True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  But this casts ice, in imagination, as deathly, almost as a kind of anti-flesh. The ramifications go down into the unconscious, deep and knotted. Dreams of ice signal – sometimes – wishes for a fixity, a hard calm, incompatible with the warm scurrying of being alive. St Francis of Assisi plumbed ice’s possibilities one winter night in Italy when carnal thoughts were bothering him. He built a mound of snow, took off his robe, and (the story goes) leapt onto it, crying ‘This is my wife! This is my wife!’ He came back indoors, though, when he had achieved a state of indifference. To become ice would be a monstrous reversal, a metamorphosis of body into statue. The recoil is instinctive to the story of the seaman on a polar expedition in the 1820s who got his hand supercooled. Put into a bucket of cold water, it froze the water. It had ceased to behave like a part of a human.

  Yet along with ice horrors go wonders, icy metamorphoses that enlarge human senses instead of curtailing them. The ice and snow of the Alps, wrote another Victorian, are substances so malleable to imagination ‘that every human soul can fashion them according to its own needs’. Into the delicate and extraordinary shapes of ice, the mind projects meaning; moulds; plays. Shelley looked up at the glaciers of Mont Blanc, where to his vision

  Frost and Sun in scorn of mortal power

  Have piled: dome, pyramid and pinnacle . . .

  People have seen cities in ice for centuries. The curious thing is that the style of the architecture changes faithfully with changing tastes. Towers and spires were perennial, while seventeenth-century sailors in the Arctic started glimpsing baroque fretwork, and Victorians added in Egyptian obelisks and Stone Age dolmens. Captain Scott’s men saw a complete model of St Paul’s Cathedral float by in the Antarctic – just like a Visit London poster on the Edwardian tube. But the impression of shape is always temporary, always fleeting. The illusion visits, forms, slips back into disorder. ‘Yet not a city but a flood of ruin’, Shelley’s poem continues. Ice is a magic mirror to the imagination, but a mirror shattered, giving back fragments of reflection, to be enjoyed for the moment only.

  There’s a warning against lingering too long in Hans Christian Andersen’s perfect winter’s tale The Snow Queen, where the nuances of ice all meet. Little Kay has been seduced away from warmth: he thinks that the ‘flowers’ of snowflakes are far more beautiful than living flowers. He sits on the floor of the Queen’s great ballroom where the polar bears dance, trying to make ice-fragments into legible words. If he can spell ETERNITY she has promised him the world, and a pair of silver skates. Every child who encounters the story knows he mustn’t succeed. Complete the puzzle, and he’ll be choosing eternity in the sense of rejecting time; choosing autonomy in the sense of forever losing connection; choosing the icy clarity of symbols over the messy, generative processes that give them meaning.

  (2004)

  WORST JOURNEY

  The Worst Journey in the World is the single greatest book in the literature of polar exploration. There are others that are beautiful. There are others that are exciting. There are some that are more revealing about the whys and wherefores of expedition leadership, and some that make a better fist of explaining polar science for a non-scientific reader. There are many that deal with a wider sample of humanity in the polar landscape than Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s band of all-male Edwardian sailors, scientists and gentlemen amateurs. But there are none that have anything like The Worst Journey’s power to evoke a time and a place, and to bring us intimately, almost eerily, inside the small world of an expedition: its sounds, its straining physical life as bodies in canvas harness pull sledges through smooth or granular snow, its chatter, its personalities, its moments of awe when the sweating humans in the foreground catch their breath and the picture opens out (and out, and out) upon the vastness of the Antarctic ice. It is written in an idiosyncratic homemade prose which somehow conveys the emotional pull of its age’s grand talk about heroism without itself being captured by any of the heroic poses. It is not grand; it does not strut or mythologise. Instead it is fervent and melancholy, ironic and understated, absolutely individual and very English. It aims to make a private reckoning with the story it tells. And, since the expedition it chronicles is Captain Scott’s disastrous return to the Antarctic in 1910–13 aboard the Terra Nova, the story deepens inexorably to tragedy.

  For Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the tragedy was personal. When Scott’s tent was discovered on the Ross Ice Shelf in November 1912, the spring after the group racing Amundsen to the Pole had failed to return, the two frozen bodies to left and right of Scott were those of Cherry-Garrard’s best friends. He had joined the expedition as a diffident and rather aimless young man, unwilling to settle down to the management of the enormous fortune he had just inherited. On board ship heading south, and then in the equally frantic base camp on Ross Island, where the work of the expedition was got through on the principle of competitive self-sacrifice, and a volunteer could shine, he found his niche – and a mentor in the shape of the expedition doctor, Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson, and a quasi-brother in the ebullient, big-nosed stores officer ‘Birdie’ Bowers. ‘Cherry’, as he swiftly found himself nicknamed, had been the only boy in a large family of girls, with an admired but elderly father. In some ways, the expedition provided him with a thrilling overdose of testosterone. He, Wilson and Bowers had performed one of Antarctic history’s great feats of endurance together, travelling for a month in the pitch-darkness and ferocious cold of midwinter to the breeding ground of the emperor penguin. And now they were dead, leaving him as the only custodian, the only rememberer, of the overwhelming suffering they had survived together. He was in the search party that found the bodies, and heard – a detail not in the book – the sharp crack as Scott’s frozen arm was broken to pry loose the famous diary. He never quite got over it. For the rest of his life, and he lived until 1959, he revisited the expedition compulsively in memory.

  So The Worst Journey in the World was intended as a memorial, but not of the official variety, with the dead explorers represented by statues and busts as frozen in their way as the corpses. Cherry-Garrard wanted, so far as he could, to create a shrine of words in which the experience of the expedition could be reanimated, from the practical jokes and the catchphrases to the hiss of the primus stove during a halt from the march and the passing effects of the light. He was more alert to the sensory detail of Antarctica than any of the other early writers except Scott – and Scott had tended to burnish up his detail into smooth tableaux for publication. Writing in 1919–21, with the First World War lying between him and the events he described, Cherry-Garrard was already reaching back, as he put it, ‘to an age in geological time, so many hundreds of years ago’ when the world had been different. He was dredging an Edwardian past that already felt remote. With his Hertfordshire neighbour George Bernard Shaw acting as literary adviser, he broke out of a relationship with the committee preparing the official history of the expedition, and was freed to write the book he needed to.

  The eventual structure of The Worst Journey was both instinctive, because need drove it, and extremely artful. His own ordeal with Wilson and Bowers, the ‘Winter Journey’, became the book’s emotional centre, placed at the midpoint of the narrative, and held up by implication as the experience that defines the nature of the whole. When the spring sledging season of 1911 opens, and Scott’s complex caravan of motor tractors and dog sleds and manhaulers sets off for the Pole across the ice shelf, and up the Beardmore Glacier to the polar plateau, Cherry-Garrard gives it its full dramatic and historical weight: but he has already established the polar journey as being, in a sense, a tragic repetition of what had been (just barely) triumphant the first time around, in the winter, when ‘three crystallised ragamuffins’ had laboured through 107 degrees of frost (Fahrenheit) without ever speaking a harsh word to each other. He suspends the narrative of the journey to the Pole at the point when he, and the last supporting parties, turned for base. The diary entries that reveal the final dreadful death-bound homeward
struggle of Scott’s party must wait till the story has been told of finding the bodies. Again, emotional priority has quietly been given to the contours of his own, survivor’s experience.

  Since then the reputation of the expedition has passed through a complete circle. After decades in which the tragedy of the polar party seemed securely heroic, Scott’s leadership was debunked in the 1970s by the historian Roland Huntford in a way which, again, appeared likely to be permanent. The world got used to a new default understanding in which the expedition stood for destructive incompetence. Yet the wheel continued to turn. Since then, with the re-examination of meteorological records that bear out Scott’s claim of exceptionally low temperatures on the return from the Pole, and a renewed appreciation of the expedition’s scientific agenda, and a friendlier revaluation of Scott’s own style and character, it has become respectable once more to admire the story; though no longer as a fable of Empire, or as a showcase for the stiff upper lip. When we imagine ourselves onto the Terra Nova now, or into the bunks of the hut at Cape Evans, it is no longer in innocence of the possibility of gross blundering there. The accusations have been made, in the strongest possible terms. We know the case against.

  One peculiar consequence of this is that it is now much harder for us to see that The Worst Journey was, for its time, a quietly heretical book, dissenting here and there from the heroic official myth. Scott’s widow Kathleen was furious over the nuanced analysis of her husband’s strengths and weaknesses in Chapter 6. ‘He has criticised Con in the most appalling fashion’, she wrote. Likewise, while holding to the official line that the organisation of the expedition had been superb, the book made it tacitly plain that almost everything had been improvised by exhausted people, with no margin for error. But the criticisms voiced since have been so much louder that, reading The Worst Journey as its centenary approaches, we are much more likely to notice its continuing discretion than the ways in which it was, actually, indiscreet. Cherry-Garrard says that Scott ‘was a bad judge of men’, but will not let us see any example of this bad judgement in action.

  Yet the book never reads as if discretion has hobbled it or muffled it. On the contrary, it is as vivid as a dream. It is the dream of his past that Apsley Cherry-Garrard could not stop dreaming; and it is contagious, it infects us too, in passages of immersive, hypnotic recall. ‘Come and stand outside the hut door . . . You are facing north, with your back to the Great Ice Barrier and the Pole . . .’ Three times in the book Cherry-Garrard makes this deliberate break into the present tense, and gives us a set-piece description of what stands before his mind’s eye. But even when the book is ostensibly running along in the past, or is tessellated together from Bowers’ or Lashly’s or Scott’s journal entries, it still somehow possesses the quality of appearing to record something that is happening in front of us, in the very moment of reading. On the Winter Journey we shake to our bones in the ice-clogged sleeping bags along with the three travellers; we step with them across the uncanny hush of Windless Bight, holding a naked candle and steering by Jupiter; we despair of our lives with them when the tent blows away in the hurricane; we hear the calls of the emperor penguins with them at journey’s end. It’s this immersive power, along with the beauty and ironies of the prose, that has given The Worst Journey a stature independent of history’s judgements on the expedition. Right through the trough of the debunking it was being read passionately and enthusiastically, and it is hard to imagine any further twist of events which could ever spoil its appeal.

  George Orwell once wrote that when he read Dickens he saw a human face appearing behind the words: not so much a literal image of the author as a picture of the very strong personality the novels suggested. This book, too, has a human face and a human situation behind it. It is the work of a lonely man in bottle-thick spectacles, sitting alone at a table in the library of the grand house he has not managed to fill with a family. Laid out around him on the table he has documents in the handwriting of the friends he knew for two dreadful and wonderful years a decade ago, before the world was shattered. He writes; and while he writes he sees something altogether different from the empty house. He sees the rubberoid-insulated cabin under the icefall slopes of Mount Erebus, he sees the wind-scoured sastrugi of the Great Ice Barrier, he sees the Western Mountains showing purple above the gold mist of ice particles suspended over the freezing sea. In the frighteningly powerful magic lantern of memory, he sees the black specks of human beings on the white snow. As he writes, they begin to move, and become his friends, sledging towards him. There they are. The dream, or the haunting, enfolds him. He sees them, he hears them. And as we read, so do we.

  (2012)

  SHACKLETON

  Pattern-minded species that we are, there’s a particularly pure cognitive pleasure about the moments when we recognise order. It happens in history, when meaning’s signal emerges from the noise of time. In science too: suddenly structure’s apparent in the flow of an event. Last year I went to Antarctica, and most days there was an albatross swooping around in the wake of the ship. Then one evening I was standing on deck when the sun was low. Its gold light lay almost level across the big grey swells, and the shadows behind the waves brought the surface of the sea, which had seemed virtually featureless, into deep relief. It became legible, an intricately fluid landscape of hills and valleys, and suddenly it was clear that the albatross was following the updraughts of this miniature topography. It was gliding across the rising faces of the swells with a beautiful economy of motion. What had looked like another aimless bit of animal behaviour in the middle distance was actually expert navigation, deliberate grace. At 60° South the Antarctic Ocean goes right around the planet, a stormy immensity broken by just a few isolated islands. The albatross cruises through the ice and the storms, hardly flapping its wings.

  It was there delivering its lesson of grace during one of the greatest dramas of human survival. In early May 1916, Frank Worsley watched an albatross from the stern of the James Caird, the 22-foot ship’s boat in which Sir Ernest Shackleton was trying desperately to reach the Antarctic island of South Georgia. Shackleton’s plan to cross the Antarctic continent had foundered when the expedition ship froze in before ever reaching land. The ice crushed the ship: a process recorded in grotesque, astonishing photographs by the twenty-eight members of the expedition, left to fend for themselves on the ice sheet with three boats and the stores they had salvaged. After months of northerly drift on the slow-moving ice, six heart-stopping days of rowing through the violent backwash at the edge of the ice brought the expedition to Elephant Island. Here there were penguins and seals to eat. With seal blubber for fuel, the explorers could just about survive, living in the cramped, dark space underneath the upturned boats. But no-one back in civilisation had any reason to look for them on Elephant Island. While most of his crew dug in, Shackleton set off again in the James Caird. South Georgia’s whaling stations lay 800 miles north-east across mountainous seas. Worsley, skipper of the sunk ship, was his navigator.

  They readied the boat for the ocean by frantic improvisation. The seams were glued tight with a mixture of seals’ blood and artists’ oil paints, the ‘deck’ was a canvas lid sewn into place. The contrast with the albatross’ adaptation to the environment seems very great. While every wave hurled the six men aboard up a summit of broken water, the albatross floated a couple of feet above the crest. While they baled for their lives, and lay in sodden sleeping bags, the albatross glided on, imperturbable. ‘His poetic motion fascinated us’, wrote Worsley in his diary of the voyage. ‘The ease with which he swept the miles aside filled us with envy.’

  But the truth is that of all the famous journeys by British explorers in the heroic era of Antarctic exploration, it’s that one that has most in common with the grace of the albatross. It’s crucial that the feat took place at sea. By land, the British at the poles were footsloggers. Unlike their competitors the Scandinavians, they refused to study the Inuit arts of survival. Even Shackleton
, gifted though he was in so many of the disciplines of exploration, never learned to drive a dog sled. But on the water the British were in their element. They became tactful, expert, light of touch. Terrifying though Worsley’s account is of running before the wind in the frail little boat, it is shot through with the unmistakeable pleasure-in-mastery of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing. ‘Half standing, half sitting on the coaming of the cockpit, I steered by watching the angle at which the pennant blew out; at times verifying the course by a glimpse of a star through a rift in the clouds. Dark hills of water reared sudden and startling ahead and astern, capped by pale gleams of breaking seas . . .’

  Worsley is not telling a story about helplessness in the face of nature, but one about deploying makeshift resources to give a nudge to the enormous forces surrounding them; about choosing the moment, and then flapping the butterfly’s wings. One of the cast­aways’ best resources was his own navigation, though Worsley is too modest to say so. To get the measurements of latitude on which their course depended, he had to kneel astride the prow of the James Caird with two men holding his legs. As the following wave lifted the boat he took out his sextant. Then in the instant when it was poised highest, and he had a view of the horizon, he snapped off a reading of the angle between the centre of the sun’s disc and the line of the horizon; and the calculations he made under these circumstances, in roller-coaster motion through the roaring waters, drenched in spray that froze as ice, were as exact as if he had written them out in a quiet room to the sound of a ticking casement clock. The American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, an admirer, calls this ‘British feng shui’. It’s existing in space, done consummately well.