Essay

On November 18, 1918, World War I ended. While the Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1920 was gripping the world, with the battlefields quiet, the polar regions once again enraptured the more privileged denizens of the West. Before the war had broken out, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Arctic and Antarctica had faced an onslaught of European and American expeditions. This period, the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration (Bloom 1993; Blum 2019; D’Arcy Wood 2020), lasted until shortly after the war. Expeditions were comprised almost exclusively of men, who hailed from countries such as Norway, the United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States. They explored the polar regions without the use of industrial or mechanical technologies – hence their so-called “heroism”. Their exploits, however, were often carried out with the little-recognized assistance of Indigenous People, their knowledge systems, and their technologies. It was during this heady period of polar exploration that the South Pole was finally reached in 1912 by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team. At the other end of the planet, American Robert Peary and his companion, Black explorer Matthew Henson, claimed to be the first to reach the North Pole in 1909. In the 1980s, however, scholars began casting doubt on the alleged accomplishment (Schweikart 1986), which remains to this day.

In many ways, polar expeditions were scripted stunts rather than genuine undertakings. The full-page newspaper article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch dated February 16th, 1919, includes photos from other polar expeditions, such as two ships caught in ice – a problem “the Aeroplan entirely overcomes.” The bombast and heavy documentation of settler-colonial exploits contrasted with the practices of Arctic Indigenous Peoples. Their criss-crossings of the region’s frozen rivers and seas and snowy landscapes across millennia have left few permanent physical marks, even as their journeys have been passed on across generations through oral histories.  

In 1919, Peary’s claim was still believed, and other polar firsts remained unaccomplished. Rather than try to repeat his alleged feat of going overland by sled and foot to the top of the Earth, European and American polar explorers sought other means of achieving the North Pole. This extreme point was likely never even reached by Arctic Indigenous Peoples given its distance from the nearest known places of human activity and habitation.

As the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration came to a close, its twilight overlapped with the dawn of the Golden Age of Aviation. The growing use of airplanes, especially for civilian travel, meant that the flying machines offered an exciting and captivating means of boreal travel. Rather than go by foot to the North Pole, explorers took to soaring through the air.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch article captures the polar spirit aloft. The article, headlined “An Aeroplane Race to the North Pole,” explains how one American explorer, Captain Robert Bartlett, and one British explorer, Captain William Frederick Salisbury Jones, “Plan to Re-conquer from the Air for Science the Long Sought for and Only Just Touched ‘Farthest North’”. The twinned private expeditions, which the Aero Club of America and the British Northern Exploration Company intended to fund, respectively, were reported as an “air voyage to the pole” that was turning into “a race of international interest, with a distinct sporting aspect and with special appeal to the national pride of the two respective countries.”

Salisbury Jones, who intended to fly from Svalbard (then Spitzbergen) to the North Pole, planned to employ a “big Handley-Page type of machine for the flight.” This type of British airplane had just carried out the first airborne trip from England to India in January 1919 in a voyage that intertwined imperial and industrial power. At the time, such long flights could not be made in one go and required frequent fuel stops. In the absence of British imperial outposts (though the English had at one point claimed Svalbard in the early sixteenth century (Arlov 2005)), Salisbury Jones planned to place fuel stations on the ice en route, particularly as “there are less than two hundred miles of open water between Spitzbergen and the ice pack which surrounds the Pole.” Salisbury Jones also had a personal connection to the archipelago, as he was managing director of the Northern Exploration Company (Kruse 2013), a British mining company that tried to mine coal-rich Spitzbergen, whose initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange he had overseen (Kruse 2022).

Across the Atlantic in northern Canada, Captain Bartlett had a similar length of journey to make. He was familiar with the Arctic, having served as Peary’s skipper for his North Pole expedition. This time on his voyage towards 90°N, Bartlett first intended to travel by boat, with a large seaplane on board one vessel and smaller scouting planes aboard the expedition’s smaller vessels. His first stop was to be the now-abandoned village of Etah, in northern Greenland, once the world’s most northerly settled locale at 78° 18′ 50″ N – roughly the same latitude as Spitzbergen. From Etah, Bartlett would fly 350 miles to Cape Columbia, at the top of Ellesmere Island in present-day Nunavut, Canada, before flying another 490 miles in a “large flying boat” to the North Pole.

One major difference between the American and British expeditions is that while Jones planned to turn back from the North Pole to Spitzbergen, Bartlett intended to carry on to Cape Chelyuskin on the Siberian coast in the short-lived Russian Republic. Cape Chelyuskin lay just south of the Severnaya Zemlaya (“Northern Land”) archipelago, which still had yet to be fully mapped. Bartlett is quoted in the article as saying, “We want to map out that territory from the Arctic map which is marked ‘unexplored.’…There is a tremendous amount of territory in this region of which we know little except what we hear of from whalers and a great vast expanse of which we know nothing at all. With machines and money and men we can remain in this region and find out just what is there.”

Bartlett’s attitude encapsulates the view that many settlers, colonists, and explorers from Europe and North America held towards the polar regions in the twentieth century. They saw the Arctic and Antarctica as lands that needed to be surveyed and mapped, whether from the ground or air, so that they could be tamed, conquered, and civilized. One scientific volume published in 1928 on Greenland calls the island a “perfect terra incognita” (Vahl et al. 1928), or unknown land. Little attention was given to the fact that people lived in the Arctic and knew it deeply. Were it not for the Greenlandic settlement at Etah, it is unlikely that Bartlett and the Aero Club of America could have even planned an expedition, as their machines, mighty as they were, still needed to refuel. (While Jones relied on Spitzbergen as a jumping-off point, the archipelago was inhabited by European settlers rather than Indigenous populations.)

For all the media fanfare surrounding Bartlett and Salisbury Jones’ airplane race to the North Pole, neither explorer ever seems to have taken off. Newspaper coverage of the planned expeditions ceased following the spate of articles like this one and several others published in early 1919.  Years later, Bartlett would venture to the Arctic on other voyages, though Salisbury Jones’ northern pursuits are less well-documented.

In the annals of Western polar exploration, it is not the destination nor even the journey, but the build-up. Anticipation was key to drumming up capital to fuel polar exploration, which played an important role in nation-building and imperial imaginaries. Whether in the sky, on the ground, or at sea, anticipatory narratives conveyed to the public that the ever-elusive Arctic was a blank spot on the map that would soon be filled in – absenting the region of the people who have lived there and crossed its vast expanses long since before the dawn of aviation.