Author Erling Kagge.Erling Kagge/Supplied
- Title: After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice
- Author: Erling Kagge
- Genre: Memoir
- Publisher: HarperCollins
- Pages: 368
Reaching the North Pole was a fantasy of the ancients. Finding the Northwest Passage was the goal of European explorers. Traversing the Arctic Ocean has become the reality of climate change. Exploiting the area’s minerals is now the preoccupation of nations.
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As destination and dream, the North Pole has few peers, and of those whose dreams led them there, Erling Kagge has few peers. He’s the first person to reach both poles – and the summit of Mount Everest.
Explorer and adventurer, Kagge’s After the North Pole is a reader’s companion to the great feat of reaching the destination – in his case, being, along with the famed polar explorer Borge Ousland, the first to arrive there on skis and without dogs or motorized assistance. It took them 58 days to cover a journey of 769 kilometres and to redeem a lifetime obsession.
“It was like a love affair,” Kagge writes. “I thought of it as soon as I woke in the morning, throughout the day, and when I went to bed at night.”
That love affair and the effort to consummate it – during which the two men ate two pounds of food every day, accounting for 5,800 calories daily, and drank formula milk rather than powdered milk because it contained more energy per ounce – comprises the spine of this book. But as much as this is the story of their 1990 expedition, it is also a history of polar adventuring, and a travel book written by a man with the eye and aspect of a naturalist.
In contrast to America’s Project Mercury astronauts – who reacted to their pioneering 1960s orbital missions with little more artistry than exclaiming, “Wow, what a view!” – Kagge tells us that “there is something deeply human about delighting in a sunrise, in hearing the birds sing and feeling the onrush of running water in a nearby stream.” There was magic in this mania.
His world view, it turns out, comes directly from Gerardus Mercator, whose cartographic projection on the surface of his landmark map exaggerates the poles – just the right metaphor for this pole-obsessed rambler. In these pages, he explores the history of polar obsession, with special attention to the 16th-century interest in reaching the North Pole and the more modern attempts of European explorers to do so.
Those missions pretty much all ended in disaster, particularly if their parties had to winter in the Arctic, subsist on fox meat and witness their fragile temporary billets overrun by polar bears. Shakespeare conjured the circumstances: “You are now sailed into the north of my l’dy’s opinion; where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutch’an’s beard.”
The theme that is woven through these tales of polar explorers is the region’s enduring attraction. We might think of it as a pun on the magnetism of the goal and a symbol of possibility. The North Pole, Kagge writes, was “a world beyond our world, where no living had been,” adding that “if you succeeded in getting there, or even close, you would be transformed, and move from our world to a parallel world with different natural laws.”
That is what drew the boldface names of bold polar ambitions: William Parry, John Franklin, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, Vitus Bering, James Cook. “They were, after all, children of their time,” Kagge tells us, and “they fought as best as they could, willingly risked their lives, endured great suffering, and achieved as much as they perhaps could within the system of which they were a part.”
Arctic Fever, as Franklin’s wife called it, broke out in great bursts, often causing infections of nationalistic fervour, once even affecting Austria-Hungary. It often caused bizarre permutations: the struggle to be the first to cross the Arctic Ocean, to be the first to fly to the North Pole and then Kagge’s no-dogs/no-motors permutation.
New forms of technology were enlisted to assist the task, rendering wooden sleds obsolete. The goal remained the same, but some adventurers fudged the struggle by starting closer to the Pole. The struggle didn’t suppress human nature and human foibles. It exaggerated them.
Over time, explorers learned to heed the lessons of the Inuit; Kagge and his companion listened well enough to wear hoods, not hats, in his expedition, to hack at the ice with a small axe and not a spade, to dry wet mittens by placing them at the groin and not the chest. (Remember that: the ultimate news you can use!) Once the two of them actually achieved their goal, they ate the polar bear they shot, first boiling the frozen meat. It tasted like cod liver oil. No matter. They were hungry, and besides, they were eating locally.
The great Norwegian polar explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, captured the rigour and romance of polar travel and exploration in a 1927 speech at the University of St. Andrews, speaking of how such an expedition “propels humanity forwards on the road to knowledge.” That is true. But he also cited the “spirit’s mysterious need to fill all the emptiness.”
It is the emptiness, after all, that over the centuries has been filled with human suffering along with adventure. An emptiness, as these explorers will testify, that also is filled with failure, and fulfilment.
