Roughly 10 years ago I realised that I was going to write a long work of fiction set at the north and south poles. It would be an epic historical mystery story, and it would be based around episodes from the lives of real explorers.
Why I would do this I did not know.
A few years before that I had read The Arctic Grail, an account by Canadian historian Pierre Berton of the centuries-long search for the North West Passage from Atlantic to Pacific. That was one obvious inspiration.
Another was my own early childhood in western Canada. There had been a lot of snow there, and when my family moved to Ireland I had to make do with an awful lot less of it. I was haunted by the snows of yesteryear, which – now that I type it in black and white – seems a bit on the nose.
Maps were another inspiration for the book. Like many people, I love looking at maps, and maps of the far north and south had always been favourites, though I had never really stopped to wonder why. There would be maps in my book, I would make sure of it.
But when I tried to look deeper into my motives, to set out my aims or identify themes, my mind recoiled from the problem. There was something big and mysterious waiting on the bleak Antarctic Plateau and in the maze of Arctic channels that hides the north west passage, and I couldn’t bear to confront it just yet. I would get to it all in good time, like a dental appointment.
Meanwhile, I could distract myself with the (literally) prosaic work of finding characters and locations to embody these vague notions. This would require a lot of historical reading and a journey to the Arctic: no need to actually think about anything yet.
The research took several years, during which (a very small number of) people would, for the sake of politeness, occasionally ask me what I was working on. When I told them that I was researching polar explorers, Irish friends would light up with genuine interest: “Tom Crean from Kerry?”
Crean, who served in Antarctica under both Ernest Shackleton and his rival Robert Scott, is at the centre of a growing cult in Ireland. He was a genuine hero, and looks well in the photographs.
No, I would say. Not Tom Crean. Or at least, he’s only there in passing.
“Then what about Ernest Shackleton, from Athy? You’re from Kildare too, aren’t you? He’d be great. He knew Tom Crean, you know.”
Sorry, not a lot of Shackleton either, much as I admire him. Shackleton may have been almost as big a bungler and opportunist as his enemy, Scott. His overoptimistic planning exposed his men just as heedlessly to danger. But unlike Scott, who seemed to accept doom almost gratefully, Shackleton worked miracles to bring all his people home again.
“So any Irish at all then?”
Well... there is this one man, though you probably won’t have heard of him. Captain Francis Crozier from Banbridge in Co Down. He was second in command of Sir John Franklin’s infamous Royal Navy expedition to the North West Passage, the one that vanished in 1845 with both its ships and all 129 hands. There’s a statue of him by the river in his home town, surrounded by dodgy-looking polar bears.
“Right... So what was so great about this Crozier lad?” (Nobody actually asked me this, of course: they’d already lost interest when I nixed Crean and Shackleton.)
Nothing, really... It’s just that he didn’t come back, that’s all. Crean passed away peacefully in his native Annascaul. Shackleton died in his bunk on his last expedition, surrounded by friends. But poor old Frank Crozier, a fine seaman, loyal friend, distinguished scientist, disappointed officer and heartbroken suitor, simply vanished in the barren lands. There is no surviving account of his actual death.
This was also the fate of the famous Captain Lawrence Oates, who – too crippled to keep up with Scott’s routed South Pole party – walked out of the tent and into a blizzard, alone and shoeless, to give the others a slim chance of survival. Too slim by 10 miles, as it turned out. For reasons I didn’t understand yet, Oates would be one of my characters too.
Later, I read about Lieutenant Joseph Rene Bellot, a young and idealistic French naval officer who volunteered for Lady Jane Franklin’s private search for her husband, Sir John. Bellot is presumed to have slipped through a crack while sledging on the sea ice. But no one saw him go. He was there one minute, gone the next.
I gradually understood that my book would be built around characters who braved the cold unknown and did not return from it, whose ends could be assumed but had not been observed.
I found several more such figures in the pages of history, including the famous Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the unassumingly heroic “Eskimo Joe” Ebierbing and the enigmatic “Albert Johnson”, a violent fugitive whom Canada half-remembers as the “Mad Trapper of Rat River”.
In 1932 “Johnson” was hunted down and killed by the police and army after a two-month manhunt in the depths of the Arctic winter. But to this day nobody has any idea who he really was, other than a man with almost superhuman endurance and survival skills. So in a sense he too disappeared in the snow.
Finally, I began to wonder whether these people had really died out there. Maybe they’d escaped: maybe they’d found a secret geometry, had managed to slip off along the tangents formed where the straight lines on our maps diverge from the curve of the planet.
Perhaps Derek Mahon was hinting at such a transcendence when he wrote Antarctica, his tragicomic poem about Oates’s last known gesture:
“He is just going outside and may be some time
In fact, for ever. Solitary enzyme,
Though the night yield no glimmer there will glow,
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.”
One of the many books I had discovered in the course of my research was Chauncey Loomis’s Weird and Tragic Shores, which tells of the life and mysterious death – perhaps murder – of the American arctic explorer Charles Francis Hall. At the end of his tale, musing on the lure of exploration, Loomis concludes: “One cannot map the sublime, or give it place names.”
Maybe that was what the novel was looking for in the channels and the ice-fields, where the binaries of black and the white, of living and dead, fade into the fogs and mirages. The book would be a mystery novel about the human need for mysteries. It would be a sort of ghost story, but without any ghosts in it.
I lifted the Loomis quote to use as an epigraph. Most of my historical characters (including the ones who lived long enough to be buried – Franklin’s enigmatic niece Sophia Cracroft; Eskimo Joe’s courageous wife Taqulittuq; Bess Magids/Cross, the cool-eyed Alaskan adventuress; Cecil Meares, adventurer and spy) left their names on the map somewhere. They are all gone now, but they reached for the sublime.
Ed O’Loughlin’s new novel, Minds of Winter, will be published by riverrun books on August 25th and reviewed by Eoin McNamee in The Irish Times on August 27th
