Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationArchive for Expeditions
Digital Archive: Livingstone Online
As someone more familiar with explorers from this side of the pond, my encounters with David Livingtone, British missionary and African explorer, have been mediated by others: biographers, Henry Morton Stanley, or the press reports of the New York Herald. No longer is this the case. Professor Christopher Lawrence of the Wellcome Trust Centre of the History of Medicine has established Livingstone Online, a place where you can read Livingstone’s own words, primarily letters from the holdings of Wellcome and other archives in the UK. Livingstone Online also offers good contextual background on science and medicine in 19th century British society. Taken together with Google Book’s collection of full text Livingstone works (including Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa), we now have the key sources to uncover the man (if not, alas, the Nile).
Listen to Chris Lawrence discuss the Livingstone project here.
Let’s Get Geophysical
As some of you know, we are in the midst of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-2009, a global program to coordinate research in the Arctic and Antarctic. This IPY follows three earlier ones: in 1883-1884, 1932-33, and 1957-1958 (which was, technically, the International Geophysical Year IGY). The first IPY was the brainchild of Carl Weyprecht, an Austrian explorer who had grown tired of watching explorers race into the Arctic on bids to attain “Farthest North,” lose their toes to frostbite, then return home with pockets empty.
Carl Weyprecht
The “Race for the Poles” was, Weyprecht realized, a race but little else. As such, it was at odds with the needs of polar research, which required observers to stay in one place long enough to take note of what they were seeing, record measurements, and collect data. Only in this way would scientists begin to figure out how the polar regions functioned holistically, and then, how they influenced the rest of the world, particularly global weather and climates.
For over a century, science and transnational collaboration have been the twin pillars of the IPY philosophy. In combining them, scientists hoped, they could uncover the mysteries of the polar regions, all the while avoiding the need to subject their projects to the demands of the glory-hungry explorers and jingoistic leaders.
Yes, well, it was a lovely idea. In truth none of the IPYs were free from megalomaniacs (on sledges or in political office). During the first IPY, the United States outpost at Lady Franklin Bay, under the command of Adolphus Greely, dutifully collected research.
The Greely Party in 1881
That is, until, Greely saw an opportunity to beat the record of “farthest north” held by the British. Two months of sledging and 600 miles later, Greely’s party established a new “farthest north” record of 83°24,′ exactly three nautical miles farther than the one set by the Nares Expedition in 1875. Science and latitude records were forgotten, though, with the expedition’s demise from cold and starvation. The failure of relief ships to reach Greely resulted in the deaths of most of his party. Nor did the spirit of the IPY carry on after the expedition’s rescue. The impressive pile of data collected by stations all over the Arctic could not compete with reports of Greely’s incompetence, evidence of cannibalism, and the execution of a crew member for stealing food.
The Greely Party in 1884
Fifty years later, an international meteorological congress tried to resurrect the idea of scientific collaboration with IPY-2, which took a new set of questions about magnetism, the aurora, and radio science, to the poles. Yet coming as it did in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, IPY-2 fell short when the money ran out.
The IGY of 1957-1958, conceived in the midst of the Cold War, seemed just the kind of feel-good, collaborative effort needed to reduce tensions between East and West. Unfortunately the first offspring of IGY was Sputnik. As the tiny satellite beeped its way over the Western hemisphere, it brought tears to the eyes of Russians, and visions of nuclear-tipped ICBMs to anxious Americans.
Despite talk of science and collaboration, then, the legacy of the IPYs has featured much of the vain-glorious and nationalistic pap that Weyprecht had been trying so earnestly to avoid. What then, can we hope to achieve in IPY-4? If my experience at the IPY-sponsored North By Degree conference is any indication, I think the ultimate benefit of getting people together is, well, getting people together. No one can offer a guarantee of future accomplishments. Most IPY subjects and discussions are too wonky to make good headlines. But ultimately the international IPY is a form of social communion, a way of building relationships. We had tense moments in Philadelphia – but we all stayed in the room – and continued to talk and argue about our positions for the extent of the conference. It is from this messy back and forth, I think, that real collaborative projects grow.
The Reenacted Voyage
SSV Corwith Cramer
In May 2006, I sailed out of Key West aboard the SSV Corwith Cramer, a 134 ft steel brigantine belonging to the Sea Education Association. With 7800 square feet of canvas, the Corwith Cramer looks like it sailed out of a painting by Fitz Hugh Lane. Yet it is a modern craft, fully outfitted for research, complete with bathymetric equipment, hydrographic winches, biological sampling equipment, sediment scoops, and rock dredges. Not that I would know the difference between a scoop and a dredge. In my former career in science, the mysteries of life were something best looked at indoors, preferably under a laminar flow hood where they wouldn’t infect you.
The Laminar Flow Hood
Today my research questions are different. They focus on humans rather than marine ecology or rarefied microbes. And it was the human element of the voyage that made the its greatest impression on me, namely my own halting adaptation to life aboard ship. As the Cramer’s B squad, we worked in eight hour watches, manning lookout, checking the weather, hoisting sail, and swabbing the sole. My berth was above the table in the galley, so I had to step over people eating (day and night) in order to get anywhere else in the ship. I slept three to four hours at a time, bathed in sweat. It was a breathtaking, bewildering, exhausting experience.
Crow’s Nest, Corwith Cramer
It was, nevertheless, an experience which affected my research, because it showed me, in a way I never really understood before (reading books in the archives), the profoundly exhilarating and unsettling nature of life on a ship packed with officers and crew. Suddenly it seem didn’t odd that scientific specimens disappeared or disintegrated before making it back to the metropole. It didn’t seem odd that Pacific and Polar expeditions so often ended in mutiny or violence. (Not that we had mutiny on our minds. The crew of the Corwith Cramer was friendly and professional. I’m just projecting what it would be like to be on such a vessel for years at a time, with a larger crew, smaller berths, no fresh food or refrigeration, few links to the outside world, mixed together with the occasional bout of scurvy). Nor did it seem odd that explorers sometimes stayed in touch with former shipmates forty or fifty years after the end of the expedition. While the Corwith Cramer bore no resemblance to the the Fram, the Beagle, the Endeavour, or any other famous crafts of discovery, it gave me a way of understanding some of the events that took place on these vessels long ago.
For me the reenacted voyage offered inspiration, a way of seeing, in a new light, historical events. But this is not alway the objective of such voyages. Maritime adventurists often find a different inspiration in the reenactment, principally to recreate earlier events. For example, Philip Beale, leader of the Phoenician Ship Expedition, plans to sail a 21 meter square rigged ship around Africa in hopes of showing that the Phoenicians accomplished this route in 600 BC.
The Good Ship Phoenicia
As Beale put it in a Reuters interview:
“”The Europeans think it was Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Dias who did it first. But I think the Phoenicians did it 2,000 years earlier and I want to prove it.
And on his website:
“The Phoenicians obviously conquered the Mediterranean, but did they really go all the difficult and long way around Africa? That is the question.”
That is indeed the question, but one that Beale will be no closer to answering after the Phoenician Ship Expedition sets sail. Phoenicians may or may not have sailed around Africa, but Beale could never recreate the voyage with any accuracy because he knows where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, something that the first Phoenician navigators would not have known. Indeed, 14th century Venetians had a much better sense of the African coastline and Atlantic currents, but still feared passing beyond Cape Bojador (on the West Coast of Africa) because they’d be sailing against the current on the way back.
Another example: in 2005, British trekker Tom Avery sledged with to the North Pole in 36 days, a feat that he claimed “rewrote the history books” because it proved Robert Peary could have made it to the North Pole in 37 days as he claimed in 1909. While there may still be doubters, Avery hopes “that we have finally brought an end to the debate and that Peary’s name will be restored to where it belongs in the pantheon of the great polar explorers.”
Avery, channeling Peary, at the North Pole
But Avery’s expedition differed from Peary’s in significant ways. Avery was a robust 29 when he reached the North Pole. By contrast, Peary was 52, hobbled by the loss of eight toes, and suffering from a variety of ailments. Avery could afford to pack light on his trip since he didn’t have to make a return trip back to land (his party was airlifted from the North Pole shortly after he arrived). Peary, by contrast, had to slog his way back under dog power.
Beale and Avery, I’m afraid, have succumbed to Kon-Tiki Syndrome, a state of mind in which reasonable explorers start believing that they are the philosopher’s stone, agents with the power to transform reenactments into the gold of historical proof. I am a great believer in such voyages as experiential education, but they have no value in telling us what really happened in the past. Unfortunately there are no shortage of adventurers and sponsors willing to organize such expeditions. What to do. Blame Thor Heyerdahl.
Touchdown! Mars Phoenix Lander
Touchdown! The Mars Phoenix Lander transmitted this image a few minutes ago. Congratulations to the University of Arizona. Go Wildcats. See yesterday’s post for more.
Mars Phoenix Mission
Tomorrow I’ll be watching two flying objects: the Phoenix Lander, a $420 million dollar spacecraft descending towards the polar plains of Mars, and Michael Fournier, a 64-year-old Frenchman who will be hurtling towards the bucolic pastures of Saskatchewan.
The Phoenix Lander comes equipped with a robotic arm camera, surface stereo imager, and thermal and evolved-gas analyzer. Fournier comes equipped with a space suit lined with wool underwear. If all goes well, both Lander and Fournier will deploy parachutes. The Mars Lander will spend its post-touchdown period testing the Martian soil to see whether water exists near the Martian poles and if it could support life. Fournier will spend his post jump moments speaking to the press and thanking his supporters. Fournier’s jump, if successful, will establish a record for highest human balloon flight and break altitude, speed, and time records for freefall. Not that this makes any difference to Fournier I guess:
“It’s not a question of the world records,” Fournier wrote via e-mail through an interpreter on Friday from his base in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. “What is important are what the results from the jump will bring to the safety of the conquest of space. However, the main question that is being asked today by all scientists is, can a man survive when crossing the sound barrier?”
Whether someone can break the sound barrier without becoming a human flank steak, is, I guess, a question that burns in the mind of Michel Fournier. But it is not “the main question that is being asked today by all scientists.” If Fournier really believes this is about science and not about personal glory, wouldn’t it be simpler (and safer) to send a crash-test dummy up instead? After all we have machines nowadays that measure pressure and temperature and others, called transmitters and receivers, that can relay this sort of information to earth. Maybe this was cutting edge technology back in the age of the V-2, but its pretty routine today. Oh, and no one dies.
