The polar regions have always exerted a ghastly fascination, like a preview of the end of the world. Half a century ago, when the Cold War was coldest, the US built a vast military air base and early warning station at Thule, on the north-west coast of Greenland, some 900 miles from the North Pole.
The US Air Force flew some of us journalists up there from Washington to show us how it intended to intercept any possible intrusion from the Soviet side of the Arctic Ocean. After we had marvelled at the dry martinis made with ancient glacial ice and all the latest gigantic radar dishes, our hosts provided two rewards, a visit to the nearby Eskimo (Inuit) village of Thule (Qaanaaq - an Eskimo palindrome), the world's most northerly settlement, and a flight over the North Pole.
Col Bernt Baichen USAF, a Norwegian-American, old Arctic hand who looked like a smooth-shaven Santa Claus, acted as interpreter when introducing me to the oldest Arctic hand of all. Odaq, who said his name meant "the seal lying on the ice", did not know when he was born, but proudly showed us a framed dim photograph of himself and Commander Robert E. Peary USN, in furs, resembling two polar bears, at the Pole on April 6th, 1909 - allegedly at the Pole.
As Fergus Fleming's excellent book relates in exhaustive detail, there was some doubt at the time, and doubt remains to this day, that Peary actually got quite as far as he claimed. However, authorities world-wide have given him the benefit of the doubt; the navy eventually promoted him to Rear-Admiral, backdated to 1909. The King of Denmark, awarded Odaq a Distinguished Service Medal with a red and white ribbon, and a pension of $l5O a year, which was matched by the Explorers Club of New York.
Generations of explorers suffered agonies, some of them fatal, in attempts to reach the North Pole. The air force took the modern junketeers in a Skymaster from Thule to the Pole in a couple of hours. There is nothing to see there, except a blank, off-white frozen wilderness.
Perhaps the greatest available excitement is that where the meridians all converge at a point it is possible to fly around the world in a few minutes. On the surface, you could circumnavigate the globe almost instantaneously. Then, in whichever direction you walked away from it, you would be sure to head south.
"The Pole," Fleming writes, "comprised an absence of all those goals towards which explorers traditionally strode. Nothing awaited its conquerors save an empty grail of solar readings." I can vouch for the fact that shooting the sun with a sextant is not one of life's great thrills. The polar mystique is baffling unless one is able to understand that any place can be alluring as long as it is very, very difficult to get to. Once it is easy, the journey can seem purposeless, except to score points in what Stephen Potter called the lifemanship of travellers' tales.
By the time the North Pole was reached, Fleming points out, "the Pole as a geographical entity had long ceased to be important. In some ways it did not need to be discovered, for its navigational status was already an accepted fact, its location never in doubt." The Pole is little more than a cartographical abstraction. He aptly quotes a stanza from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark:
What's the good of Mercator's North Pole and Equators,
Zones and Meridian Lines?
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
They are merely conventional signs!
In the 1820s, John Cleve Symmes expounded the notion that there was a hole at the top of the world and a subterranean civilization. His son Americus endorsed the theory with a book, Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open at the Poles.
In 1885, the Rev William F. Warren, the president of Boston University, published Paradise Found, stating that the hole at the North Pole provided access to the Garden of Eden, and that people were attracted to it because "mankind would ever have looked back on it as an abode of unearthly and preternatural effulgence, a home fit for the occupance of gods and holy immortals."
Fleming tells the whole preposterous story of the men who struggled obsessively north to ultima Thule from 1845, when Sir John Franklin RN commanded two ships in search of a North-West Passage, and was never heard of again.
Foolhardy international heroes journeyed northwards from America, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Norway, Italy and England. They kept spending fortunes and lives, trying to reach the Pole even after it was well known that it was only frozen sea. They travelled by ship, kayak and dog-sled, in sea-planes and suspended from balloons, on snow-shoes, on skis and on foot. Of all those pioneers, according to Fleming, "Peary was undoubtedly the most driven, possibly the most successful, and probably the most unpleasant man in the annals of polar exploration."
Ninety Degrees North justifies every one of these assessments beyond reasonable question.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic