Ushuaia - Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Polar Exploration, The Hollow Earth, Nazi Mythology and Flying Saucers

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Ushuaia - Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Polar Exploration, The Hollow Earth, Nazi Mythology and Flying Saucers

The South Pole and Antarctic Region has bred its fair share of tales of heroism, tragedy and adventure. The first journey to the pole was a dramatic race between Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen. Scott was beaten by only a matter of weeks - but such was the nature of the amateur and gentlemanly rivalry between the two explorers that by all accounts Scott seemed somewhat unconcerned by Amundsen´s triumph. Scott´s final tragic hours in the blizzards of the Antarctic, only some 70 miles from camp, and Titus Oates´señf-sacrificing act of suicide are also the stuff of legend.

The earliest explorers were not merely thrill-seeking diletantes, for their expeditions were also engaged in a wide range of scientific experiements: mapping uncharted areas of land, studying sea and animal life, recording data on magnetism and navigation, and monitoring a variety of meteorological phenomenon.

Much of the scientific knowledge in the region comes from the reports of these explorers, and there is still a great deal of research ongoing in the Antarctic. The British Geographical Survey is based there, Argentina and Chile both have Antarctic research stations on their national territory on the continent, while the USA also run a permanent Antarctic Project. Other special interest groups with a stake in the region include Greenpeace, the Antarctic Meteorological Research Centre and the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators.

The Antarctic was a source of great personal interest for my most recent boss in the city, Simon Murray, and his family. In 2003, at the age of 63, he became the oldest man to walk to the South Pole, accompanied only by the explorer Pen Hadow. In the same year Simon´s wife, Jennifer Murray, attempted to fly round the world pole to pole in a helicopter, but crashed in a snow storm over Antarctica. Five years later the flight was undertaken again. This time with success.

Scott´s ill-fated journey to the South Pole took place in 1911, which serves as a reminder that the continent has only really been in any sense known for the last hundred years. While the great exploration and charting of the Pacific had taken place one hundred and fifty years before that.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that the South Pole and Antarctica hold a strange and powerful hold on the minds of some, long after the Renaissance cartographers´phrase "Here Be Dragons" had long been banished from the maps.

In Edgar Allen Poe´s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, a seafarer makes a journey ´Into the Maelstrom´down into the southern most waters. The vogate into this remote and unknown land concludes in a surreal and self-destructive encounter with the icebergs and cataracts of the polar seas, and has parallels with the vast uncharted spaces of the human mind.

One persistent theory regarding the nature of the South Pole was linked to the Hollow Earth theory. This theory had two forms. The first was that there was a vast subterranean world beneath the crust of the earth. The second was that the world as we knew it was in itself hollow. Rather than living on the outside of a globe, the human race was in fact living on the inside of an eggshell. What it thought of as sky was in reality not an unlimited space above, but a giant bowl that was being looked down upon.

These theories have elements which can be traced to the writings of Plato and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The respected Mathematian Francis Euler and the astronomer edmund Halley both stated their belief that the earth was hollow.

In the nineteenth century, the writings of Jules Verne (Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and Edward Bulwer Lytton (The Coming Race) both drew upon the tradition of the belief in the hollow interior of the earth.

Both versions of the hollow earth theory placed great importance on the two polar regions. For it was believed that it was possible to access these hollow interior regions via two giant holes, 1400 miles wide, which were thought to exist at the poles.

In 1818, an American called John Symmes sent a pamplet to all the universities in the country outlining his sincere belief that the earth was hollow and that this phenomenon was worthy of further investigation.

Receiving an unenthusiastic reception from academia, he then wrote to the US government some five years later requesting funds for an expedition to the South Pole to discover the entrance to this hollow earth, which he had named Symmes Hole. The government voted against financing this expedition - by 56 votes to 46. An amazingly slim majority. And one wonders what those supporting the venture had in mind.

Symmes got his funds a year or so later when a wealthy doctor financed the expedition privately.

The hollow earth theory persisted well into the twentieth century. The mystical and paranormal fringe of the National Socialist Party in Germany also sought to explore the polar regions in search of the elusive entrances to this subterranean world. Drawing upon ancient Germanic legend, it was believed that all life was supported by a living and vital energy termed Vril which was thought to emenate from these underground regions. They hoped to harness this for their political ends.

They also claimed that Bulwer Lytton´s novel The Coming Race was not in fact a work of fiction - but a true account of an expedition he had undertaken. They were interested in his work, for it showed a strong endorsement of social Darwinism and eugenics. This coming race of the novel´s title was in many ways similar to the Nazi ideal of the ubermensch - amoral and motivated only by a will to power. Bulwer Lytton´s novel was set in Nepal, and similar expeditions to the polar ones were also dispatched here.

After the second world war, the Antarctic continued to appeal to conspiracy theorists and the lunatic margins of the absolute elsewhere. Shipping records show that in 1945 a large number of vessels left Germany for Ushuaia at the southern tip of Argentina, a mere 1000km from the Antarctic circle. This gave rise to the theory that a large contingent of the NSDAP had been despatched to form a new Nazi state in Antarcitca. Such people also attribute the numerous UFO sightings in the seas around the Antarctic circle to secret projects being undertaken by neo Nazi scientists.

In the years following world war 2, the hollow earth theories and conjecture that there were holes in the polar regions should have been laid to rest when the US airforce flew over both Poles, finding nothing but snow and ice. However unlikley these theories may seem, it is, however, only in the last 65 years that they have been empircally shown to be false.

Even now, not everyone is convinced. Conspiracy theorists maintain that the US airforce never actually flew over the poles, and explorers have never actually walked there. They assert that the high magnetic fields in the region are deliberately controlled by the beings who live beneath the poles to conceal the entrances to their underground world.

Others argue that there are medical records on file with the US airforce which show that the pilot who made these polar flights, Admiral Byrd, was admitted to military hospital suffering from a psychiatric disorders brought on from actually seeing these holes. He had, of course, been sworn to secrecy and denial by the US government.

There are many cruises and mini expeditions leaving Ushuaia each week to tour the Antarctic regions: Drake Passage, Deception Island, the Weddell Sea, Neko Harbour. None of these vast liners or smaller ice-breakers include Symmes Hole on their itineraries. The cultural and ethnic heritage relates to solely to the Yamanas, the indigenous tribes who made their way between the islands around Tierra del Fuego thousands of years before the European colonists arrived. There is no mention of an ancient, powerful and pure race living beneath the Antarctic snows.

The advance of scientific discovery and exploration banishes and destroys myths and imagination as surely as the demographics and mechanisation of European settlement surplants centuries of native communities. While the latter is unquestionably disastrous in its human cost, the former is also tragic in its own way, for a world without myths, imagination and fantasy is just as impoverished as one monopolised by a single global and homogenised culture.

There is though an element of self-delusion in the frequent, comfortable and luxurious vessels which depart for Antarctica. For they create the impression that the civilised, urbane and rational elements of society have easily conquored and tamed the last reaches of the unknown. When in reality they do little more than approach it at a distance no nearer than the health and safety liability assessors allow.

One of those who accompanied Robert Scott on his final voyage to Antarctica, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, wrote somewhat metaphysically that exploration and discovery can never reveal the unknown - merely push the circle which encloses our own limited scope of activity a fraction outwards towards it.

Antarctica demonstrates the truth of this more than anywhere. The wilder flights of fantasy and insanity may no longer be tenable - but the fact that the fewest of th few have seen the tiniest fraction of this great white continent, should not in any way diminish the wonder and magnificence of the land.

And perhaps to experience the colourful, ever-changing glaciers and ice-floes is to percieve a reality that is in fact more magical, rich and strange than any imagination could conceive.

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