Panel Notes: The Ice Wants to Kill You: A History of Polar Exploration

[spindizzy]

The Ice Wants to Kill You: A Brief History of Polar Exploration by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw and Ally Wilkes

The first part was a history of polar exploration from Gav!

• Arctic: not a land mass, has indigenous populations. Antarctic: landmass, has penguins. Note that Gav and Ally always know which ones they're talking about, and I do not always know that I wrote down the correct one, so I will be relying on notes and checking Wikipedia to make sure I'm not fucking this up. Also, this is very much paraphrasing unless I say otherwise, I don't write fast enough to take dictation in real time!


• Turn of the century explorers desperately wanted to be explorers, in a time where most of the map was filled in and y'know, colonialism was a hell of a drug, and they'd reached the point where they had ALMOST enough tech to not die.
  
  • Most people who died during polar exploration did so because the didn't ask the indigenous populations for help. Again: COLONIALISM IS A HELL OF A DRUG.


• Roald Amundsen:
  
  • The first person to the South pole! Won the pole race! First recorded trip!
    
    • I had no idea that this was a thing (or perhaps I'd gleaned something through thebaconfat and squeemu osmosis and not consciously thought about it?), but apparently this was like the space race, but to either pole. With the whole multiple countries racing to get a guy there first thing and everything.
    
    
    • Cook apparently presented a diary to a judging panel that "proved" he discovered the pole, whereas Roald Amundsen actually proved he got to the pole.
  
  
  • ​Amundsen was the first through the North West Passage, which will come up later.
  
  
  • He managed it mainly by ACTUALLY LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED IN SIMILAR CLIMATES, which meant that he did things like "wear furs" and "be a good hunter" and "bring people trained in survival." HERESY, right?! Compare and contrast to Scott, who brought ponies (... I have a feeling that Gav said that he brought his favourite pony, which must have been awkward when he had to eat it), man-pulled sleds, and 35,000 cigars.
  
  
  • Sir John Franklin, 1786-1847:
    
    • Came from humble beginnings – his family were merchants, I believe – and joined the navy, which allowed him to progress from the middle class to the aristocracy, because that was a thing you could do in those days.
    
    
    • He went into exploration after the Napoleonic war, and was TERRIBLE at it. He was supposed to chart [???] River in Canada, and instead HALF OF HIS CREW died of starvation and/or exposure, and the rest resorted to cannibalism.
    
    
    • ... So of course he got made Governor of Tazmania.
    
    
    • Gav described this as the wild west of the time, so that must have been exciting. ... I don't believe he was any good at it though.
    
    
    • In 1845, he was given the job of exploring the North West Passage (I told you that would come up again) to find a new trade route, which would have brought him fame! Which was enough for this guy, who was fifty-nine if my maths checks out, to take two ships and head on out. His ships (the Erebus and the Terror), had reinforced hulls, which had been intended as a thing for battle, but turns out was actually useful for breaking the ice. He took two captains, including a guy named Kojer who was actually good at polar exploration. He took grain, canned goods, and dried meat. BUT, he also took a crew that was basic bog-standard navy guys with no additional training and no additional equipment.
      
      ... Yeah, you read that right. He didn't get them additional cold weather gear to go to a FUCKING POLE, WHAT WAS WRONG WITH YOU DUDE.
    
    
    • Okay what was wrong with him was that the poles at the time were a great unexplored (by white people) wilderness so they didn't know what was there or what to prep for. Mainly because if they knew? THEY WOULDN'T GO!
    
    
    • Seriously, the temperature ranges were/are 0 to -40 degrees Celcius, there are blizzards, the landscape is either solid ice, or it's pack ice – basically slushy ice that you can get a ship through... Until winter sets in, and it freezes solid.
    
    
    • Franklin got lost. On the way to Greenland. My dude, that is NOT A GOOD SIGN. He left five men there because they were ill, and look! They might be the only survivors of this mess!
    
    
    • Then Franklin sailed both of his ships into pack ice, where they got stuck. Of course. The crew stayed there for a year and five months before abandoning ship; Franklin and twenty-four of his men died before the crew left. They left letters and the ships logs behind, which recorded the food going wrong – people died of scurvy, malnutrition, botulism, lead poisoning (because guess what the tins were made out of!), and the food was literally going bad in the tins.
    
    
    • Finding out what happened to the remains of the crew became a huge mission. Search parties were sent out after them, which actually led to effective exploration and mapping of the area. THANKS JOHN.
    
    
    • The hero of the hour was a Scottish explorer named John Rain, who did the sensible thing of LISTENING TO THE LOCALS. He used dogs! He wore furs! He did not die on the ice, and he DID find the Erebos and the Terror! He brought back the letters and reports from the local population that alternate between "there were a big group of white dudes on the ice" and "sounds like something straight out of a horror story," okay.
      
      • If I've got this right, a shambling group of survivors – grey skinned, in rags, barely alive, stumbled up to a village, who were terrified of them. The villagers gave the strangers food and a place to stay on the outskirts of the village, and then left them alone for the night. When they came back the next morning, they found the food untouched, but all of the strangers had killed each other.
    
    
    • John Rain got thrown out of the navy offices for saying that cannibalism took place, because OBVIOUSLY the brave and noble souls of the royal navy wouldn't do that! CHARLES DICKENS, who had been very invested in this story and the reporting of it, DRAGGED THIS GUY IN THE PRESS. ... Except that when people investigated, they found out that "Oh yeah, cannibalism ABSOLUTELY happened here." Wow.
  
  ​
  • The next story is about Fridtjof Nansen! I LEARNED HOW TO SPELL NORWEGIAN NAMES FOR YOU GUYS, PLEASE APPRECIATE ME. Also, please know that this guy is being played by Brian Blessed in my brain.
    
    • Nansen was a Norwegian explorer who believed that he could freeze ships into pack ice on purpose, which would then carry them on a current (which does not exist) to the north pole. And credit to him, his idea was absolutely mad but he went about it the right way! He picked a team who were all expert survivalists, and brought enough provisions and entertainments that when he froze them into the ice for a year, the only ones who got bored were... Him and his best mate?
    
    
    • This absolute mad legend decided he was going to WALK. Because he was BORED. So him and his best made set out, and promptly got stranded in an eight month polar blizzard, as you do.
    
    
    • About halfway through being dug in, so about sixteen months after they set off, the two of them decided they were close enough to use intimate pronouns. I love it.
    
    
    • When they eventually left their dug-out, they accidentally wandered into an English expedition (who were presumably less well-prepared than these guys), who dropped them off at their ship, which had become a tourist attraction in the meantime!
  
  
  • *Hamilton voice* SHACKLETON! TECHNICALLY we didn't have time for Shackleton, but apparently their thirst for Shackleton was so great that Ally specifically cut her bit short and we all ran over a little bit so that we could hear about Shackleton, so I'm going to put it in this bit where it belongs.
    
    • Shackleton was apparently the best explorer – he failed, but he failed in a badass way.
    
    
    • He tried to traverse the Antarctic, which was TERRIBLE. ... He wanted to WALK across the ENTIRE ANTARCTIC. SIR. SIR.
    
    
    • He was well provisioned and prepared, and there was another team basically coming the opposite way as far as I can tell, to leave him supplies?
    
    
    • There are photos on the BBC! Oh that's exciting! (I'm gonna find out if this is the guy who was like eight foot tall and looked like Brian Blessed buff bear cousin, one sec.)
    
    
    • There were THOUSANDS of applicants to go on this expedition, which meant that Shackleton could put together the best team! ... And a teenage stowaway, because apparently someone decided that their best mate getting in and them not doing meant that they had to sneak about ship to go along, which, y'know, imagine your OTP. (Apparently Shackleton promised the kid that if it came to cannibalism, they would eat him first!)
    
    
    • Everything was going fine until their ship got frozen into the ice, so they decamped and took what they could carry. The ship was LITERALLY CRUSHED by the ice! They had sled dogs, and had to camp on sheet ice, which... Doesn't sound safe. Their goal was to reach Elephant Island; once they had, Shackleton took five men to a whaling station in South Georgia, because if someone didn't make it there, everyone on Shackleton's crew was going to die.
    
    
    • THEY MADE IT! EVERYBODY LIVED, NOBODY DIED, EXCEPT FOR LIKE TWO GUYS ON THE SUPPLY TEAM. ... HOW.
    
    
    • The ship for this expedition left in 1914. Everyone on board it volunteered for the war, but were sent anyway because this was ~more important.~ When Shackleton got to civilisation, he asked them when the had ended! ... But it was 1916...
  
  
  Ally spoke about common themes in polar horror, recent discoveries, and conspiracies!
  
  
  • First off: the problematic trope: ancient aliens. It comes up A LOT, thanks to Eric Von Daneken's Chariots of the Gods, because apparently there are racist white people out there who don't want to believe that pyramids couldn't have been built by PoC, so aliens.
  
  
  • FOR EXAMPLE: The Thing. Apparently, on the first night of winter, the Scott Anderson Centre have a movie night and watch every iteration of The Thing. Every single one. THAT IS HARD CORE.
    
    • It's about the descent into paranoia, featuring a real life phenomenon called winter-over. Madness and oppression of place, very like The Shining.
    
    
    • ... On the longest night in polar bases, they watch The Shining! THIS IS THE BEST AND WORST GALLOWS HUMOUR I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED, WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING.
    
    
    • Anyway, winter-over. I think it's also known as Polar T3 Syndrome, which produces a creepy fugue state known as the arctic stare, and is apparently a combo of SAD and vitamin deficiencies?
    
    
    • The crew in The Thing think that the Norwegian team went mad at the prospect of winter, which is reasonable! In a Belgian expedition, the captain DELIBERATELY froze the ships into the ice without warning the crew, and they all winter-overed badly. One man tried to WALK BACK TO BELGIUM and had to be sedated.
    
    
    • The isolation of the location is deadly. No one is getting in or out until spring. (A film that plays with that is apparently 30 Days of Night.) So no one in The Thing is gonna be rescued, but the Thing doesn't WANT them to be rescued.
    
    
    • Between the humans and the Thing, they absolutely TRASH the base, which will straight up kill you.
    
    
    • There is not a lot of water, but there are gale-force winds, which meant that when a station in the arctic caught fire? The WHOLE THING burned down in AN HOUR AND A HALF.
    
    
    • WHAT.
    
    
    • Historically, a ship surgeon was ordered to overwinter, and he burned down the station instead. Wow.
  
  
  • Apparently in real life, there is a giant impact​ crater called Wilkesland, and it is Weird. It's a gravitational anomaly – like "pulls sattelites towards it" levels of anomaly – and had a huge object in a three hundred mile crater, which NASA reckons is an asteroid twice the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs. WHAT. WHAT.
  
  
  • The Thing is based on two things; a John Campbell novella called Who Goes There, and Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. At the Mountains of Madness trades on fear of the other and body horror – as a reminder, Lovecraft was a racist xenophobe even by the standards of the time.
  
  
  • A good antidote to those however is Cold Skin, which according to my notes is an Antarctic Shape of Water. scarimonious? splend? sithe?
  
  
  • A moment for the Guillermo Del Toro adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness that we're never going to get.
  
  
  • ... The next line of my notes is just "Elder gods partially vegetables???"
  
  
  • Antartica used to be forested??? NO WAIT GO BACK EXPLAIN THIS.
    
    • Apparently Chris Beckett's Dark Eden has something about this, please discuss.
  
  
  • Alien geometry is Lovecraftian, and resurrected by conspiracy theorists! (See also: faked Buzz Aldrin tweet about pyramid mountains.)
  
  
  • Alien Vs Predator is underrated.
    
    • It has a WoC as a highly qualified and respected lead making alliances! (I just have "inequality" written after that, which I assume was something to do with what she has to deal with?)
    
    
    • It's a direct successor to At the Mountains of Madness, as they find evidence of alien cultures fighting. The way that they piece it together is drawn from Lovecraft.
    
    
    • Again, I can't decipher my own notes here. "Pyramid style structures in Arctic. Mountains = Elsworth Range. If pyramids 10x height of Great Pyramid." Self. What.
    
    
    • Starts with heat signatures underground, which is honestly plausible – Ally reminds us that the Strave app tracked heat signatures, including the shape of military bases, and found something in Antartica that looked like a base, even though there's nothing on Google Maps.
  
  
  • Abandoned locations in the middle of nowhere – has a Mary Celeste vibe! Some locations haven't been touched since the 30s. The huts of Scott and Shackleton are still there! Researchers who've visited them talk about it feeling the owners have just stepped out, and they'll be right back.
  
  
  • On a similar topic: Dark Matter by Michelle Paver. An expedition finds an abandoned camp, a disaster happens, and one man is left behind on the wireless. It feels like Frankenstein. Isolation, darkness, cabin fever, the landscape explicitly haunted. Things linger on the landscape because there's nothing there to overwrite them.
  
  
  • Polar stories give you an unfiltered idea of people as they are in extremis. Very fertile idea for horror – because survival stories can be horror or uplifting, because they bring out the best and worst in people!
  
  
  And those are my notes! I assume that this is mostly stuff people know, and jennyhorrocks is going to come by and drop some facts about the artic/antarctic because that's literally what she's studied (and also I'm pretty sure she's been to one of them!) but it was fun to learn about!
  
  ... I'm gonna get buried in book recs and I can't wait.