Out in the Cold

To THE ARCTIC! (334 pp.)--Jeanneffe Mirsky--Knopf ($5).

When the northbound traveler invades the six million square miles of the Arctic Circle, he soon leaves the great timberlands behind and enters a region where the last, sparse outposts of birch, spruce and cottonwood gradually fade into the boundless levels of the tundra. Here is the world which "knows but two seasons: winter and August"; here great rivers of North America and Asia drain away and congeal into the titanic ice-blocks of the Arctic Ocean; here (and not at the North Pole) the thermometer has touched its recorded lowest (93DEG below zero) and the milk of Siberia is sold at so much per piece.

But here too, suddenly, "like an exotic quilt thrown over a slept-in bed," summer covers the cemetery of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros with plaids of buttercups, poppies and bluebells. Millions of birds and clouds of mosquitoes take to the air; and the warmed glaciers, calving with "that large utterance of the early Gods," emit the drifting icebergs which plague the waters of the North Atlantic.

This strange region and its gradual discovery are the subject of To the Arctic!, which Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson describes as "the best history of northern exploration so far written." New Jersey-born Jeannette Mirsky who, at 44, has never cried "Mush!" to a dog or put foot to floe, first published her book in 1934. But it was dropped by her publishers after the first printing, because the late

Dr. Frederick A. Cook, who claimed to be the first man to have reached the North Pole, threatened to bring a libel action (Author Mirsky had glacially described his account of his polar trip as "exciting and well-written, but . . . mainly fiction")*.-Now--revised, mapped, brought up to date--this magnificent history is again available to the public.

The New Mediterranean. Dramatic dashes to the North Pole take up little space in To the Arctic! Author Mirsky is never stingy in enthusiasm, but she keeps her eyes steadily on the varieties of men who so tenaciously explored and charted the Arctic that it may become what the Mediterranean was to the ancients--the natural connecting route between the principal centers of civilization.

Out of the Mediterranean came the first news about the Arctic. In about 330 B.C., when Alexander the Great was marching on India and Aristotle was lecturing to his classes, Pytheas, a native of the Greek colony of Massilia (Marseille), sailed out through the Pillars of Hercules and turned north. After discovering Britain, he pushed on--to the Orkneys, to the Shetlands, perhaps even to Iceland. Then, like thousands after him in the next 2,200 years, Pytheas the Greek was halted by a dense world of ice. His account of his six years' voyage was later dismissed as balderdash, and the world of the north was unvisited until the voyages of the Vikings.

Only Fit for a Saga. Like Pytheas, the Vikings, who roamed from Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen to Greenland and Newfoundland, were too far ahead of their time. By the15th Century, when their own exploratory impetus was spent, their Arctic trade-routes and their flourishing Greenland colonies had become mere fantastic stuff for sagas.

But the voyages of Columbus had a very different effect. Men discovered, to their great annoyance, that Columbus' "spice island" was a vast continent which shut them off from the rich Indies; and they tried again & again to by-pass America and Russia by finding some northwest or northeast passage. Warned that he would perish in the Arctic, Elizabethan Robert Thorne replied brusquely: "There is no land unhabitable, nor sea innavigable." So sure were these hardy Elizabethans of reaching their goal that they sheathed their cockleshell ships with lead, to protect the timbers from the worms of India.

Beards & Steeples. Richard Chancellor, one of the most daring of these merchant adventurers, pressed northeast until he reached a world where there was "no night at all, but a continual light upon the huge and mighty sea." Debarking, he and his crew eventually ended up--in Moscow, where Ivan the Terrible amiably "took into his hand Master George Killings-worth's beard . . . and pleasantlie delivered it to the Metropolitane, who, seeming to bless it, ,saide in Russ, 'this is God's gift'; as indeed at that time it was ... in length five foote and two inches of assize." Martin Frobisher, pushing to the northwest,, met a less favorable reception. He rediscovered Greenland (rising "like pinnacles of steeples all covered with snow"), but the Eskimos chased him and his crew back where they came from, "and hurt the generall in the buttock with an arrow."

Thereafter, the dream of attaining Cathay was half-lost in the rich reality of Arctic furs, ivory, oil and blubber. Thus began the long, harrowing, and still unfinished labor of charting the frozen Arctic regions.

A New Twist. A mountaineer, asked why he persistently tried to scale Mt. Everest, answered with some surprise: "Because it is there." The same answer could be made by many explorers. But with the growth of science, the most romantic impulses were given a stringent, practical twist.

In the cause of topography, meteorology and zoology, scores of ships, thousands of men, were swallowed by the Arctic. Sweden's Dr. Wulff, crossing the Greenland icecap with Rasmussen, became' too tired to eat; but as he crawled on, he "jotted down notes on the surrounding flora," dictated to his companion a concise summary of the local vegetation, and then said quietly: "Now I can go no further. . . . Will you find a place for me where I can lie down?" In 1930 John Courtauld, pioneer of the British Arctic Air Route Expedition, volunteered to remain snowed-in for an entire winter and to try "to approximate a state of hibernation" (he was dug out, still alive, next spring).

Norway's Nansen let his famed Fram "drift" (in winter it was locked in the ice) for three icy years, to test the vagaries of polar currents, emerged from the ordeal with two strong conclusions: "I have never before understood what a magnificent invention soap really is"; "Oh, how tired I am! ... Why should we always make so much of truth? Life is more than cold truth, and we live but once."

Today, the great northwest is a well-mapped area and the northeast passage to Cathay is as "carefully charted and patrolled as the north-south shipping lanes along our own eastern coast." Overhead, via the polar regions, fly the planes that are pioneering a still shorter passage between two hemispheres. Meanwhile, the last of the old explorers sigh perversely for the good old days--days when (as one of them said furiously to Author Mirsky) the sacred Arctic was not a silent victim of the "damnable . . . outrageous prevalent practice of making exploration chiefly a matter of getting machinery to run a little further than normal from the factory."

*Explorer Cook later served five years in Leavenworth Penitentiary for dealings in bogus oil stocks. Today most Arctic authorities rate his polar claim at the same fraudulent level of value.

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