Thursday, September 19, 2013

I visit Antarctica with two famous authors!



The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket***
by Edgar Allen Poe

An Antarctic Mystery****
by Jules Verne

I've been a sucker for maritime adventure books, particularly polar exploration stories, since I read "The Last Cruise of the Jeannette" as a kid. I know what binnacles and ratlines are, how a sail is fothered, and why you're screwed if you don't have the stuff in your cargo hold stowed properly. So I was delighted to learn that Edgar Allen Poe had written a novel in this vein, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1839) and that Jules Verne added a sequel to Poe's work, "An Antarctic Mystery" 60 years later.

It's worth noting that deep Antarctic exploration was still several years beyond Verne's novel (1897) and that Roald Amundsen didn't get to the South Pole until a year after Verne died. So if both Poe and Verne have their ships sailing into what we now know is the Antarctic continent and reporting that in the summer months, there is a mysterious warm spot around the pole that gets upwards of 50 degrees F in summer, that can't be held against them.

Poe's novel begins with two adventurers, who are subject to ***SPOILERS*** mutiny, starvation, heavy storms, shipwreck, and cannibalism. While Poe left a a fertile imaginary Antarctica for Verne to play in six decades after his novel appeared, Poe was less concerned with scenery and more with the psychological effects of harsh conditions and survival. It's a great story, but Poe ends it abruptly, noting that his eponymous character comes to a dreadful and shocking ending, that is not revealed.

Verne sets his novel some 11 years after Poe's fictional voyage and makes up an interesting cast of characters who turn out to have associations with Pym's original shipmates. Their goal is to determine if any of those on board the Jane with Pym have survived.

Verne dismisses or tries to explain some of Poe's more fanciful imagery. His story is also less psychologically grotesque and hones in instead on exciting complications in the voyage and how the sailors overcome them. Especially riveting is ***SPOILER*** a scene in which the Haldane is scooped up by a capsizing iceberg leaving it 100 feet above the sea, the crew spending many days digging a sloping trench into which the ship can be slid back into the sea. It almost works.

I recommend reading both books with a map (click on the pic above to get one). It's a pretty painless way to learn some cool stuff about geography. For instance, one degree of latitude equals about 69 miles, and the circumference of the Antarctic circle is about 10,000 miles, compared to the Equator's 25,000 miles. Plus Poe and Verne are very precise about the location of their ships, and much of the world just north of the Antarctic Circle was known and is accurately depicted by both writers.

The Voyage of St. Brendan might make interesting follow-up reading. Some scholars have tried to place Brendan in the Arctic encountering icebergs and perhaps even Greenland. It's an interesting idea.

No comments:

Post a Comment