Antarctica

by Gabrielle Walker

  After a hearty Christmas dinner, Shackleton surveyed the remaining food and decided that they would have to cut their rations, making each week’s food last ten days. ‘It is the only thing to do, for we must get to the pole come what may.’5

  The explorers of the heroic age mainly survived on tea, cocoa and pemmican—an unappetising mix of dried meat and fat that could be reconstituted in a stew called ‘hoosh’, often with dried biscuits crumbled in. Every scrap mattered. They even devised a ritual called ‘shut eye’ for allocating the portions: one person would turn his back and another would point to each of the servings of hoosh saying ‘whose?’.

  And as the journey grew longer and the hoosh became thinner, the explorers were also increasingly prone to food dreams that were more like nightmares. They would find themselves, perhaps, at a food stand or a feast, with fresh bread and buns and chocolate and roasting meat. If they were lucky they at least got to taste it in their dreams; if unlucky, they woke night after night just as they were raising it to their lips.

  The slope continued to rise, and the men continued to struggle. The air was not just high, but also dry; with limited fuel they could not melt much snow and they were becoming dehydrated. Shackleton recorded how, after every hour of pulling, they threw themselves on their backs for three minutes to recover.

  On 2 January 1909, they passed the previous record for the highest latitude achieved at either Pole. Still they ploughed on, as their food supplies diminished. Finally, on 9 January they passed through the barrier of 89° and found themselves within a hundred miles of the Pole. It was so close now that Shackleton could almost smell it. He knew that the party could reach their goal. But he also knew that there was not enough food left in their sacks to sustain them for the journey home. If they continued now, they would certainly perish. Survival mattered more than glory. And so he did an extraordinary thing.

  He gave the order to turn back.

  Even now, they had cut their journey very fine. Their food stores were so low that they barely reached each depot before the previous cupboard was bare. The men were exhausted, starving, scarecrows. They were racing against their own broken bodies. ‘We are so thin that our bones ache as we lie on the hard snow in our sleeping bags,’ Shackleton wrote.6

  They were also racing with time. In their weakness they were moving so much more slowly than Shackleton had expected that they risked missing the ship that was due to take them home. When one man collapsed with thirty-three miles to go, and only thirty-six hours before the ship was due to sail, Shackleton left him in the care of the remaining team member and struck out with Wild, carrying nothing but a compass, sleeping bags and some food. The two men marched throughout the night and the next day, finally reaching Hut Point at 8 p.m. on 28 February. But the hut was dark and a note nailed to the door informed the readers that the ship would wait until 26 February, and after that would sail.

  The men spent a disconsolate night, but they still hadn’t given up hope. The next morning they set one of the outbuildings alight, and raised a signal flag over the building. And, praise be, in spite of the message, the Nimrod had not yet sailed. It saw the signal and steamed to the rescue.

  When the ship arrived, Wild collapsed on board, but Shackleton hadn’t finished yet. Two of his men were still out there on the Barrier. He pulled together a rescue party and announced he would lead it himself. I can’t imagine how tired he must have been, how ready to fall, how relieved to be safe in the relative civilisation of the ship. But he wasn’t even tempted to stay and let others take over this one last act. He didn’t do it with any fanfare or in a showy fashion, but because he was a leader, and that’s what leaders do.

  Shackleton’s wife described him once as ‘a soul whipped on by the wanderfire’.7 Perhaps that is true, but he was also whipped on by the drive to lead. Back in England, between expeditions, he seemed somehow diminished, a wide boy permanently full of foolish schemes to get rich quick. But on the ice he was magnificent.

  There is a tale, perhaps apocryphal,8 that Shackleton had placed an advertisement in an English newspaper seeking crew for his Nimrod voyage:

  Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.

  Throughout his subsequent Antarctic endeavours, Shackleton never once achieved what he had formally set out to do. But he nonetheless gained his share of honour and recognition. He went on to perform daring rescues, had extraordinary adventures, and—in spite of the advertisement—never lost a single man under his direct command.

  Within three years of Shackleton’s abortive attempt, two different expeditions had wiped out his southernmost record and succeeded in reaching the Pole, although one of them would not survive the journey back.

  ‘Better a live donkey than a dead lion,’ Shackleton had observed to his wife. But he was no donkey. Turning for home, less than a hundred miles short of certain glory, was an act of extraordinary courage—one of the bravest things any Antarctic explorer has ever done.

  Roald Amundsen, the eventual conqueror of the Pole, understood this better than most. In his later account of his own expedition, Amundsen said this: ‘Ernest Shackleton’s name will always be written in the annals of Antarctic exploration in letters of fire.’

  Beyond Shackleton’s hut, away from the main colony, lay a hollow between two small hills, where perhaps forty penguins were lying placidly on their nests inside a corral made from a green mesh fence that was thigh-high. This was a sub-colony, which David was studying separately from the rest. At first I thought the penguins were trapped, but then I saw a weighbridge, an archway over a metallic grey mat, piled around with rocks.

  This experiment was all about food. ‘Adélies are just bundles of energy,’ David said. ‘They keep going forward. Unless they’re sitting on eggs they just don’t stand still. It takes a lot of food, though. They definitely eat a lot of food.’

  He told me the birds there each had a chip inserted under their skin, the same sort that people use to identify their cats and dogs. The whole thing was ingenious. When a penguin entered the bridge, it cut through an optical beam that switched the machine on. A magnetic field in the hoop overhead activated the transmitter in the chip that broadcasted the penguin’s ID. Beneath the mat, an electronic scale measured its weight, and the bird then cut through a second beam so you knew whether it was entering or leaving.

  ‘We weigh them in and out,’ David said. ‘When they’re feeding the chicks, we calculate how much food they give by comparing the adult’s arrival weight with its leaving weight. Doing that by weighing chicks causes too much disturbance.’

  The penguins eat a combination of fish and a shrimp-like creature called krill. The researchers know this, David told me, because in the past they spent a lot of time making the penguins regurgitate.

  ‘You pump them full of water, then you tip them upside down,’ he said. ‘It would take three goes to empty their stomach and we only did it once, so we left them plenty of food. We don’t do it any more. It was distressing for both the researchers and the animals. It violated their sense of self.’

  ‘Their sense of self?’

  ‘They definitely have a sense of self, an aura of penguinhood. We try not to do anything that another penguin won’t do. They behave towards you as if you’re a large penguin. If you come close to their nest they will treat you like any penguin and peck you. Their beaks are very sharp and they whack you on the shins with their flippers. But if you pick them up, no part of their normal life is in the air. When we attach the transmitters we try to trap them between our feet. We’d only pick them up as a last resort.’

  ‘What are they like to touch?’ I asked him.

  ‘If they’re fluffed out, the feathers are soft, but if they’re in sleek mode, they’re almost like scales,’ he said. ‘They’re very vigorous and extremely strong and they squirm a lot. They’re mostly bone and muscle. The bones are solid, unlike oth
er birds, and the muscles are huge for all that swimming and walking so they’re really hard to hold. You have to grab both of their feet, tuck their head in your armpit so their eyes are covered, and hold them like a football.’

  I risked a more personal question. ‘Why do you do all this?’

  ‘I dunno, I’m just interested in seabirds and the ocean and the . . . um . . . what you might call the romance.’ He was warming up now. ‘It’s the idea of this vast ocean with these warm-blooded creatures that are pretty much in the same boat as some humans except they’ve figured things out a little bit better. In a way humans have totally trashed the oceans, whereas birds have solved it because, you know, they fit in. They don’t try to change it.’

  ‘How have humans changed it?’

  ‘Well, we’ve removed the highest predators from all the other oceans. The whales, seals, cod, pollack, tuna, swordfish, sharks are all gone. If you have predators, there are long-lived creatures that eat the surpluses and coast during the troughs of food supply, so you get a stable system—one that doesn’t swing so wildly from one extreme to the other.’

  So according to David, because the Ross Sea still had birds and whales and seals and predatory fish, this was the only place on Earth where the ocean was behaving as it was supposed to.

  ‘It’s truly wild,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, it is wild. It’s all out there in full view. There are no secrets. Penguins can’t hide and they don’t question anything. But you can ask them questions, and if you’re creative enough you can find the answers.’

  ‘Do you like the other kind of wildness—the elemental kind?’

  Again, he paused to consider the question.

  ‘I don’t want dangerous. I’m not looking for an adrenalin buzz,’ he said. ‘But I do like Cape Crozier, which is famous for its wind. The weather there is really localised. You can sit in a place where it’s calm and see a raging hurricane, just a couple of miles away; it’s like a grey cloud zipping over the Ross Ice Shelf and turning the ocean into a white froth.’

  ‘Have you ever been out in a bad storm?’

  ‘Yes. A couple of times. You can be standing there in total calm and suddenly there are seventy-knot winds knocking you off your feet. One time, when I was a grad student, a storm had been blowing for like three days. When the winds finally stopped I donned my gear and ran down to the beach to check how the penguins were doing. If the storm is too strong they start to fly, and can get broken bones.

  ‘As I was down there, the wind came back, and it was a total whiteout, blowing a hundred knots. I couldn’t really walk but I could crawl and I knew the sub-colonies of those penguins pretty well. We had a little observation hide, about the size of a telephone booth, so I found my way to that on my hands and knees. It had a sleeping bag and C rations—the food that army guys eat. I wouldn’t touch the canned stuff—it’s repulsive—but I ate all the cake. I was in there for about thirty-six hours. Then the whiteout stopped, though the wind was still blowing a hundred knots and I crawled back to the main hut about a kilometre away and . . . lived happily ever after.’

  ‘Were you scared?’

  ‘No, just bored.’

  ‘What about the three other people in the hut? Were they worried about you?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But they didn’t come to find you?’

  ‘They couldn’t see.’

  I digested this for a moment. You are trapped by fierce winds in a box the size of a telephone booth for a day and a half, eating nothing but cake, while your friends can’t come and find out if you are alive or dead because they can’t see. The air is so thick with snow and wind that there is nothing anyone can do but wait. This is truly not a continent for the impatient.

  Three members of Scott’s expedition to the Pole had their own horrifying experience of the winds of Cape Crozier, but in their case they went in the winter. I asked David if he knew the story.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I read it while I was at Crozier. Those guys were out of their minds.’

  He stopped, as if considering fairness, then added: ‘They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. McMurdo is completely different because of the way the wind works around here. When we radioed in, people would never believe us that it was blowing a hundred and forty knots at Crozier. In McMurdo it was a nice day. Those guys had no idea what they would find. If Birdie Bowers hadn’t been there to build that rock igloo, they would all have died.’

  20 July 1911, Cape Crozier

  I do not know what time it was when I woke up. It was calm, with that absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances dictate. Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again. Ten minutes and it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar of it all cannot be imagined.9

  This must have seemed like the end. Apsley Cherry-Garrard and his companions, Bill Wilson and Birdie Bowers, had suffered almost unimaginably in the three weeks it had taken them to travel to Cape Crozier. They had nearly died so many times, nobody was bothering to keep score. And just as they had finally reached their goal, built themselves a secure stone igloo, and settled down for an attempt at rest, they had been hit by one of Crozier’s now legendary storms.

  There was worse to come. The next thing Cherry-Garrard heard was a cry from Bowers. ‘The tent has gone!’ The three men had pitched their tent in the lee of the igloo, but the furious winds had ripped it from its moorings. They were more than 100 km from the hut that was currently sheltering Scott and the rest of the expedition, back at Cape Evans. Without their tent, in pitch darkness and the coldest temperatures any human had yet experienced, they now had no hope of returning.

  The three men had come south as part of Scott’s team for his forthcoming attempt on the South Pole. During the winter of preparations, Wilson, a fervent naturalist, asked Scott’s permission to journey out to Cape Crozier and study the emperor penguins there. The reasoning seemed sound. Wilson believed—wrongly as it turned out—that emperors were among the most primitive of birds, and that their embryos might enable him to trace evolutionary links between birds and reptiles.

  At the time the only known rookery of emperors was at Cape Crozier. And when an earlier expedition had sailed there in the spring, the chicks had already hatched. Clearly, emperors must incubate their eggs during the winter. If you wanted the embryos, you’d have to go then.

  Scott gave his permission, Cherry-Garrard and Bowers volunteered to accompany Wilson and the three men cheerfully made their preparations. Nobody had ever travelled in an Antarctica winter. This would be exciting. But when they set off on what Cherry-Garrard called ‘the weirdest bird’s nesting expedition that has ever been or ever will be’,10 they had no idea what was to come.

  First they were woefully unprepared for the cold. The temperature plummeted beyond their imaginings, bringing them blisters of frostbite if they dared to remove their gloves or expose any flesh for an instant. Their tents were just warm enough to begin the thaw, rendering their sleeping bags clammy and their clothes damp enough to freeze even more solidly when they re-emerged. One morning, as Cherry-Garrard left his tent, he stood up and lifted his head to look about. It wasn’t for long, just ten or maybe fifteen seconds. But that was enough for his clothes to become completely rigid, trapping him painfully upright for the next four hours of sledge hauling. After that, all three men were careful to bend over into a pulling position the moment they went outside.

  On 6 July, peering at their thermometer by the light of a flickering candle, they read a temperature of -77.5°F, the lowest ever recorded. This, said Cherry-Garrard, was the day he discovered that records are not worth making.

  The nights should have brought some respite. But the men shivered so painfully and uncontrollably in their sleeping bags that they feared their bones might break. Cherry-Garrard wrote that the two worst jobs of the entire enterprise were first getting into the bag, and
then having to stay there for six hours. ‘They talk of chattering teeth,’ he said, ‘but when your body chatters you may call yourself cold.’11 The call to wake and start the day’s pulling came as a blessed relief, but, in the darkness and fumbling cold, it still took five full hours just to strike camp.

  ‘I don’t believe that minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight,’ Cherry-Garrard wrote, ‘not comparatively bad, when you could see where you were going, where you were stepping, where the sledge straps were, the cooker, the primus, the food; could see your footsteps lately trodden deep into the soft snow that you might find your way back to the rest of your load; could see the lashings of the food bags; could read a compass without striking three or four different boxes to find one dry match.’12

  Conditions were worse than any of the men had ever dreamed of, but nobody wanted to be the first to say so. The expedition leader, Bill Wilson, repeatedly asked the other two if they wanted to return and each time they said no. Later he stopped asking and merely apologised, again and again, for the horrors he had led them into.

  Still they trudged on, across the white emptiness of Windless Bight where the snow was so cold that it was like pulling over sand. The men could no longer drag their sledges in tandem. Instead, they had to relay them. Fumble and fasten your harness; heave through the cold and darkness for one mile; unfasten yourself; trudge back; hook up to the second sledge; heave, trudge, unhook, repeat. And all by the light of a naked candle, in temperatures that would freeze your soul.

  Next came Terror Point, where the sea ice crams into the island creating mountainous pressure ridges over which they hauled their sledges, one at a time, up, over, down the other side, this one first and then back for the other. And then there were the crevasses. It was impossible in the darkness to see the snow bridges that draped them. All you could do was crash through, hope your harness would hold, climb out, crash through again, and hope and climb and crash and hope again. When they finally reached the emperor rookery, their bodies and minds were all but destroyed.