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Limits of the Known, by David Roberts.

336 pp. New York: Norton ISBN 978-0393609868

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore



After half a lifetime of mountaineering, and another half of canyoneering and writing books and magazine features, David Roberts has pulled together the various threads of his life in a book that is part memoir, part historical anthology of notable exploration, and part meditation on the meaning and limits of adventure and adventuring. Its summatory and valedictory flavour come from the autobiographical element, disclosed early on, that the author is living with an aggressive cancer (he guards us against the well-meant but double-edged metaphor of “battling” or “fighting” the disease), already spread and metastasized but against which, as of late 2017 when he finished writing, he was holding his own.

Each of the seven chapters of this artfully constructed book interleaves an account of one or more historical expeditions with an episode or aspect of the author’s own life that resonates with them, providing a parallel that Roberts then uses to discuss a series of themes that are fundamental to the mindset and actions of explorers and adventurers. While providing some finely written and thoroughly enjoyable expedition narratives, therefore, the book is much more than the sum of its narrative parts.

The most famous expedition covered in the book—Nansen’s polar drift in the Fram of 1893–96—is the subject of the opening chapter, where it’s interleaved with vignettes of Roberts’s childhood, discovering the joys of hiking and mountains in the Rockies, his imagination fired by space exploration, then by polar exploits like Nansen’s, and finally by mountaineering, the one arena that, in the 1950s, still seemed to offer the possibility of new discoveries—unclimbed peaks—of a kind that had once beckoned the great names of Arctic and Antarctic travel.

Another factor linking his experience with theirs is isolation, the underlying theme of the second chapter, which interleaves an enchanting account of Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman’s reconnaissance of the remotest valleys of the Karakoram in 1937 with a description of an expedition that Roberts and a small group of companions, hungry for first ascents of unclimbed peaks, made to the Revelation Range in south-western Alaska in 1967. Roberts encountered his share of disappointment, failing to climb the peak he attempted in several campaigns over seven weeks, just as Nansen’s early optimism about sledging to the North Pole was crushed less than a month after leaving the Fram. Looking back from an age of satellite phones, the fifty days he spent without contact seemed to Roberts unfathomably isolated compared to today, giving him a kinship to Shipton and Tilman who, after leaving Srinagar with their porters and supplies were completely alone for four months—and with the crew of the Fram, a dozen men away from all other human contact for three years. Although extreme, such isolation was not an uncommon feature of expeditions during the great ages of exploration, an unavoidable sacrifice and a challenge that some rose to meet while others were crushed by it. In retrospect Roberts reports that the freedom to have no responsibility to contact the outside world for a time was an aspect of his Alaskan expedition that he treasures most—but at the same time is glad it was not much longer.

From the 1980s Roberts began to explore the landscape of the Anasazi in the American south-west, and his third chapter explores a conundrum that, as a climber, he became fascinated by as he visited the famous cliff-dwellings and, in remote canyons, discovered some previously unknown to archaeologists. Before the age of modern climbing equipment, how did those ancient people climb rock walls that seem dauntingly difficult even today? Samples of surviving Anasazi rope show they did not have enough strength to hold the weight of an adult, so they cannot have rappelled down from the clifftops. The ancient dwellers of the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, by contrast, had stronger rope, and their burial caves in the cliffside commonly show a stout stick thrust into the rock at an upward angle near the cave mouth. Their method, it seems, was to hazard a dangerous free climb to a cave, put the stick in place, and then loop enough rope over it for both ends to reach the ground, from which point they could haul up their relatives’ bodies. With the Anasazi, as with the Toraja of Sulawesi and the Chachopoya of Peru, there is the additional complication not only of climbing to a ledge or cave but transporting materials to build elaborate structures there. But where ropes are too weak to bear human weight, they may be strong enough to hold some kind of frame to a vertical surface, and Roberts concludes that series of log or bamboo ladders, connecting one ledge to the next, may have been the method used.

For Roberts, an important element of this question is that pursuing it provided a release from the essentially solipsistic pleasures of mountaineering: “However thrilling my canyon play … the game was not about me. It was about them.” Searching for modes of adventure that had a longer resonance with human history also led him to an interest in rivers, which have always been “far more central to human existence than mountains”. What were the potamic equivalents, he wondered, to the last great unclimbed peaks? Surely it would be the last undescended rivers—those not yet navigated by boat from their source (or close to it) to their mouth. These need not necessarily be technically difficult exercises in whitewater, although many are. A more common problem is the remoteness of the spot at which the boats are put in the water, often requiring a long hike or helicopter ride just to get to the jumping off point. In a series of writing assignments Roberts accompanied Richard Bangs, who has made this his life’s work, in descending rivers in Ethiopia and, in the book’s longest sustained episode of comedy, New Guinea, where the BBC crew filming their descent were more focused on their hotel accommodation and the structure of the finished documentary than they were on actually filming. Roberts felt the thrill of encountering people along the riverbank who often had almost no exposure to the outside world—“What are they thinking? Who do they think we are? Why do they think we’ve come?”—but in the end the lack of answers seemed to become a metaphor for their frustratingly fugitive interaction with people and landscape alike, forever borne onwards by the water without time for reflection.

The quest for human contact is at the heart of chapter 5, which focuses on the journeys the Australian gold prospector Michael Leahy made in the interior of Papua New Guinea in the 1930s, when he was the first outsider ever to contact several tribes whose boundaries of experience seldom extended beyond their own valleys. With a mixture of genuine anthropological curiosity and a crude reliance on firearms to overawe all those he met, Leahy never found his crock of gold but did leave behind some five thousand photographs and several reels of 16mm film as a record of his travels, along with diaries that became more detailed and thoughtful as he progressed and gained confidence as a writer, providing modern anthropologists with a now-irreplaceable record of highland Papuan societies before any appreciable contact had taken place. Ironically, such first contact was for Leahy an unlooked-for side effect of his main purpose, yet it is what today places him in the line of first-contact explorers from Marco Polo to Bernal Diaz and James Cook.

In an age when satellite imagery can reveal every inch of the Earth’s visible surface—whether humans have trod there or not—we are accustomed to thinking of the physical exploration of the planet as being completed. But in two respects it is just beginning. The first, which Roberts does not go into, is the underwater world—both the geographical interest of the abyssal plain and submarine mountain ranges and the human interest of shallower seas that are the new frontier for archaeologists investigating the drowned surfaces on which our Palaeolithic ancestors walked. The second, which Roberts does write about, are the secret spaces underground: the world of caves. While everyone knows the location and height of the highest points on each continent, he points out, no one knows where the deepest points of the deepest caves are, because they probably haven’t been discovered yet. While a mountain might be seen and measured a century before it is climbed, no one can see and measure a cave—or even be sure of its existence—until they are actually descending into it. And this exploration is happening right now: over the last two decades the title of “world’s deepest cave” has been contended by various cavern systems in France before rival teams began “pushing” the cave systems of Chevé and Huautla (in Mexico) and Krubera (in the Caucasus of Georgia) in long campaigns involving huge quantities of equipment and dozens of international cavers, resembling the Himalayan mountaineering assaults of the 1950s. Currently Krubera holds the record at 7,206 feet, but that is surely not the last word.

In the final chapter Roberts recounts his ongoing medical treatment and writes movingly of the deep friendships that his life of adventuring have led to, but also of the toll that life has taken on his wife Sharon, acknowledging the unthinking cruelty with which he brushed off her worries about accidents and bear attacks during his climbing trips even as he remembers a golden week they spent alone camping on an Alaskan lake island before their floatplane pickup. But for those in the future who, despite their loved-one’s misgivings, find their pulse quickened by the thought of adventuring into the unknown, Roberts sees no end in sight to the riches Earth has to offer.

Relics of the Franklin Expedition: Discovering Artifacts from the Doomed Arctic Voyage of 1845

By Garth Walpole

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017, $39.95

Reviewed by Jonathan Dore


Garth Walpole was an Australian archaeologist who early on became fascinated with Franklin’s final expedition, and who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the relics recovered from it by various searchers and held in the National Maritime Museum, London.  In later life he decided to expand this research and publish the results as a book, and had completed most of this work before he sadly succumbed to cancer in 2015. Before his death he had asked Russell Potter to edit the work for publication, and it has now been published by McFarland (who also brought out Glenn Stein’s Discovering the North West Passage). With the first major exhibition of the relics in more than a century due to open this summer, publication could not have been better timed, despite the poignant reminder that the author did not live to see the exhibition or garner the well-deserved attention his book would have engendered in its wake.

Although the first chapter is titled “The material biography of relics: A physical and spiritual relationship”, only the first couple of its 45 pages address the question of the spiritual meaning that individuals and cultures invest in historical artifacts. After that uneasy theoretical throat-clearing (perhaps a requirement of the original thesis), we are straight into a chronological account of the years after Franklin set sail in 1845, starting with the first tentative search expeditions by land and sea in 1848 and the first breakthrough – the earliest discovery of actual artifacts – in August 1850, on Beechey Island. At this point the chapter loses its chronological structure, and it is hard to see what organizing principle replaces it, though the complexity of events in that month, with several British and American ships operating around Beechey simultaneously, would always be hard to capture. Accounts of the reconnoitring of the various sites by different officers overlap, each one discovering not only the remains of Franklin’s first wintering but having to disentangle them from the traces of each other, as each party visited the same sites in turn. The action then moves on to Belcher’s expedition in 1852, then confusingly back again to 1850, and the chapter ends with Kennedy’s expedition in 1851. Only with the description of Franklin’s main camp at Beechey does the discussion become more clearly structured, with a focus on each site (garden, storehouse, cairn), and the artifacts found in them, as seen by each searcher in turn. Late in the day we come to the three graves, most iconic of the Beechey remains, though Walpole perhaps wisely limits his discussion to the discoveries made by the first searchers rather than trying to summarize the wealth of knowledge gained by Beattie and Geiger’s exhumation of the bodies in the 1980s.

Chapter 2’s title is similarly misleading (“The continued search for relics, 1851–1854”, though in fact it covers 1851–2010), again perhaps a relic of the original thesis. It is, however, a much better-organized narrative than chapter 1, benefiting from the historical accident that it relates a series of successive, rather than simultaneous, expeditions. In terms of the quantity of artifacts and information retrieved, the most important of these were the first four: Rae in 1854, McClintock in 1857–59, Hall in 1864–69 and Schwatka in 1878–79, all of whom, exploring within living memory of the expedition, also interviewed many Inuit who had been eyewitnesses of Franklin’s expedition, or had heard stories directly from those who were  – narratives that became cultural artifacts of as great a value as the many objects of repurposed wood and metal that the searchers traded from the Inuit.

But if the survival of these oral histories represents a triumph of individual and cultural memory, their tragic counterpart is the utter loss, apart from the single Victory Point document, of all written records from Franklin’s crews that might give more detailed information about their fate. A constant refrain throughout Walpole’s account of these expeditions is the raising – and then dashing – of hopes that written records might be discovered, as one cairn after another is hopefully dismantled, dug beneath and around, and then mournfully rebuilt when found to be empty. When Schwatka heard Inuit accounts of the strongbox carefully preserved by the men who had made it to the continental mainland at the place he dubbed Starvation Cove, he hoped that it might have contained the expedition’s records, but when he heard stories describing it being forced open, its contents discarded, and the box reused for its parts, he was shattered by the realization that the last best hope to recover any written account had gone. The barely intelligible gibberish of the Peglar papers, a few sheets of handwriting that happened to survive on or near a seaman’s body, seemed to mock the searchers with their pointless triviality.

Although the material objects collected by the search expeditions are thought of today as archaeological artifacts – part of a historical, public realm – for the first searchers many of them were intensely personal talismans. McClintock especially had known members of the lost crews, and made it his mission to restore as many personally identifiable relics as he could to their families, for whom they became treasured heirlooms of private grief. This is seen in the post-expedition histories of many objects that Walpole records, which show them re-emerging many decades later as a descendant, young enough or distantly related enough never to have known the crewmember personally, bequeathed them to a public collection. Engraved watches and cutlery, the most clearly identifiable items, were thus those McClintock made most effort to retrieve, though the sheer quantity and variety of material in the NMM collection originating in his expedition outstrips that from any others (they are all listed, grouped by expedition source, in the book’s Appendix B).

Uncertainty about the nature of many objects has caused problems in cataloguing and identification, however: is that piece of wood part of a doorframe or a hatchway? A table leg or a stanchion? Differences of opinion between searchers describing an object in a journal and conservators cataloguing them in a museum can lead to objects seeming to appear, disappear, and fluctuate in overall number. In addition, some objects seem to have been lost when collections changed hands from one institution to another. Walpole gives several examples of the kind of detailed worrying away at a description that is needed to resolve such nebulous uncertainties. It is not a task for those whose patience is easily tested.

The mostly keenly felt absence in the first two chapters is a modern map of the two search areas (Beechey and King William islands respectively) naming all of the places mentioned in the text (there are a handful of historical maps of both places, none comprehensive or easily legible). To those not already intimately familiar with the geography of these two remote islands, the descriptions of searchers moving from one place to another, and hearing of events in other places, will simply be impossible to picture or remember, since their relative positions will be unknown. This is a serious drawback.

After Schwatka there was a pause in the search of some fifty years, during which the Franklin expedition passed out of living memory. Since then other searchers – Burwash, Gibson, Larsen and others – mostly on shorter expeditions to smaller areas, have unearthed smaller quantities of material, bearing the steadily increasing signs of weathering as each decade passed. But in recent years aerial and satellite photography, the retreat of sea ice and cheaper travel have all made the remote search zone a more easily approached place, leading to the concerted effort that has now seen the discovery of both Erebus and Terror.

Chapter 5 is the most systematically organized, giving a chronological series of mostly 19th-century engravings and photographs of groupings of objects, with a key identifying each one with its modern NMM accession number. This chapter, when cross-referenced with the complementary listing in Appendix B mentioned above, provides the most permanent documentary and reference value of Walpole’s book.

Although beautifully typeset and printed, the book suffers from what seems to have been a mismatch of expectations between publisher and editor. Potter’s role, as he makes clear in his preface, has not been to rewrite or smooth out the author’s prose but to check the references and add information to fill the occasional lacuna. Unfortunately McFarland, perhaps unfamiliar with the role of an academic editor, seem to have misunderstood it as meaning that they did not need to have the text copy-edited or even, apparently, proofread, with the result that the number of typos, word substitutions, inconsistent spellings and ungrammatical sentences, which Potter must have assumed the publisher would deal with, reach sometimes distracting levels.

Now that Erebus and Terror have been located, we are on the cusp of a new era in the study of Franklin’s last expedition, in which the recovery of a host of new artifacts, apparently well preserved, unweathered, and unmodified by Inuit re-use, could potentially dwarf the number and quality of items collected with such pains over so many years by so many searchers on land. The holy grail – a trembling hope that we share with Hobson opening up the record tube at the Victory Point cairn – is that the ships may yet contain some written records, some crewmember’s journal, that will somehow be legible. The initial conditions seem good – the general state of preservation of the wood is exceptional, boding well for that of the organic material more generally – and we can only hope that the investigation planned by Parks Canada is not too slow or tentative to take advantage before further deterioration occurs.

Walpole’s book is thus published at a fitting moment. Like the exhibition due to open at the NMM in July 2017, it represents a summation of what is known and what has been recovered from Franklin’s last expedition in the first 165 years of searching. It is a memorial to the searchers, and a testament to the almost numinous presence that spoons, watches, and fragments of wood can acquire when these mute witnesses to a calamitous human drama are all that we have to go on.