The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Explorations by Hester Blum (review)

There have been innumerable published narrative accounts of expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular of the many that ended in tragedy. The cultural history of those expeditions, however, remains relatively understudied. In The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Explorations, Hester Blum sets out to change that. She focuses on the printed matter produced by the expeditions while they were ongoing, including newspapers, menus, playbills, and the messages that were left in bottles and cairns for rescuers and those who followed in the explorers' footsteps to find. Why, Blum asks, did men who were often stretched to the limits of their physical endurance expend so much energy on producing printed words? She identifies two main purposes. First, they were creating "formal devices for describing, comprehending and, most ambitiously, surviving climatic extremity." She therefore labels these writings "ecomedia," and argues that they serve as "examples of environmental writing by which … we might imagine—and with hope mediate—climate change and ecological extremity today" (5).

Although printed polar ephemera obviously provides clues as to how polar climates have changed over the past two centuries, the argument that they offer useful cultural perspectives on climate change in the present-day sense of the term is not entirely convincing. Polar explorers, after all, wanted temperatures to rise, and often needed them to do so for reasons of survival. They felt themselves utterly at the mercy of nature, with no sense that temperatures were increasing due to human causes; even if they had been aware of these things, they would not have seen them in a negative light. Similarly, the protection of the polar environment in a modern sense was far down on their list of priorities: to Arctic explorers, polar bears were dangerous predators and sources of desperately needed food, not worthy foci of conservation campaigns. If anything, the polar ecomedia of an earlier age gives us a sense of how much attitudes have changed.

Blum is on stronger ground with her contention that the production of printed matter served a more immediate purpose: to alleviate the psychological stress and mental tedium of polar exploration. She quotes the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen during the Fram expedition of 1893 to 1896, which established a new Farthest North but failed to reach the North Pole; Nansen pined for something new to read during the long, dark winter: "How we longed for a book! … The little readable material which was to be found in our navigation-table and almanack I had read so many times already that I knew it almost by heart" (qtd. in Blum 82). This is the most important contribution of Blum's work: to remind us of the power of the printed word. John Franklin's doomed expedition to complete the Northwest Passage from 1845 to 1848 carried more than a thousand books from England, and when the encampment of the last survivors was found in 1859, the boats in which they had been dragging their supplies contained—alongside the mutilated corpses of men who had died and been butchered and eaten by their companions—numerous books, including a copy of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Apparently even men reduced to the most desperate extremities could not bear to part with their reading material.

It is thus not surprising that polar expeditions produced their own newspapers; William Edward Parry's North Georgia Gazette and Winter Chronicle, produced on board HMS Hecla during a search for the Northwest Passage in 1819 through 1820, was the first of many. Their contents—doggerel poetry, short stories of limited quality, and shorter bits—were mostly banal, although there were occasional flashes of real literary and artistic talent. But quality and talent were beside the point: both the writing and the reading were done to entertain...