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Unstable Space: Mapping the Antarctic for Children in “Heroic Era” Antarctic Literature

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Abstract

This article examines the Antarctic landscape as one of the last places in the world to be explored and mapped, and as one of the most changeable landscapes in the world. The mapping exercises involved in the early, heroic-era Antarctic expeditions, helped to reduce a once mysterious and unknown landscape into a known entity, something that could be contained and restrained through visual representation. These maps focus on the limits of landscape, on the outer edges and the upper peaks and so mapping minimises and places limits upon landscapes, creating an image of the landscape which is static, re-presented for human consumption. The article will, therefore, look at the use of maps in a cross-section of six heroic-era Antarctic non-fiction narratives for children written within the last twenty years, and which recount the early Antarctic expeditions, recreating and re-presenting heroic-era maps as a means of enforcing stasis on this dynamic landscape. The children’s stories, such as Michael McCurdy’s Trapped by the Ice! (1997), Meredith Hooper’s Race to the Pole (2002), and Dowdeswell, Dowdeswell & Seddon’s Scott of the Antarctic (2012), show that the stultifying effect of maps is exacerbated in the children’s heroic-era narratives as they seek to fix the landscape geographically, as well as temporally, in the early twentieth century. The article will examine the way in which the maps in the modern retellings of heroic-era narratives seek to undermine the mutable nature of the Antarctic in order to present the child reader with an image of the continent, which is dominated by stasis.

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Notes

  1. The British explorer James Cook (1728–1779) led the 1772–1775 expedition, which was the first to cross the Antarctic Circle and discovered several sub-Antarctic islands, however, he failed to sight the Antarctic continent. The Russian explorer, Fabian von Bellingshausen (1778–1852), followed in Cook’s footsteps in 1821 and made what is now accepted to be the first sighting of the continent. James Clark Ross led a British naval expedition (1839–1843) to the Antarctic, including the ships HMS Erebus and Terror. This expedition was the first to see the ice cliffs of the Great Ice Barrier, and determine the location of the magnetic South Pole. Greater detail on polar exploration is available in histories such as The Lands of Silence (1921) by Clements Markham, former President of the Royal Geographical Society and ardent advocate for polar exploration.

  2. This is a common phrase used to describe the Antarctic continent. R. J. L. Hawke, former Prime Minister of Australia, uses the phrase in his Foreword to Graham Cooke’s The Future of Antarctica (1990, p. vi). In 1986, John Geoffrey Mosley published a book entitled Antarctica: Our Last Great Wilderness; Similarly, Thomas Bauer, in Tourism in the Antarctic (2011), describes the “spiritual value” of the continent as the “world’s last great wilderness” (Bauer, 2011, p. 77).

  3. For example, in 1999 an exhibition opened at the American Museum of Natural History documenting Shackleton’s 1914–1917 Endurance expedition and books such as Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell’s Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer (2011) utilise the story of the Endurance to provide insight into successful leadership strategies.

  4. See, for example, Philip Sauvain’s Robert Scott in the Antarctic (1993); Caroline Alexander’s Mrs Chippy’s Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-bound Cat (1997); Meredith Hooper’s Ice Trap! Shackleton’s Incredible Expedition (2000); Paul Dowswell’s True Polar Adventures (2002); Catherine Charley’s Robert Scott & Roald Amundsen Raced to the South Pole (2003); Sandra Markle’s Animals Robert Scott Saw: An Adventure in Antarctica (2008); Mike Gould’s Race to the Pole (2012), Dowdswell, Dowdeswell and Seddon’s Ernest Shackleton: Antarctic Explorer (2015); and Anita Ganeri’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Antarctic Expedition (2015).

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Correspondence to Sinead Moriarty.

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Moriarty, S. Unstable Space: Mapping the Antarctic for Children in “Heroic Era” Antarctic Literature. Child Lit Educ 48, 56–72 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-016-9307-1

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