We had found an accursed country. On the fringe of an unspanned continent along whose gelid coast our comrades had made their home – we knew not where – we dwelt where the chill breath of a vast, Polar wilderness, quickening to the rushing might of eternal blizzards, surged to the northern seas. Already, and for long months we were beneath ‘frost-fettered Winter’s frown’.
Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard
4 January 1912 and several days thereafter, Southern Ocean, Mawson’s men enter a strange new world
Getting close now!
When Aurora encounters a glacier tongue, a sounding reveals a mud bottom at a shallow 395 fathoms, which – just as Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, of the United States Exploring Expedition, assumed after doing similar soundings in 1840 – must mean they are on the continental shelf, with Antarctica itself very close. Passing by this massive ice behemoth, which extends 130 feet above the water, the explorers are entranced by the grandeur of the deep blue and green caverns and vast grottoes like giant mouse holes at irregular intervals along its length. Over the next few days, they track shoreward along the ice tongue and a now optimistic Mawson searches for a suitable place to establish his Winter Quarters, if they can only find solid land.
All up, all of the men aboard Aurora who have not been to these parts before have a sense that they are entering a strange new world, unlike anything they have experienced before. The sun, for example …
It rises in the very early hours, practically in the south, sweeps low across the horizon until well after midnight, before sinking, again in the south, for but a brief rest of a few minutes before emerging again in practically the same spot!
As to Mawson, he is beyond thrilled to now be so close. And it all feels so different from his previous visit. ‘You will be in Europe ere this letter gets to you,’ he writes to his fiancée. ‘The excitement will be very great but I hope Paquita occasionally thinks of Douglas. Perhaps it is your love warmth that already shades me from cold, for I doubt if I feel it so much as the last time.’1
6 January 1912, Polar Plateau, 1½ Degree Depot, Taffy reveals …
A week earlier, Taffy Evans and Tom Crean carefully and skilfully shortened the two 12-foot sledges, as their lightened loads no longer required them to be so long. Alas, in the process, one of the tools slipped and Taffy badly cut his hand, leaving a severe open wound.
What to do? Of course, what he has always done: tough Taff soldiered on, hiding the wound from Wilson and Scott … until now, when it can be hidden no more. At first view, as Taffy rather sheepishly removes his gloves and shows Wilson the terribly infected cut, the older man is shocked, noting that the wound is well filled with pus, while Scott, too, is anxious, hoping the hand won’t give the Welshman any trouble. In these parts, as he well knows, a cut like that can be more than problematic – it can be a death sentence.
Adding to Taffy’s discomfort, in the minus-20-degree temperatures the men’s hairy faces have turned into ice masks and their hands on their ski poles feel like frozen blocks, for the simple reason that they’re not far off being exactly that. Yet the indomitable Birdie Bowers marches on – nothing seems to slow the man down – while the Owner remains thankful that he and the others are still on skis.
6 January 1912 and four days thereafter, Southern Ocean, Mawson and his men skirt the shore
And now the coast they have been following – for they did indeed spy their first bit of land on the previous day – starts curving inwards, and the men become aware that they are steaming into what looks like a large bay, which is promising. Now, every telescope and field-glass they have on the ship is brought to bear on this piece of coast. To the east lies the wall of the glacier tongue they have been following; to the west they can see a 2000-foot-high snow-covered promontory, obviously too towering to be anything other than land, suggesting that this is all but definitely Antarctica itself.
By day’s end, far, far to the west they can see a cape that could well be the cape that d’Urville reported seeing in 1840 and named Cape Découverte. Perhaps, then, what lies before them now is the very Adélie Land that the French mariner named for his wife.
Sure enough, just before a calm and sunny noon two days later, the men spot a promising rocky outcrop about 15 miles off the port side. Venturing closer, by 3.30 pm they are about one mile off the rocks, beyond which they can see white slopes that look like an easy passage to the interior. This is looking better and better, as Belgrave Ninnis is quick to note:
Discovered new land [yesterday] … It is a bleak, desolate coast, snow covered hills with here and there patches of bare rock, and cliffs of ice. The shore is dotted with small rocky islands. All yesterday we were trying to push along it, but the weather was very foggy with a heavy snowfall and we had to go very cautiously indeed …
We have just discovered what looks like a good landing place for our hut, and any minute we may receive the order to land stores that will see us working day and night until the ship leaves …
This place has an extraordinary formation and I am already gripped thereby. Is so huge and white and quiet and … forbidding looking.
If Scott and Amundsen fail to reach the Pole I shall soon be down here with a British Expedition … but of this more anon, I have so many Expeditions promised that goodness knows where I shall be soon. But we shall, bar accidents, meet ere then.
I am enjoying myself more than I can possibly describe. You would love it …
Well now fare ye well. Welcome me with open arms if I return and weep over my distant and frozen corpse if I don’t, and cast thoughts after me as I head my devious and crevasse ridden ways …
Yours sincerely,
B E S Ninnis2
Aurora drops anchor as close as possible to this promising shore. Now, following a satisfactory reconnoitre in the whaleboat, Mawson returns to his ship and directs the small motor launch to be lowered away. Negotiating their passage past a series of islets, the launch slowly chug-chugs towards a small inlet in the rocky coast, towing the whaleboat loaded with stores as it goes. There is not a breath of wind, and it is warm enough that Mawson and the seven men with him are wearing neither mitts nor overcoats. They soon find themselves in an idyllic, tiny, landlocked harbour – an aquatic indent into the coast, about the size of a football field – flanked on both sides by some rocky ridges heading down to the shore, all of it teeming with Adélie penguins in their thousands, and Weddell seals and their pups in their hundreds.
One thing is for certain: they will not starve here, at least not in the summer months, and nor will their dogs.
As the landing party step ashore at eight o’clock on this balmy evening, they fulfil Mawson’s dream of the last four years and become the first men in history to lay foot in that 2000-mile continental expanse between Cape Adare and Gaussberg.
Arise, and step forward Douglas Mawson, Frank Wild, Cecil Madigan, Frank Bickerton, Alexander Kennedy, Eric Webb, Robert Bage and Frank Hurley, the last of whom with camera in hand as the expedition’s official photographer records it all … with one minor setback. While Mawson is accorded the honour, by the others, of being the first man in the history of the world to step ashore on this particular piece of Antarctic coast, Hurley all but instantly has the unintended honour of being the first man to sit in these parts, after he slips over on the ice.
No matter. With the sun shining down on their heads, and adventure and achievement thrilling their souls, Mawson applies one of the privileges of being expedition leader to name this general area Commonwealth Bay, with Cape Denison at its head – the last named for leading expedition donor and Sydney newspaper proprietor Hugh Denison – and the little harbour they hope to call home for the next year Boat Harbour.
The glacial slope behind that harbour that they had seen from the ship looks to be smooth and crevasse-free, which will provide a clean start for the sledging parties’ journeys of exploration, although to the left and right of the rocky shore are heavily crevassed sheer ice cliffs, with only two patches of rock showing through as far as the eye can see.
Even though the most crucial thing is that they have finally discovered solid land, with a suitable, sheltered boat harbour and a wide, flat site where their Winter Quarters can be constructed close by the shore, still the place is not perfect.
To begin with, the position is a lot further west than Mawson ever envisaged. In fact, having pushed so far west and used up valuable coal supplies, Mawson immediately takes the decision to consolidate his three intended landing parties into just two: Mawson’s Main Party, to be based here at Cape Denison, and Wild’s Western Party, to be transported with luck no further than 500 miles west of their present location, so that Mawson’s Far-Eastern Party and Wild’s Western Party may meet up during the spring and summer sledging journeys.3 Yes, it is not perfect, but this is where they will make their base.
The shallowness of the water close to the shore prevents Aurora coming nearer than one mile, which means that the serious unloading will have to be done by boat. (Landing cargo on the Antarctic shore is typically accomplished by bringing the ship in close and unloading onto the fast ice adjacent to the shore. The goods are then sledged away to the nearby destination.) And though the harbour is relatively sheltered from the worst of the ocean’s fury, and they have landed in comparatively calm conditions, they only manage to get two loads ashore before a vicious wind howls down at them south from the interior, a wind as bitter as it is unrelenting, and they are soon chilled to the marrow of their bones.
It is, in fact, so bad that one of their men, Arch Hoadley, soon has frostbitten fingers, and the motorboat gets swept away from Aurora, with the three men on board only narrowly escaping being hurled onto one of the rocky islets before its engine can be restarted. ‘Nothing I had experienced in the Ross Sea or in any other part of the world,’ Davis writes later, as one who has sailed the seven seas for decades on end, ‘came up to the gales and blizzards of Commonwealth Bay for sudden violence and frequency.’4
Once all of the men are safely back on board Aurora, albeit feeling frozen, they retreat to the warmth of the mess room. Mawson gives the order that, once the gale abates, unloading is to begin again immediately, and yet it is not until the morning of 10 January, some 30 hours later, that the wind falls enough to make that remotely possible.
All hands on deck! With the aid of a derrick fashioned from two lengths of the wooden masts intended to hold up the antenna for the wireless, the men begin to fill the launch and two whaleboats with the supplies on board that were designated for the first two wintering sites, which have now become one, as they try in vain to ignore the whipping wind.
But it is a fearful business all right. Davis has Aurora as close to the shelter of the ice cliffs as he can manage, in 13 fathoms of water, but the wind remains strong enough to drag the anchor a little before it mercifully holds. Still, with the wind blowing upwards of 70 mph, the waves come thick and fast. And though these waves are not enough to trouble the ship, they are plenty big enough to trouble the whaleboats and motor launch, and the men are only able to continue to get those boats away in the lulls, which last no more than three hours at a time. The key is to make sure all the boats are loaded to the gills, and the motor launch then tows the two whaleboats – often together with an additional ‘raft’ made of hut timbers or wireless masts – into the small harbour.
9 January 1912 and the day thereafter, Polar Plateau, Scott and his men set a record
In all the extremity of their situation – exhausted, starving, freezing – there is at least one good thing that occurs on this ninth day of January. That is, they surpass the point farthest south that Shackleton attained precisely three years earlier, which was 88 degrees 23 minutes south. It is certainly something. Another bit of good news is that there is still no sign of Amundsen and his Norwegians.
In nearly exactly the same position, albeit with only four men and supplies for substantially fewer days than his outward journey took, Shackleton decided that, while he could get to the Pole, he would be very unlikely to get back again with all his men alive. Shackleton’s logic was revealed in a conversation he had upon his safe return to England, when he said to his wife, Emily, ‘I thought, dear, that you would rather have a live ass than a dead lion.’ She had replied, ‘Yes, darling, as far as I am concerned.’5
Scott, however, carries with him to the Pole a communication from his wife, Kathleen, of an entirely different nature. It is a letter, written in pencil on a torn piece of paper, that includes the passage:
Look you – when you are away South I want you to be sure that if there be a risk to take or leave, you will take it, or there is a danger for you or another man to face, it will be you who face it, just as much as before you met [Peter] and me. Because man dear we can do without you please know for sure we can … If there’s anything you think worth doing at the cost of your life – Do it. Do you understand me? How awful if you don’t.6
Scott understands. It is not that his wife has a death wish for him – far from it – but in the equation of decision-making, he mustn’t think about her and their son, because they would be all right. She believes in his greatness and must put honour and the possibility of achievement before everything else.
So, whereas Shackleton of course turned back, Scott now goes on, exultantly noting in his diary ‘RECORD’ before getting into harness once more and pulling south, south, south, ever more south towards the axis of the world, and pausing only to lay down one week’s provisions at 1½ Degree Depot, so they can lighten their load for this last dash to the pole.
By camp on the night of 10 January, they are only, according to their navigator Birdie’s calculations – his enormous beak nose nodding ever so slightly up and down as he works it out – let’s see, 85 miles from the Pole, carrying food supplies to get them through 18 days.
12 January 1912 and several days thereafter, Cape Denison, Mawson takes a dive
In such wind, the conditions ashore are more than merely grim, with no shelter yet constructed, though the unloading proceeds apace. The first real drama arrives in the full light of just before midnight on this howling day, when suddenly the wind increases to the point that all loading and unloading is immediately stopped and the major focus of those onshore at the time – Mawson, Wild and four others – is simply surviving. Quickly, as the wind punches into them, knocks them over, screams into their ears and tears at their mouths, noses and every loose part of their clothing, they grab the heavy cans of benzine and form them into a wall, which allows them to build three other walls a little more easily. Bizarrely, as they build, they can’t help but notice that though the hurricane is howling, there is not a cloud in the sky above and the sun is shining brightly.
With the walls at last constructed, for a roof atop their makeshift ‘Benzine Hut’ they put planks weighed down by more cans of benzine, and at last they gain some respite to spend the night in a little more protected comfort. The following morning, once the wind has abated enough for the unloading to continue, the others come ashore and pick up where they left off. They work with urgency, eight hours on, eight hours off, eight hours on, and fill each 24-hour period in that manner as the work indeed goes on around the clock.
As busy as they are, however, there is still time to steal glances at the teeming life apparent all around in this strange place. For while the frozen land itself supports no native terrestrial fauna, the waters have life that ‘vies in abundance with the warmer waters of lower latitudes’.7
Adélie penguins and Weddell seals swarm around them in stupendous numbers, while baleen whales and 20-foot killer whales muster round and bob up for a look-see at Aurora’s stern. Leopard seals and crab-eater seals are sighted on the ice, 100 one minute, none the next, showing total sangfroid unless their ice platform is accidentally disturbed by a discourteous passing vessel. Flocks of various petrels – silver-grey fulmars, the snow petrel, the Antarctic petrel, the Wilson’s storm petrel and Cape petrels – may be seen skimming the water in search of food or congregating atop the enormous icebergs, chatting away without a care in the world.
Ah, but back to work and the endless unloading, together with getting together the rudiments of the permanent Winter Quarters they are building. A key installation is of course the large stove in the main hut’s kitchen area, which, apart from allowing them to cook, will also warm the larger construction. And yet, just as they are nearing final assembly, they discover that several important parts have gone missing. Recalling that a box fell into the harbour in the first part of the unloading, Mawson says to Laseron, ‘Come on, Joe, let us see if we can get it.’
Taking the whaleboat out into Boat Harbour, they manage to locate the box in freezing waters at a depth of about six feet. Alas, despite their best efforts, they are unable to pick up the elusive box with any sort of improvised hook, pike or any other such makeshift fishing device. The solution is obvious, if shattering. But Mawson does not hesitate. Saying simply, ‘There is only one thing for it,’ he strips off and jumps in to retrieve it. As his body hits the water, a jolt goes completely through him as the air explodes from his lungs, followed by a general feeling of numbness, which quickly gives way to an extraordinary sensation – like a ringing in his ears, except it is all over his entire body. He emerges blue with cold, but the box is secured.
Lo and behold, when the contents are explored it is discovered to contain … tins of marmalade. More than fortunately, the missing pieces of the stove are found elsewhere shortly afterwards and the stove is soon assembled, if not yet fired up. That chattering sound? Nothing. Just Mawson’s teeth. He will warm up, once they get the stove sorted.
15 January 1912 and the day thereafter, Polar Plateau, Scott has never had such work in his life
Things are becoming ever more difficult. Bowers’s wristwatch – crucial to determining their position, as by ‘shooting’ the angle of the sun at a precise time it is possible to work out their latitude – has been found to be unreliable. This is just one of many worries, with Scott having written in his diary at lunch four days earlier:
I never had such pulling; all the time the sledge rasps and creaks. We have covered 6 miles,8 but at fearful cost to ourselves … Another hard grind in the afternoon and five miles9 added. About 74 miles10 from the Pole – can we keep this up? It takes it out of us like anything. None of us ever had such hard work before … Our chance still holds good if we can put the work in, but it’s a terribly trying time.11
Still, buoyed along by the reckoning that they are at most two days shy of their goal, on this night Scott records in his diary:
It is wonderful to think that two long marches would land us at the Pole. We left our depot to-day with nine days’ provisions, so that it ought to be a certain thing now, and the only appalling possibility the sight of the Norwegian flag forestalling ours … Only 27 miles12 from the Pole. We ought to do it now.13
Up early the next morning and in good spirits, they push on hard, pulling their sledges as they go, and have seven and a half miles under their belts by noon. A noon theodolite reading shows them they are but 24 miles from the prize – tomorrow will surely see them reach the Pole.
Their exhausted excitement is palpable. Long have they suffered, but soon, soon the object of their deepest desires will be at hand, and they will be able to plant the Union Jack upon the most coveted remaining spot on earth.
That afternoon, at about 5 pm, they are all marching along with rising expectation, exultation and exhaustion when the sharp-eyed Birdie Bowers suddenly stops. What do you think that thing is in the far distance, something oddly black in the pressing whiteness all around?
Nothing, Birdie, you are seeing things. It will prove to be no more than an odd formation of sastrugi throwing a strange shadow and is of no concern.
Still, as they march onwards, all of them focus on this far-off object, the fear in their hearts gripping them ever more tightly as the black thing gets progressively larger and less and less like a natural feature, and more and more like their worst nightmare come to life.
After 30 minutes, that nightmare really does become real. For now there is no denying it. What they clearly see just up ahead is … is … is a black flag tied to a sledge runner.
Dear God.
The Norwegians.
Blighters must have come up by another glacier – for there was certainly no trace of them on the Beardmore Glacier. The flag’s flapping ends are badly frayed, indicating it has been there for some time. Not far away, they find the remains of a camp, mixed with the tracks of many skis and sledges and an enormous number of dog paws. It is difficult to gauge the age of the tracks with any certainty, but Wilson notes they are ‘probably a couple of weeks, or three, or more …’14
It makes little difference now. They are tramping across old ground. Far from trumpeting success, they are trumped; far from being the headline act in the piece, they are little more than old news, their late arrival only serving as a backdrop to enhance the legend of what will be perceived as Amundsen’s greatness.
It makes little difference now.
17 January 1912, Polar Plateau, Scott finds an awful place
After a sleepless night comes the bleak, bitter morning – somehow, never more bleak or bitter a morning have they seen – as Scott’s party awakes to the dreadful marching conditions of a force four to five headwind with a staggering wind-chill factor of minus 22, which only serves to lower further their already wretched spirits.
Once started, they follow in Amundsen’s sledge tracks, now appallingly apparent, and pass two of his cairns before, for some strange reason, the Norwegians’ tracks seem to drift too far to the west. They adjust and go straight on to where they think the South Pole lies, hoping against hope (for that is all that is left to them) that Amundsen has lost his way. And still this provides little comfort, as Oates, Evans and Bowers are suffering severe frostbite of the nose, cheeks and feet, and Taffy’s hands are painfully blistered, while the wound on his knuckle is giving him hell.
At their lunch camp, Birdie takes fresh bearings and calculates they are at 89 degrees 53 minutes 37 seconds south – roughly seven and a half miles from their destination. That night, after marching that distance through severe winds and a temperature of minus 21 degrees, they feel they are on the spot at last. Scott records his feelings in his journal:
Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. Well, it is something to have got here, and the wind may be our friend to-morrow … Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it.15
Birdie, meanwhile, consoles himself, as he writes in a letter to his mother from the Pole:
My Dearest Mother,
A line from the spot might not be out of place … I don’t suppose you thought your son would be at the apex of the Earth. Well here I really am and very glad to be here too. It is a bleak spot …
Now the greatest journey home. It only remains for us to get back. Fortunately we are all fit and well and should be back to catch the ship in time for the news …
It is sad that we have been forestalled by the Norwegians, but I am glad that we have done it by good British manhaulage. That is the traditional British sledging method. This is the greatest journey done by man unaided since we left our transport at the foot of the glacier …
I could not have better companions – we are a most congenial party – five is a pleasant little crowd when we are so far from home.16
Oates embraces no such romantic notions and takes an entirely different tack in his diary:
I must say [Amundsen] must have had his head screwed on right. The gear they left was in excellent order and they seem to have had a comfortable trip with their dog teams. Very different to our wretched manhauling.17
18 January 1912 and the day thereafter, South Pole, Scott is asked to deliver a letter
After Bowers and Scott calculate they are three and a half miles from the Pole, one mile beyond it and three to the right, they are off again early. Trudging, trudging, trudging along. By now, all of their expectation, all their excitement, all their exuberance at being about to conquer the South Pole has long gone, and all they are left with is exhaustion pure. Only an hour after beginning, they spy precisely what they have been fearing: Amundsen’s small, compact tent still held aloft by a single bamboo pole. The wave of disappointment that has towered above them since the day before now comes crashing down all around and drowns them in sheer misery.
Inside the tent, they find a note pinned to the bamboo staff recording that the Norwegians reached this point on 16 December 1911, 32 days earlier, and listing the men who would have their names etched in history’s finest front pages forever more, reducing the Englishmen, surely, to a mere footnote:
Roald Amundsen
Olav Olavson Bjaaland
Helmer Hanssen
Sverre H. Hassel
Oscar Wisting 16 December 1911
And Scott finds, too, left in a prominent position where he can’t miss it, an envelope with his name on it. Opening it, he finds two pieces of paper. One of them is addressed to King Haakon of Norway, advising the Norwegian sovereign – it seems, though he cannot be sure, as he does not understand the language – of what Amundsen and his men have done. The other letter is to Scott himself, and the Englishman reads it with a heavy heart:
Dear Captain Scott, – As you probably are the first to reach this area after us, I will ask you kindly to forward this letter to King Haakon VII. If you can use any of the articles left in the tent please do not hesitate to do so. The sledge left outside may be of use to you. With kind regards I wish you a safe return.
Yours truly, Roald Amundsen18
It is close to the moral equivalent of a dagger to the heart. In one fell swoop, Scott has gone from being a man hoping to write his own name in the history books as the conqueror of the South Pole to being a mere postal delivery boy for his rival. Nevertheless, he has no choice. He has been asked to deliver the letter, so, as the honourable English gentleman he is, deliver it he must.
Scott in turns leaves his own note at the tent, informing whosoever should arrive in the future that his party has also now been here. After this, pausing only for Bill Wilson to purloin some of the silk strips from the Norwegian tent seams, together with some other minor effects, they continue on towards where they estimate the precise pole lies, around one and three-quarter miles away. Continuing on after lunch, they discover one of Amundsen’s upturned sledge runners half a mile distant, which they believe to be his mark for the Pole itself.19
Birdie’s location sightings at lunch calculate they are now less than a mile from the Pole. At this point, which they name ‘Pole Camp’, they build a cairn and plant in the ice what Scott refers to as ‘our poor slighted Union Jack’, before Birdie Bowers uses a string connected to his camera to take some photographs of the five exhausted Britons: Captain Robert Falcon Scott CVO; Dr Edward Adrian Wilson; Lieutenant Henry Robertson ‘Birdie’ Bowers; Petty Officer Edgar ‘Taffy’ Evans; and Captain Lawrence Edward Grace ‘Titus’ Oates.
With a weariness that goes to the very core of their beings, they then turn their sledge to the north – back to Cape Evans.
Scott’s written words drip with pathos: ‘Well, we have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition and must face our 800 miles20 of solid dragging – and goodbye to most of the daydreams!’21
Now retracing their tracks – and as if once is not enough – Scott’s team suffer again the indignity of marching past the sneering black flag of Amundsen’s party that they had first passed on 15 January.
Almost by way of exacting retribution, they strip the bamboo pole of its flag, which Scott squirrels away into his kitbag to rest alongside a small piece of the slighted Union Jack they have so recently and so sullenly raised. As to the flagpole, it is fashioned into a makeshift mast for their sledge sail. And so it is that the Britons’ progress rests upon, and is constantly shadowed by, the Norwegians. The going is tough, made worse by the fact that they must drag their sledge up a slight slope, as the precipice of the Polar Plateau is some 2000 feet higher than the Pole. All they can do is to trudge on, as they begin to pick up the first of Amundsen’s directional cairns, and then their own at regular intervals, until inevitably the paths of the cairns part company, even as the wind picks up and the temperature drops …
‘I’m afraid the return journey is going to be dreadfully tiring and monotonous,’ Scott opines in his diary on Friday 19 January. ‘We are going to have a pretty hard time this next 100 miles22 I expect.’23 And likely longer. For with the pole achieved, albeit without the ‘reward of priority’, there remains only one thing left to do.
Survive.
And there is only one way to do so. After racing Amundsen all the way to the Pole, and losing, they must now race back to the hut ahead of the fearful winter that will soon spring up from behind them … and they dare not lose that race, for everything would be lost with it, including their lives, and they know it from the first.
If they are quick enough, and do survive, there is a chance, just a chance, that they can be the first to bring news to the world that the South Pole has been conquered, even though, regrettably, it was not by them.
19 January 1912 and three days thereafter, Cape Denison, Mawson and his men are left alone
With a flourish, Douglas Mawson finishes off a letter to Paquita, which he intends for Captain Davis to take back to Australia to be put in the post to her:
Know O’Darling that in this frozen South I can always wring happiness from my heart by thinking of your splendid self.
There is an ocean of love between us dear.
Your loving Douglas24
And now it is time to say their farewells to each other. With everything offloaded from Aurora and time pressing – beyond the oasis of clear water, they know, the ice-soldiers will soon be beginning to mass once more, to prevent the little ship from breaking free – it is important that the ship not tarry a moment longer. Davis still has to drop Frank Wild and his seven selected men – Andy Watson, George Dovers, Morton Henry Moyes, Doc Jones, Alexander Kennedy, Arch Hoadley and Charles Harrisson – some 400–500 miles along the coast to their west, so as to be able to take their own meteorological and scientific observations simultaneously with those being taken by Mawson’s party and the men left at Macquarie Island.
Ideally, as they proceed along the coast, they will ‘cache provisions at intervals … in places liable to be visited by sledging parties’.25 For the sledging parties of Wild will also explore as much of the coast and immediate interior as possible, and if both parties can get their antennae up and their radios working it may be possible for them to liaise – and have a western sledging party from Mawson’s group meet up with an eastern one from Wild’s group. A word before you go, though, lads.
For now, to bid them proper farewell, Mawson and Davis gather all the members of the two parties together with the ship’s officers in Aurora’s tiny wardroom. To mark the occasion – albeit for reasons best known to himself, and coming from a cache unknown – Frank Wild is dressed in the full garb of Sir Francis Drake, replete with Elizabethan hose, causing much merriment. Glasses are handed out, and the bottle of the finest Madeira given to Davis in London by the three old Challenger shipmates six months before is opened.
They first make a toast to their gallant British predecessors, who gave them this wine after coming to these parts in 1874, nearly 40 years earlier, as well as to previous Antarctic explorers such as the Englishman Ross, the Frenchman d’Urville, the American Wilkes, and all of their men who came here another quarter-century before that. As Davis drinks the fortified wine, gazing at the bearded, eager faces of his youthful companions – the 18 men in Mawson’s party who are to be left here, and the seven others who will accompany Wild to the west – he remembers vividly and fondly that evening with the three old gentlemen in Mr Buchanan’s house in Norfolk Street where they wished him, and them, the men of the new generation, Godspeed upon their rare adventure.26
Mawson then makes a brief, elegant speech, particularly wishing the Wild party well, while also expressing the thanks of them all for the work of Captain Davis to get them to this point and wishing him and Aurora a safe return to Hobart.
Good health, good luck, here’s to the King, and if the good Lord smiles upon us we will all see each other in just under a year’s time when mighty Aurora comes back to gather up both parties. Here’s cheers, and fare thee well!
With that, there are handshakes all around, even as some last-minute letters are scribbled, to be added to the mailbag for loved ones at home – a bag already containing the four letters Mawson has written to Paquita over the last five weeks. And then, at 8.45 pm, Mawson and his men climb back into their whaleboat to return to their barren shore, all of it to the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ being sung by those on Aurora, led by the rich baritone of Frank Wild.
‘Goodbye and do your best!’ Mawson calls out to them, as his last words to those on the departing ship.27 Whatever else, he is confident that, in men with the capacity and vast experience of Davis and Wild – whose two figures on the stern of the ship are now getting smaller as their own boat separates from the departing Aurora – he has put the work to be done in the best of hands.
Aboard Aurora, Davis soon has the boiler up to full steam, and the little ship is chugging her way around the headland, making for the north-western horizon. Wild, now calm and reflective, remains standing by the stern, the cold nipping at his ears, as he gazes back for his last glimpse of where they have left their comrades. Shortly thereafter, he shares his feelings with a friend in a letter:
I for one could not help thinking that our goodbyes were to some of them forever. It is a fearful country where they are landed. Except for less than a mile around the Winter Quarters, the coast is a perpendicular ice wall from 100 to 300 ft high, and it rises back rapidly to about 2000 ft – we cannot see beyond that. From the base there is a fairly clear track leading up to the slope about 200 yards wide. Even that is not free from crevasses, and on either side of this track the ice is so horribly broken up that nothing but a bird could cross it; and, except Mawson himself, none of the party has had the least experience.28
That experience, however, is soon coming as fast and furious as the howling wind and its spitting darts of icy sleet. As a temporary measure, the Mawson party make their new home in four tents and the small shelter constructed from the benzine cases. Though Mawson and his men are now entirely isolated, there is relief that the intense preliminaries are at last over and their actual adventure proper can begin. ‘I was glad it was over,’ writes Ninnis that night in his diary. ‘I could have wept with the greatest of ease.’29
But to work. While most of the exhausted troupe turn in for the night by 10 pm, Mawson and a tight coterie of men stay up to discuss the next steps in building the huts. They are able to consider the erection of two huts here, rather than the original one that has been planned, because the consolidation of the three Antarctic parties into two has left a surplus of huts at this base. It is decided to have one larger hut for the living quarters and one smaller hut in its lee, to serve as a workshop, with a single doorway between a common wall. Mercifully, construction is expected to be relatively quick, as the buildings have been previously assembled and each piece of timber numbered before being taken apart again. Most importantly, a master plan for both huts tells how all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put it all back together again.
For a place to build them, Mawson has already selected a site about 50 yards from the water’s edge on the sheltered side of a large pile of rocks for the sake of some respite from the vicious winds roaring down the slope at them from their south. There is just enough space on this fortuitously level expanse of rock for the two strong-beamed prefabricated huts to be constructed – and the first thing the following morning they all begin.
Dynamite has to be employed to blast holes in the rock for the foundation stumps. However, the freezing weather does not aid detonation. The men circumvent this by carrying the explosives close to their bodies, in pockets and even inside their undergarments, to keep them warm. (No greater commitment to a task hath any man than this.)
With the explosions organised, the next problem arises: what to use for tamping material around the stumps being put in for the foundations, when there is no earth or clay? Fortunately, it is not only in the fields of chemistry, physics and biology that genius strikes, and as soon as someone suggests using guano from the penguin rookery the problem is solved. By packing the guano tightly around the stumps and then pouring water upon it, which instantly freezes, it is as if the foundations have been set in stone. The other way is to urinate upon the guano. (How does one urinate in freezing conditions? The answer, as they all learn immediately, is very, very quickly. And, by the by, it is the uncircumcised men who are the best protected for the task.)
Next day, the first of the stumps are in place.
Day after endless day, the work is hard and long – they start at seven o’clock every morning and go right through until eleven o’clock at night – but it is deeply satisfying. Their home is taking shape before their eyes, and all are conscious that their survival, and at the least their comfort, depends on getting the job done right. As they work on these splendid days, the wind blows cold, the sun shines hot and the sapphire-like icebergs in the sparkling bay float pleasantly in the swell. There are regular visits from groups of interested Adélie penguins that want to see how the strange new creatures are getting along, while the only concern of the Weddell seals basking ‘in torpid slumber on the shore’ is that these strange visitors not make too much noise.30 In brief breaks for quick meals that include the last of the fresh supplies of meat, fruit and vegetables, the men dine in the environment that Antarctica most specialises in – al fresco to beat all al frescos – upon tables made out of kerosene cases.
The mood among the men as they work is nothing short of joyous. They have arrived, they are at the beginning of a great adventure and they are delighted at the progress they are making. And the scenery around them, the newness of it all, is as exciting as it is invigorating. Belgrave Ninnis is loving it all: the wonder of their environment, the work, the camaraderie, the joy of crawling into their separate sleeping bags after a tough day, all ‘snug and warm, with pipes and cigarettes, and a cheerful haze filling the tent …’31
First thing the following morning, they are into it once more, making progress on their hut, their sanctuary, as bemused penguins chatter between themselves about what all this hammering, sawing and talking between these strange creatures with the extraordinarily long flippers can possibly be all about.
The common feeling is well expressed in a letter from Mawson to Paquita:
What an exultation is ours – the feeling is magical – young men whom you would scarce expect would be affected stand half clad without feeling the cold of the keen blizzard wind and literally dance from sheer exultation – can you not feel it too as I write – the quickening of the pulse, the awakening of the mind, then the tension of every fibre – and this is joy.32
21 January 1912 and four days thereafter, Polar Plateau, Scott’s Southern Party are hit by a blizzard
The calculus of catastrophe is always on their minds.
With a blizzard now halting their push towards 1½ Degree Depot, their constant calculations – of food on hand divided by days remaining to the next depot – always have the ghastly spectre of death hanging over them. From here, they know it is 51 miles to 1½ Degree Depot and they have six days’ food in hand. At 1½ Degree Depot, they will pick up supplies for another seven days to feed and warm them for the next 103.5 miles … It should be just enough if they are not too much further delayed by unseasonal blizzards like this one, but they will be in real trouble if it does not lift.
Fortunately, on this occasion it does, though their problems are not over. The temperature spirals down to minus 30 degrees, which is unheard of for this time of year. The sun and constant freezing wind catches the minute spicules of falling snow, creating a blinding haze that obliterates Scott’s party’s former tracks and obscures their sighting of cairns. In such difficult conditions, the only way to keep up a reasonable day’s average is to pull harder, for longer, making the men ever more exhausted and ever more hungry, as the deficit grows between the energy they are expending and that coming from the meagre amount of food they are eating.
‘I don’t like the look of it,’ Scott writes. ‘Is the weather breaking up? If so God help us with the tremendous summit journey and scant food. Wilson and Bowers are my standby. I don’t like the easy way in which Oates and Evans get frostbitten.’33
It is true, Taffy is not only badly frostbitten white on the nose and cheeks, his fingertips are badly blistered. With that, his morale is extremely low. For the humble Taffy, being one of the five first men to the Pole would have secured him the financial independence he has never known to this point. And now what does he have to look forward to? Not a lot.34 And the truth of it is that his body is breaking down more quickly than those of the others. Despite being far and away the largest man among them, selected almost as a human workhorse for his tremendous capacity to haul the sledge, no allowance has been made to give him more food than the others. On top of everything else, he is starving.
As to Titus, though Scott can see that his face is just as frostbitten as Taffy’s, what he cannot see yet is that the big toe of the Soldier’s left foot is turning blue-black.
Even Scott’s ‘standbys’, the men he always feels he can count on, are suffering. Due to the onset of snow-blindness, by now Wilson cannot make out the track ahead. And Bowers is suffering frostbite of the nose and cheeks.
With food and men spent, and having faced the second full blizzard since beginning the return journey from the Pole, Scott thanks God when a reluctant sun sheds a tepid light on the grim black flag of 1½ Degree Depot at 2.30 pm on 25 January.
25 January 1912, Cape Denison, Mawson and his men build their house on rock
Their living quarters are taking shape before their eyes, under their swinging hands, as they cheerily toil away. Despite the whipping winds, there is much good-natured banter as they work.
When assembling the roof, McLean loses his footing and rolls mercifully harmlessly to the ground, clinging to the chimney he has used for support. Ninnis, believing a hurricane has struck, reaches over and holds to the pipe inside the hut, receiving a head to toe covering in soot. All one can see of him are his brilliant eyes gleaming out from this ashen shroud. Ah, how they laugh – nearly as hard as when they first witnessed the 16-stone radio-operator Walter Hannam try to move around on skis. A giraffe on roller skates would have more poise!
Mertz, meanwhile, is nailing slats on the inside of the roof with his customary fervour but chooses a nail so long it lightly punctures the bottom of Bickerton, who is outside fixing the two layers of tar paper into position.35 He yelps, and, as Laseron describes it, there is ‘more universal joy’.36 On another day, when a hammer is dropped on Walter Hannam’s head, the entirely innocent Mertz apologises on the reckoning that someone should do so – resulting in the Swiss, to his astonishment, learning a whole new host of swear words courtesy of the outraged Hannam. Yet more laughter …
Through all the high hilarity, though, the work goes on, and what was merely a skeletal frame soon starts to have walls and fixtures inside. The 24 foot by 24 foot hut has become the living quarters, with the men’s double-bunks placed around the walls. Only Mawson has a tiny room to himself, at the far end, while a darkroom in one corner is reserved for Hurley to develop his photographs.
The now adjoining 16 foot by 16 foot small hut has, as planned, become the workroom, complete with the carpenter’s bench, dynamo and wireless outfit, lathe, stove and a workbench for the zoologists. The roof of both huts is pitched at 35 degrees, steep enough to ensure the snow will slide off it and shallow enough for the shattering wind to flow over it rather than right against it. On three sides of the main hut, the roof extends down far enough beyond the walls to build an enclosed veranda, which becomes a storehouse and shelter for the 19 dogs that will stay here. (Wild and his men have taken the other nine.) On the windward side, cases of the heaviest provisions are piled up in the manner of an extra wall, to prevent the wind exerting too much pressure on the walls of the hut or getting under the eaves to lift the roof off.
25 January 1912, Framheim, Amundsen and his four comrades make it back to base
It is so typical of the Chief. Instead of arriving back at Framheim in the middle of the day, he playfully plans to have them get there at 4 am when their companions will be fast asleep and …
And all quiet now.
With just 11 surviving dogs left to pull the two sledges, this is relatively easy, and the five hale, hearty, heroic adventurers gather at the front door of Framheim. They planted that solitary Norwegian flag at the South Pole together and now they make their entrance together, having travelled 1725 miles in the last 97 days. The return journey of 863 miles has been accomplished in just 39 days, at an average rate of 22 miles per day. But quiet, Roald says. Creeping through the front door, filled with joy to be back after accomplishing their glorious feat, they close the door behind them and are officially home safe.
The first of their comrades to stir is Jørgen Stubberud. He is startled to see five familiar faces grinning down at him – is this a dream? – before one by one the other occupants awaken from their deep slumber with a typical momentary start; the party were not expected back for another ten days. Amundsen has himself been surprised at how quickly they have made it there and back from the Pole, including having covered on one extraordinary day an amazing 62 miles. But here they are, all right!
‘Where’s the Fram?’ asks Amundsen of the room, and he is soon relieved to learn that all is well, she has simply put to sea after her arrival on 9 January due to bad weather and is soon to return.
‘And what about the Sørpolen?’ Lindstrøm says to Amundsen. ‘Have you been there?’
‘Yes, of course; otherwise you would hardly have seen us again,’ laughs the Chief, indulging in coffee and hot cakes, which taste like sweet perfection itself after days of privation.
‘Ja, borte bra, hjemme best.’ It was good outside, the jubilant men agree, but still better at home.37
Back safe in the bosom of Framheim and the company of their comrades, the reality sheets home. They really have done it! Amundsen takes the opportunity to weigh himself. He has put on a few pounds.
As Amundsen himself would go on to note of their general good nutrition, ‘The best proof was, that we always felt well and were never raving about food, which has been so common in all longer sledge journeys and an infallible sign of deficient nourishment.’38
26 January 1912, Cape Evans, the first of Scott’s support teams gets back
Is there a doctor in the hut? At last there is. Having travelled over 1100 miles in three months – over 400 miles more than Scott’s previous farthest south mark – the First Support Party (aka the Doctor’s Party) reach Hut Point on this afternoon. At a respectable average of 16 miles per day, they have covered the total distance of 573 miles in 35 days, and, as ever, it is Cherry-Garrard’s words that best capture the journey:
We had the same dreary drag, the same thick weather fears and anxieties which other parties have had. A touch of the same dysentery and sickness: the same tumbles and crevasses: the same groping for tracks: the same cairns lost and found: the same snow-blindness and weariness, nightmares, food dreams … 39
They were preceded, of course, by Meares, Demetri and the dogs, who together have paved the way for the following returning parties by rebuilding the cairns razed by the blizzard that raged from 5 until 8 December 1911.
Meares and the dog teams’ own return home – arriving three weeks earlier, on 4 January – was greatly hampered by soft summer snow that slowed down the dogs and then the unexpected blizzards. The other problem was that, because they were 17 days later than planned in turning back, they were perilously short of food on their own sledge and had no alternative but to significantly dip into the supplies depoted for the three parties yet to return – taking a little butter, 50 biscuits and a day’s provision for two men from each bag of the three weekly units at each of the depots between Lower Glacier and One Ton.
It means that, starting with the First Support Party, all the returning parties will be forced to come back on progressively less rations than originally depoted for them up until One Ton Depot. During January, One Ton has been resupplied by a man-hauling party, but without the power of locomotion provided by Meares’s dogs, that man-hauling party were unable to carry any of the dog food and fewer rations to One Ton than Scott stipulated in his original instructions to Meares.40 The upshot is that any relief party coming out to One Ton Depot in the future would have insufficient dog food there to be able to continue further south to help Scott and his men back from the South Pole.
30 January 1912, Cape Denison, Mawson’s Winter Quarters are finished
It is a significant date in the life of the expedition. It is the day when the roof is completed, the basic interior of the hut is finished and the building is ready to accommodate them. To mark the occasion, Dr Mawson gathers all the men around him as he stands by the rocks on the side of their Winter Quarters. He christens the two huts and makes a brief speech thanking his men for their fine work. And then, as they all take their helmets off, the Union Jack is hoisted amid great celebration. The men give three hearty cheers and then quickly put their helmets back on, as the freezing wind has been nipping their ears, and frostbite on such delicate extremities is always a danger.
By way of further celebration, that evening the men have their first sit-down meal together, cooked by Douglas Mawson himself, on their own stove, from supplies they have brought with them, leavened by kills of penguins and seals in their own front yard. For all of them, it is wonderful to be safe and warm and well fed inside, while the bitter wind continues to howl outside. From the moment that Aurora left them 11 days earlier, the gale-force winds have rarely abated. Though reluctant to inform his team, Mawson is well on his way to the conclusion that, in Adélie Land, ‘the average local weather must be much more windy than in any other known part of Antarctica’.41
Still, for the moment they are safe and warm inside. In this brief time of rest and reflection after all the frenzy of their activity, Belgrave Ninnis sums up his view of their position on this continent in strikingly philosophical terms in his diary:
From the creation, the silence here has been unbroken by man, and now we, a very prosaic crowd of fellows, are here for an infinitely small space of time, for a short time we shall litter the land with tins, scrap timber, refuse and impedimenta, for a short time we shall be travelling over the great plateau, trying to draw the veil from a fractional part of this unknown land; then the ship will return for us and we shall leave the place to its eternal silence and loneliness, a silence that may never again be broken by a human voice.42
6 February 1912, Cape Evans, after being farewelled a year before, Scott’s Terra Nova finally returns
Laden with Indian mules, more Siberian dogs and such relief supplies that the expedition might require for the second year, on this cold morning Terra Nova at last draws alongside the fast ice at Cape Evans, after an exceptionally long and arduous journey. Having left Lyttelton seven weeks earlier, they first picked up the Wicked Mate, aka Captain Victor Campbell, and his men at Cape Adare before dropping them at Evans Cove, north of the Drygalski Ice Tongue, on 7 January so they might undertake a month’s geologising.
Since then, Terra Nova has spent the best part of a month trying to force a path through the ice floes crowding McMurdo Sound to reach Cape Evans. The fact that on this day they have at last achieved their goal brings relief to both the crew of Terra Nova and those gathered at Cape Evans, who have anxiously been waiting for this moment.
8 February 1912 and two days thereafter, Upper Beardmore Glacier, Scott’s party battle on
For the last three weeks, since starting on their return journey from the South Pole, the men have been struggling, and weakening with that struggle. All of them are suffering, none more than the huge Welshman, Taffy Evans, whose hand wound has refused to heal and is getting worse by the day. In the freezing conditions, on an increasingly poor diet and in his run-down state, the wound has begun to badly fester and his fingernails are falling out. Despite the best ministrations of Bill Wilson, this and Taffy’s mess of other afflictions – suppurating blisters and frostbitten face – are bringing this great snowman down.
But does Taffy care? By now, their formerly jocular companion has turned so morose that it is hard to tell, but the evidence continues to build that he is giving up. Three days earlier, Scott and Taffy Evans took a bad tumble down a crevasse, Taffy hitting his head, and his mental state has been dubious since. ‘I fear,’ Scott confides to his diary, ‘Evans is becoming stupid,’ before deciding the last word is too harsh and changing it to ‘dull’.43
Meanwhile, the frostbite on Oates’s nose and cheeks has worsened, and he has reluctantly revealed to Wilson, though not the Owner, that his painful big toe is now completely black with the same – not that he is one to ever show pain; he carries on regardless. But Taffy and the Soldier are not the only ones suffering. Over the past week, Wilson’s own leg has been so swollen that he has relinquished his skis to Bowers and is now travelling on foot. Scott has also come a ‘purler’ and painfully injured his shoulder. Of the five, only Bowers – good old Birdie, he is such a trooper – seems to be travelling well.
Beyond their injuries and conditions, though, the principal problem is that all of them are slowly starving, getting thinner and colder by the day as they lose their last reserves of fat. Such is the energy they are expending through the heavy work they are doing, exacerbated by the high altitude and cold – for the lower the temperature, the more energy the human body must burn to get its own temperature to normal range, in the same manner as a hut must burn more coal to make a comfortable temperature inside – not even full rations would be enough to sustain them. But making matters even worse is that they are finding it progressively more difficult to locate their food depots. And when they do finally make it to Upper Glacier Depot, it is only for Bowers to discover that the depoted biscuit box is mysteriously short one full day’s allowance. The only explanation is that one of the parties preceding them to the depot has taken it, which is deeply disturbing.
Notwithstanding the extremity of their situation, however, Scott now makes a couple of extraordinary decisions. The first is that, despite the weather being conducive to travel, he deems it worthwhile to all but stop for a day and a half so that Bowers and Wilson can take geological samples from the foothills of Mt Darwin and Mt Buckley.
They are thrilled with what they find. ‘Wilson,’ records Scott in his diary, ‘with his sharp eyes, has picked several plant impressions, the last a piece of coal with beautifully traced leaves in layers, also some excellently preserved impressions of thick stems, showing cellular structure.’44
It is true that the importance of these fossil finds is enormous. It is proof that Antarctica once had flora and fauna flourishing. The true measure of how important Scott personally sees the find is that, in his second extraordinary decision, he acquiesces to Wilson’s wish to add 35 pounds of rock samples to their sledge, before – altogether now men and heave extra hard – they set off again.
Three days later, the men find themselves lost in heavily crevassed country that should be familiar but isn’t. A dispute breaks out whether to head right or left. They end up heading left, only to find it even more crevassed and so icy that their perpetually slipping, sliding, skittering skis are close to unworkable. The men keep falling into crevasses every minute and are lucky not to suffer terrible injuries or worse. Seeing a smoother slope in the distance, they make their way towards it but then find themselves in a different kind of turmoil, a place where the irregular crevasses give way to huge chasms, which are closely packed together and very difficult to cross. Scott’s rising desperation shows in his diary entry that night: ‘There were times when it seemed almost impossible to find a way out of the awful turmoil in which we found ourselves.’45
But does Scott abandon the dead weight of those rock samples? He does not. Apart from everything else, such rocks provide a real point of difference to Amundsen. Yes, the Norwegian conquered the South Pole first, but he, Scott, arrived there only a short time later and has advanced the cause of science to boot, as witness, among other things, those precious rocks.
In the wake of their struggle, and their slower than anticipated rate of return, Scott feels he has no choice but to reduce rations. Not surprisingly, the huge Taffy Evans, who needs more food than them all – but gets no more, because the rations are divided evenly – is now so weakened that he can no longer help make camp for the night. He simply sits there, mumbling incoherently. Every day now, as they set off, he trails further and further behind, resulting in longer stops to allow him to catch up. ‘Taffy,’ Scott writes, ‘is nearly broken down in brain, we think. He is absolutely changed from his normal self-reliant self. This morning and this afternoon he stopped the march on some trivial excuse.’46
11 February 1912, Winter Quarters, Mawson’s party receive a surprise visitor
On this morning, the cheeky 22-year-old chief magnetician, Eric ‘Azi’ (short for his favourite word: azimuth) Webb, bursts into the hut to announce that a ruddy great elephant seal has arrived in their harbour and is making cumbersome progress over the rocks near the shore! An elephant seal venturing onto the Antarctic mainland is an uncommon spectacle, and, as one, the men excitedly spill out of the hut, Hunter pausing only to grab his trusty rifle along the way. They arrive on the scene to find that Johnson the sledge dog – living up to his namesake, world heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson – has the great beast bailed up and is actually snarling and baring his jaws at the massive creature from the deep, which is nearly 50 times the dog’s size.
With just one snap of its mighty mouth, Johnson’s head would have simply disappeared, the way a dog eats a peanut, but now, on catching sight of the men, the elephant seal instantly loses interest in the mad mutt and begins lumbering towards these insolent tall creatures who would invade his regal domain.
Now living up to his own name, biologist Jack Hunter lines the sea beast up between the sights of his rifle and, before the creature can make a slow getaway, shoots him dead at close range. The elephant seal measures a good 17.5 feet in length and 12 feet around the fattest part of its girth, and they estimate its weight at just under four tons.47
Before the carcass can freeze stiff and become unworkable, the men immediately employ block and tackle and set about raising and flaying their quarry, saving the impressive skin and skull for their biological collection. Dog-carers Ninnis and Mertz butcher over a ton and a half of the meat and blubber, which will be used throughout the winter – the meat to feed their 19 ever-ravenous dogs and the blubber to keep the hut fires burning. Blubber, in fact, burns so well that it can turn the stove-top red hot – though on such occasions they have to be careful that the ‘oddments [constantly hung above the stove] like wolf-skin mitts, finnesko, socks, stockings and helmets, which had passed from icy rigidity through sodden limpness to a state of parchment dryness’ do not get too hot and burn.48 Oddly, blubber also proves useful as an application to frostbite.
Meantime, others of the men are also, as the occasion arises, killing penguins and Weddell seals, whose carcasses are soon snap frozen by the natural air temperature, and these are carefully put by Herbert Dyce Murphy, the short and slight storeman, in a cellar beneath the hut’s front porch, which is designed to be used as a meat store.
And though that meat store proves to be an effective place to keep the 15 frozen carcasses of lambs, seals, penguins and this elephant seal, there is a problem with it. That is, it is an extremely difficult spot for the 30-year-old Murphy to get in and out of, let alone to hack one frozen carcass away from another in. The solution? Despite having been left out of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, purportedly for being too effeminate – there’s no doubt he has a soft and rosy complexion, high-pitched voice and beautiful blue eyes – Murphy has three Arctic expeditions to his credit and is a man of considerable initiative.
He works out the way to do it is to push a dog through the trapdoor, let it grab one of the penguin carcasses on top and then, once the dog springs back out, grab the meat from its slavering jaws. It works well, right up until the day that the dog in question manages to get a rare bit of Sunday mutton and this time refuses to release it. Instead, the dog springs out and away from the outstretched hands of the grasping and gasping Murphy, who then spends the next hour charging madly around their nascent camp in wild pursuit, while the other men howl with laughter. Thereafter, Murphy decides he must do the job himself.
Murphy’s redeployment as a storeman has been quite a come down. He was to have led the second landing party, somewhere between here and wherever Wild is being dropped, yet Murphy feels honoured to simply remain part of the AAE, even in a reduced capacity.
Mid-February 1912, off the north coast of Antarctica, Davis takes a chance with Aurora
It is strange to gaze closely upon a coast that few eyes have ever seen before, and none from this close. In Aurora over the previous three weeks, Captain Davis has been keenly aware of the privilege of his position as the ship closely follows the contours of the Antarctic coastline, pushing westward – though the compasses are practically useless this close to the Magnetic Pole. The British Admiralty chart on the bridge of Aurora shows only odd bits and pieces of land, as reported by Dumont d’Urville and Wilkes and a couple of others, but for the most part it is absolutely blank – until Davis’s officers lightly sketch in the coast as they see it. It is a great satisfaction to be able to close at least some of the gaps on that vague spiderweb of a map of Antarctica he had seen in Shackleton’s office four years earlier. He later recounts:
The unknown land seemed to rise in an almost unbroken curving slope until, at a height of approximately 3000 ft, it met the horizon to the southward. This was a very different topography to that of the Ross Sea area. One expected to find here the same awe-inspiring and dramatic spectacle of mountain peaks and glaciers that had astonished and delighted one in Victoria Land. But here, so far as one could judge by the contour of the ice-cap, the land hidden beneath it might well consist of rounded slopes and rising plains, the grazing lands, perhaps, for untold herds of prehistoric animals in days before the age of ice.49
As Aurora continues, they are confronted by ever more ice, including an enormous glacier tongue, protruding so far out into the Southern Ocean that they are nigh on a week in getting past its northern extremity to the other side. By this time, all trace of actual land has disappeared, and, as Davis puts it, they know they are ‘looking at no ordinary coastline but at one that had been overwhelmed by an all-engulfing flood of ice.’50
But for a place to land, there is little on offer – no more beaches, inlets or safe harbours are apparent. Facing the passing men are just huge and unrelenting ice cliffs. The plan of dropping sledging-party provisions at regular intervals along the coast is clearly out of the question. There appear to be no places to drop Wild and his men, let alone provisions for their sledging parties, and the situation becomes ever more desperate as the days pass.
The second party now confronts the fact that it is losing precious time and even more precious coal. The more time that passes in these days of mid-February, the more chance there is that they themselves will be frozen in on Aurora. And the further they go – they are already 1500 miles to the west of where they dropped Mawson’s party, which is three times more than the plan – the less coal reserves the ship will have to get back to Hobart. Already, the radio of Wild’s Western Base will be useless for receiving messages from the Mawson party at Cape Denison, because it can only do so over a distance of 500 to 600 miles.
In the view of Captain Davis, it has now come down to a matter of hours before he must drop the party, not days. But where? All they can see are the high ice cliffs before them. Davis is at his most desperate when, at 8.45 on the morning of 15 February, they spy a promising high ice-shelf formation, similar to what Davis and Wild previously saw at the Great Ice Barrier but significantly lower. What is more, as they continue along it, by noon they come to a point where a few hundred yards of ice floe butts up against a part of the ice cliff that is only 80 feet high, and against this snow that has been blown over the cliff has formed a drift like a ramp in the lee of the cliff. Is it really possible? Could it be done?
Frank Wild certainly thinks so, and in no time at all the experienced Yorkshireman has led an investigative party across the ice, up the snow ramp to the top of the ice cliffs and beyond it. Upon his return, he reports to Davis that at the top they can see land less than 20 miles away, and he is certain that what he was standing on was the blue ice of a glacier, meaning it would be stable enough to establish their Winter Quarters upon.
A key decision beckons. In some ways, it is pure madness to drop men for a year upon ice in a part of the world where huge chunks breaking off into the ocean to eventually melt into nothingness is as natural and unremarkable a process as autumn leaves falling to the ground in other parts of the world. It is nothing less than the equivalent of ignoring the biblical admonition that a man must build his house on solid rock as opposed to shifting sand. In this case, they are considering putting men on ice that soundings reveal is floating on 200 fathoms of water.
And yet Wild is adamant. They have come this far. They have all their equipment and supplies. He is sure the ice is stable and they will be okay. What to do? It is difficult to imagine Davis, the expedition’s second in command, returning to Hobart with the news that the Australasian Antarctic Expedition has only managed to establish one base in Antarctica, instead of the targeted three, while bringing back a third of the landing party staff. However, with Mawson’s second base already consolidated into the main base on a spot already far to the west, if the Western Base is not established here, that will be exactly the situation. They simply do not have time or coal to find anywhere else on this coast – and that is if such a place even exists, which Davis is starting to doubt.
Reluctantly, Captain Davis finally agrees – though he does feel gloomy about it – that at least they may start unloading stores while he thinks about it further, and they can see in that time if there is anything to suggest it is not stable after all.
Done!
17 February 1912 and the day thereafter, six miles south of Lower Glacier Depot, for Scott’s party, the situation takes a turn for the …
This dull, overcast day sees the party struggling through freshly fallen snow that clogs the sledge runners and creates extreme difficulty underfoot. Although Taffy has slept well and says he is feeling fine, only a half an hour after they set out his ski shoes come away and he drops far behind the sledge. He is ailing so badly that their pace has been halved.
Concerned, Scott stops to prepare lunch, yet after quite some time Taffy is still only seen far off in the distance behind them.
Now the alarm is raised, and the four party members ski back to the aid of the stricken Taffy. Reaching him first, Scott – whose affection for the Welshman has remained steadfast – is immediately shocked by the sight of this former laughing giant now dishevelled on hands and knees, highly distressed with an animal look in his eye. His hands are exposed and frostbitten, and, in a series of grunts, he manages to tell his leader he thinks himself to have fainted.
Leaving Oates by the collapsed man’s side, Scott, Wilson and Bowers hurry back for the sledge, and once they have retrieved it they quickly transport the comatose Evans to the tent. An awful responsibility now falls on Scott, and there is no way around it. The brutal truth is that, with Taffy lying there insensible, their supplies depleting by the day and the dreadful winter starting to overtake them, ‘the safety of the remainder seemed to demand his abandonment’.51
But could they really do that? Leave a living man in the polar wilderness, so as to save themselves? Has it come to this?
Mercifully, Scott is spared the decision. From midnight, Taffy becomes ever more still, his breathing more shallow, and at 12.30 he breathes no more on this earth. Finally, the old Antarctic campaigner may rest – forever, here at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. Scott writes:
It is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way, but calm reflection shows that there could not have been a better ending to the terrible anxieties of the past week. Discussion of the situation at lunch yesterday shows us what a desperate pass we were in with a sick man on our hands at such a distance from home.52
In fact, there is another notably sick man among them at this time doing his best to hide it and to soldier on regardless. For Lawrence Oates, what has been mere frostbite of his feet has started to turn gangrenous – that is, the actual blood vessels and tissue have begun to die, to rot. A red line marks the border between the living flesh and the dead flesh, and as the days go by that red line keeps moving and more of his body dies. It makes every step an agony, but Oates does not wish to burden the others with his problems and continues on the best he can.
19 February 1912 and the day thereafter, Hut Point, another of Scott’s men returns
When a near-dead Tom Crean staggers through the door at Hut Point at 3.30 am, the foundation stone of another staggering story is laid. For most of the last six weeks since separating from Scott’s Southern Party, Crean, Teddy Evans and Lashly have been pushing their way back through dreadful conditions, first hit by a three-day blizzard while they were still on the plateau, and then losing their way to the top of the Beardmore Glacier.
This has so taken its toll that by the time they made it back on track and to the bottom of the Beardmore Glacier, Teddy Evans had been faltering from the effects of full-blown scurvy, with his stiffening and swollen legs turning green with bruises, his gums ulcerating and his teeth loosening. Solidly in harness since the day the last motor sledge had given up the ghost three and a half months earlier, Evans is now so totally exhausted that the scurvy has its tentacles wrapped around him and is rapidly drawing him ever down. At One Ton Depot, a little over a week earlier, that condition descended to the point where Crean was sure that Teddy Evans had died. Fortunately, that was not true, as Evans was still compos mentis enough to feel Crean’s hot tears on his face, roughly coming to, with a weak kind of laugh. But he was certainly close to the point of death.
Lashly recorded that Evans was ‘turning black and blue and several other colours as well’.53 When fully roused, Evans, with what could easily be assumed to be his dying breath, had given direct orders that he was to be left in his sleeping bag with what food they could spare while Crean and Lashly pushed on without him, to save themselves.
No, sir. Not going to do that, sir. Though they had only minimal rations left and, having covered over 1500 miles, were beyond exhausted themselves, Crean and Lashly strapped Evans to their sledge and struggled on. Pausing now and then to dribble some precious drops of brandy down their leader’s throat, they reached Corner Camp on 18 February.
And it is here that the likeable Irishman rose to the occasion. For, leaving Lashly with Teddy Evans, Crean ‘strode out nobly and finely’,54 making the 39-mile dash for Hut Point without crampons and carrying nothing more than two biscuits and a stick of chocolate, to raise the alarm.
He has arrived 18 hours later only just ahead of a terrible blizzard that has been roaring up behind him. Now, Atkinson gives Crean a tot of brandy followed by some porridge, which the exhausted man immediately throws up. ‘That’s the first time in my life that ever it happened, and it was the brandy that did it,’ jokes Crean.55
By the following day, once the blizzard has blown itself out, Atkinson is leading a relief party to go and get Lashly and Evans. Though it is a close-run thing – a thing with frostbite nipping at its extremities – they are able to get them back to Cape Evans.
Ever afterwards, Teddy Evans would say that in his entire naval career this was the only time he had given a direct order only to have it disobeyed.56
20 February 1912 and the day thereafter, Shackleton Ice Shelf, the Western Party’s decision is made
And now they are finally finished. By virtue of all hands on deck working over the past five days at a furious pace – not only on the deck but also on the ice shelf, the flying fox and the summit of the 60-foot ice cliff – all of the material for the prefabricated hut and all of the supplies, including 12 tons of oh-so-precious coal, have indeed been put at the top of the ice shelf. (At Davis’s suggestion, they have named the formation the ‘Shackleton Ice Shelf’, by virtue of the fact that they spotted it on the great man’s birthday.)
By the time everything is finished, it is just gone midnight. In the early hours of this morning, Davis approaches final-decision time. Well, after all their effort to unload, he can hardly give an order to pack it all up again, so for Wild this decision is a foregone conclusion, but the good captain does insist on one thing before agreeing to it. Frank Wild must write him a letter, making clear that it is not Davis but Wild himself who is insisting on staying on the Shackleton Ice Shelf. Wild soon produces it:
S. Y. Aurora,
Shackleton Glacier
20.2.1912
Dear Captain Davis,
… There will probably be some discussion about the position of this base, and no doubt some authorities will consider we are taking unjustifiable risks, and were this a barrier I should be of the same opinion. However, I am convinced that it is a glacier and with practically no movement. It is quite possible that during the twelve months of our stay here small portions will break away from the edge, but at the distance back at which I intend to build the hut I consider we are certainly as safe as Amundsen on the Ross Barrier.
You have made a good survey of the site yourself and will be able to satisfy any of the Party’s relatives that they will be as comfortable here as is possible in the Antarctic …
Yours ever,
Frank Wild 57
Look, it will hardly save Davis from the most severe criticism if Wild and his men subsequently perish, but it is something.
With talk rife among the crew regarding the precariousness of the ice-cliff encampment, Wild speaks to each member of his party individually, offering them the chance to immediately return with Aurora. ‘If it is good enough for you, it is good enough for me,’ each expedition member, to a man, replies.58
And so they are unanimous.
As Captain Davis and his men make ready to leave, one of Wild’s men, Morton Moyes, says to him pleasantly, ‘Have a good trip home.’
And they don’t call him Gloomy for nothing, as Captain Davis is as quick as he is pointed with his reply: ‘You’d better hope I do as nobody but me knows where you are and you’ll be lost forever if I don’t get home.’59
It is a terrifyingly fair point. But the decision is taken and now they must get on with it.
At 7 am on 21 February, with blankets strapped to their backs, Wild’s men scramble over the side of Aurora then wave and cheer from their position on the sea ice as the sturdy little workhorse of a ship sails away and …
And watch out! Just an instant after the ship has left the shore, a massive piece of the ice shelf breaks away and tumbles down from the cliff to hit the sea with massive force. The result is a huge wave that not only causes Aurora to roll heavily but also breaks up the very part of the floe where they have landed their stores. It is a narrow escape, but at least the ship is away safely.
From the party’s position high above the ice shelf, it takes a long time for Aurora to finally disappear from view. No fewer than 2500 miles from the nearest point of serious civilisation, Hobart, there are few people on the planet more isolated than they are.
And the men on Aurora are thinking of them in turn, none more than the skipper, as he gazes back on the spot where he has left the men he is ultimately responsible for, no matter what the letter in his pocket says. ‘A black “oasis” in a white waste of snow! Was this an ice-shelf, attached to the land, on which we were leaving them?’ wonders Davis.60 Or is it a piece of ice destined to soon be part of the Southern Ocean, leaving Wild and his men to face a certain watery death?