A Little More Whiteness, Please

[Scott Badger]

RJ:

>Another Narrator:
>"There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys
>taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes,
>to the final walls of ice. Our judgement lapsed, fatally: we paid more
>attention to the Pearys and Nansenso who returned -- and worse, we named
>what they did "success", though they failed. Because they came back,
>back to fame, to praise, they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin
>and Salomon Andree: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among >the
poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we
>had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over
>all ability to know victory or defeat.
>     What did Andree find in the polar silence? What should we have
>heard?" (589)


I keep wondering what Pynchon means here.  One thing explorers like Franklin
and Andree found was death most horrible - death from from scurvy,
starvation and exposure in staggering numbers.  Their explorations were
marked by an almost pathological refusal to even consider the methods of the
natives that allowed them to not only survive, but even thrive.  For almost
two hundred years, polar attempts repeatedly failed because the food,
clothing, means of transportation and shelter that the Europeans doggedly
attempted to apply to the arctic were wholly inappropriate.  It wasn't until
nearly the turn of this century that explorers like Nansen, Amundsen, Peary
and Cook began to "succeed" by adopting the way of the Eskimos rather than
their own, supposedly superior, technologies.

Scott