All the way back in November I had the happy opportunity to visit the Tromsø Polar Museum, far up north in Norway. I was working on the barquentine Antigua sailing the fjords there, from Tromsø to around Reinfjord and back. The tours are a week long, usually with the aim of seeing whales, northern lights, and the general sort of breathtaking natural beauty found in the cold, ice-jewelled places of the world. Jagged snowy mountains, the noonday sun hanging a mere inch over the horizon throwing orange and pink shadows on everything, temptingly clear blue water so cold that it makes your ribcage contract when you plunge into it. You know. That sort of thing.
Tromsø being the terminus of our tours, we usually had a day or so to spend in the city. After we had waved off the departing guests and frantically scrubbed down the entire ship, the time was ours until the next passengers arrived. Popular activities included visiting the large, modern swimming complex with its variety of hot and cold pools, exploring the many hiking trails, and the traditional favourite of sailors: blowing all our money on madly expensive Norwegian beers.
Being of a certain persuasion (down with the polar sickness) my main priority was the aforementioned Polar Museum. I knew it was here, I knew it held in its collection Helmer Hanssen’s sledging compass used on the 1911 trek to the south pole, and I also knew that somewhere in the building would be a large, boxy piece of scrap metal which was one of the things I wanted to see more than anything else in the world.
The museum itself is housed in a low red clapboard building on the waterfront. A blue plaque on the outside reveals that it was once a customs house. It focuses primarily on the history of hunting and trapping in northern Norway and Svalbard, whaling, sealing, and the exploits of Nansen and Amundsen.
Meandering through the ground floor, I admired unsmiling waxworks showcasing the cold weather gear utilised by whalers of old. I peered into cases of artefacts recovered from Willem Barentz’s overwintering on Nova Zembla. I tried not to meet the plaintive glass eyes of a taxidermied seal pup, forever locked in its final moments on styrofoam snow. Old compasses, even older rifles, furs, skins, bits of ancient dog sled: the course of life in snowy maritime regions usually shakes out in shades of grey and brown, framed with brass fittings and carefully wound rope seizings.
A squat staircase lead to the upper floor. Looking up, I could see a very familiar model airplane. This was presumably where we’d be kicking into high gear. Be cool, I told myself. Don’t immediately start looking for it. Enjoy the things that come beforehand. When my good pal Ireny and I first visited the SPRI Polar Museum we purposefully didn’t look for the Black Flag (if you know you know) but tried to let it come to us naturally as we followed the chronology. Of course this did mean that we got increasingly wound up as we approached January 1912 and at one point Ireny caught sight of the Object in question out of the corner of her eye and turned to me with a wild look to whisper “I’ve just seen it”- but that is beside the point. The point being that I was determined to be so very relaxed and normal. In front of the big crunched up piece of dented metal scrap. That I wanted to see so desperately.
I ascended the stairs to be greeted by a collection of rather nice models displaying famous polar aircraft: Andrée’s balloon, the Norge, the Dornier Wal planes used by Amundsen and Ellsworth. There was a bust of Amundsen, and a collection of fabrics from airships.
However, despite all my best efforts, I also saw the tank immediately. It was difficult to miss, placed as it was directly in the line of sight of the stairs. It was larger than I imagined, and much more casual, somehow. Call me crazy, which I well may be, but I was almost expecting some sort of imposing aura. It was cut open in three places, a legacy of investigators hoping to uncover some extra clue to the fate of the crew to whose plane the tank had once belonged.
It was from Tromsø that Roald Amundsen took off on his final, fatal flight into the grey unknown. There is a large statue of him not far from the waterfront. It was one of the first things I saw in the city after hopping off of the airport shuttle, duffel bag on my shoulder. It was cold and the sun had already slipped behind the mountains, casting the city in a pale half light. There was snow on the ground. Very appropriate atmosphere.
The fuel tank is one of three confirmed items ever recovered from Amundsen’s vanished Latham 47 flying boat, the others being a wing float and another tank. Shuffled off into a corner beneath a window and in front of a severe-looking waxwork of Helmer Hanssen (Hanssen was a Tromsø native, explaining why he’s got such a large presence here), the tank wasn’t cordoned off and was only identified by a languid little sign on the wall, which summarised the events of Nobile’s disastrous flight in the Italia, Amundsen’s rescue attempt and subsequent disappearance, and finally dropped the information that this was one of the very few remnants ever found from the Latham 47. Not very bombastic.
As I stood there reading, an elderly woman clad in the distinctive red snow suit of a Hurtigruten cruise passenger wandered up and used the tank as a table to spread out her museum guide. Her knees knocked against it. The metal made a dull clunk. Once satisfied, she ambled away without a second glance at one of the few physical pieces of evidence relating to the death of one of the greatest polar explorers in history. I boggled. I reeled. Other crimson-coated Hurtigruten guests swarmed mildly behind me.
The air took on a surreal quality. My hearing became very sharp, as if I had been taking a test and suddenly heard a fluorescent light buzzing overheard. Standing in front of the final artefact of Roald Amundsen’s legacy while surrounded by Brits audibly trying to recall the details of the Terra Nova expedition was, I think, precisely how Amundsen himself must have felt when he heard “three cheers for the dogs”. I was going insane.
I scurried off, taking refuge a few feet away in between a glass case containing a model of the Gjøa and a wall of photos. Amundsens glowered out at me en masse. One photo was mislabelled as being of Amundsen and Frederick Cook when the second man was clearly Adrien de Gerlache. Thank god. The opportunity to be pedantic grounded me somewhat.
Why did it feel like an affront? Of course: museum etiquette. Please don’t touch the exhibits. But this is a fuel tank. A large piece of dented metal. It’s hardly fragile. And does the fuel tank even truly have significance? Or is it entirely incidental? The wall adjacent to where the tank stood was filled with objects taken to and from the South Pole by Amundsen’s party. Matchbooks, knives, compasses. Everything carefully inscribed ‘Sydpolen’ or ‘Amundsen’ to give it credence as a genuine Artefact. So why did I feel more moved by a twisted hunk of metal? What made the tank so important to me when ostensibly the actual people of the time wanted me to get excited about the objects they had specially designated as artefacts?
Of course I was interested in seeing these things. Of course I cooed over Hanssen’s sledging compass and grinned at the big silk flag embroidered Northwest Passage, South Pole, Northeast Passage, North Pole with satisfaction akin to what I feel when I see the four stars on German football kits. But the fuel tank was the only thing that made my breath catch a little, and this was entirely down not to the thing itself but to me and what I personally was doing to it in my mind.
Artefacts only have meaning insofar as it is granted by the people who view them. Then there is cultural value that imbibes an artefact with meaning. My mother loves to tell of an incident that occurred when I was a child and my family was on holiday in Italy. We visited Pompeii, and, as the story goes, in the middle of a tour of one of the excavated villas, my shrill little voice rang out: “But Mummy, it’s only a lot of broken pots!” Four year old Sabina did not have much cultural or contextual appreciation for Pompeii. Ironically I would then go on to become an insufferable history geek and spend quite a lot of time staring captivated at broken pots and other, even more broken things. Case in point.
This past December I heard a fantastic lecture given by Ash at Terror Camp, the annual conference for fans of the television show The Terror, which spoke beautifully on artefacts and the meaning we give them. The broad gist of the talk was the common naming of artefacts of the Franklin Expedition as relics, lending to them the mystique and veneration of religious objects. This, as Ash pointed out, has troubling implications when it comes to the Franklin artefacts, remnants that they are of an aggressive colonising force. We should not venerate the project of empire. The devastation wrought by the British on the people, animals, and environment of the Arctic should not be swept aside in favour of worshipping a bent spoon, no matter how sadly the original owner of said spoon may have ended. The demise of Franklin and his men was repurposed as a tale of martyrdom in the name of Exploration, Discovery, Britannia! But in truth they were sacrificed on the altar of the empire’s insatiable thirst for money and power.
Was I aping the Victorians in Tromsø, paying homage to this piece of junk? And most relics are pieces of junk. As well as being museum aficionados, my family simply loves poking into any old church we pass by on holiday so I’ve seen, off the top of my head:
-a piece of the true cross
-a piece of the manger
-hair from Mohammed’s beard
-tunic belonging to Fatima
-the staff Moses used to part the Red Sea
…and various and sundry saints’ knucklebones, femurs, whole skulls, and, once, an entire skeletal hand encased in an elaborate golden ark. You could drop a coin into a slot and the ark would light up for thirty seconds, allowing the viewer to briefly gaze in awe at the desiccated remains of…a saint whose name I do not recall.
How many of these relics, carefully preserved and displayed on black velvet, in darkened chambers to block out light damage, in temperature-controlled cases, were real? Well, at the risk of sounding blasphemous, probably none of them. Okay, Fatima’s tunic I’d believe. That’s fair enough. But the manger? Cmon. Not to mention that there are probably enough bits of the true cross floating about out there to construct several of the things, Berlin Wall rubble for Christians. And am I seriously meant to believe that this stick was what the prophet Moses, the big guy, used to part the Red Sea? Forgive me if I find that hard to swallow.
I’m intrigued because of the historiography behind them and the delicious gruesomeness of a sainted skeleton dressed in mouldering velvet. But for a devout observer, these objects hold power and emotional meaning. That’s something I can’t turn my nose up at. Upon seeing the sextant and chronometer used by Frank Worsley during the voyage of the James Caird, a sort of wild fervour rose in me that I can only imagine is what a true believer might have felt gazing upon the lavishly jewelled golden reliquary constructed expressly to hold a bit of splintered wood. What I felt had nothing to do with the fact that the sextant was a highly precise piece of technology. Alright, perhaps a bit, but that only accounts for the general pleasure I get from seeing any navigational equipment. The tightness in my throat was all due to the association with a historical figure whom I hold in great esteem, whose life and exploits I have spent significant time researching, and a small icon of whom resides in my wallet. (Really.) Equally, I doubt many people overcome at the sight of the supposed manger have significant interest in animal husbandry accessories.
After all, the placement of an artefact in a museum has nothing to do with its usefulness or function. As Ash eloquently explained, an artefact has no utility. It is nullified the moment something becomes an artefact, being replaced instead by its function as a signifier. If you will forgive me for getting a bit Marxian for a moment, the use-value of the object has nothing to do with its importance as an artefact.
Frequently, of course, artefacts are important because they give us a visual glimpse into the past: so that’s what a Nansen cooker looks like. So that’s how big the sledges were. So in a way it is still the utility of these objects that intrigues us. They help us imagine them in use. But others hold a fascination completely disconnected from their original function and it is these that tend to evoke the most emotions. These are the ones most likely to fall in relic territory. They are not useful. Often it is precisely because they are not useful that they are emotive. They are pathetic in the traditional sense of the word. Conjured immediately to mind are the scraps of slightly shredded brown paper displayed at the SPRI. A torn wrapper from a package of biscuits, the paper was taken by Apsley Cherry-Garrard from the tent in which the bodies of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers were found. It meant nothing to any of the three men in the tent. But still it was taken by Cherry-Garrard, a miserable little souvenir of the great tragedy of his life. And so looking at that useless bit of paper in the museum, I felt my heart contract and stared at it for an inordinate length of time.
Do we treat the artefacts in the SPRI as relics? Do we still see Scott as a martyr, as he was portrayed in the direct aftermath of his death? His legacy has become a notoriously complicated in the past century, with ups and downs, but I believe that this is all for the better. Antarctica has no native population to subjugate. But it has the promise of natural resources tucked away beneath the ice and snow to be extracted and, in the early 20th century, the opportunity to earn a great deal of national clout. Scott and co. were there in the name of science, but no nation past or present has ever helped fund science simply for the sake of it. Unquestioning veneration (in modern parlance I believe it is called a parasocial relationship) never leads to good.
Being a bit more prickly and not having the good PR sense to die before he could turn into a curmudgeonly old man, Amundsen never received quite the martyr treatment that Scott did. And I don’t think I put Amundsen up on a pedestal. I certainly am fascinated by him, but am fairly well-aware of his flaws and shortcomings. Sometimes it’s actually these flaws which I find most intriguing of all. In general I try to keep a balanced mind about historical figures in whom I take an interest: the Huntford Trap is not one I’m eager to trip into. And Amundsen really could be kind of a dick.
Yet in a way, I suppose I was making a pilgrimage of sorts. Being in the physical presence of the fuel tank didn’t offer any information I couldn’t have gathered from a book or the internet. I didn’t really need to see it for a better visual understanding of anything. It was big and bulky enough, in fact, that it rather confused my understanding of its place in the plane. I am not well versed in planes. But I was champing at the bit to see it nonetheless.
Was it the whiff of death that gave the fuel tank its strange grip on me? Death undeniably lends weight to things. I’ll nod towards the museum’s few Andrée artefacts at the top of the stairs which, despite being mostly scraps, had a certain eeriness to them. Call it hindsight or drama, whatever you like. We assign meaning to artefacts, particularly when we know the context to which they belong. That’s an immutable truth of human nature. Meaning can change over time as cultural values and contexts and understandings shift. A recent trip to the American Museum of Natural History turned up more than just a handful of empty display cases once occupied by human remains, an unmistakeable hallmark of changing perspectives and ethics. Tellingly, these spaces popped up frequently in the halls of African and Asian peoples.
Musings on meaning like those raised by Ash’s talk always electrify my mind and make me look at things in new ways. Are these the right ways? What are the right ways? I’m not really qualified to give answers, just being someone who takes an interest in history and has some strong feelings about how the past is represented and recreated in books, in museum, and in our own heads. I am also a constructivist by nature and by trade, which makes me even more wishy-washy. Perhaps the Latham fuel tank is so meaningful to me because I’m American and, despite enjoying an unsatisfying film, my deep-seated programming makes me crave neat Hollywood endings tied up with bows. I want to know what happened to that goddamn plane.
A strange subconscious part of me had some weird hope that seeing the fuel tank would make me better understand Amundsen in a way. As if it were a last letter or photograph from which some secret could be gleaned. I wanted to look at it and gain some sort of insight. I did not. My overwhelming sense was just how impenetrable it was, how anonymous. How...useless. And because it was useless, it only drove home the unsolvable mystery of Amundsen’s disappearance. We will have no grand final words. The final photograph is a blurry shot of a man in a hurry, doing up his coat buttons and vaguely frowning.
I did not find the fuel tank beautiful or particularly interesting to look at. It didn’t help me better understand the way a Latham flying boat operates, nor did it lend me any new perspective or knowledge on Roald Amundsen or his death. If it were to cease being an artefact, it would not be useful. It would be scrap. And, as I’m sure the rambly, confused words you have just read indicate, I can’t even quite articulate why it felt so important, for all I was assembling meaning just as fast as my overtaxed neurons could fire.
All the same. If you happen to take a trip up to Tromsø, try not to accidentally kick the big grey metal signifier on the ground upstairs. It might not damage it or affect our understanding of history in any way, but something about it just makes me wince regardless.
Eee what a brilliant read, thank u for sharing!! I love to think about museums and I love to hear you think about museums!! Two quick wonderings: 1. Can an artefact ever stop being an artefact? 2. I wonder if the functional objects still do carry emotional weight, in the sense that we imagine how they were used but also who used them (like Wuzzles sextant - does use add weight, or does the weight remain separately assured)?