Adventure classics: Home is the sailor, home from the sea

Surface at the Pole

by James Calvert

***

At first thought, if a submariner wanted to surface at the North Pole, it might seem simpler to do it during the summer when ice melt lakes called polynyas sometimes offered breaks in the Arctic Ocean’s frozen surface. That was the hope of James Calvert, commander of the USS Skate, who chronicled the historic voyages of one of the earliest nuclear-powered submarines in his 1960 volume, Surface at the Pole.  But although the Skate was able to surface numerous times during its initial August 1958 voyage as it circled the pole, the goal of surfacing at the actual geographic North Pole eluded it. At least for a time.

Sir Hubert's memorial at North Pole

Not able to surface during the comparatively balmy arctic summer? How about trying it during the depths of a polar winter? And how about accomplishing a lifelong goal of one of the world’s most ardent adventurers, Sir Hubert Wilkins?

An Australian by birth, polar explorer Wilkins was the first to fly a plane in Antarctica, was knighted for his exploits, and served as a consultant on polar clothing and equipment to the U.S. Army. In 1931, he made the first attempt to reach the North Pole by submarine. Unfortunately, neither his vessel, an aging, pre-nuclear U.S Navy submarine he renamed Nautilus nor his equipment were equal to Wilkins’ ambitions. After sailing further north than any previous ship had accomplished under its own power, and days of negotiating the polar ice pack, he was forced to return.

But nearly 30 years later, his dream was still alive. He visited Calvert after the Skate’s return in October 1958.

“Now that you have everything you need to do the job,” as Calvert recounts Wilkins’ admonition, “you must go in the wintertime.”

“I was startled,” Calvert writes, “but knew what he meant. Every bit of submarine exploration in the Arctic had been done in summer, when polynyas are abundant. In winter they would be frozen over and open water nonexistent or very difficult to locate. . . (then) he sat for some time with a faraway look and a half-smile. . . On the first of December I learned of his death from a heart attack.”

Early in 1959, the Skate was sent back to the Arctic Ocean to investigate the feasibility of winter operations. And to fulfill the final request of Wilkins – having his ashes scattered at the North Pole, by submarine.

Would a surfacing during the Arctic winter even be possible?

Possibly, if the Skate’s sail, the vertical structure that housed its masts, antennas, periscopes and ventilation pipes – vital to its safe operation – could be strengthened enough to serve as a battering ram. “Could they stand the splintering shock as (a) three-thousand-ton ship drove them into the ice?” Calvert wondered.

In March 1959, the Skate had reached the North Pole again, beneath the surface of its frozen sea. “There was no sign of a skylight,” Calvert writes, using the name given to areas of ice thin enough for light to show through, although with the sun still below the horizon there would be little light at best. Hours passed while the ship searched for an opening before finding a trace of thin ice, “so small we could see the whole area at a glance through the periscope, outlined sharply by the . . . floes around it. . . (at last) with a sickening lurch we hit and broke through.”

The Skate had reached its goal.

Raising the flags of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States from the Skate’s masts and periscopes in the midst of a stiff gale, the crew held red flares in the darkness to give Calvert enough light to read the service for burial at sea. The sprinkled ashes “quickly disappeared in the half-darkness and the swirling snow. . . Sir Hubert Wilkins had reached his final resting place.”

(After the death of Wilkins’ widow, Suzanne Evans Wilkins, at her request her ashes also were sprinkled into the sea at the North Pole, this time under brilliant summer sunshine.)

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an August of adventures at sea with Edward Beach’s Around the World Submerged: The Voyage of the Triton.)

Adventure classics – Billions of tiny architects of the reefs

Voyage of HMS Beagle

by Charles Darwin

***

One of the questions on Charles Darwin’s mind even before the Royal Navy’s survey ship, HMS Beagle, began its multi-year, round the world mission in 1831 was the origin of coral reefs, the only geological features formed by animals. Exactly how coral polyps by the billions formed their structures was a question of importance both for geological theorists and for the British naval strategists.

Among the instructions issued for the Beagle’s voyage was that “the circularly-formed Coral Islands in the Pacific occasionally afford excellent land-locked harbours. . . and would be well adapted to any nice astronomical observations which might require to be carried on in undisturbed tranquility. While these are quietly proceeding. . . a very interesting inquiry might be instituted respecting the formation of these coral reefs, ” including examination of the “modern and very plausible theory” that such reefs have been raised from the summits of extinct volcanoes.

Oceanic coral reefs often formed a circular island or group of islands with a central open area, or lagoon. Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, whose books Darwin studied, and to whom he would dedicate his own book about the Beagle’s voyage, believed that coral reefs grew around the summits of underwater volcanoes, with the circular atolls reflecting the opening of the volcanic crater.

Acting on the Admiralty’s orders, Beagle Captain Robert Fitzroy stopped at the Keeling (now Cocos) Islands in the Indian Ocean. Among other activities, he took soundings of the area to determine the depth at which coral formations began. These gave the depth limit for living corals as only about 20 fathoms (37 meters), but the island in question, rising more than 7200 feet (2100 meters) Darwin wrote, “forms a lofty submarine mountain, with sides steeper even than those of the most abrupt volcanic cone. . . and every single atom, from the least particle to the largest fragment of rock in this great pile, which however is small compared with very many other lagoon-islands, bears the stamp of having been subjected to organic arrangement. We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals!”

If the sea depth had remained constant, corals could never have built their reefs on the bottom, far below their habitable limit. On the other hand, besides the fact that the Keeling Islands soundings showed they were not formed around volcanoes, how did coral reefs come into existence?

Although it pained Darwin to disagree with Lyell, he proposed a new theory: that reefs formed around the fringes of existing land, and that it was the subsequent subsidence or sinking of that land below sea level that formed the open, circular interior lagoon of atolls. (At the time, no one was aware of the additional role played by rising and lowering sea levels in the formation of coral reefs.)

Darwin would end by writing an entire book, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, to state his new theory of the place of the humble coral polyps in the formation of the Earth. Far from being offended by Darwin, Charles Lyell was delighted.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a September of young adventurers with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. And you thought your schooldays were bad. . . )

Adventure classics – The mystery of the vanished giants

The Voyage of HMS Beagle

by Charles Darwin

***

As the Royal Navy’s HMS Beagle made its way around South America in the mid-1830’s, frequently dropping off its on-board geologist, Charles Darwin, to make inland excursions inland, Darwin had time to wonder about the strange fossils he was collecting along river banks. What were they? And what had happened to sweep them from the earth?

The sheer numbers of fossils troubled him. He struggled to accommodate the huge quantities of bones, seemingly produced by the catastrophic deaths of large numbers of animals, with his enthusiasm for Scottish geologist Charles Lyell’s theory of gradual change over time.

“The number of the remains embedded in the grand estuary deposit which forms the Pampas and covers the granitic rocks of Banda Oriental, must be extraordinarily great. . . Besides those which I found during my short excursions, I heard of many others, and the origin of such names as ‘the stream of the animal’, ‘the hill of the giant’, is obvious,” he wrote in his journal of the voyage of the Beagle.

Darwin published his records in two editions, in 1839 and 1845. The 1957 collectible edition I’m working from is based on the 1845 edition, when Darwin was well on his way to puzzling out his theory of evolution based on natural selection. Some of the South American fossils, such as the extinct giant sloths, were obviously related to still living relatives. But what to make of creatures such as the Macrauchenia, looking like a humpless camel with a long snout, whose 1913 reconstruction illustrates this post? Or the Toxodon, with a rhinocerous-like body and rodent-like teeth, whose skull he bought for 18 pence, which when found “was quite perfect; but the boys knocked out some of the teeth with stones, and then set up the head as a mark to throw at.”

It would require 21^st century science to place the giant grazers in the family trees Darwin was starting to create, Scientific American magazine reported March 20, 2015, in “Mystery of Darwin’s ‘Strange Animals’Solved.”

Initially researchers trying to place the animals’ relationships were stumped by a lack of DNA, which degrades quickly in the South American climate. Instead, an international team used a different tactic, extracting collagen protein, to at last give two of Darwin’s mysterious mammals their place in the family tree of mammals.

“Part of a group of more than 250 mammals known as the South American ungulates,” Scientific American reported, “the creatures lived on the continent for around 60 million years before disappearing around 12,000 years ago.”

Purely on the basis of their fossils’ physical appearance, some had been suspected them of being related to elephants. Darwin himself suggested a possible link between the camel-like Macrauchenia and surviving llama-relatives, the wild guanacos of the pampas. But after sequencing proteins from two museum specimens of Toxodon and two of Macrauchenia, scientists finally placed them in a group that includes horses, tapirs and rhinos.

And what caused their disappearance after millions of years of survival? I’m going to suggest a catastrophic cause undreamed of by Darwin – the arrival of humans on the South American continent.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics puts Darwin back on board ship, to continue an August of adventures at sea.)

Adventure classics -- All endured, all came back

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

by Alfred Lansing

***

He died a failure in the eyes of the world, forever in debt, never accomplishing the adventures he set out to do. Instead, Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton performed perhaps the greatest of all feats: he brought his crew safely back from one of the most horrific explorations in history.

In his lifetime, Irish-born Shackleton seemed like an also-ran. His naval career began not with the Royal Navy like rival explorer Robert Scott’s, but as an ordinary sailor on merchant vessels. In his first Antarctic voyage in 1901, he played second string to Scott, who heaped scorn on Shackleton in his account of the expedition. Beaten on attempts to reach the South Pole by Norwegian Roald Amundsen (and by Scott, who died in his attempt), a Dublin paper’s headline, “South Pole Almost Reached by Irishman,” summed it up. It was always “almost” for Shackleton.

Still, by the second decade of the twentieth century, he’d found a project both worthy and potentially lucrative¾ a race not just to the pole, but across the entire southernmost continent. The expedition bore the grandiose title, Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. To document its supposed glories, the expedition’s crew included photographer Frank Hurley, whose 1915 photo illustrates this post.

The plan, Alfred Lansing wrote in his 1959 account, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, was “typical of Shackleton¾ purposeful, bold and neat. He had not the slightest doubt that the expedition would achieve its goal.”

The expedition received King George V;s blessing on the very day in 1914 that Great Britain declared war on Germany. Should the crew sail for Antarctica or place themselves at the service of their country? They offered to stay, their government said, “go.” After all, the war would soon be over, wouldn’t it?

Stymied previously by ships that became icebound in Antarctic waters, for this voyage Shackleton bought a ship from one of the world’s most famous polar shipbuilding firms and christened her Endurance.

In spite of the shipbuilder’s care, in January 1915, the height of the Antarctic summer, Endurance became stuck fast in the ice. For nearly a year, she and her crew drifted north with the moving ice pack until, crushed by the ice, she finally sank on November 21, 1915. The crew never set foot on the land surface of the great southern continent.

Shackleton’s crew rescued their lifeboats from the Endurance, dragging them over the disintegrating ice for more months until they found open channels. Their struggle to survive would last until May 1916. In the course of it, they would endure voyages in their small open boats through some of the world’s coldest, and stormiest, seas. They all survived.

Shackleton would die in 1922 of a heart attack. His fame was soon eclipsed by that of Scott, who had perished with his picked band of companions on a final push for the South Pole. Not until Lansing’s 1959 book did his reputation recover. Because, after all, he returned with all hands safe. It was a lesson the world had finally learned to appreciate.

I’d slotted another sea adventure story, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, for today’s post. But on reading it, I learned that Verne proclaimed his crew of castaways the most ingenious in fiction, even surpassing those of Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson, scheduled for the first week of September. So I’ve moved Verne’s book to the last Wednesday of August, toe to toe with Wyss’s. May the best castaways win!

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an August of adventures at sea with another story of World War I, Colin Simpson’s The Luisitania.)

Adventure classics -- The color of loneliness

The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’

by Joseph Conrad

***

It was acclaimed in its day as one of the best novels by one of the greatest prose stylists writing in English. It was the novel that helped decide Joseph Conrad’s future as a writer. It contains some of the most evocative writing about the sea and sailing ships ever written. But oh, my, that title. It’s enough to make you wish Conrad had been satisfied with the title used in his story's first American publication: Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle.

(Publisher Dodd, Mead and Company insisted on the more innocuous title not because it thought “nigger” was offensive¾ it was the 1890’s, after all¾ but because who would want to buy a book about a black man?)

In fact, it’s less a book about a black man than about the crew he is a part of. “A negro in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no chums,” Conrad wrote in the introduction titled “To My Readers in America.” But in his life and death, he becomes “the centre of the ship’s collective psychology and the pivot of the action ¼ mastering our compassion, scornful of our sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions.”

As the British merchant ship Narcissus (the name of a vessel Conrad actually served on) prepares to leave Bombay (now Mumbai), it finds itself one man short. “Can’t make out that last name,” the mate, Mr. Baker, complains when the crew is mustered. ¼ ‘Wait!; cried a deep, ringing voice.”

The newcomer is James Wait, a West Indian coming aboard improbably in the East Indies. He is “calm, cool, towering, superb.” But he carries a deadly weakness, at first only hinted at by his metallic cough. He is going home to die, infected with tuberculosis, the disease that took the lives of Conrad’s parents and millions of others.

The ship he works on has a secret, too. Like most sailing merchant ships of the day, the Narcissus is top-heavy with masts and sails, with a shallow draft that makes any shifting of cargo potentially fatal. “She was exacting,” Conrad writes in the “storm” chapter of his book. “She wanted care in loading and handling, and no one knew exactly how much care would be enough ¼ The ship knew, and sometimes would correct the presumptuous human ignorance by the wholesome discipline of fear.”

And fear they will, as Wait’s life and the ship’s hang in the balance rounding the storm-ridden waters around the tip of South Africa as the way back to England.

As Conrad writes, Wait has the attention of the entire crew, but no chums. And I suspect, neither did Conrad. Although he pictures most of the crew as British and English-speaking, he was neither. Like the lone Finn and the Scandinavian brothers Conrad portrays among the Narcissus crew, he would often have been as isolated by language as Wait was b y color. The orphaned son of Polish aristocrats, Conrad joined the French merchant marine service in his teens. When his French service was threatened by Russia (which then claimed most Polish territory), he switched in his twenties to service aboard British ships where his Russian citizenship was not a barrier. It was his first experience with the English language, which he would speak with a strong accent to the end of his life.

It’s easy to imagine that both his initially limited grasp of English and his status as an aristocrat and member of a European intellectual elite would have distanced him from comradeship with most of the crews he worked with. After nearly twenty years of seafaring life, he decided to become a writer, using an anglicized version of his given names, Joseph Conrad, to sail into literary history.

This short novel, only a little more than 50,000 words, with the awkward title is readily available on Amazon. Now out of copyright, it’s also available as a free e-book at Project Gutenberg,
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an August of adventures at sea with Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island.)