Book review: Norwegian author dissects the fascination with Arctic exploration in ‘After The North Pole’
Booksology “After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice”
By Erling Kagge; Harperone, 2025; 368 pages; $ 32.
“The history of the many attempts to reach the North Pole,” Norwegian author and adventurer Erling Kagge writes, “is also the history of how illusions of a frozen wasteland can lure people to their death while satisfying newspaper readers’ growing appetite for drama, suffering, and death.”
Kagge is speaking specifically about 19th-century Europeans and Americans, who gobbled up printed accounts of the far northern excursions undertaken by men seeking to be the first to stand atop the world, efforts that often failed, sometimes disastrously. Yet by the dawn of the 20th century, attaining the goal had become a race.
Fascination with that long march deep into the Arctic has hardly ebbed. More than ever today, publishers issue a steady stream of books about this final stage in the Age of Exploration, books scooped up by flocks of readers almost pathologically obsessed with the topic. Their appetite remains unsated. And it’s into this fray that Kagge jumps with “After the North Pole,” a meditative history on journeys north of 66.5 degrees latitude spanning from antiquity to the present.
Bringing new insight into this well-worn topic is no easy task, but Kagge has an advantage that pays dividends throughout the book. In 1990, he and his fellow Norwegian Børge Ousland were the first to reach the pole unassisted, with only skis for transport. It was a considerable accomplishment that gives him unique insight into the centuries of stories he recounts here.
Early on, Kagge tells of receiving a globe as a childhood gift and being instantly enthralled by its whitened summit. The fascination never receded. He plunged into the pole’s history before plunging that direction himself, and it’s that history that constitutes the bulk of this captivating volume.
Humans, Kagge tells us, have long pondered what lay at the top the planet, which was already known to be round by the rise of civilization. He burrows into the early archives, touching on discussion of the subject in Hinduism’s Rig Veda, telling of Greek astronomer Pytheas’ journey into what became known as Thule around 325 BCE (like his fellow explorer Marco Polo, Pytheas’ claims have been challenged, but his descriptions of what he saw are far too accurate to have been feigned), and writing of the Alexandrian polymath Ptolemy, who correctly positioned the Pole as the globe’s uppermost point.
Centuries later, in 1494, Spain and Portugal divided ocean transit routes across the newly discovered world, pushing other rising powers to look north for quick passage to trading ports in Asia. European Arctic explorations were on.
Dutch navigator Willem Barents was first to go, heading thrice into the seas above Russia late in the 16th century, hoping for open waters. Instead he found his death, the first of many northern sojourners to meet that fate.
By the mid-19th century, Britain was consumed by dreams of reaching the Far East either via the fabled Northwest Passage atop Canada or directly through the Arctic Ocean, then widely believed to be a warm sea of open water thinly rimmed with ice penetrable by ships.
Kagge spends minimal time on the well-chronicled stabs at discovering the Northwest Passage, keeping his primary focus on ventures aimed at reaching the Pole. He begins by touching on Mary Shelley’s immortal 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” which ends on a whaling vessel from which the doctor’s monstrous creation is last seen floating into the Arctic Ocean. It was an unintended metaphor for the forthcoming futile efforts at overcoming nature’s brutality, one Kagge uses to foreshadow what follows.
By the latter 1800s, one mission after another, many involving large crews, sailed into the icebound sea. Kagge recaps many of them. These include the famously calamitous Greely and Jeannette Expeditions that left few survivors, along with lesser-known attempts such as Julius Payer’s failed endeavor on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that ended in a perilous escape.
By century’s end, belief in an open polar sea was nearly extinguished and explorers, finally taking note that the Inuit traveled in small groups, realized they should do likewise. The age of large-scale naval voyages for commercial and military purposes that left unnumbered corpses in icy graves gave way to the era of men reaching for the Pole purely for their own glory.
The early 20th century competition between Frederick Cook and Robert Peary is detailed here, and their frequently questioned claims carefully dissected. Kagge also devotes considerable space to his Norwegian compatriot Roald Amundsen, first to navigate the Northwest passage and first to reach the South Pole, who also claimed the less-remembered feat of being aboard the first airship to fly over the North Pole during the first transcontinental flight across the Arctic Ocean, traveling from Spitsbergen to Alaska.
Because sea ice is constantly moving, Kagge reminds his readers, one can reach the Pole only to float away from its precise location moments later. Due to this, along with doubts about Peary and Cook’s claims, the first verifiable time anyone stood atop the world occurred when Soviet planes carrying military personnel armed with positioning technology superior to their predecessors, landed nearby on April 23, 1948, a secretive event largely unknown even now. “With the world’s gaze elsewhere,” he writes, “these Russians quietly, finally, stepped on the most northerly part of our world.”
Throughout these tales, Kagge periodically reflects back on his own arduous trip to the Pole. These brief but vivid interludes highlight, from firsthand experience, the causes of the mishaps and triumphs those who preceded him underwent. His memories offer readers a deeper understanding of their travails. It’s a delicate balance that easily could have turned attention toward himself, improperly shifting the book’s focus. But he maintains it. His ego never intrudes on the narrative. Instead his knowledge amplifies it.
“A polar explorer exists at the very limits of reason,” Kagge writes of his own adventure. But as the stories found in “After the North Pole” so clearly demonstrate, no shortage of Arctic voyagers have also lived far beyond that horizon.
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