Taken from ‘Alone’ by Richard E. Byrd:

“…Except one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude for long enough to find out how good they really were. And it was all that simple. And it was something, I believe, that people beset by the complexities of modern life will understand instinctively. We are caught up in the winds that blow every which way. And in the hullabaloo the thinking man is driven to ponder where he is being blown and to long desperately for some quiet place where he can reason undisturbed and take inventory.”

After his exceptional tale of survival and near death from CO2 inhalation while alone at a base in Antarctica, and the subsequent four years of coming to terms with it all, Byrd organised the curious Operation Highjump, a 1946-47 US Navy expedition, sending 4,700 men, 13 ships, and multiple aircraft to Antarctica. What a curious time in history, to mount such a peculiar mission towards these extreme latitudes below the equator? In what most would expect to be a very close post-war calming of world powers, the US launched this strange mission into the depths of the frigid and barren ice fields.

I have little interest in conspiracy theories, yet it can’t be helped to read about the Thule Society which is a curious note inside the Operation Highjump Wikipedia page. The theory goes so deep, as to suggest the Americans were attempting to find secret Nazi bases in the Antarctic. There is hardly a lack of information on the topic, and even a few Google Earth sightings to boot. Yet of course, Nature Magazine debunked this entire theory, and all we’re left with, is a curious Byrd, manning an unusual expedition to Antarctica, showing little fodder for any outrageous behavior.

Byrd isn’t the only adventurer with a conspiratorial past. Aleister Crowley pondered a summit of Mt Everest, in 1905, well ahead of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. A relatively accomplished mountaineer (with an actual attempt on K2) and renowned heroin addicted occultist, Crowley was connected to Theosophy, a group rumoured to have maintained connections with the aformentioned Thule Society; makers of mercury rockets and secret ice bunkers…

Yet the real magic of all this, was my discovery of Ultima Thule, a mystical island hidden somewhere above Iceland, or the Shetland islands… Or in fact, any place we haven’t found. The Nazi’s stole the Swastika, and forever tainted it’s true meaning, as was done with the concept of Thule by that pesky Thule Society. We should all remember that the Swastika is the Hindu representation of the creator god Brahma: which when faced to the right, represents the evolution of the universe… How those mythical Germans love to modify ancient and religious symbols with great reversing zeal!

It was in 320BC that the Greek explorer Pytheas supposedly encountered Thule, someplace north of Britain, possibly a ’six day sail’. There isn’t much north of Britain… Maybe it was the Faroe’s? The Shetlands? No one has ever found it since, with wild speculation that it’s the birthplace of the Aryan race (that curious Germanic Thule Society again…), while others claim it to be the epitome of mythical place marks; Atlantis itself. So while we’re speculating, maybe this is where the Inca’s ‘White God’s’ originated from, in Thor Heyerdahl’s investigations over the first men and women that departed South America, bound for the Pacific islands in reed boats?

The very idea of Thule is what drove Fridtjof Nansen deep into the north. The romantic idea of its very existence helped fuel public interest, and support for his wondering. His was a search for something improbable but beautiful, at a time when exploration actually meant the finding of something new, or proving once and for all, that there was nothing to find at all.

In contemporary times, the German Arved Fuchs, searched for Thule too. But at his time of exploration, we already knew it didn’t exist. We’d already lost hope… I can see more now, with precise satellite imagery than even Fuchs himself could see from land. However, his search wasn’t for something which might exist; it was a homage to the explorers that truly didn’t know. It was a reminder, that a search isn’t always to find something, because a search also has the wondrous ability to create. While post-modernity has left us a little cold and existential in our search for something new, it hasn’t taken away the potential for creating something in the act of the search itself.

The wanderer of today is not searching to find anything new; but is rather on a search to create his or herself, and to take quiet inventory from all this madness. People will wave and exclaim upon departure ‘I hope you find whatever you’re looking for!’ Without realising there is nothing to find.

Except maybe Ultima Thule.