Such was the outrage at Cook’s deception that nobody bothered to examine Peary’s own proof in much depth. After a cursory look at his diaries and instruments, the National Geographic Society proclaimed that he had reached the Pole. Britain’s Royal Geographical Society came to a similar opinion, but with reservations: he had no better evidence than Cook that he had stood at 90° N, and his mileage seemed incredible, varying at times from 30 to 50 miles per day; but to cast doubt on his achievement would be to call him a liar and, as everyone knew, Peary was a man of his word. The medals and awards that had been given to Cook were bestowed a thousandfold on Peary. Not until later in the 20th century did experts acknowledge that his proofs were insufficient and that the evidence pointed overwhelmingly to his not having reached the Pole. According to the British explorer Wally Herbert, who became in 1969 the first person to traverse the polar pack on foot, he might at best have come within 60 miles of his goal.
However, Peary’s achievement should not be sneered at. In a region where every bit of ice looks the same, where every lead and every pressure ridge is indistinguishable from every other, does it matter if he turned back sooner than he should? What would he have found had he continued to the Pole? Nothing but more of the same monotonous ice. The marvel is that he got so far with the men and equipment he had. In awarding him the prize, geographical societies were guilty of self-deception, but little else.
Peary died on 19 February 1920 and was interred with full honours in Arlington Cemetery. Cook died in 1940. His last words were that he did not care what people said. ‘I state emphatically that I, Frederick A. Cook, discovered the North Pole.’ Both men were probably liars, but nobody will ever know for certain whether one or, fantastically, both might have been speaking the truth.
THE RACE FOR THE SOUTH POLE
Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen (1911–12)
For a long while, following the voyage to Antarctica in 1839–43 by Captain James Clark Ross, the world paid little attention to its southernmost continent. Unlike the Arctic, with its promise of a sea passage to the Orient and the lure of rescuing Sir John Franklin, Antarctica was of slight interest to governments. True, its outer waters offered a natural bounty of whales and seals, but Antarctica itself was reckoned a dead and pointless place. What purpose would it serve sending expeditions over an endless expanse of ice? They might find the South Magnetic Pole, or even the South Pole itself, but these were goals of relatively small importance. Anyway, the severity of the climate made it very doubtful that anyone could survive a winter on the continent, let alone progress far into its interior. By the end of the 19th century, however, scientists and adventurers were turning their eyes south. As early as the 1870S Britain despatched HMS Challenger (captained by George Nares) to investigate the effects Antarctica had on the meteorology and currents of the southern hemisphere. The Challenger had brought back much valuable information, but there remained a host of questions yet to be answered. As developments in the Arctic seemed to prove with every passing year, ice was no longer the insuperable foe it had once appeared. If humankind could overcome the northern pack then it could do the same for the southern and, possibly, make inroads on the polar ice cap itself.
That this was no pipedream was shown in 1897–9, when the Belgica made the first wintering in Antarctic ice. It was not something its commander, Lieutenant Adrien de Gerlache, or crew had intended to do, nor was it an experience any of them wished to repeat. They very nearly died of scurvy and, as a young Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, reported, it was only the skill of an experienced Arctic hand, Dr Frederick A. Cook, that brought them home alive. Overlapping with the Belgica was the Southern Cross expedition, sponsored by a British news magnate and captained by a Norwegian whaler named Carsten Borchgrevink. Between 1898 and 1900 Borchgrevink established the first land base on the continent and sledged some distance over the Ross Ice Shelf, accumulating several pieces of rock and a reputation as one of the more unpleasant people with whom to be stuck in the ice.
These two voyages were of special interest to Sir Clements Markham, President of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. A man of the John Barrow stamp, Markham had been urging Britain to reclaim its place at the forefront of polar exploration ever since the 1860s. The failure of the 1875–6 Nares expedition to the North Pole – of which he had been an ardent supporter – and subsequent success in the same field by other nationalities had dampened his ambitions in that direction. The Antarctic, on the other hand, was a clean slate on which Britain had every right to inscribe its superiority. And not only a right but a duty: was it not a Briton who had first set foot on the place? (Actually, it was not: an American sealer discovered the Antarctic peninsula, and the first continental landing had been made by a Frenchman; but this was by the by.) Let others do as they wished, Britain would be first to the South Pole. A year after Borchgrevink’s return Markham orchestrated a multi-national assault on Antarctica, in which Swedes were sent to the peninsula, Germans to the eastern coast and Britons to the Ross Shelf. In 1902 a Scottish expedition would depart, and in 1903 a French. But it was the 1901 British voyage that excited him the most. He had chosen its destination with care: the Ross Shelf offered the best chance of reaching the Pole. And he had personally selected its leader as the man best qualified to do so.
Once the most powerful country on the globe, by 1900 Britain felt itself woefully under strength. Medical experts pronounced that since the Industrial Revolution its population of underpaid and undernourished workers were smaller and weaker than at any time in its history – a fact that was proved by the measurements of those who enlisted in 1899 to fight in the Boer War. Strong men and brave deeds were required to buck the trend. Markham already had his brave deed in mind: all he needed was a strong man to see it through. He chose Robert Falcon Scott. A young torpedo officer in the Royal Navy, Scott was one of those men who could only have existed at a certain time and in a certain place. The first decade of the 20th century was his time and Britain was his place. Unlike many of his compatriots, Scott was physically fit and had all his own teeth. He believed in God, but included king and country in his faith. He was daring, brave, intelligent, exceptionally tough, and single-minded in a grit-jawed sort of manner. He was, in Markham’s opinion, the perfect man to raise the Union Jack over the South Pole. This would dispel the image of Britain’s weakness and encourage others to follow suit.
Scott’s voyage aboard the Discovery was a disappointment. Although the expedition explored the area around the Ross Ice Shelf and discovered King Edward VII Land, it made little progress across the ice. In 1907 Scott’s second-in-command, Ernest Shackleton, sailed in the Nimrod to make his own stab at the Pole. He forged a route up the Beardmore Glacier, discovered the South Magnetic Pole and came within 100 miles of the Pole itself before being driven back by exhaustion and scurvy. By 1910 Markham was no longer President of the Royal Geographical Society, but his influence on Antarctic exploration remained strong. In that year Scott sailed aboard the Terra Nova for what would be Britain’s last and most successful push for the Pole.
When the Terra Nova expedition landed at Cape Evans in McMurdo Sound on 4 January 1911 it was the biggest, best provisioned, best equipped and most expensive assemblage ever to set foot on Antarctica. Its 49 members had pemmican and tinned food to last 36 months; they had the material to build wooden houses; they had skis, dogs and sledges; as an experiment they also took ponies and caterpillar-tracked mechanical sledges; they had experience of the ice – many of them had been south before – and they had a fit, fearless, inspirational leader.
Scott’s aim was not only to reach the Pole. He wanted also to shed more light on the nature of Antarctica. His prospects in this respect were limited: he did not have an endless amount of time; his scientific officers would be able to do little more than record data and collect specimens for analysis at home; and there was so much of the continent that remained untouched – for all the activity in recent years, the interior was an almost pristine b
lank and the coast had been visited in few and isolated spots. Regardless of these limitations, Scott made a start before the austral winter of 1911. While he and his polar party remained at McMurdo Sound to take readings, perfect their ice-travelling skills and lay the depots that would be needed for their journey the following season, a group under Raymond Priestley was taken by ship to investigate the Bay of Whales, on the other side of the Ross Ice Shelf. Later, another party under Edward Wilson sledged to Ross Island to collect eggs from a rookery of emperor penguins (a theory held that at an embryonic stage they resembled fish, and might therefore offer clues as to how life emerged from the sea). Of the two travelling parties it was hard to say which had the worst experience. Wilson’s left in winter, when the eggs would be at the required stage of development, and had an appalling time in temperatures as low as– 75°F – one member, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, called it ‘the worst journey in the world’ – returning with five eggs, two of which they dropped. The men of Priestley’s so-called northern party did not return at all that year. When they arrived at the Bay of Whales they found their anchorage occupied by a Norwegian expedition. Unwilling to share the spot with others, they steamed west to Cape Adare, landing at a spot they called Terra Nova Bay while their ship stood out to sea. The extra days’ journey ate into the time allotted them. The pack ice formed early that year and the Terra Nova was unable to break through to the coast. Cut off from their support ship, Priestley’s men built a shelter on a lump of rock they named Inexpressible Island and settled down to a lonely winter in which starvation and scurvy was kept at bay (just) by a monotonous diet of penguin meat.
Meanwhile, at McMurdo Sound, Scott’s group was having its own troubles. The expensive mechanized sledges seized up in the Antarctic cold; the ponies floundered helplessly in the snow; and although the dogs worked perfectly, their mastery was beyond most of the men. These difficulties meant that the most important food cache, One Ton Depot, which was to greet Scott on the Ross Ice Shelf following his journey to the Pole, was placed considerably further north than had been planned. For the Pole attempt the following year Scott decided to take the dogs and ponies to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, but from there, rather than risk using methods with which he was unfamiliar, it would be man-hauling – a time-honoured practice at which Britons had traditionally, if unfruitfully, excelled. Scott’s first season could not, therefore, be called an unqualified success. And the prospects for his second were unfavourable: not only had his meteorologist predicted exceptionally bad weather for the coming summer, but he now found himself engaged in a race for the Pole. As the Terra Nova reported, the leader of the Norwegian expedition at the Bay of Whales was Roald Amundsen.
Amundsen was one of the most thrusting polar travellers of the age. Born in 1872, he was four years younger than Scott himself and was, if possible, even tougher and more determined. At an early age he had read Franklin’s journals and had been so impressed that he had determined to carve a name (and career) for himself as an explorer. He devoted himself to the cause, building his muscles with repetitive exercises and testing his stamina with long winter ski journeys across the high plateaux of Norway. He first came to the world’s attention in 1906 after a three-year voyage in which he traversed the North-West Passage in a small ship named the Gjoa, demonstrating with embarrassing ease that the key to success in the Arctic was to take a small group and live, as Inuit did, off the region’s natural resources. His next goal was the North Pole, which he would undoubtedly have reached had not Robert Peary (supposedly) beaten him to it in 1909. When the news came Amundsen was momentarily disappointed. ‘This was a blow indeed!’ he wrote. ‘If I was to maintain my prestige as an explorer, I must quickly achieve a sensational success of some sort.’ Success of the kind he sought could only be found at the South Pole. So there he went, but in secret. Borrowing Fridtjof Nansen’s Fram for what he explained would be a voyage through the Bering Strait, he steamed instead to the Antarctic. His arrival disturbed Scott partly because it was unannounced, partly because he was trespassing on what the British considered their territory, and partly because he was there purely to reach the South Pole. He had no intention of wasting time and money on scientific observations; he simply wanted to bag the globe’s southernmost axis. And he wasn’t going to man-haul his sledges but use dog teams, which his fellow countryman Nansen and the American Peary had shown were the most effective means of polar travel. He was a small, beaky-nosed, beady-eyed, ultra-efficient campaigner who had yet to lose any battle he had steeled himself to fight. His presence 80 miles nearer the Pole than themselves was, to the British, unnerving.
The following summer the two polar expeditions set out. Amundsen was the first to go, on 19 October 1911, with four men, four sledges and 52 dogs, travelling on skis and wearing the light, warm furs that had already proved such a boon in the Arctic. Scott left two weeks later with 15 men wearing unwieldy, moisture-absorbent woollens, and accompanied by 10 sledges dragged by ponies and dogs; after a while they shot the horses (which were either eaten or placed in caches for the return journey) and dragged the sledges themselves. Amundsen went fast and unencumbered, covering 90 miles in the first four days. The British party moved slowly and in harness, gathering rocks from nearby outcrops and piling them on their sledges. Scott’s route took him up the Beardmore Glacier, a massive chequerboard of crevasses through which he picked his way with care, marking the route for his return journey and, once he had reached the top, depositing caches to sustain his team on their return. Amundsen, who had eschewed the Beardmore in favour of a short, hard climb over an adjoining, steeper glacier, was laying only the occasional cache: his security lay in speed – that and the dogs which, as the sledges lightened and became redundant, would be eaten. Throughout his journey Amundsen averaged 17 miles per day; Scott trudged on at a rate that was sometimes as low as 6 miles a day.
On 7 December Amundsen passed Shackleton’s furthest south. ‘I find it impossible to express the feelings that possessed me at that moment,’ he later wrote. ‘All the sledges had stopped, and from the foremost of them the Norwegian flag was flying. It shook itself out, waved and flapped so that the silk rustled; it looked wonderfully well in the pure, clear air and the shining white surroundings. 88 degrees 23 minutes was past; we were farther south than any human being had been.’ On the same date Scott was still hauling his rock-laden sledges over the Beardmore Glacier. By 9 December Amundsen was confident of success, but without knowing Scott’s whereabouts could not be entirely sure that the British had not, in some fantastic fashion, stolen the lead. ‘Every step we now took in advance brought us rapidly nearer the goal,’ he wrote. ‘We could feel fairly certain of reaching it on the afternoon of the fourteenth ... None of us would admit that he was nervous, but I am inclined to think that we all had a little touch of that malady. What should we see when we got there? A vast, endless plain that no eye had yet seen and no foot yet trodden, or – No, it was an impossibility; with the speed at which we had travelled, we must reach the goal first, there could be no doubt about that. And yet – and yet...’
Amundsen need not have worried. Scott’s party did not reach the top of the Beardmore until 4 January – and when it did it was struggling with more than just overladen sledges and poor clothes. One man, Edgar Evans, had fallen into a crevasse and injured his head; he protested that it was nothing, but from that point he lagged continually. While his weakness may have been the result of brain damage, it was also a sign of incipient scurvy. Unlike Amundsen’s team, who had moved fast enough to avoid the disease and had, anyway, been eating the flesh of their dogs, Scott’s group had subsisted on pemmican and the various tinned foods that their nation produced and packaged with such efficiency. (Vitamin C had been discovered in 1911 by the London-based scientist Casimir Funk, but its anti-scorbutic properties – and its presence in fresh meat – were unknown to Scott when he provisioned the Terra Nova.) Blithely ignorant of Evans’s disease, Scott drove his team forward.
At t
he top of the Beardmore Scott made a curious decision. The initial plan had been that the polar party would start large, then shed members as it went until only a select group of four remained for the last leg to the Pole: himself, ‘Titus’ Oates, Edward Wilson and Edgar Evans. One group had already turned back at the bottom of the Beardmore, and a second now departed at the top. But for some reason, Scott chose to increase the final group from four to five. The fifth man was Lieutenant ‘Birdie’ Bowers, an officer who was extremely fit but had no previous experience of polar travel. At a stroke, therefore, Scott reduced the space in their single tent and compromised the rationing. Why he made the choice remains a mystery: it could have been that he valued Bowers’s navigational skills and physical strength, or it could just have been one of the sudden impulses to which he was prone. He did not acknowledge, however, that Bowers’s lack of experience might be a hindrance. Nor did he realize how badly injured Evans was or how far his scurvy had progressed. Arguably, from this point, the expedition was doomed.
Off the Map Page 59
