Chris Mitchell
This is one book not to be judged by its cover. It features a photo of Shackleton’s ship Endurance, even though the venerable explorer barely gets a mention in Gurney’s book, and even then only at the end. As the title suggests, The Race To The White Continent is more concerned with the discovery of Antarctica by competing nations’ mariners than with the exploration of its interior.
As such, Gurney’s history is a sort of seabound prequel to the more familiar tales of Shackleton, Scott et al, and weaves together accounts of the American, French and British expeditions to the last continent whose coast still had to be mapped, let alone claimed. All three expeditions set off within months of each other at the end of the 1830s, each vying to go further South than Captain Cook’s 1770s circumnavigations and discover what lay beyond the treacherous pack ice.
It’s evident from the introduction that the writing of this book has been a labour of love for Gurney, and there is little that is dispassionate or clinical about his prose. Indeed, the descriptions of the Antarctic expeditions don’t begin until about a third of the way into the book, so keen is Gurney to ensure that the scene has been suitably set of what voyages went before the explorers and the magnitude of the perils they faced.
Tales of the grisly American whaling industry and the coastal exploration of South Australia provides useful background context on the prevailing maritime commerce and competition across Oceania and the still newly established colony in New South Wales. Gurney deservedly devotes a whole chapter to the remarkable genesis of the American Antarctic Expedition, the Holes At The Poles theory, which maintained that "the world was hollow and contained at least five concentric hollow spheres with air space between and all the surfaces habitable". This idea gained such popularity through lectures across the States that Washington was compelled to finance the expedition.
Gurney’s depictions of the three expeditions themselves is fascinating, fusing together numerous sources and contemporary paintings into a narrative that both dramatically describes the progress, discoveries and setbacks of each voyage as well as the hopes and fears of their respective commanding officers. Wilkes, the deeply paranoid and highly strung commander of the American expedition, is a particularly memorable character, not least because he managed to get his cartography of the Antarctic coast comprehensively wrong. – but this wasn’t shown to be so until the British expedition returned, by which time Wilkes had been basking in short-lived glory for some time.
Other characters also loom large with Gurney’s account, amongst them the dashing British commander Ross, whose expedition’s success paved the way for the arrival of the Arctic’s interior explorers, the shotgun-toting McCormick around whom no living animal was safe, particularly as wholesale slaughter could be justified as the scientific collection of specimens, and Joseph Hooker, the tireless botanist and friend of Darwin who had to provide virtually all of his own equipment for the cataloguing and preservation of new discoveries because the British Admiralty refused to finance what they considered to be scientific frippery. The contribution of men like Hooker to science is spectacular not only due to its breadth but also through the sheer tenacity with which they pursued it.
The Race To The White Continent provides a worthy introduction to the inauguration of Antarctic exploration and brings alive the hardships, bravery and occasional savagery of the men involvedt. Gurney has managed to condense the complexities of this bustling period of maritime history into a highly readable account that captures the optimism and excitement of the explorers themselves.
