‘A funny thing happened while I was conducting the research for and writing this book,’ notes Stephanie Barczewski (page 305). The ‘funny thing’ was the sudden uprush in positive evaluations of Robert Falcon Scott. Books published by Ranulph Fiennes, Susan Solomon, Max Jones, and David Crane all defended Scott against the well known aspersions of Roland Huntford. Barczewski, who began her work with the intention of fostering a more balanced outlook on Scott, thus found herself in a position somewhat analogous to that of the ill-fated explorer himself at the South Pole, forestalled in her literary endeavour by a host of Amundsens. To her credit, she forged on and produced a very worthwhile volume of her own.
Unfortunately, Barczewski does seem to have lost heart somewhat in the later stages of her trek. Her research has turned up some fascinating nuggets of information; however, she relies unduly on secondary sources for a large part of her narrative, and she has not integrated the important new information she brings forward into a fully convincing set of arguments. The first chapter of Antarctic Destinies provides a general outline of Antarctic exploration before the ‘heroic age’; next, the Discovery, Nimrod, Terra Nova, and Endurance expeditions each receive a chapter. In the chapters on Scott, Barczewski draws mainly on Huntford, Fiennes, and Crane, usually striking a good balance between the extremes of criticism and adulation. She breezily justifies her failure to do any significant archival research for this section by asserting that the manuscript sources have already been ‘thoroughly plumbed’. She states that her book is ‘intended for a general, non-specialist audience’ (page xviii), but those in search of a ‘good read’ will find little here to rival the accounts of Scott's career by Fiennes and Crane or the excellent books on the Endurance and Nimrod expeditions by Caroline Alexander and Beau Riffenburgh. For academics and polar enthusiasts, the lack of primary source research must pose a serious drawback.
Barczewski then turns to the questions of interpretation and commemoration as she outlines the changes in the reputations of Scott and Ernest Shackleton from their own time to the present. Here academic readers will find more sustenance, but the general audience Barczewski claims to be addressing will surely find the long historiographic disquisitions tedious. This section is far better than the first in terms of original research. Barczewski's discussion of the various memorials to Shackleton and her humourous account of his recent reincarnation as a model for business leaders are particularly well done. However, the book often deteriorates into mere listings of (for example) memorial plaques dedicated to Captain Oates or references to him in recent fiction.
Barczewski's main conclusion, that the changing reputations of the two explorers had more to do with changes in British culture than with their own failings or virtues, is certainly well substantiated. One can only applaud her for pointing out that neither hero-worshippers nor debunkers have presented readers with the ‘real’ Scott or Shackleton. The reality may, indeed, lie well beyond the grasp of any historian. Instead, we can only speculate as to why different eras have chosen different heroes. In this respect, Barczewski's approach is more sophisticated than that of Fiennes, Crane, Alexander, and Riffenburgh, each of whom passionately argues that his or her subject deserves a place in the pantheon of exploration. But what if an explorer's elevation to (or demotion from) the pantheon can never be an absolute measure of worth, but only an indication of the values held by the culture that does the elevating or demoting?
Given the importance and relative originality of this insight, it is a real pity that Barczewski did not do more primary source research or develop her arguments more fully. She herself sometimes falls into the same frame of mind as Fiennes and the others, for example complaining that Diana Preston's biography of Scott ‘makes little attempt to restore him to greatness’ (page 269). Overall, she is clearly far more sympathetic to Scott than to Shackleton, and though she declares that she has attempted to maintain a balanced perspective, she frequently indulges in unwarranted criticism of the latter. It is understandable and indeed necessary that she should mention Shackleton's philandering and his poor judgement in financial matters, but there is no need to harp almost obsessively on the ‘unsavoury quality that hung about him’ (5). Barczewski's ostensible purpose is to place the public representations of the two explorers in their cultural context, but too often she seems bent on the far narrower goal of convincing her readers that Shackleton does not deserve his current eminence.
Barczewski's emphasis on Shackleton's failings leads her into a distorted estimation of the place he held as a popular hero during his lifetime, and particularly after the return of the Endurance expedition in 1916. She repeatedly states that the ‘British public’ ‘saw Shackleton as an opportunist . . . focused exclusively on his own glorification.’ After a brief period of lukewarm acclaim, ‘many people’ decided that the Endurance story was ‘frivolous and irrelevant’ (pages 116–117). The only proof advanced in support of these sweeping claims is the comparative lack of press coverage for Shackleton's return, though this was hardly surprising given the wartime context. In fact, though rumours about Shackleton's private life and financial peccadilloes had long circulated among explorers and geographers, the wider public was unaware of them (and remained so until the publication of Roland Huntford's biography in 1985). Moreover, there is evidence of considerable enthusiasm in 1916 even among those who disliked Shackleton. Scott's widow, for example, wrote in her diary: ‘I think it is one of the most wonderful adventures I ever read of, magnificent, Shackleton or no Shackleton’ (Kennet Reference Kennet1949: 143). After the war, for five months Shackleton lectured twice each day at London's Philharmonic Hall. Press notices were laudatory. ‘The Londoner who fails to see Shackleton . . . is robbing himself of his birthright,’ commented the Pall Mall Gazette.
This downplaying of Shackleton's reputation is necessary to support Barczewski's sometimes overly schematic argument. She contends that, among those grieving over wartime losses, Scott's stoicism in the face of death ‘resonated more profoundly’ than did Shackleton's survival (page 116). While this may be true, it is a great (and quite unnecessary) oversimplification to ignore the undoubted appeal that Shackleton's flamboyance and sheer determination had for his contemporaries. The British public loved tragic, noble heroes like Scott, but the same public could readily embrace other varieties of heroism. According to Barczewski, ‘Scott better fit contemporary notions of . . . masculinity’ (page 116), but Shackleton had his counterpart in the fictional heroes of writers like Rider Haggard. As the popularity of E. W. Hornung's gentleman burglar Raffles shows, the Edwardian hero could have more than a touch of the rascal or the swashbuckler about him and still win approval. ‘No one ever exemplified better the pure romance of exploration,’ H. R. Mill wrote of Shackleton (Mill Reference Mill1923: 289), and surely Mill was not the only one who thought so. On the other hand, Barczewski's claim that Scott's reputation was ‘unassailable’ until the 1960s (page 161) takes no account of such critics as George Bernard Shaw. Like Shaw, many explorers condemned Scott in their private correspondence, but, in startling contrast to her treatment of the gossip about Shackleton, Barczewski ignores this evidence.
Overall, Antarctic Destinies is of interest as an indication that the cultural turn in polar exploration history is likely to be an enduring and fruitful trend. It does not, however, demonstrate all that the cultural approach can achieve. Added to the book's more significant failings are a number of small but irritating errors, such as the repeated descriptions of the naval officer Scott as a ‘military’ hero. Barczewski remarks that the narratives published by Parry, Franklin, and other Arctic explorers in the 1820s were eagerly read by their ‘early Victorian’ audience (21). As she is a specialist in British history, this error must be the result of sheer carelessness – an indication, perhaps, that being ‘forestalled’ did indeed cause her to rush too quickly through the later stages of her project.
