Many of the utilitarian early Antarctic research stations’ exploration huts, and other things these expeditions left there have now been actively conserved or are under restoration, reflecting their modern status as historic, commemorative buildings. The work includes preserving their varied contents, which range from paper and fabrics to evocatively branded packaging, tinned foodstuffs and equipment. A number of these huts and stations are in the care of the Cambridge-based UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (established in 1993), whose ‘flagship’ base for summer visitation is Port Lockroy. This is a former base built in 1944 during Operation Tabarin, a secret mission during the Second World War to establish a permanent British presence in the Antarctic. The Scott and Shackleton huts discussed in this book are now in the hands of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, founded in 1987. Both Trusts aim to preserve and promote these structures to help future generations understand and appreciate the Antarctic, and the stories of its exploration that they embody. Luckily for those who wish to remain ‘armchair’ polar explorers, Shackleton’s and Scott’s expedition huts (1907–1909 and 1911–1913 respectively) have been extensively photographed, so that visitors can view them online and imagine themselves living there during the ‘Heroic Age’.
In a role reversal from the polar expeditions where staged photographs of expedition members with sponsored foodstuffs were obligatory, Scott and Shackleton are now brands in their own right. ‘Captain Scott Tea’, as originally blended for his 1910 expedition, is available, as is Shackleton-branded clothing, inspired by that taken on his expeditions or worn by him. Similarly, three bottles of Mackinley’s whisky were removed from a case found during the restoration work on Shackleton’s 1907 hut at Cape Royds. The blend was analysed and has since been recreated for a modern market as ‘Mackinley’s Shackleton Rare Old Highland Malt’. Even Amundsen does not escape. His name is associated with skincare products and outdoor clothing that link back to his successes as an explorer.
In many ways, it was science that sold these expeditions to the various establishments, institutions and funders, even if science was not the primary focus. Scott was certainly scientifically minded with a curiosity to find out more about the Antarctic. Shackleton recognised that he needed scientists on his expeditions as a way of legitimising his desire to seek ‘firsts’. Similarly, when writing about his expedition to the South Pole, Amundsen stated that ‘on this little detour, science would have to look after itself’ as he was focused on attaining the Pole. This is a bit unfair as it ignores the valuable work undertaken by the Fram after the shore party had been dropped off at the Bay of Whales, and the meteorological records kept by the men who remained at the Antarctic base of Framheim, on the Ross Sea ice edge.
All three British expeditions generated a large amount of scientific research, much of which was published over a number of years. This includes more than 50 scientific reports from the Discovery expedition alone, while Shackleton’s 1907 expedition scientists published their findings in a wide range of journals between 1910 and 1914. The body of work created by these expeditions, now available to future scientists working in the Antarctic, acts as a starting point to understanding the changes in its climate and landscape. An interesting by-product of this research is in understanding how weather conditions may have affected Scott’s returning party. The meteorological and temperature readings gathered by scientists such as George Simpson, and the numerous sledging parties, have been compared with the automated results received between 1986 and 1999. Susan Solomon’s analysis of Scott’s last expedition uses these records to highlight how the extraordinary weather and temperature patterns in March 1912 had a negative impact on the Polar Party on its return march.
The logbooks from the various British expedition ships, as well as those from French, Belgian and German expeditions, have been used to analyse the extent of summer sea ice around Antarctica between 1897 and 1917. This has been compared to satellite information from 1989 to 2014. The results have allowed scientists to improve mapping of the variations in the summer sea-ice limits over a longer period and to try to understand the impact of climate change on the Antarctic.2 On a more personal level, Tim Jarvis used his 2013 recreation of Shackleton’s boat journey and crossing of South Georgia to highlight the climatic changes in the last 100 years. South Georgia’s glaciers have retreated 97 per cent since 1916, resulting in Jarvis’s team crossing a heavily crevassed glacier rather than a vast snowscape that Shackleton would have recognised. More worryingly, the König Glacier had retreated so far that the team found an Alpine meadow in its place.
Many institutions have these early expeditions to thank for setting a scientific agenda in the Antarctic. In the UK, there is the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), which can trace its history back to Operation Tabarin, the Second World War mission mentioned here. However, BAS’s spiritual history starts with the science undertaken by the early polar scientists. After the war, Tabarin transformed into the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey and broadened its remit into science and exploration before becoming the BAS in 1962. Its continuing focus on collaborative international research is a legacy of which pre-First World War pioneers would have been proud.
An institution with direct links to the expeditions led by Scott and Shackleton is the Scott Polar Research Institute. It was established in 1920 as a memorial to Captain Scott and his companions, with the aim of undertaking research in natural and social sciences that relate to the polar regions. The first director was Frank Debenham, the geologist on the 1910 expedition. He was supported by Raymond Priestley, another geologist who accompanied him in 1910, and James Wordie, the geologist and chief scientist from Shackleton’s 1914 expedition. In turn, James Wordie was very supportive of the 1955–1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which achieved the 1914 goal that he attempted with Shackleton. An important scientific legacy these expeditions left was the number of scientists with Antarctic experience and understanding, who were able to support and encourage the next generation well into the second half of the 20th century.
The significance of the Antarctic as a place of science was confirmed by the 18-month research programme undertaken during the International Geophysical Year (IGY), 1957–1958. The success of the IGY resulted in the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which came into force in 1961 and overcame the more politically confrontational nature of superpower relations at the time. This treaty confirmed that ‘Antarctica shall continue for ever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord’, and defined Antarctica as anything below 60° south. It also banned military activity, such as establishing bases or fortifications, and nuclear testing and disposal. Importantly, the treaty promoted a spirit of international scientific cooperation between the signatories through sharing results and personnel. In order to make this a success, participants had to agree to a ‘freeze’ on claims of territorial sovereignty, especially where they overlapped. It also prevents further claims on the continent until the treaty expires. There are now 53 signatories in differing membership categories, up from the original 12 that signed in 1959. Other treaties are linked to the Antarctic Treaty creating the Antarctic Treaty System to ensure that the continent remains ‘a natural reserve, devoted to peace and science’. There are currently nearly 80 research stations there, of which around 40 are all-year-round bases, and are run (in some cases on a shared basis) by 31 different countries.
The scientific programme of the IGY included overland expeditions with echoes of those led by Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton. The most significant and well-reported, not least on newsreel film and television, was the highly mechanised Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1955–1958) led by Dr Vivian Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary, which first crossed the continent via the South Pole, just over half a century on from Shackleton’s attempt. Fuchs’s party of 12 men left their temporary ‘Shackleton Base’ on the Weddell ice edge in November 1957 and covered the 3,508km (2,180 miles) to the newly bui
lt New Zealand Scott Base, near Scott’s original 1902 hut on Ross Island, McMurdo Sound, in 99 days. Hillary’s team had, in the meantime, laid depots south from McMurdo towards the Pole, reaching it on 3 January 1958. Hillary’s arrival at the Pole was not originally planned but he pushed on there, making his group the first to reach it overland since Scott. The first Americans only arrived by air in 1956, prior to constructing their Amundsen–Scott Base at the Pole in preparation for the IGY. This base, today greatly developed in terms of the scientific work done there, was built from materials airlifted in from the US McMurdo Station on Ross Island, also built for the IGY close to Scott’s original 1902 hut.
The IGY spurred on other expeditions with combined science and ‘first-attainment’ goals. The Russian 1957–1958 overland expeditions reached both the (then) South Geomagnetic Pole and the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility (the furthest point inland from the sea) at 3,658 metres (12,000 feet) up and 2,012km (1,250 miles) inland. They undertook scientific work and the mapping of uncharted areas of the continent as they went. Since then at least ten parties have crossed the continent. For example, in 1980–1981 Sir Ranulph Fiennes led a three-man party in his British Transglobe Expedition, using sledge-pulling skidoos and following the 0/180° meridian, which took them 67 days. As if that was not enough, he returned with Dr Mike Stroud in 1992 to complete the first totally unsupported crossing via the Pole, completing 2,170km (1,350 miles) in 95 days. Will Steger, with an international team of six men, undertook the longest overland expedition in 1989–1990, from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula via the South Pole to the Russian Mirny Base on the eastern coast – a distance of some 5,955km (3,700 miles) that took seven months. By comparison to the length of all such continental transits, Amundsen’s high-speed dash from the Ross Sea up the Axel Heiberg Glacier, which won the race to the Pole, was about 1,300km/810 miles (700 nautical miles). Scott’s tragic, trudging march to it up the Beardmore, the via dolorosa of Antarctic discovery as one writer has called it, was 1,416km/880 miles (about 760 nautical miles).
In more recent times, the nature of overland expeditions has evolved with a greater emphasis on attaining ‘firsts’ of a more personal nature, such as method of transport, the course taken and personnel, rather than being for scientific purposes only. Journeys have become ‘self-discovery’ challenges for those making them, or undertaken in support of charitable causes, which helps underpin their costs through sponsorship. To take a few examples: in 1989, despite women having worked as part of the Antarctic scientific community for decades, the American Victoria Murden was the first to reach the Pole by land on skis. The first man to cycle there on a route of 1,247km (775 miles) was Daniel Burton in 2013–2014, while the youngest (so far) to complete the journey from the coast is Lewis Clarke, who was 16 years and 61 days old when he arrived at the Pole on 18 January 2014. A small group of people are motivated by their family links to Antarctica, such as Patrick Bergel, Shackleton’s great-grandson. Bergel completed the first crossing of Antarctica in a passenger car using a modified Hyundai Santa Fe in early 2017 to commemorate Shackleton’s attempt in 1914–1917. In a similar vein, Alice Holmes, the granddaughter of Sir James Wordie, walked and skied the final 160km (100 miles) to the South Pole with her husband and David Hempleman-Adams in December 2015. She was motivated by a feeling of ‘unfinished business’ and a wish to create a legacy by raising money to digitise Wordie’s diaries and other relevant papers from the 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It has to be noted, however, that many such ‘challenge’ journeys to the Pole are one-way, with the return being by air.
These modern expeditions are also very different in other ways to those undertaken by Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen, for whom there was no continental support structure and, for the British parties, little training in advance of arriving on the continent. While expeditions are still high-risk, modern communications mean that relevant authorities can be alerted quickly and rescue by air can be within days during the Antarctic summer. Additionally, a number have support teams to provide immediate assistance. This, however, is not the case in the winter months, when scientists left at the research stations know they are almost on their own. Ron Shemenski, a physicist who was rescued during the Antarctic winter in 2001, described the Amundsen–Scott station at the South Pole during winter as ‘a place that’s harder to get to than the International Space Station’.
Whatever the time of year, the early explorers had to be more self-reliant and deal with situations as they arose in isolation from the outside world. Shackleton, for example, had to save himself after Endurance sank in 1915. The time that the British government then required to equip and send a relief ship south to pick up his men from Elephant Island was longer than he needed (including three failed attempts) to effect their rescue himself from South America. Today, increased contact with the continent also means there is little need to overwinter in Antarctica before undertaking an expedition. This reduces the logistical challenges and the costs involved. The clothing and equipment has undergone refinement and new technology has helped to make it lighter and more efficient, although some still prefer old ways for practical reasons, such as string ties instead of zips as they are easier to repair. This does not take anything away from the endeavours of people who nowadays attempt to conquer some aspect of Antarctica, but highlights the different challenges they face and how extraordinary the achievements of the early expeditions were, more than 100 years ago.
While the scientific community has a permanent presence on the Antarctic continent, most other human activity is transient and seasonal. The high interior remains vast, bleak and largely empty, but while still terra deserta it is no longer terra incognita. The ‘Heroic-Age’ explorers and scientists blazed trails there that others of many nations have followed, multiplied and greatly broadened in the last century, and continue to do so. History and landscape aside, Antarctica’s critical climatic significance for the environmental stability of the world, and the research work undertaken there in many fields from Earth sciences to medicine and astronomy, keep it well in the public eye.
* * *
1http://www.coolantarctica.com
/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/threats_tourism.php Retrieved, 3 March 2017
2http://www.the-cryosphere.net/
10/2721/2016/tc-10-2721-2016.pdf Estimating the extent of Antarctic summer sea ice during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, retrieved 27 February 2017
CREW LISTS
Key personnel
DISCOVERY 1901–1904
Officers and Scientists
Robert Falcon Scott, Captain RN leader
Albert B Armitage, (first) Lieutenant, RNR navigator and second-in-command
Michael Barne, Lieutenant, RN magnetician
Louis C Bernacchi physicist
Hartley T Ferrar geologist
Thomas V Hodgson marine biologist
Reginald Koettlitz surgeon
George FA Mulock, (second) Lieutenant, RN
Charles Royds, Lieutenant, RN meteorologist
Ernest H Shackleton, Sub-Lieutenant RNR, (and third lieutenant),* surveyor and photographer
Reginald Skelton, Lieutenant (E) RN, Chief Engineer*
Edward A Wilson assistant surgeon, artist and zoologist
Warrant Officers (all RN)
Thomas A Feather, Boatswain
James H Dellbridge, Second Engineer
Frederick E Dailet carpenter
Charles F Ford steward
Petty Officers (all RN)
Jacob Cross, PO
Edgar Evans, PO
William Smythe, PO
David Allan, PO
Thomas Kennar, PO
William MacFarlane, PO*
Seamen
Arthur Pilbeam, RN
William L Heald, RN
James Dell, RN
Frank Wild, RN
Thomas Williamson, RN
George Croucher, RN
Ernest Joyce, RN
Thom
as Crean, RN
Jesse Handsley, RN
William J Weller, MN dog handler
William Peters, RN*
John Walker, MN*
James Duncan, MN* shipwright
George Vince, RN (died March 1902)
Charles Bonner, RN (died December 1901)
Stokers
William Lashly, RN
Arthur L Quartley, RN
Thomas Whitfield, RN
Frank Plumley, RN
William Page, RN*
William Hubert, MN*
Royal Marines
Arthur Blissett, lance corporal
Gilbert Scott, private
Civilians
Henry Brett* cook
Charles Clarke cook
Clarence Hare* assistant steward
Horace Buckbridge* laboratory assistant
* The list is taken from Scott’s Voyage of the ‘Discovery’; added to it are the men who spent only one Antarctic winter with the expedition, marked with an asterisk, who – with the exception of Shackleton and Mulock – were not listed in the book. Clarke took over duties of cook from Brett. Scott ran Discovery on naval lines but, with an entirely volunteer crew including civilians, as a merchant vessel in legal terms.
NIMROD 1907–1909
Ernest H Shackleton leader
TW Edgeworth David chief scientist
Jameson Boyd-Adams meteorologist
Philip Brocklehurst assistant geologist and surveyor
Bernard Day motor specialist
Ernest Joyce in charge of dogs, sledges and equipment
Alistair Mackay surgeon and biologist
Douglas Mawson physicist
Bertram Armytage in charge of ponies
Eric Marshall surgeon and cartographer
George Marston artist
George Murray-Levick biologist
Raymond Priestley geologist
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