Elegia Arcticas

I do not regret the journey; we took chances, we know we took them, things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint.

The above very memorable and poignant lines were written by Robert Falcon Scott, an Englishman, just before he and his four comrades froze to death in the frigid wastes of the Antarctic, while trying and failing to be the first explorers to set foot on the South Pole. They had reached it but had found that the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, had beat them to it by a month.

I wonder if the word "bummer" had been invented yet. Probably not.

It was 1912, the same year that quite a few degrees longitude to the north, the travelers on the "Titanic" likewise became victims of ice.

Notwithstanding his exploration exploits, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Scott is remembered longer for leaving us that thought while so aware of his imminent death in the utterly hopeless confines of his ice-doomed tent. His attitude can be applied to situations in our own lives, though there can't be many attended by so much desperation and frustration -- denied by his proverbial British upper lip.

I first became aware of those lines when the English composer Ralph Vaughn Williams used them and others to precede each of the movements in his stirring 7th Symphony, which he subtitled "Sinfonia Antarctica." On my particular recording of it, which has been one of my treasures for over 50 years now, the passages were spoken by the accomplished English actor John Gielgud.

How the fates love their sometimes cruel ironies!

Sixteen years later, in 1928, Amundsen found himself on the losing end of the same sort of incident, in the same kind of locale but this time in the Arctic, much closer to the recumbent "Titanic." He had been urged to come out of retirement to rescue Umberto Nobile, an Italian who earlier had been Amundsen's pilot while they were doing their exploring in a dirigible. They had met with the same kind of disappointment that Scott had suffered, having been beaten by two Americans -- and similarly by just a few days -- in being the first to fly over the North Pole.

But this joke was so bad that it wasn't finished with them yet.

A little later Nobile attempted to bring more honor to Italy by returning to the North Pole in a dirigible on his own, but it went down. During the attempted rescue, Amundsen and five others disappeared, never to be seen again. Nobile, however, was rescued by others.

By then all the multiple meanings of the word "cold" probably had been coined!

In 1969 the Italians and the Russians made an interesting film called "The Red Tent," in which the principals of that attempted rescue meet after death in a type of afterworld and discuss how things came apart. Sean Connery played Amundsen in a subsidiary sort of role, and Claudia Cardinale, still in possession of much of her amazing visual glory, could also be spotted. But Peter Finch dominated the movie. He played the main character, Nobile.

Getting back to Scott, in his journal he also said, "God, this is a horrible place!"

I think most of us, going purely on what we've always heard about the South Pole, would agree. Yet there was a news item just a couple of weeks ago, saying that the U.S. and other countries that jointly preside over the Antarctic while conducting scientific investigations and trying to preserve its original character, are getting very concerned about the damage being wrought by all the tourists who go there each year. I think the number is up to about 30,000 or so.

Things certainly do change! After claiming the lives of so many of those early voyagers, with the subsequent passage of not that many years both of the ice caps have started melting down, in more than one way.