That done, we pack our bags just in time as the helicopter lifts us out of there with winter’s telltale storms in cold pursuit.
It is March 17, 1912. Scott’s men are camped, forestalled by a blizzard that is raging outside. It is very cold; now, even at midday, the temperature is -40°F. It is Oates’s thirty-second birthday. He had gone to sleep, perhaps with some assistance from Wilson in the form of morphine, hoping not to wake up. But wake up he does. Somehow, he manages to extricate himself from his sleeping bag and crawl across the legs of his companions. Somehow, with his badly frostbitten fingers, he manages to untie the cords that keep the tunnel-like door to the tent shut tight. According to Scott, “We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death” and “tried to dissuade him.” Perhaps not emphatically, and certainly not effectively. Somehow, Oates manages to crawl through the tunnel door in the sleeping socks that cover his blackened gangrenous feet. He has no need of boots. He has no need of feet. He is not coming back.
Scott records Oates’s last words in his diary:
I am just going outside and may be some time.
That is the last they ever see of him. His body has presumably been covered by the snow from the blizzard when they are finally able to pass through the tunnel themselves and resume their march. They jettison Oates’s sleeping bags, a theodolite, and camera, but, remarkably, “at Wilson’s special request,” Scott consents to the remaining three of them continuing to pull the thirty-five pounds of geological specimens.
Nothing illustrates the differences between Amundsen and Scott more than this: for one, the fact that dogs are the proven means of polar travel and, for the other, the notion that there is something more noble, more grand, in man-hauling. Amundsen had traveled to the South Pole and back with speed and little risk either from a lack of food or meeting the fast approach of winter. He used dogs and skis and never man-hauled a single thing, not even a single mile. And here Scott is, being belted by the first storms of an approaching winter, running out of fuel and food as fast as he is running out of fit companions, and yet he finds noble purpose in still pulling some rocks.
There is something about these dogs from Greenland and Siberia that connect the world’s two polar regions in a way that even Ross and Crozier and Amundsen cannot. It is all about evolution and efficiency. The dogs’ coats, feet, and temperaments have, through a process of evolution enhanced by breeding, made them able to withstand cold, travel in snow, sleep under snow, and eat the wildlife. Their pack-like ancestry made them trainable, malleable, and able to work together as a group given the right dominance. Of course, that all began in the Arctic, where the Inuit had come to rely on them. In the Antarctic, of course, the dogs are not native but they might just as well have been: all the same things applied, right down to being able to be fed on the local wildlife—in this case, seals—unlike ponies and mules, which needed to have all their forage shipped in.
For that reason, the use of dogs persisted in the Antarctic as the most efficient, most evolved means of transport—like a penguin’s streamlined body for swimming in the sea—for more than eight decades after Borchgrevink landed the first dogs at Cape Adare in 1899. In fact, they would probably still be there were it not that one of their advantages—that they eat the local wildlife—came to be seen as a negative.
It is January 28, 1985. The New Zealand Antarctic Research Program is one of the last of all the Antarctic programs to use dogs, and they are to stop within twelve months. Each year, over fifty Weddell seals must be killed to supplement the diets of the dogs, and the public outcry has, understandably, turned public opinion against using dogs in Antarctica, no matter how efficient they are for travel, even compared with more modern means like snowmobiles and caterpillar tractors. There is also concern that they are non-native species, and worse, that they might bring diseases with them to Antarctica.
The first day I arrived in Antarctica, October 18, 1977, a dog team pulling a sledge was there to greet me and a fellow kiwi passenger and take us to New Zealand’s Scott Base, while the Americans were all loaded into a big green military vehicle, with wheels as big as I was tall, to go to the American base of McMurdo, a couple of miles over the hill from Scott Base.
I remember how romantic it felt, being with the dogs. You were so right, Cherry-Garrard, this really is adventure, my boyhood dreams galore. It was still early enough in the season that the sun set behind the mountains, and that evening I wandered along the line of dogs chained by the pressure ridges, each bathed in a golden light that highlighted their thick black, brown, gray-and-white fur. They were big animals, boisterous, and with big brown eyes. It was impossible not to love them, to think of them as more pets than beasts of burden. But then you notice that the spacing of their chains is deliberate and far enough so that they cannot tear each other apart. You are reminded that these are animals that will cannibalize their own for survival; an asset if you are Amundsen, a source of revulsion if you are Scott, and in that, he was not alone.
But now it is January 28, 1985, my last day in Antarctica this season, and it will be the last time I ever see the dogs. My team and I must be taken to our waiting Hercules aircraft, which has landed using skis on the permanent ice runway sited on the barrier, the giant shelf of ice over which Amundsen and Scott had both traveled on their way to the pole. The dog handler offers to take us out to the plane using the dogs.
I sit near the front of the sledge. Once again, the sun is low and the dogs are bathed in a soft yellow light. There are eight dogs pulling the sledge and just as a dog chasing a ball can exude enjoyment, the enthusiasm of these animals as they trot along over the snow-covered surface, tails aloft, speaks of joy. It is what they have been bred to do.
There is no shouting from the sledge master, no cracking of a whip. What I remember most is the serene silence of it all. The huffing of the dogs, the creaking of the runners, and the squeaking of the snow: they all made sounds, yes, but they did so in a way that accentuated the silence of being out there on the barrier, moving smoothly across the ice and snow.
It remains the most beautiful, most in touch with nature form of travel I have ever used. And, yes, I love Weddell seals and understand the arguments against using dogs in Antarctica in our modern era, but I would be lying if I said I was not sorry to see the dogs go.
The very next year at Cape Bird, I have the opportunity to do some man-hauling. A crabeater seal, usually a creature of the pack ice, has come ashore and died. A colleague of mine wants the carcass. The only problem is the dead seal is over two miles from the helicopter pad. It is still early in the season at Cape Bird and the beach is still covered in ice and snow. One of my assistants and I fashion a crude sledge by converting my generator-box-cum-hide, and we opt to man-haul the seal to the helo pad. An adult crabeater seal can weigh up to 660 pounds, although they are more typically just under 500 pounds. This one has been there for a while and is desiccated, presumably losing some portion of its weight. Even so, to us it feels every ounce of 660 pounds. Man-hauling is no fun. There is no romance, nothing noble about it that I experience. If I could have thrown away thirty-five pounds of it to ease the load, I would have. If I were Scott, and my life was at stake and I was hauling the extra weight over hundreds of miles rather than just two, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
It is March 18, 1912, and the conditions for Levick, Abbott, and Browning camped at Hell’s Gate go from bad to worse. “The wind increased to hurricane force, and suddenly one of the tent poles (on the lee side) broke with a snap, and then two others followed, and in a moment the tent was down on top of us, and we pinned down into our bags by it, with a fearful weight of wind on it.”
Things do not look good for them. All their belongings are loosely scattered throughout the tent, they are not in their wind-proofs, and the pressing of the tent on them “produced a helpless suffocating sensation.” Abbott and Levick struggle into their wind-proofs and crawl out from under the tent, leaving Browning lying on their sleeping bags to st
op them blowing away. The wind is so strong that they have to crawl on all fours but they are unable to find anywhere sheltered enough to give them “the ghost of a chance” of erecting their spare tent. With severely frostbitten faces, they crawl back under their tent, and there they wait for the worst part of seven hours for the wind to abate, which it does not.
Finally, they crawl out from under their collapsed tent, pile stones on top of it to prevent their sleeping bags from being blown away, and then make their way on hands and knees toward the snow cave. It takes them one and a half hours to cover the half mile, during which they often need to lie flat on the polished ice surface to prevent themselves from being blown backward. “I shall always remember the appearance of Brownings (sic) face,” wrote Levick afterward, “which was dusky blue, streaked with white patches of frostbite, and I suppose the rest of us were the same.”
The others revive them with a hoosh and, as they do not have their sleeping bags with them, the men are forced to sleep two to a bag. Levick, who is chided mercilessly by the other members of the Terra Nova Expedition for being fat, gets to spend “a most uncomfortable night” according to Campbell, sleeping in Campbell’s bag, who the next day declares, “I was squashed flat.”
That day, March 19, the wind moderates enough to allow Abbott, Browning, and Levick to fetch their sleeping bags. From then onward, they inhabit the snow cave, or “igloo,” as they call it, for what will inevitably be the longest, darkest, and coldest of winters.
Levick is not looking forward to it:
. . . the prospect of the winter before us is enough to give anyone the hump I should think . . .
It is the night of March 19, 1912. Scott, Wilson, and Bowers have gotten to within eleven miles of One Ton Depot. They “have two days’ food but barely a day’s fuel.” It is -40°F and a blizzard blows, keeping them in their tent. Scott’s right foot is badly frostbitten: “Amputation is the least I can hope for now.” Wilson and Bowers plan to leave Scott alone and go to the depot to get fuel.
It is here that the reality of the short Antarctic season really bites. For ten days, the blizzard rages unabated and “outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift.”
It is March 29, 1912. It is the end.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WINTER
The men continue to work on the igloo after shifting into it. The main room is nine feet by twelve feet, with the ceiling being about five and a half feet at its highest point. Naval disciplines are maintained. With his heel, Campbell, the commanding officer, draws a line down the center of the snow cave: one side to mark the mess deck for the men, one side to mark the quarter deck for the officers. The sleeping bags of the three officers are arranged on the right side of the room: first Priestley, who has their precious few stores stacked at the end of his bed to make a small alcove, Levick in the middle, and Campbell at the far end. On the left side there is the small cooking area with its blubber stove, then, somewhat more cramped, the bags of Dickason, Abbott, and Browning. Campbell decrees that what is said by the men on their side of the line is completely up to them and cannot be used against them. Similarly, what the officers discuss on their side of the line cannot be used by the men against the officers. Of course, in the cramped space, they can all hear the conversations of everyone. At first, Campbell insists that they get out of their bags for meal times, but fairly quickly he relents due to the cold, allowing everyone but the cooks to eat in bed. He also insists on having church on Sundays, when he reads from the New Testament and the men sing hymns.
The passageway includes two doorways, constructed using packing cases with canvas flaps, through which the men must crawl. There is a stores area and steps up through a tunnel leading to the outside. They line the internal walls of the main room with blocks of snow that go only half way up the walls, thereby creating a shelf for their meager belongings.
They lie squeezed together on the floor of the snow cave, which they have covered in pebbles and seaweed. Each day, a pair of them makes the morning and evening meals using seal blubber for fuel, which burns slowly emitting a thick black smoke that coats the insides of the cave, the men, their clothes, and everything they touch. At night it is pitch black, but mostly during the days, they lie in what Priestley describes as the “visible darkness” afforded by the faint light emitted from blubber lamps.
Levick has devised the blubber lamps by suspending a string from a safety pin into a tin of oil derived from heating seal blubber. They have a Primus stove with them but very little Primus fuel, so they have crafted a similar arrangement to make a blubber stove.
Levick, aware of the dangers of ill-prepared food, institutes strict rules about the preparation and cooking of their mainly seal meat diet. As it turns out, seal meat is high in vitamin C, which should save the party from dying of scurvy, as Owen Beattie determined had been the fate of the Franklin Expedition. But their acidic diet, with its lack of carbohydrates, has its downsides too: the men are unable to control their bladders. As a consequence, they often wet themselves and are forced to lie in their wet clothes and sleeping bags. Even after placing a can beside each man’s bag, they often cannot make it in time; although they tend to keep such accidents to themselves and lie there in discomfort and silence. All of them, at times, experience diarrhea too, with Browning being plagued by severe diarrhea, sometimes needing to “turn out” eight or nine times in a day. Campbell went outside the cave on one occasion to relieve himself but received such severe frostbite on his genitals that thereafter they fashioned a small alcove near the entrance to the cave and have stuck to relieving themselves there.
Levick describes the misery of their living quarters:
We are settling into our igloo now, and a dismal hole it is too. Our diet of seal meat is producing curious symptoms. Owing I suppose, to the highly acid state of our urine, we have not only the greatest difficulty in holding it, but some of us are actually wetting our sleeping bags during the night in our sleep. Campbell especially suffers from this, and also from bad haemerrhoids.
It is almost impossible to imagine their discomfort and squalor: afflicted by acute diarrhea, wetting their clothes and bedding, and no possibility of cleaning themselves, their bedding, or their clothing, and no possibility of changing them either. Their only option is to lie in the filth, cheek by jowl, their clothes and bedding damp with feces and urine, and in Campbell’s case, blood too. “Dismal hole” does not seem to even begin to describe it.
It is January 12, 2005. I am in Antarctica with my son, Daniel. Before we can head out to Cape Bird, we must undergo survival training, which is carried out in a crevassed area not too far from New Zealand’s Scott Base. We get roped up. We have high-tech clothing, specially insulated boots, crampons, harnesses, carabiners, synthetic ropes, and jumars—mechanical devices for ascending a rope. We know we are going to be gently dropped into a crevasse and then need to climb our way out. Even so, with all our modern gear and our readiness, it is neither psychologically comfortable nor physically easy. I shudder to think how the likes of Scott’s men coped with the frequent unexpected falling into crevasses with the crudest of gear.
To make a shelter, Daniel and I construct our own snow cave, piling up shovelfuls of snow to make a drift, then hollowing it out using the shovel. In the twenty-four-hour daylight of an Antarctic summer, it is a surprisingly comfortable residence for a single night: the light shines translucently through the walls of the snow cave. We have insulated mattresses and double sleeping bags packed with pure down from eider ducks. The air temperature is cold, but not too cold. We are snug. The most surprising thing of all: it is so quiet, insulated from any outside sounds, like the wind. That was the first thing that Campbell noted about their igloo.
But make no mistake: swap it for twenty-four hours of darkness and much colder conditions, make it for seven months and not one night, take away the freeze-dried beef stroganoff and frozen prawns, and the novelty would soon go away. It would quickly become a dism
al hole.
And having been afflicted by diarrhea when camped in a polar tent, unchanged in design from those used by Scott, let me just say that there are few activities more unpleasant than sitting over a bucket with your trousers pulled down when it is -20°F and blowing a gale.
As with Antarctica’s penguins, fat would be an ideal asset for the Northern Party to survive in Antarctica. However, Levick and the others are beginning their vigil in poor condition, exhausted from five weeks of hauling sledges, and they have precious little food. As the doctor in the party, Levick takes it upon himself to ration the food strictly and to keep track of everyone’s health. The regimented nature of the party under Campbell’s leadership probably helps with the discipline of eking out the merest of rations.
The real issue confronting Levick and Campbell, however, is that it is simply not enough to get through the winter months of darkness. Somehow, they have to hold back enough food, enough equipment, and enough suitable clothing in order to undertake the two-hundred-mile journey back to Cape Evans when, and if, they eventually emerge from their winter hibernaculum. To do otherwise would be to merely delay their inevitable deaths. Even so, Levick has to ensure that they get through the winter in a condition where they can still walk, let alone pull sledges for two hundred miles in some of the toughest conditions imaginable. It is their only assured means of getting to safety. They cannot just sit there and hope to be rescued before their food runs out.
Hence, from the first day they contemplate a winter in Antarctica with little rations, Priestley is put in charge of their meager food supplies with a clear instruction that he must ensure they have enough in reserve to make the journey south when the sun returns in the spring. In fact, while Priestley acts as quartermaster and doles out the food, it is Levick who fashions their diet and decides how much and of what they shall eat.
A Polar Affair Page 24
