by Ramona Koval
CHAPTER 12
The great white desert
When my parents took my sister and me for a walk to the kiosk at the end of St Kilda pier, I looked forward to the vanilla ice cream in a cone that was our reward for good behaviour. My father told us that ice cream came from the South Pole, which he said he could just see over the horizon. I’ve always enjoyed the idea that the southerly wind whipping across Port Phillip Bay blew directly from the pole, which I still hope to visit one day.
But I have visited Robert Scott’s ship Discovery, which took him to the Antarctic for the first time in 1901, at Dundee on the east coast of Scotland. I found it completely absorbing for the few hours it took to examine every part of the exhibition—which covers both Scott’s Discovery and Terra Nova expeditions—to press every button, and to listen to every soundscape of the wind and the snow. You can go aboard the ship and see the crested expedition crockery and the brass bars around the dining table, which stopped it smashing off the surface in a storm. Scott imposed Royal Navy procedures: officers ate separately from the men. While they were frozen in ice for two years in Antarctica they kept up an officers’ mess, officers’ clubs and officers’ quarters. The officers had certain privileged liquors and alcohol; they had cigars while the men had cigarettes. A class distinction ran through the entire expedition.
In Dundee I saw the thin leather clothing that men wore in freezing conditions—today no self-respecting bikie would wear such little protection in temperate weather. I read the menu for 22 June 1903 (turtle soup, halibut cutlets, plum pudding and jellies) and read about the harmonium presented to the expeditioners by the people of Christchurch. A copy of Gulliver’s Travels is on display, a present from Sir Clements Markham, who launched Scott’s career.
Scott’s journal from the Terra Nova expedition is full of his yearning for adventure, for knowledge. Proud of being English, he is in pursuit of ‘wild doings in wild countries’. His men spend their days in readiness for their last strike out for the pole, the Southern Journey, taking turns giving lectures on their specialities—Lawrence Oates on feeding the horses, Edward Wilson on sketching, Edward Atkinson on parasitology, Frank Debenham on volcanoes and Charles Wright on ice problems.
In Antarctica Scott lists his impressions of the landscape, which dwarfs his camp in the vast whiteness. They make a kind of poetry:
Impressions
The seductive folds of the sleeping-bag.
The hiss of the primus and the fragrant steam of the cooker issuing from the tent ventilator.
The small green tent and the great white road.
The whine of a dog and the neigh of our steeds.
The driving cloud of powdered snow.
The crunch of footsteps which break the surface crust.
The wind blown furrows.
The blue arch beneath the smoky cloud.
The crisp ring of the ponies’ hoofs and the swish of the following sledge.
The droning conversation of the march as driver encourages or chides his horse.
The patter of dog pads.
The gentle flutter of our canvas shelter.
Its deep booming sound under the full force of a blizzard.
The drift snow like finest flour penetrating every hole and corner—flickering up beneath one’s head covering, pricking sharply as a sand blast.
The sun with blurred image peeping shyly through the wreathing drift giving pale shadowless light.
The eternal silence of the great white desert. Cloudy columns of snow drift advancing from the south, pale yellow wraiths, heralding the coming storm, blotting out one by one the sharp-cut lines of the land.
The blizzard, Nature’s protest—the crevasse, Nature’s pitfall—that grim trap for the unwary—no hunter could conceal his snare so perfectly—the light rippled snow bridge gives no hint or sign of the hidden danger, its position unguessable till man or beast is floundering, clawing and struggling for foothold on the brink.
The vast silence broken only by the mellow sounds of the marching column.
Another account of Scott’s second expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, was published in 1922. It starts with much charm:
Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as a medium of discomfort.
In July 1911 Cherry-Garrard set out from the main party with Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Edward Wilson, on their ‘Winter Journey’ to obtain emperor penguin embryos to study. The Discovery expedition had been the first to find emperor penguin rookeries. The flightless birds were thought to be part of the evolutionary march from reptiles to birds. The emperor penguin bred in the middle of winter, unlike any other bird, in the middle of the worst season in the most desolate part of the planet.
The mystery was why this was the case when the temperature was seventy degrees below zero and the blizzards didn’t let up, and the chicks had to balance on the feet of the mother or father, cuddling against a bald patch on the parent’s breast. Cherry-Garrard was fascinated by the penguins’ child-rearing practices:
And when at last he simply must go and eat something in the open leads nearby, he just puts the child down on the ice, and twenty chickless Emperors rush to pick it up. And they fight over it, and so tear it that sometimes it will die. And, if it can, it will crawl into any ice-crack to escape from so much kindness, and there it will freeze.
On an earlier expedition, they reported that the emperor chick was still without feathers at the beginning of January. If the same egg had been laid in summer, it would have been without protection the following winter. The emperor penguin has to put up with nesting hardships ‘because his children insist on developing so slowly, very much as we are tied in our human relationships for the same reason. It is of interest that such a primitive bird should have so long a childhood.’
The youngest member of Scott’s group, Cherry-Garrard was nearly blind without his glasses, which he had to remove while sledding. He had little scientific training and had never been to the Antarctic. The three men embarked on their journey in total darkness with temperatures down to seventy-five-below, the coldest temperature recorded up to that time. They trekked for one hundred and twenty kilometres in their thin gabardine outfits, manhauling the sleds, which were loaded with three-quarters of a tonne of research equipment and their supplies. The idea was to obtain the fresh penguin embryos and dissect them in a laboratory they were going to construct. They planned to build a stone hut on a rocky outcrop some kilometres up Mount Terror, a structure they could heat and work in. As if this were not hard enough, they decided to use this trek to test the perfect diet for the polar attempt the next summer, so they divided up the types of food—biscuits, pemmican and butter—and each ate a different proportion of fats to protein to carbohydrates. It was so cold their teeth chattered until some of them shattered.
After five weeks they finally brought three emperor penguin eggs back to the expedition camp. They had collected five, but two broke on the way from the rookery to the hut. They examined the insides of these eggs, as well as those smashed and discarded eggs they had seen at the rookery.
From their base camp, Scott, Wilson, Bowers and Oates set out on the ‘Southern Journey’ to the pole. As the months passed, Scott’s poetic impressions of the camp had turned to a loss of confidence in his use of horses and sledges and his journal entries became restrained. He realises he had been too confident in his strategy of using horses and motor sledges. His cheery tone fades once he understands that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen
has got to the pole first, and left him a letter:
Dear Captain Scott—As you probably are the first to reach this area after us, I will ask you to kindly forward this letter to King Haakon VII. If you can use any of the articles left in the tent please do not hesitate to do so. The sledge left outside may be of use to you. With kind regards I wish you a safe return.
Yours truly,
Roald Amundsen
What did Amundsen mean about the letter for the King of Norway? Was it a snide reference to Scott being his servant, now that he had been bested at the pole? Scott maintained he was on a scientific expedition rather than a race, and indeed the doomed men hauled back thirty-two pounds of geological specimens with them for the cause of science, but how did he take the news of coming second?
On their return journey the weather turned worse and the men faltered with illness and lack of provisions. I adore these shivering stories of men pitted against the elements because they are ripe with tragedy, bravery and the truth of human nature under extremes of pressure. They are romantic too, in the pursuit of such an abstract goal. There was nothing to see at the South Pole to distinguish it from any other part of the polar plateau. They sacrificed all for an idea.
The best-known story of the Southern Journey is that of Captain Lawrence Oates. ‘I am just going outside and may be some time,’ Oates said to the others on the morning of 16 March 1912, his parting words to the men he wanted to save, after accepting that he was no longer able to walk. The three he left behind—Scott, Wilson and Bowers—died a couple of weeks later, only a few kilometres short of their goal. Imagine the scene of Scott writing till the last, scrawling messages to the men’s families and pleas for the care of his wife and child.
Scott’s mentor, Sir Clements Markham, writes in his introduction to Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals that the explorer, with the bodies of his men beside him, wrote until the pencil dropped from his frozen hand. His last words were to reassure Markham that he should feel no guilt for sending the men to their deaths, saying he never regretted being in command of the expedition.
Reading Amundsen’s The South Pole I’m aware that his proud account of his success at reaching the pole was written in Brisbane in the months after his return. He was to embark on a series of worldwide lectures, and he was buoyed by his sense that he had the right approach, the right equipment and perhaps the right nationality to have succeeded. Fridtjof Nansen himself wrote an introduction to Amundsen’s book and pointed out that the methods and means that brought him success were those of the nomads who had lived and journeyed in harsh northern polar conditions for thousands of years, rather than those invented in the present day. He praised the meticulous planning and execution of the expedition: ‘It is the man that matters, here as everywhere.’
I wondered if Amundsen and Nansen would have adopted such a tone—proud and challenging the follies of the other party—if they had known that the bodies of Scott and his companions lay dead in the ice, Scott’s journal frozen to his very chest? When the world learned of their fate, and the bodies were found in late 1912, opinion turned against the Norwegians, and Amundsen was accused of being underhanded by switching his expedition from the North Pole to the South Pole without telling anyone until he was well on the way.
So what happened to the three penguin eggs for which Cherry-Garrard, Edward Wilson and Birdie Bowers had risked their lives in such atrocious conditions? Cherry-Garrard arrived at the Natural History Museum in London in 1913, four years after the expedition had set out, the sole survivor of the Winter Journey—he had not been in the party for the Southern Journey. His reception was deeply disappointing. The egg specimens were no longer interesting to the scientists there, as the theory about the importance of emperor penguin embryology to the evolution of birds had begun to be discredited. The visit is reported by Cherry-Garrard with humour:
I resort to Mr. Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily offensive even for an official man of science, for myself.
I announce myself with becoming modesty as the bearer of the penguins’ eggs, and proffer them. The Chief Custodian takes them into custody without a word of thanks, and turns to the Person of Importance to discuss them. I wait. The temperature of my blood rises. The conversation proceeds for what seems to me a considerable period…Feeling that to persist in overhearing their conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires. But this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer’s thoughts and intentions become darker and darker. As the day wears on, minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully and ask his business. The reply is always the same, ‘I am waiting for a receipt for some penguins’ eggs.’ At last it becomes clear from the Explorer’s expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit murder.
But the tone and humour of the account belies the truth—Apsley Cherry-Garrard was in the search party that found the bodies of Scott, Bowers and Wilson. When he returned from the pole he suffered long and serious mental illness that we might today ascribe to post-traumatic stress disorder. He worried that he should have been able to do something, anything, to save Scott and the others. His later account was written under the guidance of his neighbour George Bernard Shaw.
Cherry-Garrard’s biographer Sara Wheeler paints a picture of a passionate but shy man, who at fifty courted his twenty-year-old bride-to-be, Angela Turner, by giving her a stone on a beach. ‘Years later,’ writes Wheeler, ‘when she had become an Antarctic expert, Angela discovered that the courtship ritual of the penguin centres around stonegiving, stones being a vital commodity for the construction of the nest.’
Not all the Antarctic adventures ended quite as tragically. Ernest Shackleton was on the Discovery with Scott, but was sent home unwell in the middle of the expedition, which he felt to be a personal failure. He certainly made up for it later, and his memoir South tells of another journey that didn’t strictly succeed in its aims, but became a fantastic story of endurance and wit and great leadership. In 1914, on the Endurance, he set out to cross the Antarctic continent from sea to sea, via the pole. On another ship, the SY Aurora, the Ross Sea party was tasked with providing supply depots to enable the main party’s survival. But the Endurance was trapped in pack-ice and crushed before the men could begin their cross-continental journey. After adventures on ice floes, Shackleton’s party landed on remote Elephant Island. He left the crew there, sheltering under two upturned boats, while a small group struck out for South Georgia, from where he knew help was available from those at the whaling stations fifty kilometres from the landing point.
I love the way Shackleton sets out the parameters of the problems he has to solve, and the strategies he will use to solve them. To give poor Scott his due, his notes were made under terrible conditions, while Shackleton wrote and published his book a few years after his return. Shackleton, who had been a journalist and public lecturer, is a more engaging writer than Scott.
There is so much to learn from Shackleton’s book. He gives you an ice education and includes an ice glossary: pancake ice, hummocky floes, growlers, to name a few. You learn that old seal bones can be dug up and stewed down in sea water to eat when things get tough. That blubber is good for making lamps and for eating. One of the last things Shackleton removed from the sinking Endurance was a banjo. The men left on Elephant Island had a concert every Saturday night, each singing a song about another member of the party.
I’m taking his book with me if ever I voyage south of Tasmania, as much for the recipes for seal blubber as the adventure. Shackleton took to
rearranging the weekly menu, as the number of permutations of how to cook seal meat was decidedly limited. The men didn’t know what to expect and this was useful in order to surprise them. And their joy at being rescued was palpable too. When Shackleton reached the whaling station with two men, their first night in a room with an electric light and warm, soft beds was so comfortable that he says they were unable to sleep. He immediately arranged for the retrieval of the men who were waiting at the landing place at South Georgia as well as those who had waited on Elephant Island for four and half months by the time they were rescued. Three men of the Ross Sea party had died.
After this ordeal, Shackleton mounted another expedition in 1921, but died of a heart attack while his ship was moored in preparation. He was buried at Grytviken in South Georgia, at rest at last.
CHAPTER 13
This deep darkness of night
Some people pack books about journeys that other people have taken when they themselves are travelling. Others can’t imagine doing this. There are several schools of thought. Will reading about another journey take away from your own experience of it? Or will discovering the differences between someone else’s journey and your own heighten your experience? Or, if you want to have your own experience of the place, perhaps a novel that takes you to an utterly different place is best.
My adored polar explorers were the best prepared of men. I’m always intrigued to know how they passed the time on expeditions, and what they read.
