On Easter Sunday Father killed and ate a dog. He and the man with him cooked it on a Primus in their tent after yet another unsuccessful day spent searching for their companion, buried alive 8,000 feet up on Greenland’s ice cap.
In 1930, four years before my birth, Father, J. M. Scott, was one of a party of fourteen young men who sailed to the Arctic to pioneer a route for the first commercial airway from Europe to North America. The party was led by Gino Watkins, aged twenty-three, who like Scott had just come down from Cambridge but had already led two expeditions to the Arctic. With a love for jazz, dancing and sports cars, foppishly dressed, Gino did not resemble most people’s idea of an explorer. One fellow undergraduate said he looked like a ‘pansy’.
The proposed air route lay over the coastal mountains which were of unknown height, then for 500 miles across Greenland’s unexplored ice cap, the most hostile environment on earth. Gino’s plan was to survey and map the coastal range but, crucially, to set up a meteorological station high on the ice cap, which – manned in shifts for one year – would record temperature, wind and weather conditions six times a day. Nobody before had ever passed a winter on the ice cap, much of which is in 24-hour darkness. No one on the expedition or elsewhere knew what to expect.
That August Scott guided a party up the glacier leading onto the ice cap. Winching up the sledges and hauling up their dogs by rope, it took them six days to travel the first fifteen miles. In the next ten days they sledged a further 112 miles into the frozen desert to set up the weather station, a nine-foot tent equipped with a full range of meteorological apparatus – but no radio or communication with the outside world.
The two men left to man the station were replaced by two others in late September while the weather was still good. In November the party which set out to relieve them was pinned down for so long by blizzards they had consumed most of the food and fuel intended for the station by the time they finally reached it. Either it must be abandoned or one man alone must staff it through the winter until he could be relieved. Courtauld, another Cambridge undergraduate and heir to a family fortune, volunteered to do so.
Arctic winter closed in. On 8 December the sun failed to rise, not to be glimpsed again for weeks. Gales raged continuously. The Base anemometer recorded 129 mph before it blew away. At the weather station high on the ice cap conditions were worse.
At the end of February Gino said to Scott, ‘I’m afraid someone will have to go and fetch Courtauld while the weather is still bad. I’d like it to be you.’
Scott took one man; each drove a dog sledge. One of these broke in half on the glacier, then a blizzard pinned them down for days. It took three attempts to get going. After seventeen days travelling in appalling conditions he calculated they were on the latitude of the station and within a half-mile of it. Marking off a grid with flags, they began to search for it. Most of the time the weather was atrocious and visibility reduced to a few yards. When the low sun did appear the snowscape became a zebra pattern of bright crests and dark shadowed troughs. It was like looking for a man overboard in a rough sea. They spent the next three weeks searching the area … and could not find Courtauld.
By 15 April, having already eaten two of their dogs, there remained three-quarter rations for only four more days. The decision to abandon the search was Scott’s as leader of the party. Having taken it, they raced back to Base, travelling in any weather and running the crevasses blind in darkness. On the final stretch the exhausted dogs were no longer able to pull the pathetically light loads. Dumping the sledges, men and beasts stumbled the last miles to Base where Scott gave Gino the news.
Taking two men Gino set out at dawn on the 130-mile journey to the weather station. Scaling the glacier, he and his party raced towards where Courtauld lay buried. On 4 May they knew they must be near; almost at the same moment the three saw a dark speck half a mile away. As they hurried nearer it became a very tattered Union Jack, three-quarters hidden by the snow, but everything else was entirely buried beneath a huge drift. There was no sign of life, but as Gino climbed the drift he saw an inch or two of ventilating tube projecting above the surface. He knelt over it, shouted … and a voice came back. Entombed beneath the ice cap, Courtauld had been isolated in his tent for 149 days.
Gino, Courtauld and Scott were changed for ever by the Arctic. They’d lived in a vast white empty world of cruel beauty and truth. To face the adversities they encountered there required comradeship, resolution and courage; their lives were simple, pure, their purpose clear. Afterwards, what could match the intensity of that experience?
Along with the others Scott never adjusted to everyday life. But he was also changed in another way. His failure to find Courtauld altered his personality, turning him into a misanthrope who needed drink to become whole. Forever afterward he believed himself a failure and the conviction would poison and ruin his life.
While together in Greenland he and Gino had at one point been caught in a jam they thought they might not escape from. Gino was not without responsibilities. His mother was dead, his father expiring from TB in a Swiss sanatorium. His sister Pam and brother Tony, both younger than he, were living almost without funds in a rented house in London, looked after by Nanny Dennis who had been with them for over twenty years. By nature insouciant, Gino had inadvertently become head of the family. Now in Greenland he said to Scott, ‘If anything happens to me, look after Pam’.
The two managed to extricate themselves from that particular hazard, but on the second phase of the Air Route Expedition in 1932 something did happen to Gino. He went out alone in his kayak, hunting seal among the ice floes to feed his party … and disappeared. His kayak was found floating half full of water, and his trousers soaking wet on an ice floe, but his body and rifle were never recovered. The accident – if accident it was – remains a mystery.
Scott was a representative of his period and class; he believed in duty, honour and the manly code. He did the right thing and married his drowned leader’s sister, Pam – a woman whose temperament and tastes could not have been more different from his own.
In the year following the couple’s wedding they had a son, whom they christened Jeremy Gino Scott – myself.