Abstract
For any reader wondering why a point on the globe visited only by a very small number of people is worth a dedicated book, Michael Bravo provides compelling answers in this well-written historical account. Bravo’s volume is a recent entry into the publisher’s Earth Series of books, which has produced about two dozen ‘deep dives’ from noted scholars on histories of specific geographic and environmental concepts, from caves and fire, to silver and waterfalls. These lavishly illustrated paperbacks are designed to give a concise overview of these topics to a broad but sophisticated audience. Bravo is emphatically well-qualified to write such a history of the North Pole, given his extensive scholarship on Arctic topics such as Indigenous navigation, geopolitics, historic scientific expeditions, and contemporary climate research.
In North Pole, Bravo’s clear prose leads the reader through a cultural history of this place, from Inuit celestial navigation to early modern cartography to the quests of the ‘heroic age’ of exploration in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of territory Bravo treads will be familiar to historical geographers and historians of science who research Arctic exploration: there are familiar figures like Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, and Fridtjof Nansen and an overview of the Arctic as a literary motif and zeitgeist fixture in the Victorian era. However, Bravo gives this material a fresh spin by urging readers to think beyond the North Pole as simply an abstract object of nationalist fervor or foolhardy adventure. As he writes, A lifetime of knocking on the door of the North Pole led explorers themselves to reflect deeply on the nature of their endeavour . . . What had been widely regarded as one of the most coveted geographical goals on Earth . . . became a metaphor and possibly also a quest for the nature of geographical knowledge itself. (p. 7)
Bravo makes this claim in part by arguing that these 19th- and early 20th-century adventurers had at least somewhat inherited a sense of the Pole’s importance from early modern cartographers such as Peter Apian of Saxony, who produced a series of popular maps in the early 16th century that depicted the North Pole holding the Earth and universe together. Indeed, Bravo’s second and third chapters contend that the North Pole played an important role in the European scientific revolution, during which powerful princes and merchants imagined and pictured the world as a globe and mapmakers like Apian gave Europeans a way to view their expanding world from the perspective of looking down over the Earth from above the Pole. These spherical, global models in turn existed thanks to the work of Ptolemy and other ancient Greek scholars, demonstrating that thinking about earthly polarity extends back thousands of years. In these early chapters, Bravo provides a particularly useful scholarly contribution, as much of the writing on outsider imaginings of the North Pole and the Arctic has tended to focus only on the most recent few centuries.
Bravo’s North Pole is an excellent read for both students and for scholars looking for a concise introduction to the myriad histories surrounding this point on the globe. However, even specialized Arctic historians and historical geographers will find new material and fresh insights in its pages.
