continent the size of Cuba.”

As we admitted in the beginning, there have been in the search for the continent no such storms of excitement as there were from at least two of the discoveries of the Northwest Passage, after McClure’s report (third or fourth discovery)[3] in 1854, and Amundsen’s (fourth or fifth) in 1906. But on the whole the theoretical continent has given a pretty consistent performance for a hundred years.

I have myself been in parties, of three in one case and of four in another, that discovered large islands, rich with vegetation, birds and animals, which had never been seen before by human eyes, press agented or otherwise exploited. We were thrilled, of course. It was one of the great experiences of our lives. But to judge by outward appearances, there are friends of mine who have been even more thrilled by “discovering” hamlets in Brittany that were “absolutely unknown to Americans.” And I think they really had at least an equal right with us to the thrill, for I imagine that discovering polar countries never seen by human eyes is today easier than the discovery of a Brittany village previously never seen by Americans.

Adventure, in the last analysis, is measured by the thrill it gives to the discoverer, and later to those who hear about it. You can predispose the world to any desired thrill by suitable advance publicity. A deliberate campaign would be too long and expensive, so you should choose for discovery something well advertised already, as, for instance, the word and idea “ray.” We have long had the rays of the sun, and they have been very popular. Then there are the X-rays, radium rays, and many others, until the world is now ready to be thrilled by anything that is called a ray. It is also important to have a good adjective for the ray you are going to promote. “Cosmic ray” is the best to date--see what it has done for Millikan. If you can find a name a little better than cosmic, people will go daffy over the discovery of your ray. (Death rays are perennially successful.)

Thus we arrive at a heartening conclusion: the tribe of Great Discoverers will not become extinct until the Age of Advertising has passed.