Tough Guys

Antarctica was in the news last week. In Antarctica itself, Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd was starting a 1,000-mile trek from the Bay of Whales. In Philadelphia was celebrated an antarctic centenary--the discovery of the Antarctica Continent by Charles Wilkes. To observe this anniversary, Philadelphia's well-heeled American Philosophical Society assembled a group of seamy explorers and scientific greybeards to review a century of U. S. polar exploration. They dined sumptuously (food from Holland's, Philadelphia's famed Negro caterers), but their talk was of privation and of hungry men: Wilkes, Kane, DeHaven, Hall, Greely, Peary, Stefansson, Bartlett and other polar tough guys.

Charles Wilkes was not the first to find antarctic land--that had been done 20 years earlier by Nathaniel Brown Palmer, a Connecticut sealing captain--but he was the first to make enough landfalls to establish an Antarctic Continent. After the War of 1812, whaling and sealing began to spread into the Antarctic Ocean, and the New England skippers asked the Government for information and charts. Congress approved a naval expedition, settled its command on Lieut. Charles Wilkes, a scholarly, hot-tempered, opinionated martinet.

With a fleet of battered old tubs, inadequate clothing, excellent instruments, he sailed off in 1838. He had 83 officers, 342 enlisted men, nine scientists. In 1840 he established the existence of 1,500 miles of Antarctic coastline. On the way home he did a lot more exploring, some of it in the South Sea Islands. Not long after dropping anchor off New York in 1842, Wilkes was attacked in Congress for killing some cannibals who had murdered two of his officers; also for cruel and inhuman treatment of his men and for disrespect to a superior. He was exonerated by a court-martial.

A German mapmaker promptly labeled Wilkes's antarctic coastline "Wilkes Land," and cartographers of many another nation followed suit. But not the British. Long afterward an Australian named Sir Douglas Mawson went over the Wilkes route, claimed that Wilkes had made mistakes or misrepresentations. These were attributed by Wilkes's defenders to polar refraction, which sometimes makes land below the horizon appear above it (a phenomenon also seized on by Robert Peary's defenders to explain Peary's mistakes in Greenland). Later it was shown that Mawson himself had erred because of the same illusions. Finally in 1939 the Australian Government caved in, put Wilkes's name on nearly all the 1,500 miles of shoreline which he had mapped.

Today four great-grandsons of the peppery old sea dog are in the Navy, and two great-great-grandsons are at Annapolis.

Kane. Another illustrious tough guy who got a hand in Philadelphia last week was Elisha Kent Kane (1820-57). While scamping his studies as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, he came down with rheumatic fever, which left him with a bad heart. Undaunted, he studied medicine, got a post as assistant surgeon in the Navy. He fell ill in China, was twice invalided home from the Mexican War, once with coast fever, again with wounds and raging typhus. Undaunted still, he went on an expedition in 1850 to search the Arctic for Sir John Franklin, who had been missing for five years. Later he was put in command of a second search party. Despite scurvy, dying dogs, desertions and a ship frozen in the ice pack, he made valuable meteorological, geological, magnetic, tidal, glacial and botanical surveys. At one time he was doctor, nurse and cook to a shipful of bedridden men. He finally got his party, invalids and all, to safety with loss of only one man. Kane died in Havana just after his 37th birthday.

Elisha Kane also found time for love. He had a secret affair with Maggie Fox, a celebrated spiritualist who produced spirit noises by cracking her toes. His letters to her were printed in Love Life of Dr. Kane, now a collector's item.

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