The News at the Ends of the Earth: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration

by Hester Blum

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Travel

328 pages, Paperback

First published April 4, 2019

Reviews

[Annie Cheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you read any part of this book, read chapter 4 on arctic dead letters (blank forms that polar explorers left under rocks, in cairns, in messages in bottles — the blank space was meant for the next person who found it to leave updates on the expedition, but often they’re the last remaining record of a dead expedition, and these forms keep resurfacing in the arctic even now). Not sure why but I found it unreasonably poignant… the whole book was a reminder of the haunting materiality of texts, the strange temporal romance of leaving a mark or sending a message despite vain hope of future reception, text making as a vital community organ, etc etc etc… got me pondering so much about how anthropocene climate change affects our notion of “ephemeral” texts (since our own impending ephemerality is omnipresent) and I’ll shut up now

[Timo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Op p. XXI staat tweemaal 'bibliotèque' in plaats van 'bibliothèque'. Op p. 185 duikt dan weer het woord 'Intuit', wat natuurlijk 'Inuit' moet zijn. Tussen 1848 en 1859 verliepen op p. 178 twaalf jaren, maar volgens p. 188 zijn dat er maar elf. De Jeannette-expeditie van 1879-1881 wordt op p. 107 ‘nearly forty-five years’ na de noodlottige Franklinexpeditie van 1845-1848 (‘the late 1840s’, p. 108) geplaatst. Ik kan dus eigenlijk niet eens stellen dat het boek van excellent schrijf- en rekenwerk getuigt.

Het boek is wel voorzien van mooie prentjes! Ook de toewijding van Blum is lovenswaardig - al sprak die me weinig aan.

[Alex Tischer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Met Blum in October, a beautiful study of attempts at making a "mark" in an oceanic landscape that inherently deters mark-making. Newspapers on Arctic and Antarctic voyages, cairns to signify buried notices of position, daily dropped bottles with coordinates on the whereabouts of the ship, the 1819 - 1914 era of polar "discovery" was a fascinating hubris of natural resource staking and also created frenzies for information back in temperate lands for what the expeditions experienced. Such frenzy is evident in books that center polar discovery or life at the poles: Frankenstein, lots of Poe, and Jules Verne as well.

[Jayme Mowery · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is an incredible look at the ephemera of polar expeditions. Did you know they brought entire printing presses on these ships and would circulate newspapers and make playbills for one act plays they would put on for each other?

unique perspective on cultures of exploration, humanizes the lionized heroes of the poles. Sure they were brave and heroic, but they also liked to write silly stories about penguins and play dress up with their friends.