Antarctica The Conquest of the South Pole. By J. Gordon
Hayet. (Thornton Butterworth. 18s.) AFTER one's first excited admiration of the feats of heroism and endurance performed in the Antarctic has given place to acceptance of the Homeric facts, one can be induced to note that since the end of the War an important change -has taken place in these ventures. The " Heroic Age," the age of Scott, Shackleton, Mawson and Amundsen, suffering great 'hardship and facing great peril, the age of private enterprise in short, has been succeeded by the 'mechanical age. Man no longer struggles with muscle and lung unaided against the peculiar terrors of the only uninhabited continent : the aeroplane, the motor sledge, electricity, the wireless come to help him. -And although feats of heroism will certainly still be heard of (for machines break down at times), 'organization, scientific and mechanical resource and intelligence become the dominating - factors. Exploration is becoming, in a- sense, rationalized ; and disaster if it occurs will be primarily error and incidentally tragedy. As Professor Hugh Robert Mill remarks in his introduction to this popular summary of the Antarctic expeditions undertaken between 1906 and 1981; referring to disasters of the past":
" This need not be so in the future. Such sufferings and disasters are not a necessary condition of polar travel. -Even the most severe cold cannot harm a healthy well-fed man in. the prime of life. . . . The explanation of the Antarctic presents itself to me as a challenge to human intelligence rather than to physical strength."
The more one reflects on this judgement the less satisfactory the term Heroic " Age seems as a description of the pre- War days. " Romantic " is perhaps the closer wOrd. The lonely hero can be provided by the contemporary expedition, us was proved in the case of the efficient Greenland expedition which gave us the five months' solitude of Mr. Courtauld. Mechanized exploration does not lack its signal figures. And one common factor unites with its misery both kinds of venture—the initial nervous worry of finance. The prede- cessors of Scott and Shaeldeton—as is pointed out in this book—were employees working to orders ; they had little freedom, but they knew where they were. Their successors were free—free to find funds where they could. And their successors faced with the much greater costs of mechanical equipment have had once more to enter into bondage, and this time to a master exceedingly dangerous to science and exploration—publicity. These matters are touched upon in this . comprehensive yet succinct narrative. The conquest of the Pole itself has ceased to be an allurement. As Admiral Byrd, the most luxuriously equipped, of the moderns, said after he had flown easily over the empty, markless place where ten earlier explorers had camped : " One gets there, and that is all there is for the telling. It is the effort to get there that counts." The effort has now been turned in other directions to the surveying and discovery of the coast, the tracing of mountain ranges, the slow eating away at the white mystery which has virtually to be rediscovered every time. One can well under- stand Shaekleton's emotion on his last voyage, when he saw again the scene of a lifetime's labours still impassive and unconquered.
It would be invidious to single out any particular journey in such a country, but one must echo the author's praise of the work of Sir Douglas Mawson, whom he describes as the most consistently successful Antarctic explorer and one who has known the " Heroic " and the mechanical period. One hopes that Mr. Gordon Hayes will Continue the work he began in his monumental' Antarctica, for one misses in this otherwise engrossing book the critical matter which made Antarctica
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