Sea Control - Sea Control 413 - Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects with Dr. Daniella McCahey & Dr. Jean de Pomereu

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Links1. Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects by Jean de Pomereu and Daniella McCahey, Conway, 2022.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today I'm joined by Drs. Daniella McKay and Yande Pomerun. We're going to hear about some of their favorite historical artifacts in their new book, Antarctica, History, and 100 Objects. This episode was edited and produced by Joshua Gruber. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean. Chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org.

So if you're interested, please reach out and get involved. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guests today are Dr. Daniela McKayhee, Dr. Jean de Pomerue, and we're going to be discussing their book, Antarctica, a History in 100 Objects. So, Daniela, Jean, welcome. Daniela, would you

start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, please? My name is Daniela McKayhee. I'm a assistant professor in history at Texas Tech University, and I research the history of Antarctica, particularly in the context of the British Empire. Thank you so much for joining us. And Jean, how about you? Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself for the listeners? Yes, my name is Jean de Pomerue. I'm a historian currently and a photographer, and I have also been a reporter focusing on Antarctica and polar science in general. I am currently based at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, where I'm working on a historical project focusing on the cultural, scientific and political history of ice sheets. That is the big masses of ice that cover Greenland and Antarctica. Well, thank you both very much for joining us again. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Danielle, I'll direct the first question to you. How did you first become interested in Antarctica as a career focus?

For me, the interest was mostly an academic one initially, because in the United States, we don't grow up learning about Antarctic history. So it's not like I have a childhood where I was like, you know, revering polar explorers per se. I read Mr. Pauper's Penguins, of course, but that was probably my only exposure to polar explorers growing up. It was when I was in graduate school that I became interested in how, in Antarctica, you have this place where, number one, scientists are interested in going to extreme lengths to do research, and number two, how, in Antarctica, often scientific research is used as a justification for occupying the country, or the territory. And I thought, like, it's very interesting that this continent for science has been very unevenly examined by historians of science. That was my interest. It's interesting that you bring that up because we've done now 250 episodes of Sea Control. I've probably done six episodes talking about the Arctic.

And all this time I've been waiting for someone to come along and talk about Antarctica. So I'm very happy to have the two of you here today and break this streak. John, how about you? How did you first become interested in Antarctica? I first started through my own photographic practice and I was really interested in abstraction of Antarctic landscapes as a place which is really more about absence than presence of objects and scale and I was sort of awed by this sense of loss of scale and otherworldliness of Antarctica

and this rapidly led me to look at what else had been done historically in terms of the visual culture of Antarctica And that's something that I I'm still following today and still hoping to we're working on and hoping to develop further. I combined various activities in order to get down there. I also was a science reporter on a number of scientific and artistic exhibitions down there, both photographing and writing about the expeditions I was accompanying. And that eventually led me into academic research to try and basically push it, push this interest further and wider and deeper, rather, most of all. Jean, you also went to school in the UK, so you have more. Yeah. So I guess what's very interesting in terms of this book and my work with Daniela is that, yes, I fought from what separates us.

Obviously, she's a woman, I'm a man, different generations. And I was brought up, although I'm French, I was brought up in the UK. And so I was quite heavily versed in all of those heroic stories, although I did eventually transcend those and start to take interest in what was going down there today and in the lapse of time between the early 20th century and today, including Cold War science and different aspects of Antarctic history. So, Daniela, you mentioned a little bit of this in your answer to the first question, but why is Antarctica often left out of history discussions, and why do you think that's unfair? So, I think it's really unfortunate that Antarctica is left out of history discussions. Something I noticed once I did a Google image search for world map, and oftentimes Antarctica is not even on the map. Sometimes it'll be pushed to the bottom or even be apt and all together. In history textbooks, you never hear about what's going on in Antarctica. And I thought,

well that's really strange i think that that's really strange in general because there's some kind of by not by historians not talking about antarctica and not including it in our discussion we are kind of implicitly endorsing the idea that scientists are the authorities uh when it comes to the antarctic and that you know that the antarctica is this special place that's not touched by human history even though all of the sort of human activity in antarctica obviously is part of greater global trends in history. Like the phrase that we start our book with is, you know, Antarctic history is human history. And it's not all about penguins and stuff. I know I feel and we both feel that, you know, if you're talking about Antarctica, and you don't discuss things

like imperialism, or the Cold War, or gender relations and things like that, like, you're not really getting a full understanding of what's going on there. And it does, by historians not talking about it you're endorsing this view that not only just is Antarctica special but even that like science is special which as a historian of science I have like a you know problem with with that kind of endorsement. John why did you decide to write this book and how did you decide which objects to highlight and how did you come into contact with the various artifacts? Yes well I mean this is a a common story between me and Daniela the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut it um this was back in um 2019 was hoping and planning to stage a very big exhibition

retracing the history of antarctica over two centuries so by centennial um exhibition to commemorate the the discovery of antarctica in 1820 now mystic seaports one of the largest maritime museums in the world and the largest in in the in the united states let's say non-label purely maritime and um and the reason they were interested in antarctica is because um nathaniel palmer who was one of the three first leaders of one of the three first expeditions to to actually site the continent in 1820 came from stonington which is right next to to mystic so um they were interested in in in creating this this large exhibition um there was a call for um curators daniel and i were amongst those who applied i think late on they decided to take two take on

two curators rather than one and i think that was a great move because as i said earlier it it provided us with a with a wider perspective with two very different entry points into antarctic history and it it would have made for a better exhibition if the exhibition had gone ahead but of course, COVID came along and it was postponed and eventually cancelled. So Daniela and I were sort of left empty-handed, having done pretty much a year's work on the project. And because the exhibition was very material-based with objects, images, we sort of thought, well, actually one of our frustrations was that the exhibition planning hadn't planned on the catalogue. So I thought, well, we thought, well, maybe this is the opportunity to remedy that. And we came up

with this idea of a book on 100 objects, which is a cliche in a way. I mean, it's a recipe that's been widely used since the first one, which was the history of the world in 100 objects by a curator of the British Museum in London. But as Hitchcock once said, it better start off with a cliche than end with one.

And I think that's exactly what we've tried to do is to break cliches about Antarctica. And again, coming at it together through our different perspectives, has led to many many discussions but i think also a better book and just note that we uh have a lot of objects in our book there are some objects in here that we had planned on including in the exhibition but most of these objects we weren't because doing a book allowed us to include things that either for logistical reasons um or the expense of the fragility of the objects we

wouldn't have been able to include in an exhibit we're able to include in this book so it does uh the book does let us do more in a certain way than the exhibit would have. Well, Daniela, let me come back to you then and ask, did you have a favorite object among those that you assembled? Yeah, so I have a favorite object. I think it changes every time people ask, but one of my favorites is kind of maybe a dark horse candidate. It's object number 35, which is a radio transmitter.

There is this perspective that a lot of people have when they talk about Antarctic expeditions in the first half of the 20th century or the first 20 years of the 20th century, I guess, where they say it was like going to space. And it's like, well, if you've studied this, you know, it's actually not like going to space, because in space, you have communication the whole time between, you know, famously Houston, we have a problem, right? There, when these men went to Antarctica, people back home would only find out if they lived or died, you know, years later. And there was no communication between them. And then in the American expeditions in the 1920s were the first that brought down and successfully used

radio transmitters. And the first expedition, the one that we have the picture of, was one that was only used between the men when they, like it was one that was on an aircraft that flew to the South Pole. So it was only used between the men. It didn't actually get used to, you know, call home. But by the third, second expedition, they were doing that. And I also quite like how this radio transmitter is such like a very techie literally a black box it's a black box but then you have we have it paired with this really beautiful watercolor painting that was taken during the second expedition um when where they retrieved the um loss that they retrieved this artifact and bought it back and then john over to you uh what's your favorite yes so daniela just

mentioned a a black box and i'm afraid i'm going to talk about the black flag so it all sounds a austere which is actually not a good reflection of the book which includes many colorful and and interesting objects that intricate objects complicated objects anyway but the reason i i picked this object is is really because it's very poignant it's a flag that was um taken down to antarctica by roald amundsen and his men who became the first to reach the south pole in december 1911 he um got to the south pole and you have to put it put yourself in in in the mindset and and the location the south pole is situated on the end deep on the antarctic plateau which is basically a flat empty frozen space um without anything that differentiates one meter from the

other it's all isotropic which means it's it's even in all directions a bit like the surface of the sea which and which differentiates it for example from from a mountain where when you reach the summit you know you're at the summit it doesn't take measurements you're situated bodily and and physically situated at the top mountain you can read where you are not at the south pole so you had to make calculations and these calculations were made with with instruments which at the time were still you know quite approximate and so he he made these calculations They made that calculation. They planted a flag, left a tent. But in order to be sure that no one was going to query or question they're not reaching the South Pole or not identifying the right location, they did what's called boxing the pole, which is they left black flags in four directions around what they believed was the pole and basically boxed it with these black flags. So it was contained within that box, which was delimited with these black flags.

Now, then they left. And a month later arrived Captain Scott, who was hoping with his men to be the first to reach the South Pole, who had no idea whether Amundsen, his rival, had reached it before him or not. And if you imagine them walking, having walked 800 miles, traipsing across the icy frozen waste, you know already starting to starve frozen unbelievable harsh hard conditions and suddenly on this open plane they see in the distance this little dot and as they grow as they walk towards it they see this black flag and for them this black flag was just you know a vision of hell it was the end it was just a catastrophe beyond belief so the the emotional the power and then value of this flag is is really quite amazing and i actually like to think of it it's also

very modernistic aesthetically this sort of white plane with this black flag there's something very modern about it and it kind of reminds me of um to end there it kind of reminds me of the monolith in a way in um in in 2001 the space odyssey where where the where the astronauts arrive and discover this thing now of course scott and his men knew exactly what that black flag was and and what it meant um and as they walked further they reached the tent which amundsen left behind, and which marked his estimate of where the South Pole was. So yeah, it's a very tragic, heavily loaded object, but very simple. Now, while we're on the subject of navigation, Daniela, can you explain the significance of the magnetic dip circle? And what was the magnetic

crusade? So the magnetic crusade, one could argue that it's kind of one of the first major international scientific type competitions in the early 19th century, now that the longitude problem had been solved by John Harrison's chronometer, which famously Captain Cook took on his, that's another one of our objects, Captain Cook took on his first voyage to the Antarctic, the scientific community became interested in how the magnetic field was disruptive to some navigational equipment, how they could kind of correct that. And one way that it was determined that this was like a strategic idea that the Royal Navy was very interested in was, well, maybe let's map the entire magnetic field. And of particular importance was the two parts of the world where the magnetic field is at its foe side.

So the North and South Pole. And an expedition to the Arctic had already been done where the British kind of planted a flag at the magnetic North Pole. and so plans were made to try and plant a flag at the magnetic south pole and this the british really saw this as a british type expedition since it was edmund halley in the late 17th century who kind of was doing early geomagnetic work um but the british were unhappy perhaps to find out that the americans and french were also very interested in being the first to reach the magnetic south as well called sort of the magnetic crusade the magnetic dip circle which had also only relatively been it had been invented a while before but had only been relatively recently adjusted so it could take measurements at sea measuring the angle between the sort of dip and the horizon in order

to map you could actually map the magnetic field at sea so in the same period you have three different expeditions from major empires, France, Britain, and the United States, which is eager to show itself as able to compete with these European empires that all go to the Antarctic to try and find the magnetic South Pole. None of them actually reach it because the magnetic South Pole is on land and it's not reached until the Nimrod expedition in, I guess it's probably reached in what 1908 1909 the nimrod expeditions between 1907 and 1909 when the british do plant a flag there in this magnetic crusade even the french and the american expedition encounter each other in antarctica because they're all sort of down there at the same time and i would argue that

this is the first kind of international competition over doing science and linking science discovery and empire in the antarctic and also in the case of the british in particular and I suppose all three, it begins this establishment of a colonial empire of scientific research where the British were establishing geomagnetic research stations all over the world to kind of aid them in this mission of mapping the Earth's magnetic field, which they felt would bring them an advantage in sea power. John, what was the Aurora Australis? Well, the Aurora Australis actually provides a great antidote to the black flag and the black box, which we dedicated earlier, because it is, I would say, one of our most colourful and rich objects. It's not the first

book to be published, but it's the first book to be printed in Antarctica. So the first book to have been put together in Antarctica was in 1901-04 by Captain Scott and his men during Captain Scott's first expedition, known as Discovery Expedition, in which during the wintertime, to keep the men busy and to give them a project to work on when they were indoors, other than the science, et cetera, which they kept doing during the winter months. Captain Scott invited his men to contribute to this book in the form of drawings, poems, short stories, funny stories,

whatever they wanted. And it was eventually compiled, and the original copy is currently in the Royal Geographical Society in London, And various facsimiles have been made, so you can actually buy a facsimile, which has recently been republished. But the original then was this compilation. And this started a tradition that went on for decades and still goes on today of putting together publications in the winter month. The difference with the Aura Australis was that it was the next one to be produced in 1907, during the 1907-09 Nimrod expedition, which was led by Shackleton, Ernest Shackleton of endurance renown. And Shackleton decided not only to put together a publication in the winter months, but actually to print it down there.

And he in order to do that, he he brought down a printing press. And this is another aspect of keeping the men busy during the winter. And and like its previous predecessor, it which was called the South Polar Times, it comprises poetry and and and and drawings and stories and all sorts of things which really tell us about life in Antarctica during the Edwardian age. So it has that sort of of certain stiffness in the sense of associated with with the time, but also plenty of humor and very personal touches. So it's a real beautiful, insightful, moving insight into what it meant to be to winter down there at that time at the edge of the earth without contact with the outside world. And, yeah, it's it's it's wonderful. And actually to end, it was actually bound down there as well. And it was contained within these covers that were made from the plywood of storage cases. So storage cases which had been emptied, they cut up the wood and turned that into the cover of these volumes.

Well, appropriate transition as we discussed the way that people would occupy themselves on these expeditions. Jan, last question to you. What can you tell us about the history of board games in Antarctica? Well, board games were obviously another way of keeping people, men, early on it was mostly men. And of course, that's a big aspect of our book is to show through objects how women eventually were allowed and got to play an important role in all things Antarctic. But the board games were brought down from the earliest days just simply to keep busy like anywhere else. But even more so, I mean, you can imagine their added value and importance within the seclusion of Antarctica and the 24-hour darkness of winter. So this included all the classic board games such as chess and drafts, et cetera, and backgammon. But I guess later, you know, if you go to Antarctic stations today, most of them have an entertainment kind of room where they have, well, they used to have CDs and videos.

things are changing but um but but also stacks of books and and all sorts of games to play with so every kind of game you can you can imagine so that's one aspect of games in antarctica board games have also been made on the theme of antar of the antarctic and antarctic exploration so admiral bard the american explorer who organized many expeditions down to antarctica famously made a board game which sort of plays on his exploration and his flight over the South Pole

and it's basically who gets there first with his board games but it was a way of raising money, of raising his profile, of doing education outreach on the expedition. The idea was repeated by a French explorer called Paul-Emile

Victor who also made his own board game which is actually a bipolar Arctic and Antarctic board game and um yeah so there's both and to end on the juicy stories um on there's a tale of of um which remains somewhat foggy and murky of of murder having been done over a board game over a chess game in a russian station um daniel remind me what period that was i think it was in mid yeah i think 70s or something um but it's one of those stories where nobody quite exactly knows it's sort of anecdotal that someone murdered someone over the outcome of a chess game in a

Russian station and afterwards that the games were banned. Of course, you have to remember when the story emerged, although Antarctica did foster some scientific exchanges between Western and these scientists, there also was this international competition, which we could talk about at length, But it very much, I think, suits the American and Western depiction of the Soviet Union to think that they are murdering each other over their chest. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guests, Dr. Daniela McKay and Dr. Jean de Pomerue. Jean, we'll start with you. Where can we find you online and what are you working on next? um well i'm you can find me online on the website of the scott perler research institute which is part of the university of the university of cambridge and is a sub-department of the geography

department so that's the scott perler research institute and there you can read about all the different aspects of my work the central aspect right now as mentioned beginning is a is focusing on the history of the exp of the exploration of of the scientific political and cultural history of the ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica. So it's a history of how we came to understand these vast, unknown environments. Danielle, the same question to you. Where can we find you and what's your next project?

Well, of course, my faculty profile at Texas Tech, but also at Twitter at Farsouth History, my Twitter handle. And I frequently post work, like popular writing with the conversation on different sort of topics related to Antarctic history. My current research project, I'm working on getting a book published

on the history of British and New Zealand Antarctic programs during the International Geophysical Year, which might be of interest to some of your listeners because of the kind of major role that the United States Navy played in the development of the New Zealand program. They're very near each other on the McMurdo Sound. And that should be coming out

with Harvard University Press in about a year. And I'm also doing another project right now on the history of the Discovery Investigations, which is the first kind of major maritime research project in the Southern Ocean. Well, thank you both again for coming on. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Me for wine, put it in the alley. Way, hey, put it in the alley.

Help me for wine, put it in the alley. Put it on the shimbo now. A porter of a porter gin, oh. Way, hey, put it in the alley. A porter of wine, both white and red, oh. Put it on the shimbo now. So help me for wine, put it in the alley. We'll be right back.