Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  On 14 December Amundsen reached the South Pole. In anticipation of his arrival, the weather that morning was fine – it had been relatively warm throughout the journey, so much so that, despite a few blizzards, the fur-clad Norwegians ‘sweated as if running races in the tropics’ – and although the sky was overcast by 3.00 p.m., it was clear enough for them to tell from their instruments that they were at the Pole or at worst a few miles from it. Amundsen was surprised and a little disappointed: surprised because the journey had seemed so easy and uncomplicated; disappointed because he had always wanted to reach the North Pole but had, almost by default, conquered the South. He wrote: ‘I cannot say – though I know it would sound more effective – that the object of my life was attained ... I had better be honest and admit straight out that I have never known any man to be placed in such a diametrically opposite position to the goal of his desires as I was at that moment.’ The Norwegians raised the flag, spent three days scouting the ice to make sure that they had actually reached the Pole, then sledged home on 17 December. ‘The going was splendid and we were in good spirits, so we went along at a great pace ... A mild, summer-like wind ... was our last greeting from the Pole.’ On 25 January 1912, at 4.00 a.m., they returned safely to the Bay of Whales with two sledges and 11 dogs. All five men were alive and well. Amundsen’s summary of their record-breaking trip was terse: ‘Ninety-nine days the trip had taken. Distance about 1,860 miles.’

  On 17 January 1912 Scott’s party limped on to the Pole. They found a Norwegian flag and a tent containing letters of encouragement, epistles which he was asked to carry back to the King of Norway, and, cheekily, a set of navigational instruments. It was hardly worth their while casting about to find the exact whereabouts of the Pole, but from a sense of duty they removed a sledge runner with which Amundsen had marked the spot and erected instead a Union Jack at what they calculated was a more precise location, about three-quarters of a mile north. Scott estimated its height as 9,500 feet above sea level, some 1,000 feet lower than the altitude he had measured at 88° S. Then, drearily, they mounted their camera on its tripod and posed for a self-portrait. The resulting exposure, of five men dressed in limp, black rags, their clothes and faces stained by soot and grease, is one of the most harrowing images of disappointment in the history of photography. Their despair is exacerbated by a squint, which gives the impression that the sun was shining; but although the ice cast its omnipresent glare, the weather on that day was cloudy and threatening; the temperature was – 21°F and, as Scott recorded, ‘there is that curious, damp feeling in the air which chills one to the bone in no time’. Whereas Amundsen had seen a shell of shining ice, Scott saw nothing but windswept emptiness. ‘Great God!’ he wrote. ‘This is an awful place.’

  They left on 18 January. Scott – who was an accomplished diarist – remarked: ‘Well, we have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition and must face our 800 miles of solid dragging – and goodbye to most of our day-dreams!’ Their sledges were still piled with rock, their food was low, Edgar Evans was growing weaker by the day, and the Antarctic was brewing a storm so horrendous that later commentators would give odds of its occurrence at twice in a hundred years. The winds poured from the interior towards the coast, giving the first indication of their violence while Scott’s men were on the Beardmore. In the blizzards they lost their carefully positioned markers and had to find a new path through the crevasses. They were all starving, but Evans, scorbutic and damaged by his earlier fall, was the worst affected. He became incapable of movement and died on 18 February. Oates, meanwhile, had severely frostbitten feet and by 11 March was, as Scott wrote, ‘very near the end. What we or he will do, God only knows... Nothing could be said but to urge him to march as long as he could.’ How long any of them could march was dictated by their provisions. They had a week’s food, which would carry them at their present rate of six miles per day a distance of 42 miles. Their nearest cache, One Ton Depot, was 55 miles away. Even if the weather improved, Scott did not see how they could make the last 13 miles, given their current weakness and the rough nature of the ice. On that day Scott ordered Wilson to ‘hand over the means of ending our trouble to us, so that any one of us may know how to do so ... We have 30 opium tabloids apiece and he is left with a tube of morphine. So far the tragical side of our story.’

  The tragedy progressed. On 14 March the temperature sank to – 43°F. ‘It must be near the end,’ Scott wrote, ‘but a pretty merciful end ... No idea there could be temperatures like this at this time of the year with such winds. Truly awful outside the tent. Must fight it out to the last biscuit, but can’t reduce rations.’ On the 15th or 16th (Scott had lost track of time) Oates left the tent. ‘He was a brave soul,’ Scott recorded. ‘This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning – yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.’ They tried to dissuade him, but their appeal was in vain. ‘We knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.’

  Oates’s sacrifice very nearly saved the others. On the 19th they were 11 miles from One Ton Depot, had food for two days and enough fuel to melt snow for two cups of tea per person. It was just possible they might reach safety. But they did not. A ferocious storm hit them on the 20th, and nine days later Scott wrote his last diary entry. ‘Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.’ At some later date he added, ‘For God’s sake look after our people’. After that there was nothing.

  In late October Scott’s base party sledged in search of their leader. Eleven miles south of One Ton Depot, on 12 November, they saw a black stick protruding from a smooth plateau of snow. It was the pole of Scott’s tent. Digging down, they opened the canvas and discovered the three remaining members of the polar party. Bowers and Wilson lay peacefully in their sleeping bags, the tops closed down as if they were asleep. Scott was halfway out of his bag, with his coat open and one arm thrown over Wilson. Under his shoulders were the three notebooks in which he had scribbled his last thoughts. There were also two letters, one to Wilson’s widow and another to his son’s godfather, J. M. Barrie, both written a few days before his death. The former was a standard letter of regret. The latter was a personal testament to triumph and sorrow: ‘We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end. It will be known that we have accomplished our object in reaching the Pole, and that we have done everything possible, even to sacrificing ourselves in order to save sick companions. I think this makes an example for Englishmen of the future ... Goodbye, I am not at all afraid of the end, but sad to have missed many a humble pleasure which I had planned for the future ... I may not have proved a very great explorer, but we have done the greatest march ever made and come very near to great success. Goodbye, my dear friend. Yours, R. SCOTT.’

  They took the diaries, the undeveloped rolls of film, the personal effects, and then collapsed the tent, leaving as a memorial a cross of skis. When the northern party dug itself free in January 1913 and marched over the ice to McMurdo Sound – an awful journey in itself – its members could not believe what had happened. The greatest, most powerful expedition to have left Britain had ended in disaster. They packed their bags, boarded the Terra Nova and sailed home. Behind them they left their hut, their provisions, the skeletons of their mechanized sledges and all the impedimenta with which they had sailed so optimistically.

  When news of the tragedy reached Britain the sensation was immense. Amundsen’s prodigious achievement in reaching the Pole was drowned in a tidal wave of British national sentiment. It
seemed almost as if the Norwegians’ efficiency was a form of cheating. Indeed, many felt that they had cheated: coming south without warning, trespassing on another man’s continent, deliberately setting out to foil his effort. It was outrageous. And what had Amundsen done, other than place his foot on a piece of ice distinguished from its neighbours only by its coordinates? Scott, in contrast, had conducted a proper scientific expedition – had died, in fact, for the benefit of humankind. Ultimately, however, no one could deny how effective Amundsen had been, and once the mourning had ended a more sober appraisal of Scott’s expedition took place. There were so many stages at which his death could have been averted: he could have trained himself to drive dogs rather than relying on ponies and man-hauling; he could have placed One Ton Depot further south; at the top of the Beardmore he could have stuck to his original plan instead of adding Bowers to the polar party; he could have left his sledge-load of rocks behind instead of dragging them to the end; he could have worn furs instead of woollens; he could have provisioned the men more effectively. All these criticisms came, of course, after the event. Whatever Scott might or might not have done, in doing what he did he became a legend.

  It was not just the fact of his dying that gave him legendary status – others had died, just as bravely, in the ice – but the manner in which he did so. His was an age in which everything was writ large: empires, fortunes, machines, concepts, ambitions, deeds and disasters. To Britons such as Scott, of a certain class and a certain upbringing, life was governed by a straightforward set of rules: women and children went first, a captain went down with his ship, fights were fair and one shook the opponent’s hand afterwards. Taking part was as important as winning, and the game was a vast and exciting one. If death came one faced it in the knowledge that one was doing one’s duty. When the Titanic sank in April 1912 it was noted with approval that the band played to the last and that not only the captain but the owner went down with the ship. (Scott’s nickname was, fittingly, ‘The Owner’.) In later years these values would be caricatured, along with so many aspects of the Edwardian era, as mindless and self-deluding, a pompous exercise in self-righteousness divorced from reality. Maybe they were all these things. But they were also the code by which many people lived. According to the quasireligious ethos that gave Britain faith in its empire, Scott’s death was not that of a simple explorer: he was a martyr.

  ALONE IN THE ANTARCTIC

  Douglas Mawson (1911–13)

  When Scott selected his men for the Terra Nova’s last voyage, there was one he very much wanted to join the group: Dr Douglas Mawson from the University of Adelaide, a 30-year-old geologist who weighed 15 stone, not an ounce of which was fat. One contemporary described him as ‘an Australian Nansen, of infinite resource, splendid physique, [and] astonishing indifference to frost’. Mawson had gained this accolade while a member of Shackleton’s 1907–9 expedition, during which he not only became one of the first to scale Mount Erebus, but made a remarkable 1,260-mile sledge journey to reach the South Magnetic Pole. No sooner had he returned than he heard of Scott’s forthcoming attempt at the Pole. Immediately he caught a ship to Britain, cabling Scott that he would pay a visit ‘relative to Antarctic matters soon after arrival’. To Scott’s surprise, the matters Mawson wanted to discuss had very little to do with the South Pole. The Australian advocated a separate expedition to chart the undiscovered coast west of Cape Adare, as well as to conduct a more thorough investigation of the South Magnetic Pole. As he pointed out, the region was closer to Hobart than was Perth. Its discovery was a matter not only of Australian national honour but of great scientific importance: everyone had been to the Ross Ice Shelf, but the region beyond Cape Adare, which formed the western promontory of the gulf in which the shelf sat, was a mystery. He had men willing to accompany him. All he needed was transport. If Scott would take him there on the Terra Nova he would consider his expedition subsidiary to Scott’s, and his findings – which would surely be many – would be published as part of Scott’s own.

  Scott’s response was negative. The Terra Nova had enough to do as it was, and a mission to Cape Adare was beyond its capabilities. But if Mawson wanted to join his own group he would be paid £800 per annum for the two years he expected to be away and would be guaranteed a place among the party Scott intended to take with him to the Pole. Mawson rejected his offer, and continued to do so despite Scott’s persistence. He turned instead to Shackleton who, although not personally planning an expedition, was interested enough in the Cape Adare proposal to lend it his support. As with most polar ventures, finding the funds was almost as tiresome as the voyage itself; but with Shackleton’s help Mawson raised enough to purchase a 280-ton sealer, the Aurora, and provide 26 explorers with the provisions and equipment they would require for the journey in hand. In most respects his expedition was like Scott’s: the men wore Jaeger woollens and waterproofs from the London clothiers Burberry; they took the same cans of pemmican and relied on the same conical tents. Unlike Scott, however, he did not expect to man-haul: instead, Mawson put his trust in dogs.

  The Aurora left Hobart on 2 December 1911 and anchored off Antarctica on 8 January 1912. The pack ice had prevented them reaching Cape Adare, so they landed to the west, on a headland that sat within a 50-mile-wide stretch of water (Mawson called these respectively Cape Denison and Commonwealth Bay). Here the party split, 18 men under Mawson remaining at Cape Denison while the remaining eight under Frank Wild, a veteran of the first Scott expedition, sailed west, hoping to land about 500 miles from Cape Denison but in fact being forced 1,400 miles round Antarctica to the Shackleton Ice Shelf. Having dropped Wild’s party, the Aurora steamed back to Hobart, not to return until the following year.

  The Cape Denison party were well equipped. They had food for two years, building materials (including drills and dynamite) to construct three huts, 25 tons of coal, drums of oil, electric motors, batteries, furnaces, stoves, radios and even a small aircraft (though its wings had been damaged in transit and it could only be used for towing). During the autumn months they took scientific measurements, learned the rudiments of sledge travelling and climbed the steep slopes that rose from Commonwealth Bay, in early March making an exploratory foray five and a half miles across the plateau above. Anything more adventurous was precluded by the weather, whose ferocity astonished Mawson. The temperature sank to 60° F below freezing, and several times gales of up to 150 miles per hour devastated their camp, blowing away boats, sledges and any item that was not buried under the snow. ‘The elements are trying to destroy us by hurricane,’ he wrote. Later, ‘The winds have a force so terrific as to eclipse anything previously known in the world. We have found the kingdom of blizzards. We have come to an accursed land.’

  The following spring Mawson attacked the plateau. At the point they had reached in March they excavated a cavern in the ice – Aladdin’s Cave, they called it – which was to act as their forward base. From here parties of three men would fan out to explore the surrounding plateau, dragging their sledges behind them or, in the case of one group that went west in the hope of connecting with Wild’s party, using the crippled aeroplane as (in Mawson’s words) an ‘air-tractor’. The dogs, meanwhile, were reserved for the longest of the proposed journeys: a 500-mile march east along the uncharted coastline towards Cape Adare. This was Mawson’s pet project, and it was he who was to undertake it, accompanied by two others: a Swiss mountaineer and ski champion, Dr Xavier Mertz, and a fresh-faced army officer, Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis. By November the storms had abated slightly and on the 6th of that month Mawson gave the order to depart. If all went well, he expected the parties to cover 1,500 miles of unexplored coast and hinterland. They had, however, only a limited time in which to do so. The Aurora was due back in the first week of January, and if Wild’s group was also to be picked up before the ice closed in it would have to leave Commonwealth Bay by the 15th. This was the date, Mawson stressed, by which everyone must be back at Cape Denison.

  Mawson
, Mertz and Ninnis had 17 dogs to pull three sledges weighing a total of 1,723 pounds. From this cargo each man drew a daily allowance of 40 ounces of food to see them over a distance that Mawson set at 15 miles per day. His estimate proved optimistic. Hampered by gales, crevasses and rippling plains of sastrugi – hard ridges of wind-carved ice that made sledging a nightmare – they rarely achieved their target. Two weeks into the journey they had covered only 120 miles, approximately half what Mawson had hoped for. During that time, however, they had climbed to a height of 2,600 feet, had discovered a mountain that they named Aurora Peak and had traversed the crater of an extinct volcano 1,000 feet deep and three miles in diameter. In the following weeks they made more discoveries: two huge glaciers, the first of which Mawson named after Mertz and the second after Ninnis. Once again, though, they lagged sadly behind schedule, taking seven days to cross the Ninnis Glacier alone. Beyond the Ninnis Glacier their speed picked up, and for several days they were able to cover 15 miles at a stretch. On 12 December, Mawson announced that their journey was almost at an end: two more days in these conditions would bring them a distance of 340 miles from Cape Denison. At that point he proposed they abandon one of the sledges, cache a quantity of surplus equipment, and make a lightweight sprint to the 155th meridian, the point he had reached on his last expedition with Shackleton. In this fashion he hoped they could cover a further 60 miles before turning for home.

  Mawson’s decision was rash. They would travel faster on the return journey, their food consumption having lightened the load on the sledges. But by the time they turned around they would have been on the ice for more than a month. They would have less than that to retrace the 400 miles to Commonwealth Bay. Even with lightened loads they would still face the same crevasses, gales and sastrugi that had slowed them down on the outward journey. Their sledges were battered, they had already lost several dogs and the remainder were exhausted. The men, too, were at the limits of their strength. Ninnis, the weakest of the party, had suffered frequent bouts of snowblindness and had, in addition, a badly frostbitten finger. In these conditions they were cutting their margin very fine if they wanted to catch the Aurora before it sailed on 15 January.