^M00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:03 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:17 >> Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Library of Congress and a terrific opportunity to learn more about Finding the Antipodes: The Cartographic History of Polar Exploration from 1500 to the Present Day. I'm Helena Zinkham, here on behalf of the Librarian of Congress because I'm director for all collections and services at the Library. Reading your program, I found myself very excited because the topics are both historical and completely contemporary. Correct? And so what great conversations you're going to be having, not just in listening to your speakers, but in talking amongst yourselves during the course of the symposium. But we should begin with an important thank you. the program today is sponsored by the Library's Philip Lee Phillips Society, and I wondered if some of the members are here today. Would you mind raising your hand if you're part of the friends' group? Alright, so that's a big thank you, heartfelt, for your long, stalwart support of our cartographic collections. For both our longtime supporters and those of you who are coming to the Library for the first time today, I'd like to mention just a few fun facts before the serious business of the day begins, and you know by now, right, fun facts is a code word for statistics, or words that end in 'st' - best, most, oldest. Library of Congress, founded in 1800, we're the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. A proud heritage. We also believe that we're the largest library in the world because we have more than 158 million items in our collections and that's 470 different languages. So we're the national library of the United States, but we're truly international in our scope and purview. How many pieces do you think we select to add to the collections every day? 15,000, I'm told. Imagine the mailroom. Overflowing. Now, the Geography and Map Division has created one of our premier collections, the official figure is 5.5 million maps, atlases, databases, and that means it's the world's largest assemblage of cartographic resources. Geography and Map, fondly known as G&M, is also a leader in adding thousands of items to the Library's website every year, so we have a strong commitment, not only to people who can visit Washington to use our resources, but also to online visitors throughout the world. We're constantly acquiring and preserving new information resources and we also strive to make sure that those collections are widely available so that they can create new knowledge, spark new ideas. In other words, keep checking back. There's always lots more new to see. Given your interest in the polar regions, I also wanted to mention the Cold Region Bibliography, a database of almost a quarter of a million citations gathered here at the Library of Congress between 1962 and the year 2000. I understand that there is also a more recent Cold Regions Bibliography project that goes all the way through 2011, but for your historical research interests, a quick Google search will take you to that resource, Cold Regions Bibliography at the Library of Congress. And I think you'll like their log-in; they picked the word 'cold.' Nice and easy. In other words, our longstanding interest in areas such as the Arctic and Antarctic is strong and we're glad for the opportunity to learn more from our speakers and audience over the next day and a half. Thank you for coming together for this special event. ^M00:04:26 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:31 John Hessler is your guide for the morning. He's a specialist in Geographic Information Sciences and also our Kislak Collection curator. Your turn, John. ^M00:04:41 [ Silence ] ^M00:04:47 >> I want to thank you for coming. I'm going to just talk a little bit about sort of the outline of the day and then I'm going to turn it over to the speakers and the introducers. Today, we're going to split the day into basically two parts. The first part is going to be historical and we're going to hear about the historic mapping of the Antarctic and the exploration of the Antarctic and the Arctic. And this afternoon we're going to hear about the modern exploration and the mapping of those areas. We have a fairly exciting program. Most of the people here have spent some time on the ice and so had some actual experience with the cold regions, as Helena termed them. One of the things I want to point out is we have two cartographers - Nicole and Claire, if you want to raise your hands - who are two young cartographers from the University of Minnesota Polar Geospatial Center who will be talking about remote sensing this afternoon. They've brought with them copies of the latest Geospatial Center's map of Antarctica. I'll put it on the back table for any people who want to take a copy. And so with that, I'm going to introduce Dick Pflederer. He's a member of the Phillips Society, part of the Steering Committee. Most of you also know him as probably one of the premier scholars on portolan charts. And Dick will be the guide through the morning program. And thank you all for coming. ^M00:06:15 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:22 >> Well, I'll my welcome, and I want to say I think I really have possibly the easiest job of the morning because I have the opportunity to introduce a very diverse and very well-prepared set of speakers, and I'd like to start by giving you a little introduction of Dr. Robert Clancy. Robert is the Professor Emeritus at the University of New Castle in New South Wales in Australia. He has degrees from the University of Sydney and the Monash University in Melbourne. I believe those were last century. Is that correct, Robert? Yeah. But probably the most impressive thing I learned about Robert while going through his resume is that in 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia for his work in immunology, because his degree is actually in medical research and also cartography. And this Order of Australia is something that's approved by the Queen, the Queen of England, and it's a very significant honor, and I think this speaks to the level that we have representing our speakers in this conference. He's also recently been named a Foundation Fellow at the New South Wales State Library. That's - we like to call it the Mitchell Library. His interest in Antarctica began in his undergraduate days because he was working on a subject I don't exactly what it means. I do know the name of it; it's called immunocompetence in extreme environments. So that was a focus of Robert's early work. since then, he has made 15 trips to the Antarctic continent and I think we can consider him possibly one of the true experts not just in the cartography but also in the, let's say, other aspects of exploration in the Antarctic. Today, he's going to give us a talk with a very interesting name. I have to read it here. It says, quote, From the Place of "No Bears," end quote, To a Global Village or The Histo-cartography of Antarctica. I'm glad I spitted that out, and, Robert, I'll turn this over to you now. Please welcome Dr. Robert Clancy. ^M00:08:37 [ Applause ] ^M00:08:45 >> Good morning, and thank you so much for having me here today. It's always difficult to follow Dick because normally, without even trying, he gives your talk for you. so thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. I've always been exciting coming to Washington and I haven't been here for a number of years, so it's been good to look at the changes. So let's - I thought I'd start by just telling you why I'm interested in Antarctica. On your left, you can see a very brown picture of three people and I'm the one in the middle with the hair. And that was a long time ago - it was 1959 - and it followed when, you might remember that in 1928 Richard Byrd took down a Boy Scout to Antarctica. That Boy Scout was Paul Siple and he became a very important American, particularly in the IGY era in the mid-50s. And Australia, not to be outdone, decided it would take two Boy Scouts down and I was one of them. Very lucky. But the picture actually came from a friend of mine who arrived a year or so ago. He was actually resurrecting his house in Melbourne and the first thing you do is you pull up - you call it lino or linoleum here - and you pull up the linoleum and underneath there are newspapers. And the first thing he saw was this picture of me on a newspaper from 1959. ^M00:10:16 So I really feel this is a historic document and probably of greater interest than some of the maps I'll show you. this began my great interest and, as Dick mentioned, I'm a clinical immunologist, and I got very interested in a story I heard when I first went to Antarctica in 1959 that people who spend a lot of time in Antarctica died from bizarre cancers. There was really a serious story about, no one quite understood why. And so I set up a program for about a decade in the late 90s and early 2000s and where we actually looked at why this could be so, and in fact that when people do go to Antarctica, they actually depress their immune system, both their T-cells and the antibody-producing B-cells quite significantly until they come home. So there may be some sense in that. and this is just the picture of me reenacting the South Magnetic Pole, which it moved a long way from when Wilkes and others were looking for it in the early 40s and now it is over water, and that's our reenactment. Enough about me. Antarctica. Let me first talk about the idea of Antarctica because it's not a new one. This is a map that's taken from a 1503 history book by Fereste [phonetic] and on the left you can see the classic zonal map of the Greeks. The Greeks understood that the world was a sphere, that there was a symmetry. The Greeks likes symmetry and they liked balance, and they understood that at the north end it was cold so it would have to be cold in the south. There was a lot of land in the north, there had to be a lot of land in the south. On the right hand side is the classic so-called TO map, and you can see [inaudible]. Everything's over here. I'm a long way from home. Anyway, on the left, you can see an example of the TO map, sorry, of the zonal map. This is a Macrobius map published in 1540. Macrobius being a Roman geographer who picked up the ideas going back to the early Greeks and he just fills this in a little bit more and you can see this zonal frigidous zone at the south and in the top left, as you can look at it, you see the picture of Europe. It's a rather distorted picture, but then it is 1540. Now, the reason I've got the map on the right is that it's the only printed map that the Australian Antarctic Division still regularly prints. No one prints maps anymore and all the modern cartographers here would know that. But it was here just in case most of your are Arctic people to show you a little bit about the anatomy of Antarctica. ^M00:13:14 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:13:22 Ah, well, you can see if you look beneath America. The whole of Antarctica looks like a great big tadpole and you can see the peninsula, which is really the extension of the Andes, which reemerge as it comes down from under the Drake Passage. And at the bottom you see an indentation which is the Ross Sea, which is essentially below New Zealand and Australia. On the other side, you've got the Weddell Sea. And we'll be actually showing you some maps, some early maps, of the regions, both of the peninsula, the Ross Sea, and particularly some of the areas around that big circumference south of the Australian continent. Of all the various ideas that came out in the Middle Ages, the one that persisted and the one that got most press was that of Ptolemy. Ptolemy, of course, put together his 10,000 coordinates in 150 A.D. As far as we know, he didn't himself draw a map, although it seems to be very unlikely that he didn't. As the ideas reemerged in the east, maps were drawn. They were taken, translated from Greek into Latin, and this is the Ptolemaic map of 1482. And as you can see, there is some difference from the world in Antarctica that we know today. Antarctica is a huge massive continent which is joining the African continent with Asia in encircling an enclosed Indian Ocean. It goes to within 15 degrees of the equator. So Ptolemy understood Antarctica would exist. Maybe it's not something we'd ever get to, but it would exist, must exist, and it was a massive part of the land. And the story of Antarctic discovery and mapping is very much a reduction of this extraordinarily large piece of land. The other idea I wanted to float was that the word 'arctic' is essentially Greek for 'bear' and you can see it circled in the left hand picture here of two maps by Johann Doppelmayr in the 1740s which really reflected the pattern of the skies, in a zodiac sense, as they were known at the time. And the bear of course was above the Arctic and the word 'arctic' comes from the Greek word for the bear. And Antarctic would obviously be the opposite to bear in a place of no bears, which in fact is true, in case there was any misunderstanding, but you'll see that the southern skies were starting to be filled out and understood in a stellar sense by the early 1700s. And Doppelmayr was a German mathematician, very influenced by Helvidi, the great astronomer, and you'll see that the Southern Cross, which I've also encircled here in red in the right hand map of the southern skies, was well-known and well-understood by 1700. The Southern Cross, in fact, was first described in about 1504-1505 by Amerigo, and Corsali, who was a spy for the Phoenicians, expanded on this in a letter, a very famous letter, which was also reproduced by Remuzzi in the 1540s. So the Southern Cross was well-known and well-understood and became a very important siting star in navigation. The third sort of idea and concept that I really wanted to get across in this section was the fact that always Antarctica and the Arctic have been seen as a polar unit, and although we can easily describe differences, they've been seen together even from a cartographic viewpoint in maps which predate. This happens to be Blaugh's map, drawn by Blaugh in the year of his death but not published until later, when the plates were rebought and published. And you can see that the Arctic and the Antarctic were being presented within the same frame. And this was in fact occurring more and more as even though very little or nothing was known of the Antarctic at the time. So the second idea I want to explore a bit is what drove exploration, what drove discovery of Antarctica, and the great drive was really an economic one. If we look at the development and understanding of the geography of the world in the 14-1500s, so right up - and 1600s, it was all determined by the establishment of great trade routes and this is not a time, unfortunately, to talk about that really exciting story of how the trade routes were controlled, developed, except we see that there's this progression from the entrepreneur - the Marco Polo's, if you like - through to the stock companies, the Dutch Indies Company, the English East India Company, through to imperial expansion as the great countries of Europe decided they wanted to extend their power and their influence through an empire system. And they really superimposed themselves on top of the stock companies that had established such extraordinary trade links. And it was this discovery, the discoveries that came as a result of determining these great trade routes really, and the particular countries that controlled those trade routes ended up becoming the great players in Antarctic politics. And the great world events would determine which of the players become more important. We see a sequence when Portugal and Spain, from the Iberian Peninsula, control the sea routes both to the east and to the west, the Americas, and then across the Pacific, the Great Spanish Galleon routes, and the Portuguese, of course, with their great control by establishing forts all along the way from Portugal through to the East Indies. This became replaced by the Dutch, who were very powerful in the 1600s, more powerful than England, and then finally, England, which became particularly powerful after the Seven Years War in the 1750s. As a result of this trade development, there's this progressive reduction in the hypothetical Antarctic because, not that Antarctic was found but it wasn't found, and so therefore it became an empty part of a map. ^M00:20:11 And the other really interesting point that when I was putting this talk together, really something struck me for the first time is that everything that's happening in terms of discovery relevant to Antarctica is saying Antarctica is going to be different to nowhere else. It's going to be a great economic zone. And as more of the sailors, the whalers, and others started circling around Antarctica, it wasn't right up until the middle of the last century that there was this flash of change in thinking it's quite remarkable that most of us sitting here in this audience have a scientific interest in Antarctica. I find that quite extraordinary. So I've just put these maps to show how the Antarctic, the idea of an Antarctic continent changes. In the top left, again, you see the old Ptolemaic map of 1482 and you can see the land-locked Indian Ocean and the massive Antarctic continent. Now, just look at the change that's occurred in really 70 or 80 years, a little over 100. Here in the bottom right, we have [Inaudible] World Map of 1590 and you see two amazing changes. Firstly, there's this massive continent, the Americas, up here. And, again, it is amazing to me just how much definition of that continent occurred in such a short time. Remember, there was no GPS and we didn't have our clever modern cartographers to help us. The second great change is there is a continuous southern ocean and that whole land-locked concept of Ptolemy was gone. And this, of course, reduces Antarctica essentially to a tracing which was defined by four or five points, but defined by the great cartographer, McCarter. And McCarter said, oh, this is Antarctica has got to be. Totally hypothetical points with the exception of perhaps one. This idea of Antarctica dominated cartographic thinking for just under 100 years. So if we now look at the second, when Holland and the Dutch took over from the Iberian Peninsula countries, particularly in the East Indies, and established rapid transit routes to the East Indies by sailing south, catching the [Inaudible], and missing - poor old Australia; we got discovered by accident and no one was really interesting in us, but they defined us. Two-thirds of our borders very quickly, by Tasman and many others, mainly by accident because they missed turning up north and running into the west coast of Australia. And the north part was discovered also by accident because they were looking for a quick route through from Batavia to Peru. And then Tasman came and joined the dots and discovered that south part of Tasmania. But what they didn't discover was an Antarctic continent. Tasman circumnavigated Australia, so he knew that was a southern land, but nothing was seen of Antarctica. And so the Dutch maps start appearing without any land, without any Antarctic on them. The 1700s were a different political period. England was ruling the roost. It had taken over. It'd won the Seven Year War, if anybody'd won it, which was probably the first World War. It extended form borders outside of Europe, involve the Dutch and the English and everyone else fighting everybody. And this is a map by Hogg [phonetic] just two years after Cook did his incredible circumnavigation of Antarctica, enclosing any Antarctic continent into, within the Antarctic circle. And in fact Cook believed there would be an Antarctic continent, although he never saw it. There is great controversy over exactly what Cook said, but he actually said he thought there was, but he said - it was the only time I'd ever seen Cook being a little arrogant. He said, look, if I can't see it, no one else will, either. And why don't I demonstrate for you - look at the little arrows that I've put in this particular map. You can see these three occasions that Cook actually went south of the Antarctic circle. Now, many people here been to Antarctica? If you've been a tourist, then the chances are you haven't been beneath the Antarctic Circle. So Cook had rotten luck that he just happened to go south beneath the Antarctic circle, where there was no Antarctica popping up. You know, I have to say I've been to Antarctica six times before I actually went beneath the Antarctic circle, so Cook had really bad luck. What a remarkable trip, though. Now, we're talking about the economic drivers here and when Cook came up through the Scotia Arch, these islands south of South America, he actually saw huge numbers of seals. Seals were a great economic target. The sealers had been coming down the coast of South America. They'd wiped out the seal populations. And so a new sealing ground was very important, and so we found that both the American, the English, Norwegian, sealers from all around the world were coming into the south. And I just picked out one here, John Visco, who worked for a company called the Enderby Brothers. It was an English company that started in whaling and went into sealing and they, Enderby, instructed his sealing captains to discover land as well as bring back seals for profit. And Visco, an amazing trip in 1833, circumnavigated - it was the third circumnavigation of Antarctica. We'll come to the second, which was [inaudible] in a minute. But John Visco was just a sealing captain who was doing what he was told. And you'll notice, again, about 1:00, if you look at the map, there's an area which is Enderby Land, which is, again, south of Australia. And it's a very important discovery because it's a discovery of part of Antarctica which really set the western boundary for, from our point of view in Australia, the area of claim that we would make at a later time. And you can see Australia in, just the bottom part of Australia, in the bottom right. And it's an extraordinary trip. Nearly everyone on the ship died. He lost one of his two ships. They all got scurvy - everyone got scurvy in those days, even though they were supposed to know how to treat it - and I think there was only two men standing when it staggered back into Hobart. The other economic target was whales, and what I've done here - on the right hand side, there is a map that is actually a map from the, showing the Dundee Whalers in 1894. There were three great groups of coordinated whaling companies looking for whaling grounds in Antarctica in the early 1890s, and this one was one of three. It was the Scottish group, the Dundee Whalers, and a chuck [phonetic] called Murdoch wrote a book which included this particular map, and he was a bit of a scallywag and he wrote some quite humorous stories about his trip. But the important part about the trip was it included a young doctor called Bruce and Bruce was to become a great advocate of Scottish interest in Antarctica, and he and Murdoch became quite good friends. But this just shows you the route down through the Atlantic to the area of the South Shetland Islands in the peninsular area of Antarctica. Now, on the left-hand side, there's a map by Carl Larsen. Now, although it's 1924, in fact it's the second-last year of Larsen's life. I put this here because Larsen was the second of the great groups of people looking for whaling back in the early 1890s, and Larsen was the person who really established the whaling industry in pretty much the world because he established factory ships, he established the base on South Georgia, and when he - this is a map showing him moving to the Ross Sea and you can see that he's based on the bottom right in the Bay of Whales, which is the end of the Ross Ice Shelf and sending out catchers looking for whales and looking for a safe harbor, which he didn't find. And in fact he died from a heart attack on his last trip, which was the following year. But it was the only map that I could actually find actually done by Larsen because Larsen was one of those people who was only famous in retrospect. He didn't write very much and so to be famous you've got to write things. But he was an amazing person. The third of the whalers was a chuck called Bull, who worked for Foyn, who was the person who developed the powerful gun for shooting whales. And so there were these three foraging groups looking for establishing a whaling industry in Antarctica. Thirdly, we want to look at the political powers. After 1800, nationalism and imperial designs became the driving factor in world exploration. England was dominant, as I mentioned, after the Seven Year War. There were a series of scientific meetings in England and Germany defining the interests of the great nations of Europe in looking at Antarctica. Antarctica had become the last great, if you like, area for claiming territory and exploiting economically. And Antarctic was very much on track for the usual economic exploitation outcome. ^M00:30:08 This is a map of Thaddeus Bellingshausen's trip in 1921. He was probably the first person to see Antarctica. It's a great area of controversy; I don't think it really matters very much. But he was a very accurate navigator. He'd been with - he'd been with the earlier trip by the Russians trying to establish direct access to their eastern seaports and this was an attempt to compete with the other European powers for interest in the southern oceans. It's a funny map with lots of little lines, but basically illustrates his circumnavigation. It's from the first English translation of Bellingshausen's work in the early 1940s because no one really knew much about Bellingshausen. He only wrote in Russian, it wasn't well-popularized, and even the Russians themselves didn't take a lot of notice of this, although they do now. The two great drivers from Europe for more exploration were Normyer [phonetic] in Germany and the English, which we'll come to. This is, again, a map by Normyer in 1872 with one of his first presentations claiming that we, Germany must take a much more serious interest in Antarctica. And Clements Markham was the English equivalent, and this is from one of the Royal Society presentations in 1893 using a map actually from the Challenger Expedition, which was the beginning of oceanography and we'll see again a map of that in a minute. And it was published and presented by John Murray, who was on the Challenger Expedition, and he actually could see the blue area around Antarctica and he claimed that the draggings from the surface, from the bottom of the sea, were those he's expect from a continent. And so this was one of the first pieces of evidence that Antarctica actually existed as a continent. This, of course, are - these great scientific meetings initiated the heroic age, and I just don't have time to take much about that, but this is the I-map by Amundsen, who was the winner of the first to the South Pole. And you can see this was a very orchestrated direct attack on Antarctica. There was no mucking around. He was going to go to the South Pole, come back, leaving poor Scott to linger. And you can see on the right hand side, quite remarkably, the trip taken by Shackleton in about 1906, I think it was, where he very nearly got to the South Pole and he'd shown his way up over the Bismarck Glacier. But the map of Amundsen goes, again, from the Ross Sea on the left hand side from the Bay of Whales. It's an absolute direct trip straight there and straight back and home. Another one of my great favorites in this era was Douglas Morrison. Douglas Morrison was an Australian who pushed very much for the discoveries of Australian interest in Antarctica. And this is actually from his 1911, not 1932, expedition and it goes from Commonwealth Bay in the top left and two lines that actually shows the crossing of two glaciers. The glaciers are named after this two colleagues that died on that trip, Mertz - there's the Mertz Glacier - and his other colleague. And he struggled back and, of course, most of you know as he got back he saw the ship disappearing and he had to wait another year for the ship to come back. It's one of the great survival stories of the Antarctic. It's becoming a very political period now and this is really the first proper political map of Antarctica. Morrison pushed very heavily for an Australian interest in claiming parts of Antarctica. England had made claims early in the 1900s and France then in 1924 and that created a lot angst and interest because the French area of Adelie Land is that narrow segment you can see in the top right hand part of Antarctica. And that led to Morrison again running two sequential trips to Antarctica in 1929 and then 1930, where he penned out that area that's beneath Australia as a British Australian claim and really established a claim system that was very active at that time. This map was a comprehensive map put together by a chuck called Baylis [phonetic] for the Department of External Affairs in Australia in 1939. It was the most comprehensive map that was available at the time. Richard Byrd [phonetic], of course, began an interest that really began with Wilkes's American interest in Antarctica. And this is from the National Geographic magazine, which really followed Byrd very closely, and Byrd was a great organizer. And the various colors you can see his first trip in 1928, where he flew the first polar trip over, the first airplane to cross the South Pole. His second trip, where he established a meteorological station and actually stayed in it on his own over a winter period for some months, which was - he nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning. And then of course the other of his five great trips, which I'll mention in a minute. Byrd was really a great hero of Antarctica and brought a different level of mechanization and organization to Antarctic travel. We often forget the Germans. The Germans had a big interest going back to Normyer, back in the 1800s, and Drygalski and Filchner, various - there were two great German expeditions in the early 1900s. And this is a map, a remarkable map - it's quite inaccurate, but it's quite remarkable - by Alfred Richter in 1938. The German Reich had sent him down to challenge the claims of Norway and Norwegians claimed the land for themselves a week before he actually got down there. It's a great story. And this is inland. They went about 600 miles inland, firing aluminum darts with Swastikas on them, defining their area of territory. And this is the Humboldt Ranges. It looks great, but I'm told by those who know the better that it's an incredibly inaccurate map, again because they didn't have land-based reference points. And of course Operation High Jump was when America, in the post-war period, really put enormous amount of muscle into discovering Antarctica. What it showed was what can be done. There were five, just under 5,000 men in this huge effort with aircraft carriers and their whole aim was to map as much of Antarctica as possible and they did all but I think it was 60-70% of the coastal area was defined. And this is a map just illustrating what they were aiming to do and you can see their main base is Byrd's old base, Little America, in the Ross Sea at the end of the Ross Ice Shelf. And the planned explorations were something like 17,000 photographs were done using new technologies following post-War II and these photographs, as far as I know, most of them have never been looked at, but they were done with an angular projection so they could be translated into maps. And Operation High Jump was followed the following year with Operation Windmill because they suddenly realized, like the Germans, they didn't have land bases to actually accurately place what they were mapping and they were able to get nine land bases over 1,000 miles of coastline the following year. And in both cases this was the introduction of helicopters into Antarctica. The other great driver was science and geomagnetism was the main science that interested people in the 1700 and 1800s because this was what determined compass deviation and compass deviation would mean if you followed the compass you'd miss where you wanted to go by sometimes hundreds of kilometers. And another very interesting area which relates to maps particularly is the whole concept of plate tectonics. Now, this is essentially a variation of Wegener's map in around 1912-1914 of Antarctica showing the Gondwana land combination of continents. And the various colors join up where fossils had been found of a similar elk. I've added in a black line because I think one of the most interesting fossils that Wegener didn't know about were the perching birds, which constitute 80% of all birds, and the earliest perching bird fossils are actually in Antarctica followed by Australia and then around the rest of the world. ^M00:40:05 And so this fossil record became very important, but what was not known by Wegener and only recently recognized is that Autilius in 1595 had actually written, when he looked at his own world map, that the vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves in his thesaurus of 1595. And so the idea of plate tectonics I put to you was in fact an idea that came from a very early map, the map itself being published in 1570 by Autilius, a remarkable geographer. He could actually see the conformity of and the coming together, if you like, of the American continent with Asia and Africa. Edmond Halley really stimulated the interest in geomagnetism by setting up isolines, and this is from his original map actually of 1699 that was republished by various people, such as Orton's [phonetic]. I'm moving fairly quickly because I'm just suddenly aware of the time. This - there was a series of explorers in the 1840s. Dumont d'Urville was the first. Where the French were very interested in the area of geomagnetism and this is Dumont d'Urville's map. You can see Tasmania at the top where he left and the various crosses beneath are where different people have projected where the South Magnetic Pole would be and, of course, he hit land at Terre Adelie, named after his wife, and realized he was not able to actually get to the South Magnetic Pole, but projected where it would be and the various thoughts where people said this is where it's going to be, of course, not realizing that it was land. This is a great map. It's from Wilkes' U.S. exploring expedition of 1838 and I've just chosen one which has a whole lot of, it looks like a whole lot of dirty marks, but these were the areas that Wilkes thought were the big whaling areas that people should be exploring. And you can see again this segment of 1,000 miles south of Australia, right near the bottom, which was the area of Antarctica that we call Wilkes Land and where it was actually first discovered by Wilkes. A truly remarkable man; a truly remarkable set of discoveries. And Ross, of course, is probably best known, best organized, and certainly most scientific. This is the Ross Sea. This is Ross's crisscrossing around the south of the Ross Sea. On the right hand side, you can see Victoria Land and Victoria Land and down the bottom, Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, which of course became the area that the British used for their base camp for Sheridan and Scott later. And over on the left you see across - the ice shelf's going across the top of this map and on the left is the Bay of Whales, which became the base for Amundsen and then Byrd and a number of other explorers. The South Magnetic Pole finally was found by three people on Shackleton's party. This is Douglas Mawson on the right and on the left Mackay and Evans, the Australian geologist, in the middle. And you can see the map site is interesting there. They're becoming more accurate, but, again, on the Ross Sea on the right and you can see the exploratory party went up from their bass in the Murdoch Sound, at the end of the ice shelf on the bottom, and then went inland halfway up, a trip that was just as fraught with danger and difficulty as that of Shackleton which you saw on that previous map by Amundsen. It is quite interesting. Mawson, through all his life, was concerned that he didn't quite get there and he was always talking about, well, you know, I think I got there, but I'm not sure because they were using vertical dip as the only way of knowing where they were. Oceanography became the second driving science and nothing was more important than the Challenger Expedition. John Murray was one of the naturalists on that and I showed you his map of the dredgings showing pieces of rock that came from melting icebergs. They also did these incredible studies. They looked at and they showed an isodensity throughout the circumpolar current without, I think, appreciating the importance of showing a column of water with the same density, same saline concentration, moving, which was what determines the amount and the depth of a current. And they've actually - I've actually gone back and looked and the data is all in his papers. They also talked about floating banks of algae and were very early in pushing the idea of food chains and, of course, confirmed the low pressure zones and the idea around the Antarctic continent and the idea that there was perhaps a polar anticyclone and that that would determine winds coming off the Antarctica before they understood the nature of density determining winds. And, of course, it projected the importance to understand warm water and the sea ice in connection with polar land from the dredgings that I mentioned. So this was a very, very important expedition and this is the map from that expedition. And, again, if you look to the left of Australia, you'll see a dip down beneath the Antarctic circle on one occasion and those are the dots you'll see on where he took his samples of water at different depths, showing that the density didn't change, which is very different to the changing density of the shallow currents in the equatorial regions. International Geophysical Year was such an event. It was - this is a map from the Illustrated London News indicating what was planned and indicating the countries, the bases, that were involved in this extraordinary event that occurred in '57-'58. It was thought of and conceived of in the home of, I understand, Van Allen with a group of physicists. What made this such an important period was that science became the primary catalyst rather than economy for the first time. They picked - they planned this for the peak site of the cycle. It involved 67 countries with 12 bases and 11 different earth sciences were studied. There was a major expansion of bases for this. And what I think is very important is that it occurred - the planning period occurred at the time of Stalin's death. It's certainly been commented upon that this was perhaps the beginning of a thaw. Obviously, there was still quite a Cold War that existed, but it was the beginning of a thaw because suddenly scientists were coming together from around the world. Both America and the United States and Russia launched their first satellites and the first transantarctic expedition run by folks with New Zealand and England occurred at this particular time. So it was a time of extraordinary activity and extraordinary science. The outcomes of the International Geophysical Year very briefly were that the Van Allen Belt was discovered, that area of concentrated charges particles which concentrates around the poles. The mid-ocean ridges were identified at a time when people were starting to think of tectonic plates. And the hard solid crepuscular radiation, which can be quite dangerous in space travel, was identified for the first time. I think of equal importance was the idea of a world data system, which we'll hear more about. The moldable data streams, remote sensing, interdisciplinary studies - something we take for granted today - was quite new at the time. And thirdly, of course, the Antarctic Treaty followed, and this was followed by further the Madrid Protocol and environmental protection and the idea of a global village evolved. And so what we have today, I think, is a remarkable outcome that was not predicted. Who could've predicted it? Mawson in the '40s and '50s was promoting to the Australian government that we really must have a foothold because of the economic advantages of exploring Antarctica. And so I love using this Metis flag, which was the flag used when the Indian groups combined with ex-pats to fight the Hudson Bay Company in Canada. This idea of a village coming together and a great communication and communique between the peoples of the world. Thank you very much. ^M00:49:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:16 >> Thank you very much. And I think what we're going to do is hear the next two talks and then have our Q&A after Chet's finished. Thank you, Robert. Well, we're going to now move 180 degrees north, from the South Pole to the North Pole. Our speaker is Michael Robinson, Professor of History at the University of Hartford. Michael holds degrees from Boston College and also University of Wisconsin. Got a long list of publications, but I want to highlight two books, one that I think is pertinent to our study today is called The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture. That's been out for a few years, but the second one is coming out, the next one, is coming out in the fall of this year. It's called The Lost White Tribe, and at first I thought that might be polar bears, but, no, it refers to the continent of Africa. Michael also has 11 articles and over 20 conference papers that I have been able to find, and many of these are on polar exploration. He's spoken at a number of prestigious institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Explorers Club, the British Library, and also at NASA. I was also taken by the fascinating title of his blog. It's titled Time to Eat the Dogs. And today Michael's subject is called The Rise of "Arctic Fever" in America. Please welcome Professor Michael Robinson. ^M00:50:55 [ Applause ] ^M00:51:02 >> Thank you all for coming. It's really a terrific pleasure to be back at the Library of Congress. I was - back in the year 2000, I was here as a Doctoral student working at the Smithsonian and my advisor at the Smithsonian, Pam Hanson, was really very - she was very encouraging of me going to the different places where they would have material on the Arctic and she said you really have to go to the Library of Congress. And I spent a number of months here working actually right downstairs in the Manuscript Collection. So for me it's a terrific pleasure to be back. I have very, very fond, fond memories. I really enjoyed listening to Robert's talk and, by the way, thank you to the folks, the Phillips Map Society for that great introduction as well as John and Helena as well. But I found it really interesting listening to Robert's talk because I can see the ways that the Arctic and the Antarctic kind of - they're not exactly the same, but they kind of echo each other in certain ways and so I hope that in my talk today you'll see some of those echoes. I'm actually going to try and follow a similar approach in the sense of looking at the Arctic historically but also paying attention to particular themes, why does the Arctic become so important, particularly in American culture in the 19th Century. I call the talk The Rise of "Arctic Fever" in America. With historians, we're always - we like finding nice names for various eras, you know, historical eras and Arctic Fever is the kind of name that we would attach to the 19th Century, but in fact they attached it to themselves, so that's why I like it. Arctic Fever was a term that was used by many people, so, for example, Robert Peary, the man who was purported at least to discover the North Pole, said "the Northern bacilli were in my system, the Arctic Fever in my veins, never to be eradicated." An earlier explorer, George Washington DeLong - actually he didn't say this of himself, but his wife in writing a eulogy of him, said "the polar virus was in his blood and would not let him rest." And, finally, it was not a condition that was unique to explorers; it actually attached itself to American culture as a whole. McClure's magazine wrote in 1893 that "Arctic enthusiasm is an intermittent fever, returning in almost epidemic form after intervals of normal indifference." Arctic Fever is an interesting thing. It's a kind of colorful metaphor. No one actually thought anyone got sick up in the Arctic. It's a metaphor that has, I think, some interesting meanings behind it. one of the things that when explorers would talk about an Arctic Fever, they meant it in a sense that when they went to the Arctic, the experience changed them so profoundly that they couldn't leave it behind. It became kind of imprinted within them. It became a kind of obsession. And so explorers and other people attached it to a kind of emotional state that people went through as they were in the Arctic. And I think that's true. I mean, as many of you have been to the Arctic or to the Antarctic and probably have found themselves touched by that experience. I certainly have, both in the Russian Arctic and in the North American Arctic. It's a profound experience. But I think that Arctic Fever actually had a number of different causes and I'd like to talk about some of those other causes today as well because it's no coincidence that Arctic Fever attached itself to Americans in the 19th Century. There were very specific political, scientific, economic reasons for this outbreak of the Arctic bacillus when it occurred. So that's what I want to talk about today. Just to give you a sense of what the Arctic meant to Americans in the 19th Century, it was spectacularly interesting and exciting to Americans really starting from about the 1820s and reaching its peak in 1909 with the, again, the so-called discovery of the North Pole. Really, I think the event that made it in 1909 so interesting was that there was a dispute about who actually discovered the North Pole, but - so you have all kinds of American Arcticana, as I like to call it, from Arctic toothpaste to what you're looking at on the right hand side here is sheet music called The Polar Bear Polka. And in fact, if anyone here is interesting in not just maps, but in this kind of ephemera of the Arctic, there's all kinds of fantastic collections at the Museum of American History in the Smithsonian. In fact, for the kind of radius of 1 mile around this exact location has incredible collections, both at National Archives, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian. Air and Space, as well. So but Arctic stuff was everywhere and even to the kind of distribution of what were called traveling dioramas. So, for example, when a very famous explorer, Elisha Kane, died in 1858, he was kind of the Neil Armstrong really of the 19th Century. There was a diorama that was painted - dioramas were these massive canvases that were painted as a scroll so that you would sit in a room and, you know, before motion pictures, this thing would actually scroll by you, showing you a story of what had happened to Kane up in the Arctic. Kane's life was so interesting to people, where he explored in the Arctic, that there were three panoramas traveling around the United States simultaneously competing with each other. And even at the Columbian Exposition, which was put forward in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, you had stuffed explorers, or at least a diorama of the Greely Expedition. I bet the dogs are actually stuffed. That was showing in Chicago. But I want to - I think the place to start in talking about Arctic Fever is not in the kind of personal experience with the Arctic. I think we need to actually talk about geopolitics because without the kind of national interest in the Arctic, none of this other stuff would've happened. And the geopolitical story of the Arctic begins really between the United States and Great Britain. Now, this isn't to say, by the way, that there aren't other players in Arctic exploration. In fact, the countries of Scandinavia with Fridtjof Nansen and the Russians, a number of different players were in the Arctic. But from the perspective of the United States, the most important geopolitical player or rival was Great Britain. The United States had a very fraught relationship with Great Britain in the 19th Century. It had fought two wars against Britain, you know, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. At the same time, the United States being, at least on the east coast, a number of people were of British descent. And so as a result there was a kind of cultural longing to be like Britain, so there's both a - it was almost a kind of younger brother syndrome, where there was both a sense of wanting to one-up Britain but also being very, very eager for British approval, particularly cultural approval, which is sometimes called the Great Race between the United States or, in this case, Uncle Sam and John Bull. And you see that reflect itself in the field of exploration really more than any other. In the early 1800s, the British began exploring the Arctic in earnest. This itself is a really interesting phenomenon that we could spend, you know, 45 minutes talking about, but in short what had happened was the British had created an enormous navy in the early 1800s and they used it effectively to defeat Napoleon in the first decade of the 19th Century. By 1815, the war against Napoleon was over and the British found themselves with this enormous navy and nothing to do with it, so they tried to downsize it as quickly as they could, but there was still thousands of British seamen as well as British naval ships with nothing to do. ^M01:00:08 And John Barrow, the Second Secretary of the Admiralty, said "instead of fighting French ships at the line, let's fight them against the Arctic." They resurrected really an ancient search for the Northwest Passage, a kind of passage that would lead from Europe to Asia without having to go around the Americas or Africa. So it was this search for the Northwest Passage that was created out of a kind of backlog of ships. Now, what's interesting about this also in the early 1800s is it also signals something that's very interesting, which is an awareness by the British that exploration was more than just merely about commerce or trade, that there was a kind of exploration that could be essentially not practical, and that would really attach to symbolic motives. And when I say this, you say, well, isn't the Northwest Passage economically useful? Yeah, it would be, but the British realized by the 19th Century that the Northwest Passage, even if they'd found it, would've been completely choked with ice and would be commercially useless. So they were beginning to figure out this idea and this came really from the voyages of James Cook, which we heard a little bit about, in the Pacific. This reality that exploration had a kind of symbolic value or soft power, as we might put it today, that was of use to them. So Ross and others go looking for the Northwest Passage. They are - almost all of them are impeded. They can't find it. finally by the 1840s, the great British explorer, John Franklin, is sent into the Arctic to find the Northwest Passage. Franklin was the, you know, I think from the British perspective, Franklin was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of explorers. He was a guy who had already been on two prior expeditions. He had almost been faced with starvation on one of these expeditions. He was known affectionately back in Britain as the man who ate his own boots. He was seen as a tough, weathered, incredibly knowledgeable man who would lead the cream of the British crop in terms of sailors into the Arctic with two of the most technologically sophisticated ships that the British had, HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, which found their maiden voyages in the Antarctic. The Erebus - you probably can't see from this image here, but the Erebus is actually sheathed with iron and if you look just in front of the rudder in this image, you'll see there's a little gap there. That's a propeller so the Erebus in 1845 actually had a steam engine that would be used intermittently if the ship got caught in the ice. It would be used to kind of ram its way out of the ice. So these were excellent ships. I bet you all know what's coming next and you know, my polar buffs in the audience know what's happening to the Franklin expedition, but Franklin leaves with these two ships, 129 men in 1845, no one ever sees him again. The expedition is lost and over the next five years there are a number of attempts to try to find this expedition. The British send relief expeditions. Really by 1849 after, 1848, after three years out, Lady Jane Franklin becomes involved in the search. She starts petitioning other heads of state to look for her husband and the lost expedition. She petitions Zachary Taylor from the United States and also a commercial interest as well, so she talks to Henry Grinnell, who's an American whaling magnate based out of Connecticut, and asked Grinnell would he put some of his ships towards the search for her missing husband. There's this interesting combination where Grinnell says, yes, I'm certainly willing to give my ships towards this search. The American government is saying, well, we're certainly interested in finding your husband, but we don't want to put up the money for it. and you see this kind of private-public collaboration between the United States which basically creates a naval expedition funded by Grinnell to go find Franklin in the Arctic. It would be as if, you know, if Bill Gates, I guess, collaborated with NASA to send an expedition to the moon. Although you never know. But in any event, so this is a very interesting event and so the first American expedition under - I should be careful here. The first naval expedition of exploration in the Arctic was in 1858. It was called the First Grinnell Expedition. I should say that Grinnell - one of the reasons why Grinnell was okay with these ships going into the Arctic was because they were looking for pods of whales in the higher Arctic before this period of time and so there were plenty of American sailors who had some experience in the Arctic because there were commercial interests there. But this was really looking in the higher Arctic, in places that would be difficult to get. They went looking for Franklin in Lancaster Sound. This was the area that Franklin had been charged with trying to explore in search of the Northwest Passage. The Grinnell Expedition looked in the Lancaster Sound. This is kind of interesting. When it arrives in Lancaster Sound in 1858, you know, this kind of windswept place filled with pack ice and brutal conditions, what do they find at the head of the Lancaster Sound but nine other ships also looking for Franklin. So they meet at a place called Union Bay and they all chat with each other and have nice meetings, the British and the American sailors, and while they're actually at-bay talking with each other, making visits from ship to ship, they find evidence of the Franklin Expedition on Beechey Island. Beechey Island is a - it's not technically an island; it's really a peninsula off of Devon Island. This was an illustration from Kane's book. Kane essentially - Elisha Kane, the person I was talking about before, he wrote up the expedition narrative for the First Grinnell Expedition. What's interesting about this image - I really like it - is it shows four graves. These graves were from the Franklin Expedition. If you look at Devon Island today, you don't really even need a - you don't need an illustration because the graves are there. The four graves of the Franklin Expedition are still on beaches of Beechey Island. What I find really interesting, though, is if you look back at this, look at the size of those cliffs. You've got the moon, right, and it's like, hey, wait a minute, where did the cliffs go. So what I like about it is actually I think it shows you in a sense what kinds of meanings Americans attached to the Arctic. They saw it as a kind of gothic environment, a sublime environment. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. There were other features of this site that were of interest to the Americans and the British. There were remains of a really extensive winter camp where they were able to determine from the deaths of the four men on the beach as well as the material from this gravesite that Franklin had spent his first winter on Devon Island. By the way, I don't know if anyone, probably many of you are following this, but Parks Canada has actually found one of the ships of the Franklin Expedition and is actively diving the site right now. So we look forward to some really interesting information from this expedition going forward. The members of these expeditions did not find Franklin, but they found tantalizing evidence of Franklin. I want to do something really annoying right now, which is diverge from the Franklin search to talk about something that it sparked, okay. The long and short of it is everyone died on the Franklin Expedition, but the Franklin Expedition itself became very important to Americans because it brought to the floor this idea of Arctic science and the two are connected together because one of the things that people thought might've happened to Franklin and his men was that they had not perished and they had not tried to go south but had actually gone north toward essentially the Arctic Basin, and that they were in the Arctic Sea. Now, you would think, well, if they were in the Arctic Sea, then they were probably dead after four years. No, because most Americans believed, including members of the scientific community, that the higher Arctic was actually free of ice, that it was a potentially warm environment with all kinds of food sources available from them. So if that sounds a little strange, I want to talk a little bit about this science issue and how important it became for the Americans. Elisha Kane, as I had mentioned, was on that first expedition serving as a doctor. He became so interested in this mystery of the Franklin Expedition that he proposed sending another expedition into the Arctic, again bankrolled by Grinnell, looking for Franklin not in Lancaster Sound but looking north in the polar basin. His argument was that the higher Arctic was actually warm water, it was open water. And this idea was called the Open Polar Sea, that somehow in the higher Arctic conditions made it possible for the water to remain open there. Now, if you look, there was actually a kind of long heritage of this idea that maybe the high Arctic was a place that was free of ice. So you see Cornelius de Jode's polar projections in 1593 that showed some lands in the higher Arctic - this is a polar projection, of course - but with channels, right, with channels circulating around the Arctic. And this was repeated on other maps of the period, for example John Dee's [phonetic] polar projection map also shows islands surrounding a watery North Pole. You'll see a little mount in the middle. That was - many people thought that might be a load stone, a kind of magnetic anchor for the North Pole and they didn't know about, I guess, the iron core of the Earth yet. ^M01:10:56 And then, of course, Mercator's polar projection at the same period of time in much more detail shows these channels. Now, you could say this is all speculation and why would - you know, did Kane or anybody in the 1850s really think that these maps were based upon good information? No. I mean, they were scrupulous critical thinkers. They realized that these maps were highly speculative, but there was other information that they were getting, contemporary information, that made them think this idea had some merit. I just want to talk a little bit about it. the whaling expeditions of the 1840s and 1850s, enormously important economically to the United States, had started to discover some interesting things. You would see, for example, in the higher Arctic whales being brought up, particularly Right Whales, that were being brought up by fleets in the North Atlantic that had embedded harpoons from South Atlantic ships - excuse me, from Pacific ships. This is a photograph of a whale that had been brought up with a remnant of a harpoon in it. But so you would see these whales brought up with evidence that they had once existed in the Pacific but now they were in the Atlantic. Right Whales were not seen in the equatorial regions, so it begs the question how did they get from one ocean to the other, especially since they're air-breathing and would need to have open air, access to open air, in order to go from one ocean to the other. People like Kane said it must be that they're finding an open passage across the high Arctic, evidence that he thought might suggest an Open Polar Sea. There was also evidence from bird migrations and other animal migrations in the high north. It took me awhile to find this 19th Century color photograph of birds migrating. But what Kane and other people had heard of was reports that not all migration patterns in the wintertime showed animals and birds heading south; sometimes they headed north, okay. This was secondhand information, but interesting biogeographical information. But perhaps the most convincing evidence came not from biogeography but from ocean currents. As early as the 1770s, Benjamin Franklin, in talking to sailors and captains, had realized that the Gulf Stream was not only something that affected the coast of North America, but that it arched well into the Atlantic Ocean. And he created this map, when really you could consider this one of the first thematic maps, in 1778 showing that current of warm water beginning in the Gulf of Mexico arching past the continental shelf and then rolling off into the Atlantic. The Gulf Stream, Franklin posited, made a kind of circle, a gyre. But later geographers thought, well, there's some evidence that the Gulf Stream might loop higher up into the Atlantic. So you start to see maps showing the Gulf Stream arching higher north, perhaps off the coast of Greenland, wrapping itself around the coast of Europe, before rolling back into the Atlantic, the southern Atlantic. Now, if you asked yourself the questions, well, where is the data that the Gulf Stream would look like that? Well, the Gulf Stream, you don't actually have to look at currents; you can look at climates to see the influence of the Gulf Stream. So as early as the 1830s, people had begun to realize that if you just drew climate maps across the lines of latitude, you get this weird effect in Europe, which is it seems like Europe is a heck of a lot warmer than it really should be. In fact, I like doing this in class. Now that you have Google Maps, you can actually like start in London, which is - I can't remember the exact latitude of London, but you get a temperature, and then you roll it west and you end up somewhere near Hudson Bay, and it's always about 30 degrees cooler. It works every time. The temperature differential caused by the Gulf Stream is enormous. But people began to realize this in America and creating thematic maps, like William Wooldridge here, which shows how this heating effect not just affects Ireland and England, but goes up as high as Scandinavia, right. so, again, this is evidence that perhaps that Gulf Stream was warming the Northern Atlantic. Well, you can see where this is going. It's not too far from saying the Gulf Stream makes this extended loop to saying maybe the Gulf Stream just loops itself right up into the Arctic itself. And so this map of the world by Silas Bent in the 1850s shows that that warm water perhaps rolls right up and keeps on going past Scandinavia to affect the Polar Ocean itself. And it was on this idea that people started looking for Franklin in the higher Arctic. But here's the interesting thing. It wasn't just - and here's another map by Silas Bent showing a polar projection, showing that this warm water perhaps had heated the rest of the Arctic. But it wasn't just the search for Franklin that made this Open Polar Sea idea so interesting. This was enormously interesting to men of science in the United States, and the headquarters of U.S. science was right here in the city of Washington. Alexander Dallas Bache was probably the most powerful American scientist at the time because he was the superintendent of the Coast Survey. His job was to essentially chart the harbors and riverways and sandbars and estuaries of the American coast to make it safe for trade. And so he had, comparatively speaking, an enormous budget when compared to anyone else. And Bache believed that this information about the higher Arctic would be very important for him in understanding the currents that circulated through the Atlantic. It was also enormously important to Matthew Maury, the Director of the Naval Observatory, who became a huge proponent of the Open Polar Sea and tried to help Elisha Kane and other explorers to explore the higher Arctic in looking for. Now, when you ask yourself the question like how would what's happening in the higher Arctic have anything to do with the American coastline, you have to step back and think for a minute that these were scientists much like climate scientists today who believed that he polar regions held the key, the kind of climactic key, to an understanding of the rest of the world, and that if they could unlock the secrets of the Arctic and Antarctic, they could understand how the system of, you know, Earth water circulation actually worked. So they saw very high stakes in this discussion about what's happening in the higher Arctic. Well, Kane goes to - he actually goes to Smith Sound in the 1850s and, although Kane himself was kind of hobbled by rheumatic fever and scurvy, two of his men went higher up Smith Sound to the top of Greenland and reported seeing open water. So there was confirmation, kind of observational confirmation, that this Open Polar Sea existed, which only made the idea more and more dominant. Isaac Hayes, the commander of the Hayes Expedition, sent his own expedition to try and see how high this Open Polar Sea actually went in 1860 and also came back commenting that he had observed open water at the top of Smith Sound. Now, of course, from today's perspective where we know that there isn't an Open Polar Sea, it begs the question, well, what did they actually see. Were they lying? Were they making it up? And I don't think they were lying about it at all. I think they actually saw what the Russians would call a polynya, an area of open water. And it happens very commonly in Smith Sound that because of currents, you'll see a large break in the ice, sometimes 15-20 miles of open water, and I think that's what they probably saw. And so exuberant were they to believe in this idea that they came back and declared that they had found the Open Polar Sea. But what's interesting also about this illustration is that this wasn't just kind of arcane knowledge that these explorers came back and told a few geographers in Washington. No, these were expeditions that everybody followed in the news. ^M01:20:01 So when Isaac Hayes comes back with an illustration of an Open Polar Sea in his book of the same name, it becomes the basis of an illustration by Frederic Church, probably the pre-eminent landscape artist in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s. Aurora Borealis is actually, I believe, at the American - the Smithsonian Museum. Yeah, I believe it is. So and you can see here that there's the Hayes ship embedded in the ice. Now, when did this idea begin to fall off the map? By the late 1770s, you see expeditions actually making it into the Polar Sea itself. The Jeannette Expedition under George Washington DeLong actually heads towards the North Pole in hopes that it would find open water. They don't find open water. The Jeannette is locked in the ice, is crushed by the ice, and most of the men on that expedition died. But they come back with reports that there is definitively not an Open Polar Sea in the higher Arctic. But in a sense, the Franklin search, the interests of American scientists, had already done their work. by the late 1800s, the Arctic had entered the American consciousness. It had become a key feature of popular culture. Now, how do you kind of measure this? I should back up and say, you know, as a graduate student - I became a graduate student in the mid-1990s when if I wanted to find information from 19th Century popular culture, I had to go to this book called the Poole's Index and, you know, look through topic headings and then run to the microfilm. Now we have full text databases, not just of kind of specialized journals but literally databases of everything. So, for example, if you go to Google Books, you'll see the ability to run what's called an N-gram. An N-gram is this capacity they now have which allows you to essentially search for words within all of their scanned collections, which I think totals somewhere - now I think Google Books has scanned somewhere around 30 million books. So one of the things you can do is put keywords into this and actually track the prevalence or frequency of those keywords over time. So just for curiosity sake, I put the word 'arctic' in from the 19th Century, from 1770 to 2008, and the N-gram - which is available for everybody if you want to try this at home - also allows you to distinguish types of literature that you're searching for. So just out of curiosity, I put in English Fiction. And if you look at this, this is the frequency of 'arctic' within English Fiction from 1770 to 2008. And you'll see that there's this dramatic and rapid increase in the interest in the Arctic within Fiction around the 1820s, bumping up again in the 1840s right at the time of the Franklin search, rocketing up in the 1860s, decreasing during the Civil War - other things were on people's minds, clearly - and then rocketing up again after the Civil War in the 1870s. You can see all kinds of acknowledgement of the Arctic as an important landscape. What's interesting to me is that where would you expect to find this? Is it in adventure literature? Oh, yeah, this is also the rise in the 1880s-1890s of what we call pulp fiction or dime store novels. So the Arctic became a landscape for all kinds of adventure literature for boys and girls. But in addition to that, we shouldn't limit it to just what we might call low-brow or middle-brow literature; it was also very much on the minds of what you would consider maybe high-brow American literature. So you can find links to the word 'arctic,' to the polar regions, reference this to explorers in the work of Theroux and Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack London. The Arctic is everywhere in American culture. And it shows that in a sense, even though the Franklin search is over, even though the Open Polar Sea is dead as an idea, the Arctic itself has become by the late 19th Century an American landscape. Frederic Church doesn't need the illustrations of Isaac Hayes to find the Arctic an interesting place. He goes on his own expeditions to the Arctic to render the sublime, to create landscapes that will evoke an emotional reaction out of Americans. Although there is a nod to Franklin. If you look at the foreground of this picture of the icebergs, you'll see the broken crow's nest showing the death of sailors in the higher Arctic. And the final thing I want to talk about is I think there's another reason the Arctic becomes such an important place, and the reason why the Arctic becomes so important is because Americans are dealing with a kind of identity crisis in the late 19th Century. This identity crisis is not unique, I should say not uniquely expressed, in Arctic exploration, but there's a kind of larger cause behind it. Robert Peary's 1909 expedition, I think, frames it well. Peary was an explorer; he was somebody who was extremely well-educated. He went to Bowdoin College, he became an engineer, he was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a technical professional within the American Navy and yet Peary never likes to kind of wear that on his sleeve. He wanted to be seen as the tough guy. He was someone who was really interested in being seen as a kind of arduous, hard-working American man. You have to realize that what's happening as Arctic exploration is coming to the fore is American society itself was changing. If you look at the density of the United States population from 1830 to 1860, you'll see that America was primarily a rural population in the 1830s. most people were farmers living on small farms near the East Coast. By the 1860s, the frontier had expanded to well past the Mississippi and that there were regions of the country now really spanning from Boston to Philadelphia and then expanding west into the Ohio River Valley. They were very industrial, very, very industrial in nature. And that by 1900, the massive expansion of the U.S. population had created urban zones all throughout the East Coast. In fact, the U.S. Census declared that the frontier was closed in 1890, saying that effectively there was no place left to explore in the North American United States. And I think the end of the frontier and the rise of urban areas gave rise to what a lot of people thought was, well, this is wonderful, right. we have a booming economy, we're becoming the strongest economy in the world, and yet what are the costs of that industrial expansion? There's pollution. There's contamination. There are contagious diseases running rampant in large American cities. And probably most frightening for the upper class and upper-middle class white Anglo-Saxon protestants of the northeast was the idea that the population wasn't just expanding, it was expanding with the wrong sort of people. it was immigrants from other parts of the world that they felt very uncomfortable with. Catholics from Italy, from Ireland, people who didn't speak English, people from the West Indies. God help us, right? All of these other sources of immigration coming to the United States and, in a sense, creating the labor pool required for industrialization, but also leading to this anxiety that perhaps the white wasp class was losing its ground. And people started talking about race suicide in the late 19th Century. Alright, now what does this have to do with Arctic exploration? I'll get there. Theodore Roosevelt became a kind of patron saint of this idea that white Americans were losing its way. He said in his book The Strenuous Life, "I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble-ese, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife. To preach that highest form of success which comes not to the man that desires mere easy peace but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph." Theodore Roosevelt, who actually grew up with terrible asthma, horrible eyesight, who considering himself a weakling, essentially tried to take his own personal story of becoming a tough guy and map it onto American culture, saying the way we find our way back, white America, is to challenge ourselves physically, to go out into nature and essentially rejuvenate that aspect of our primitive selves that we've lost through industrialization. ^M01:30:00 And if you think this wasn't heard by people like Robert Peary, you should see his quote from 1904, which is, when speaking to polar rivals, he says, hey, if any of you guys win this, right, I will be proud because we are of one blood, the man blood, right. this is the beginning of that kind of over-the-top hyper-masculine view of, you know, men battling nature that we've become so accustomed to. Now, that was the early 1900s. the Arctic has a very, very different kind of meaning to us today. The Arctic was a place where people thought of it as a kind of man against nature, this assault against the environment. I think now what has happened, especially with climate change, is that we're beginning to see the Arctic as a fragile place. Certainly the ice of the higher Arctic has become a sort of symbol of - or I should say the diminishing ice, the kind of recreation of an Open Polar Sea no less - as something that shows that we're in trouble as a planet. And that the polar bear, which had been a kind of symbol of the fiercest animal in the Arctic in the late 19th Century has now become a kind of victim in the early 21st Century. So the Arctic itself has changed a lot. And so that leads me, I think, to the final question and I want to end with this question, which is, well, okay, the Arctic has an interesting relationship with the United States historically, but why do we care? I mean, what use is this story to us now today? And I think it does have a very interesting - I think it does have a very interesting meaning for us in the late, excuse me, the early 21st Century, which is that in a sense the Arctic, the issues that we find in the Arctic, are still alive today, but they're being attached to different areas. If you ask yourself the question, wow, geopolitical rivalry that involves popular culture and science and people trying to fund various expeditions to these arduous places where people generally lose their lives, you don't have to look to the 19th Century; you look to the 1960s and the beginning of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It also, I think, raises really interesting questions about what are the ultimate goals of exploration. In the late 19th Century, it was very difficult for Americans to kind of justify the loss of life, enormous cost, and then the loss of life on many of these expeditions. What's the issue confronting NASA and JPL today is the question of how much money and what's the best use of money and what's the lowest risk for doing exploration in space? Do we put, as the figure on the left shows, humans into space with all of the expenses that attach to human exploration? Or do you try other types of exploration to these austere extreme environments? And if you do so, will it generate the same interests in terms of popular culture? So it's not as if the Arctic regions and the space age are perfect parallels, but in a sense they rhyme across history, and I think that's another ultimate reason why we need to take these stories of 19th Century Arctic exploration so seriously. Thank you very much. ^M01:33:37 [ Applause ] ^M01:33:42 >> Thank you very much. Your talk about Franklin reminds me of what we're doing in the South Indian Ocean today looking for that Malaysian Airliner. It's almost exactly the same story. You hold tight; we'll have some questions a little bit later, alright? >> Very good. >> Thank you. Wow, that was a great talk, and I think we can see a little bit of the similarities between the Arctic and the Antarctic in terms of the way it was approached mostly in the 19th Century, but also plenty of differences, too. Our next speaker is a good friend of mine, Chet Van Duzer. He's an independent scholar, very well known around the Library of Congress because of his work on several projects here in the Library and some of its great resources, both in the Medieval and Renaissance area of maps. He's a Board Member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Mississippi and getting into the questions of technical analysis of old maps form a physical point of view. He's also the author of several books and articles and I wanted to remind you that the German edition of his latest bestseller, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps, has just been published in German. His current book project is entitled The World for a Prince: Pierre Descelier's Map of 1550, to be published by the British Library in September of this year. When I was at the British Library, I had the chance to spend about two days going over this huge map, which, if I recall, spans about 2 meters in width. As I said, he's interesting in the technical aspects of maps. He's recently been involved in what is called multispectral imaging of a very important world map by Henricus Martellus at Yale and a map about which he's writing a book. Maybe you can explain better when you get up here what the idea of this multispectral imaging is and what it can tell us about old documents. Today's talk is, again, back to the southern climbs, Inventing Terra Firma around the South Pole: The Concept of the Southern Ring Continent in the Period 1515-1554. Chet. ^M01:36:16 [ Applause ] ^M01:36:24 >> I'll just say a couple of quick words about multispectral imaging. It's a technology that allows the recovery of damaged or obscured or overwritten text from books and manuscripts. The Lazarus Project has the goal of making this technology available at minimal cost to institutions that have books and manuscripts that would benefit from the technology. A lot of institutions have just a handful of such objects and it wouldn't make sense for them to spend $120,000 on the equipment and invest the time and energy in training people to use it, so the Lazarus Project brings this technology to the institution so the objects don't have to travel and the institution doesn't have to purchase the equipment. So in the case of the Yale map, it was thought to have been very influential to Martin Waldseemuller in making his world map of 1507, but all the texts on the map, which is very large, similar in dimension to the Waldseemuller map, had faded to the point of illegibility and using this technology we've been able to recover that text and I've been exploring just how close the relationship is between those two maps and it turns out to be very close indeed. But having said that, I'll move into my talk today and I want to thank Dick for the introduction and to the Library for having me here today, to the Phillips Society, and to all of you for coming. I'm going to step back in time a little bit, looking at the early cartography of the southern polar regions, starting at about 1515 and moving into the middle of the 16th Century, and I'm going to look at one globe and two maps mainly, but I'll start out with a little introduction to the early cartography of the southern polar regions. So jumping into that, I'll start with a quote from the Roman rhetorician and politician Cicero in his Dream of Scipio, which was part of his republic. I'll just read the quote. "Moreover you see that this earth is girdled and surrounded by certain belts as it were of which two the most remote from each other and which rest upon the poles of the heaven at either end had become rigid with frost while that one in the middle, which is also the largest, is scorched by the burning heat of the sun. two are habitable. Of these, that one in the south, men standing at which have their feet planted right opposite to yours, has no connection with your race." So that all sounds a little bit abstract, but he's talking about these climatic zones that Robert alluded to and illustrated earlier. His idea that the Earth had these climatic zones was elaborated by Macrobius in the 15th Century in his commentary on the Dream of Scipio and that his elaboration of that idea is illustrated in maps, in manuscripts of his commentary on the Dream of Scipio. So just to orient ourselves a little bit here, we can see the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. What that entails is that the northern part of this map is the combination of Europe, Africa, and Asia together, so the known parts of the world, and we have an equatorial ocean and a southern continent, a very substantial southern continent, that goes back to this idea of symmetry that was so popular in antiquity. ^M01:40:13 And the map illustrates these bands that Cicero talked about of consistent latitudinal climate areas, so burning hot around the equator, temperate to the north and south of that, and then frigid at the poles. Just to illustrate, one more Macrobial map from the 10th or 11th Century. So the idea of the southern continent, of there being a hypothetical land mass in the far south appearing on maps goes back to classical antiquity and is illustrated in many early Medieval maps. Again, the northern land mass consists of the combination of Europe, Africa, and Asia, we have the equatorial ocean, and this large southern continent. And as Robert illustrated earlier, these maps made the transition to print and thus enjoyed a wide diffusion in the late 15th and early 16th Century. And this is the first representation of a southern continent on what I think we could call a modern map of the world, Francesco Rosselli's oval planisphere of about 1508. It has the southern continent, which in this case is essentially a large island in the southern polar regions. So with that background, I'm now going to turn to this globe and maps that illustrate a different conception of the lands in the far south as this ring of land. So I'll introduce Johannes Schoner's globe of 1515. Here is Schoner. He was a polymath, an astronomer, a mathematician, geographer, cartographer, and teacher. And here is an image of his 1515 globe. So here's Africa and Europe on the globe, here's the New World, and I want to point out there's two surviving exemplars of the globe in round as it were, one in Frankfurt and one in Weimar. And the Library of Congress owns gores of that globe which survived in the binding of a codex in the Kislak Collection that preserved Waldseemuller's two world maps. So Schoner's globe was based largely on Martin Waldseemuller's famous world map of 1507 and I'll just illustrate that dependence very quickly. Here's the New World on the 1507 map, the New World on the 1515 globe. Of course, the map is projected so the images don't look exactly the same, but the geography is very similar. And the similarity of the geography can be seen in the islands in the southeastern Indian Ocean as well. And, again, the projection of the map makes it harder to see the similarity, but I'll run through the fact that these islands appear in the same spots, with the same orientations, even this little unnamed island in the south. But there are differences between the 1507 map and Schoner's globe, one of which is the difference in the position of Africa with respect to the equator. We can see on the left in the 1507 map Africa sits down on the equator as it were, the equator runs through West Africa, whereas on Schoner's globe West Africa is entirely above the equator. So although Schoner depended heavily on the 1507 map, there are also important differences between the 1507 map and his 1515 globe. And one of those differences is the southern continent on the 1515 globe and we catch a little glimpse of that here. I want to emphasize that there is no southern continent on Waldseemuller's 1507 map. Perhaps that's just because the map doesn't go so far to the south, but we can see that there's no southern continent on Waldseemuller's 1507 globe, either, which portrays essentially the same geography as his 1507 world map. I also want to point out, in terms of contextualizing the southern continent on the 1515 globe, this is Martin Behaim's globe of 1492, which is the earliest surviving terrestrial globe, and we can see that he basically avoids the question by placing at the South Pole symbols of the city of Nuremberg and lots of descriptive text. And this is the South Pole on the Lenox globe circa 1510 in the New York Public Library and there is no southern continent there. So here is the southern continent on Schoner's globe and one surprising feature of the name of that continent is Brasilia Regio, the Region of Brazil. So we can zoom in a little bit to see it more clearly. So how did Schoner get the idea that Brazil was the name of the southern continent? Well, he published a pamphlet to accompany his 1515 globe much in the same way that Waldseemuller published a pamphlet to accompany his 1507 world map. And in that pamphlet, he describes Brasilia Regio, and what he says is that the land was discovered by the Portuguese and that it's not distant from the Cape of Good Hope and it runs from east to west. And, well, the southern continent on his globe does run from east to west. He also says that the inhabitants of the land wear untreated animal skins, use bows and arrows, have cacia [phonetic] and unusual birds and abundant gold and silver. He's clearly describing Brazil as we know it rather than this southern continent. So what's happened is that he misunderstood an earlier pamphlet, The Tidings Out of Brazil, as it's titled, which was published in 1514, just one year before his globe. In that pamphlet, there's a somewhat confusing passage about two Portuguese ships that were sailing west in the southern Atlantic and saw land to the north and south and were blown backwards and were not able to explore further, and that passage was confusing enough that Schoner misinterpreted it to mean that Brazil was this southern continent, this southern land that they saw in the south Atlantic. So if we look more closely at the southern continent on the 1515 globe - just to orient ourselves, I've indicated the southern tips of Africa and South America there. If we zoom in, we can see that there's a remarkable feature in the southern continent. There are two enormous lakes surrounded by mountains, joined by a spectacularly long river, and Schoner does not say a word about this in his pamphlet. So the question is where on Earth did this feature come from in a hypothetical southern continent, and I'm going to make what will seem at first a very bold suggestion that is has to do with the River Nile. So the flooding of the River Nile was one of the great geographical mysteries of antiquity. Why? The Nile floods in the summer, when it's not raining in Egypt. All other rivers flood in the winter. Why should it be that the Nile floods in the summer when it's not raining? Well, there are many different explanations put forward for that flooding in the summer and one of them is that of the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela, and Mela writes "but if there is another world" - referring not to another planet, but to a continent of the south - "and there are antiqthenies" - that is inhabitants of the opposite world - "opposite us across the equator, then even this would not be far removed from the truth that the river" - meaning the Nile - "has its source in those lands, whence it penetrates beneath the seas in a hidden channel, then emerges again in our lands and it is for this reason that it swells in the summer solstice because it is then winter at its source, at a source in the southern hemisphere." So Mela is suggesting that the Nile floods in the summer of the northern hemisphere because it has its source in the southern hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite. And we can see a later representation of that idea, and I want to emphasize that this is a later interpretation made in 1649, of Pomponius Mela's suggestion that the Nile has its source in the southern continent. So just to orient ourselves a little bit, I pointed out Europe, Asia, and Africa and the southern continent. Zooming in on the area of the Nile, we can see that the Nile is in Africa, where we'd expect it to be, but then also in the southern continent we have this text that says "source of the Nile in the Other World." Moreover, we have the Mountains of the Moon in the southern continent. The Mountains of the Moon are Ptolemy's hypothetical source of the Nile. So they've been relocated from Africa to the southern continent. ^M01:50:04 Going back to Schoner's globe, we can see that one of the lakes in the southern continent is directly below the Mountains of the Moon on Schoner's globe. That suggests a connection between them. But where did this lake, these two lakes joined by this long river, where did that come from? Well, I'm going to look at depictions of the Nile on some Medieval maps. This is the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi made about 1300. I've reoriented it. It properly has East at the top, but I put North at the top just so it's a little bit easier to assimilate quickly and I've indicated the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The Red Sea is very helpfully painted red so it's easy to find. And we have in Africa the Nile as we normally understand it and then this western branch of the Nile running across the southern edge of the map. And I'll zoom in now and we can see that this western branch of the Nile is depicted as a long stretch of river joining two lakes, and it's running east and west in the southern part of Africa. Looking at another Medieval map, the Sali [phonetic] map of circa 1100. This one's a little bit difficult to see because of the way it's colored, but we have Europe, Asia, and Africa. Again, I've oriented this with North at the top. And we have the western branch of the Nile in the southern part of the map. I'll zoom in now. And, again, we can see that it's a lake in the west joined by this very long river to another lake in the east, and this is, again, along the southern edge of Africa. The Ranulf Higden Mappa Mundi, 14th Century. In this case, curiously, the cartographer doesn't depict the northern reel, as it were, stretch of the Nile at all, but we again see this western branch of the Nile joining two lakes via this long stretch of river running east and west. Looking now at the idea that those lakes were surrounded by mountains, this is the Peutinger map, which was made in about 1200 but is based on a Roman model. And I'm showing you - it's a very long map, and I emphasize the Roman road network, but I'm showing here the segment that depicts the Nile. So we have the Nile Delta, the Nile River Proper, and then it comes from a lake surrounded by mountains. So zooming in a little bit, we can see that lake surrounded by mountains from which the Nile flows. We have here a mappa mundi that illustrates Beatus of Liebana's Commentary on the Apocalypse. This is in the Saint-Sever manuscript of that from the 11th Century and I've again oriented the map with the North at the top. Zooming in a little bit, we have the Nile and, again, a lake surrounded by mountains associated with the Nile. We'll look at one more example of that. It's an anonymous chart of about 1506, the so-called Kuntzman [phonetic] III map. And we see Africa here, the Nile where'd we expect it flowing into the Mediterranean. Also, western branch of the Nile and there's a lake surrounded by mountains associated with the river. So what do we have here on Schoner's globe? What Schoner has done is he clearly believed Pomponius Mela's theory that the Nile had its source in a southern continent. That was what explained the fact that it floods in the summer. And he's taken this western branch of the Nile that is this stretch of river that goes east and west and joins two large lakes and transferred it to this southern continent. So we see here a great example of the freedom cartographers in the early 16th Century felt to map hypotheses. It's really strikingly bold and it was very gratifying to find an explanation for this very curious geography of the southern continent in the early 16th Century. Now I'm going to look at the second example, which is the southern continent on an anonymous world map in the Vatican. It's in a manuscript of Ptolemy's geography. The manuscript was made in the middle of the 15th Century. This map was added to blank folios in that manuscript in about 1530 and we see it has this spectacular southern continent. The rest of the northern part of the map is more recognizable, but this southern continent is really very striking and we'll have a quick look at it from west to east. So here's the western part of that continent. The continent, very curiously, is labeled Terra Incognita in three different places, but as you can see it's full of place names. And I have transcribed and examined all of these place names and, to the best of my ability to tell, they're simply invented. Moving east now, we can see in this part of the southern continent there are no less than six cities. As far as I can tell, those names are purely invented. Moving further east, we see this peninsula that juts northeast toward Asia, and this is the part I'm going to return to in a minute because not all of the place names in this part of the map are invented. This is, I think, where the most interesting part of that southern continent. But just to finish moving west to east, here we have the easternmost portion of the southern continent and you can see there are many more place names here. There's talk of giants and people living to be 150 years old. But I want to go back to this peninsula that juts northeast from that southern continent, and it turns out that many of the place names in this part of the southern continent in this peninsula come, strange as it may seem, from Columbus's fourth voyage. In Columbus's fourth voyage, he was sailing - he sailed through the Caribbean to the coast of Central America, specifically to Honduras and Nicaragua, and went down the coast there. And it's those place names that appear in this peninsula that juts northeast from the southern continent on this map in the Vatican. So at the bottom of the map there I've circled Porto Seguro, the Safe Port. It's a place name that appears in Columbus's fourth voyage. Rio Belem, Bethlehem River, comes from Columbus's fourth voyage. Of course, there are other Rio Belems in the world, but when we put together the place names that come from Columbus's fourth voyage, I think the connection is indisputable. The Bay of Corabaro [phonetic]. The name comes from Columbus's fourth voyage. Then we have the Mountain of Saint Christopher, again from Columbus's fourth voyage. So the evidence starts to pile up. Then we have this very interesting inscription which I translate here, which says that in the Gulf of Corabaro, worms are born which bore through ships, shipworms, and Columbus had difficulties with shipworms on his fourth voyage. And finally the River of the Pine. Again, it's not a very distinctive name, but it does come from Columbus's fourth voyage and I think the accumulation of evidence that these place names all come from Columbus's fourth voyage is indisputable. So where did this idea come from? Well, going back to Francesco Rosselli's map of 1508, when Columbus was on all four of his voyages, and I think we can safely say to the end of his life, he believed that he was exploring Asia. And on Rosselli's map of 1508, at the top there are place names from Columbus's fourth voyage on the coast of Asia. So in this case - in the area I've circled there. In this case, the cartographer believed Columbus's, followed Columbus in his belief that he was expiring the eastern coast of Asia on his fourth voyage. On the Vatican map, many of those same place names are, well, sort of in Asia; they're in the southern Indian Ocean on this peninsula that juts up from the southern continent. So they've been displaced very far to the south. And one question that arises is, while this seems like a very unusual idea, did it appear in any other maps. And there's some intriguing evidence on the Jagiellonian globe of 1510. As you can see, the globe is in this armillary sphere and so it's difficult to get pictures of, but there's this one surviving photograph of the globe when it was taken out of the sphere. We can see it has a fairly standard depiction of South America from the early 16th Century. There's the island of Cuba. But the globe has a second representation of America. In this case, I'm showing a photograph taken through the armillary enclosure, which is not very satisfying, but you can see the words, the end of "noviter reperta" and it says "America Noveter Reperta," America Newly Discovered, on an island in the southern Indian Ocean. And now I'm showing a facsimile of that same globe which is made by the Jagiellonian University, where it resides, and we see this large island in the southern Indian Ocean which just about reaches the tropic that labeled America Noviter Reperta, America Newly Discovered. ^M02:00:37 So the globe has on it America twice in a way, the standard representation of South America from the early 16th Century and then this island in the southern Indian Ocean. And that island is located in just about exactly the same place as the peninsula on the Vatican map. We can see that they both just about reach the Tropic of Capricorn with their northern tip. They both also have a mountain range running down their spines. So there was clearly - it wasn't just one cartographer who had this idea that America, this newly discovered land, was in the southern Indian Ocean, south of the Tropic of Cancer. So it wasn't just the cartographer, but nonetheless the question remains where did this idea come from. The fact that the name America appears on the Jagiellonian globe, which is probably made around 1510, points towards Waldseemuller. Waldseemuller coined the name America in 1507. In fact, there is a passage in the Cosmographiae Introductio, the pamphlet printed to accompany the 1507 world map, that might've inspired this location of part of the New World in the southern Indian Ocean. Waldseemuller writes "in the sixth climate towards the Antarctic are located the farthest part of Africa recently discovered, the islands of Zanzibar, the lesser Java, and Sula, and the fourth part of the Earth, which, because Amerigo discovered it, we may call Amerige, the land of Amerigo, so to speak, or America." So in one of the two passages in the book, where he talks about the naming discovery of America, he says it's very far to the south. So it seems that a cartographer took this statement out of context, and we have to remember that Waldseemuller depicts South America in a relatively normal way on his 1507 world map. Someone took this out of context and used that, interpreted it to place America in the southern Indian Ocean, which we see here. So it's a very curious map. And the third example I want to look at is of the Southern Ring Continent, as I call it, is a map printed by Michele Tramezzino in 1554. You can see the eastern hemisphere of that map. It has this ring of land running around the south and then switching to the western hemisphere, you can see it has this ring of land in the south which is not complete, however. So where did this idea come from? It - what I want to look at is the idea that went back to antiquity and it's an intuitive idea that the poles are cold and thus very moist. There's a lot of moisture at the poles. Moisture is generated at the poles, as it were. And Roger Bacon, the English philosopher, in the 13th Century picked up on that idea and spoke about not only the generation of moisture at the poles but a flow of moisture between the poles. And in this diagram, he has the North and South Pole and he says, on the top part of the diagram the beginning of India and on the lower part the beginning of Spain. So orienting, reorienting that so it's a little bit easier to understand, we have the North Pole, the South Pole, and he's talking about a flow of water between the poles in the Atlantic, between India and Spain. Let's go back to the Tramezzino globe. It seems to be extraordinary well-configured for a flow of water between the poles the way that - between North America and Asia, we have this very clean strait and it's worth pointing out that Japan is not represented, as if to facilitate this flow of water between the North and South Poles. Of course, Bacon had talked about that flow occurring in the Atlantic, which would not be possible on this map because the Southern Ring Continent would prevent it. But the cartographer seems to have transferred this flow to the Pacific. Okay, maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe we have Roger Bacon on the one hand and Michele Tramezzino's map on the other hand. It's just a coincidence that this map looks like it was designed for such a flow of water between the poles, but it's worth pointing out that the projection on this map is specifically that recommended by Roger Bacon. It's called the globular image of the Earth with the lines of latitude straight and equal distance from each other. So I think that's pretty good evidence to help confirm that this map was designed to embody this idea of a flow of water between the poles. So that brings us to the conclusion of my talk, and one of the things I find very interesting about these maps is they all have this Southern Ring Continent but they all make very different use of that idea. On Schoner's globe in the upper left there, one of the main motivating factors, it seems, in his depiction of that southern continent was to depict the sources of the Nile in the Southern Continent while that doesn't appear on either of the other two maps. On the Vatican map, in the middle we have this very curious depiction of part of America, this peninsula with place names from Columbus's fourth voyage, jutting up from the Southern Continent that doesn't appear on either of the other two maps. Then finally, on Tramezzino's map we have what seems to be a depiction of the world's geography to facilitate this flow between the North and South Poles and that doesn't appear on - it's not related to either of the other two maps. On the Vatican map, the Southern Ring Continent's continuous and would prevent any such flow. And on Schoner's globe, there is land at the North Pole, so the geography of the North Pole on Schoner's continent, Schoner's map, is very different from that depicted on Tramezzino's map. So this seemed very curious geography of a Southern Ring Continent was used by three cartographers in very different ways. Thank you very much. ^M02:07:21 [ Applause ] ^M02:07:26 >> Thanks, Chet. That was a great - could you stand over here please. We might have some Q and A. Great story, and I'm struck by the similarities between the talks, particularly this idea of circulating water. Now, Chet's water comes a bit farther than your water because it goes a whole 180 degrees. So we have now about 10 or 15 minutes for Q and A and we have some microphones present, so - boy, those lights are really bright. I guess that's because we're being photographed. But why don't we see a show of hands. Who wants to start the questions? Yes, Bill? >> For Chet, is there a western branch of the Nile, or what were they thinking of? >> Yes, there's - >> Yeah, come up, I'm sorry. >> Yeah, there's been speculation. Maybe it's the Senegal. It's not really clear. It was so early in our knowledge of Africa, I'm afraid we don't really have a good answer to that. >> On the [inaudible] map, it seems to be Senegal. >> Yeah. >> Okay, thank you, Bill. Next question, please. >> I have another question for Chet. The three maps you've shown have very different kind of uses of what they're depicting in the ring of land around the Southern Pole. What strikes me also is at the same time in the northern hemisphere, a very common depiction around the North Pole was a ring of islands. And so, you know, going back to the Behaim globe even it's in there, so it seems interesting that - it probably made it more comfortable to depict that kind of representation of land. >> Yeah, it's interesting the ring of islands around the North Pole as well and it suggests that maybe there was an idea of symmetry behind this. I'm not sure. I didn't see a way to really convince myself of that. the idea had occurred to me, but I couldn't see anything that really cemented it for me. >> Okay, another question? Yes, sir? >> Chet, I hate to see you getting all the questions, but I have one, too. I'm curious why you selected these three maps to illustrate your talk as opposed to looking at other maps that are also well-known that seem to have Antarctica much more accurately depicted, such as, you know, from this same time period, Oronteus Finaeus, [inaudible], to name two. So I'm just curious why this selection. >> Well, I selected these because they're more unusual. They're more difficult to explain. The cartographer doesn't tell you - Schoner, for example, doesn't tell you this all has to do with the Nile. And I also think that the more unusual depictions of the Southern Polar Regions point out clearly the freedom that cartographers felt at that period to map hypotheses. It helps point out how fluid our image of that region was at that time. That's all. >> Thank you. Yes, sir, Burt? >> What is the status now of the competing claims in the Antarctica? I'm under the impression that some years ago there was some convention or something to suspend those, but I don't know that. can you clarify that? >> There are going to be people here who are more modern than me who can give you a more modern answer, but essentially the claims that came for land in Antarctica came originally from those countries who had explored in those areas, and that's fairly clear. The confusion came around the area of the Antarctic peninsula, where you had England making claims, Argentina making claims, and it's quite interesting that the conflicts between Argentina and England over land goes back a long, long way. And of course, Chile making overlapping claims. And so you have this confusion of claims. I think the claim situation which is always based on you mapping it, you being there, and you policing it, has interesting connotations. I think the most amusing one is when the Australian Navy, or at least half of it, chased a fishing boat halfway around the world for taking fish from areas that were in our segmental claim, that Canadian concept of segmental claims. I think the reality is that nobody takes too much notice of the claims and we have a situation where certainly the area that we own - Australia owns 42% of Antarctica. Well, that's sort of quite nonsense. And the reality is that people put bases where they want bases. And it's quite extraordinary the number of countries taking Antarctica as a serious focus and certainly China now is taking a great interest in Antarctica. And people say that we have this wonderful period where science has suddenly been the main balance since the IGY in the late 50s because there's no commercial, nothing commercial to exploit, that the moment we certainly find something that is realistically commercially worth exploiting, then it becomes serious and all the claims go for naught. And I think, you know, we see the issue of whaling in Antarctica as a great example. I mean, no one takes any - well, certainly the Japanese don't take a lot of notice of Australian claims that this is our area, and that's certainly been an area of commercial exploitation. So I think that while we have this sector claim situation, there are so many anomalies. For example, America and Russia have never claimed any specific area. And it's not - people say, oh, they came in late. That's not so. America's had serious interest in Antarctica since at least the 1840s with Wilkes and the Russians have had a serious interest since Bellingshausen, only they have never made claims. But they don't respect or accept that other people have serious claims. So I suspect that things will sort of churn along until all of a sudden someone finds something that's worth exploiting, and you may find that science takes a second seat. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Jim? >> This is for Robert again. Along the same lines, is Antarctica shrinking? And if so, are these claims based on any historic maps that are uniformly regarded as more accurate? Because if the continent is shrinking, the historic maps no longer represent their natural land mass. >> No, it's one of the fascinating things about Antarctica. It's not shrinking; it's expanding. It you look at the ice shelf around Antarctica, there is more ice in and around Antarctica overall than there ever has before. I'm not going to buy into the climate warming story, but it's become such an issue now that a number of countries are looking at having to reposition their bases because we can't access. For example, Mawson, which is one of the bases that Australia uses, is now - it's so hard to reliably get in to there with supply ships each year that they're seriously thinking of moving it to somewhere which is closer because the ice shelf is increasing year by year. As regards to the traditional areas, England was really dominant in the early claiming and claimed a huge amount and in fact gave areas to Australia and New Zealand. I mean, the areas that our part of the world take an interest in have been bequeathed by England. But they're pretty - I mean, there are specifics in terms of the areas, the segmental area. I think it was the Canadians that first came up with this idea of segmental claims. And France, of course, claimed in about 1924 Adelie Land, which is that thin slither annoyingly right in the middle of the Australian claim. I do this with a smile on my face. But I think the other reality is - I've been to Antarctica a number of times where I've met the most extraordinarily interesting, fascinating scientists from obscure countries that can't afford to have bases and so they come and work on our bases or your bases and there really is an amazing collegiateness about research in Antarctica. My own work, which was looking at the way in which the immune response got downgraded in people who went to Antarctica, we were amazed that we found - we looked at four bases and we looked at the levels of immunity in people that were using those bases. At some base, you'd find a massive dip that would come up again as they came back on the ships back to Tasmania, and in others it was a narrow dip. And we couldn't work out why. We looked at every - I had a Ph.D. student working on this who was in fact a statistician because if you know people like me, you know we're pretty lousy statisticians. And so I had a real statistician do a Ph.D. and we looked at every variable and we couldn't get anywhere. And then we started - because - and it was quite interesting the connection that we were talking about in terms of the Arctic and space. There is great connection between Antarctic studies and work with Cape Canaveral. And we - the chap that I did most of my work with actually was employed, had interacted with Cape Canaveral, and ended up being employed in the Man to Mars Program fairly recently. It was a great loss to us. But he, because of that communication and interaction between space and Antarctica, we were able to sue software packages and real-time analysis of psychometric status of people. and we were able to work out that the reason people get depressed immunity and whatever the subsequent aspects may be, which is the same patterns that we find in athletes that over-train - it's quite an interesting story - was because, when we analyzed with the packages we got from Cape Canaveral, it was in fact the stress levels. And if you have a stressful group of people shut together in the big red hut for a year in the middle of winter, and it's a stressful relationship, their immunity becomes markedly impaired whereas if they all get on well. But this was only because of that sort of communication. ^M02:20:12 >> Thank you. Question here? >> This is for Robert again. I think the question about the amount of ice in Antarctica is really not the area of square miles but the volume. That ice comes from a higher elevation and the question is, is the volume of ice in Antarctica increasing or decreasing. >> Yeah, no, I'm probably not the right person to ask because my understanding is that it's - the sea ice is increasing but the total ice may be - there are aspects of Antarctica where the ice is becoming less and depending on who you talk to of the day whether the balance is less or more. But that's a good point. >> Excuse me. Yes, sir? >> I have a question for Chet. You mentioned the Columbus feature names on a couple of maps. I'm just wondering if you know off the top of your head if any of those have persisted throughout the years into more recent place names. >> I am trying to think. I don't think so. None of them occur or leap to mind as having persisted. >> Another question? Yes, sir? >> In the interest of fairness, I have a question for Michael. >> Good for you. Go ahead. >> And I wanted to just pick up the thread on the Franklin Expedition. You mentioned that there were I think nine groups that were looking for it. what's the story on them? >> Oh, so the short answer is that by, you know, in the early - the Franklin ships, like most British ships, were provisioned for many years because, you know, from the experiences of Ross and others, sometimes these ships got locked in for one, two, three years. So Franklin's ships were actually provisioned for at least three years in the ice and so no one really paid much attention until 1848 and then the British Admiralty sent some rescue expeditions in 1848. When Lady Jane Franklin got involved, that number - and the pressure increased dramatically. So I believe all of those other ships were both essentially national and private British expeditions trying to find Franklin. I believe all of the others were, but there were a number of ships up there. And then the Grinnell Expedition was the one American ship. But it must've been very interesting to come into this area and see all these other ships. >> Okay. One more question. Yes, sir? >> Thank you. this is also for Dr. Robinson, but I'd like to use Dr. Clancy's discussions about the segmental claims as the point of departure for it. there were also, of course, a period of extensive segmental claims in the Arctic. People tended to start losing interest in those as they found there were no land masses there, but now those segmental claims are reappearing with added complications of things like extensions of the Lomonosov Ridge under the Law of the Sea. My question is what's your perspective of the heritage of the sort of 19th Century American culture that you discussed and how that plays into American thinking about those claims in the Arctic now. >> That's a good question. So my feeling was in the 19th Century that - well, let me just - maybe I should just flip it around. I think that the, in the early 21st Century, this issue's very interesting and there are a number of people working, particularly Canadian historians, on Arctic exploration and the Franklin search as these kind of ceremonies of possession, right, that it's not just about finding Franklin. Whereas you mentioned the Russians planting a flag at the bottom of the, you know, on the North Pole at the bottom of the sea. So this is a very contested issue. The United States is involved at least, you know, as an ancillary interest, but in the 19th Century I think the interesting thing was that, in a way, if you looked at when the Arctic became important - it became important right before the Civil War. What's happening right before the Civil War? Well, there are all of these new territories, western territories, that had come into the nation through the Mexican-American War and essentially the country was falling apart trying to figure out what to do with these things. Do they come into the nation as free states, as slave states? So there was this huge amount of controversy about these territories coming in. whereas in the Arctic, the Arctic became a kind of place where you could plant flags, talk about American exceptionalism, kind of strut your stuff as the American continent without any of the messy business of having to administer an actual possession. And I think in a sense the moon also represented that same kind of space or, to some degree, the Antarctic as a place where you can show - you can get all these soft power benefits without any of the real difficulties of administering a place. So I think that's one of the reasons why the Arctic became such an important place in the 19th Century. >> Okay, we've got room and time for one more. Okay, Ryan? >> You mentioned the big names of the explorers, but have there been studies of who were the crew members, why did they sign on to go to somewhere so dangers, what benefits did they think that they would get from joining on such a mission? >> That's a really good question. So has there - there's been a number of books that have looked at various members of expeditions or articles. But if you're asking the question has there been any kind of systematic look at the people joining these expeditions, to the best of my knowledge, no. and it would be a terrific project because, you know, at National Archives, for example, the Robert Peary Papers, it's just choked full of letters to Peary saying, you know, I'm 19, I, you know, I want to go. You know, like there's this famous advertisement. Was it by Shackleton? I should know this. It's slightly out of my expertise, but I think he put an advertisement in the paper saying something like "Wanted," you know, "strong men," you know, "return improbable." Something like that. and it just increased the number of people. and, you know, the same kind of issue with this Mars I mission, where, you know - I don't know if probably many people are familiar with it, but this idea that we could set up a colony and it would be permanent and you would never come back to the United States or to wherever you were coming, leaving from. And there's thousands of people signing up for this. So I think it's a fascinating - it would be a fascinating approach to actually look at all those people. >> Well, you know, the analogy could be the earlier pion voyaging to the east. The Portuguese, for example, well less than 50% of those who went out survived and almost none of those ever came back. Well, I'll tell you what, I think we had a great morning. I'd like to thank you three speakers for giving us such a diverse view of these territories. ^M02:28:20 [ Applause ] ^M02:28:25 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E02:28:32