ALTHOUGH THE ENGLISH HAD LONG VALUED CERtain substances from the earth, such as minerals, peat, and coal, rock collecting was more of a hobby than a science in Britain before 1800, and fossils carried little meaning. A century before Discovery sailed, most British naturalists assumed that organic species, each perfect in its original creation, never died out. Fossils represented mere sports of nature or still living types. They offered no clues to the past except perhaps as evidence of the global reach and deadly impact of the biblical Deluge. On the basis of the Genesis account, many British naturalists believed that the earth was only about six thousand years old, with its basic features carved either in the beginning by God or later by the Noachian flood. Geology was less a systematic study of nature than a devotional lesson in the supernatural. It offered scant justification for exploring a lifeless, icebound southern continent. Nature was static and Antarctica, if it existed, an eternal wasteland.
A series of nineteenth-century conceptual revolutions in geology and paleontology gave potential meaning to Antarctic research. Early in the century, fieldwork by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier showed that the earth was far older than once thought, its features and conditions had changed over time, and various species came and went in the past. He laid bare the geological column: layer upon layer of sedimentary rock, with each layer containing a characteristic mix of fossilized species. For his findings, he received titles in France and honors from abroad. Across Europe and North America, universities established new positions in the earth sciences. A cadre of midcentury British geologists, including the RGS’s Roderick Murchison, extended Cuvier’s work by tracing the broad contours of the rock strata and dividing geologic history into named eras and epochs. The empire became their laboratory. Continuing discoveries of prehistoric species fueled popular interest in the field, with the identification of the first upright-walking dinosaurs by British comparative anatomist Richard Owen in 1841 turning paleontology into a Victorian sensation. By the 1850s, queues formed to view his reconstructed giants at the British Museum.
As interest grew, revolutions in the earth sciences began building on themselves. The theories of the British barrister-turned-geologist Charles Lyell elevated current seismic events, such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, from merely local, transitory acts of God or nature to mighty engines of a global geologic cycle that continuously renewed the earth’s surface through uplift and erosion. The Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz dramatically demonstrated the extent of past climate change by finding evidence of former glacial action even in temperate and tropical locales; and he suggested that ancient ice ages had caused the mass migrations and extinctions reflected in the fossil record. Supported by governments that suddenly saw economic value in such knowledge, scientists in Europe and America began mapping the earth’s substratum. And as the theory of evolution gained acceptance late in the century, comparative paleontology became a means to study biological relationships and the former distribution of land, water, and ice. Antarctica no longer looked so distant, different, or irrelevant. It could once have been like Europe; Europe could once have been like it.
Geology was behind only terrestrial magnetism and geographic discovery as a scientific justification for the Discovery expedition. Promoting the venture during the 1890s, for example, Challenger naturalist John Murray—whose own main interest was oceanography—played up its potential for geology. “Is there a sixth continent within the Antarctic circle,” he asked in the 1894 address that launched the campaign for a British Antarctic expedition, “or is the land nucleus, on which the massive ice-cap rests, merely a group of lofty volcanic hills? This is a question still asked and answered differently by naturalists.” The evidence for an Antarctic archipelago came from Robert McCormick, the naturalist on James Ross’s 1839–43 expedition who mistakenly characterized all of Victoria Land’s mountains as volcanic, and from other explorers who reported finding only volcanic rocks on islands south of Cape Horn. All of this supported the idea of an oceanic archipelago of volcanic islands. During the 1880s, however, the Challenger expedition dredged up bits of sandstone, limestone, and other types of continental rock from the Southern Ocean’s floor. “These lithological types are distinctly indicative of continental land,” Murray noted. The rocks could only have come from melting Antarctic icebergs. Other expeditions made similar finds, which pointed toward the existence of a great southern landmass. An Antarctic expedition, Murray stated, could resolve this question.1
In his address, Murray raised a range of issues that would occupy Antarctic geologists for generations. He called on them to survey the rock strata, map the terrain, gauge the depth of the polar ice sheet, look for fossils from more temperate times, explore the interior, and measure the earth’s curvature in high latitudes. “All this should be the work of a modern Antarctic expedition,” he declared. Speaking after Murray, the Duke of Argyll extolled the proposed expedition’s scientific importance, “especially to the science of geology.” For his part, Markham wrote, “The main object of the expedition, then, would be to explore the Antarctic continent by land, to ascertain its physical features, and above all to discover the character of its rocks, and to find fossils throwing light on its geological history.” Like Murray, Argyll and Markham had no interest in a mere dash to the South Pole.2
The expedition’s geological goals crystallized in 1900, after organizers named British Natural History Museum geologist J. W. Gregory to head Discovery’s scientific staff with full authority on shore. Gregory had led the first geological expedition to Africa’s Great Rift Valley and conducted field research in the Arctic. Eminently qualified to direct the Discovery’s shore parties, he proposed an ambitious program for the expedition that put geology virtually on a par with terrestrial magnetism as its principal activity. As he outlined it, the explorers would pursue three main topics of research in the earth sciences.
The first topic involved the nature and extent of Antarctic land. Fridtjof Nansen and some other polar experts argued that the Antarctic was much like the Arctic—with a large ice sheet grounded on an archipelago of islands. Following Murray, however, Gregory believed that it consisted of a true continental landmass, though it might be partly submerged. “There is,” he explained, “little doubt that Antarctica is geologically a continent, consisting of a western plateau, composed of achaean and sedimentary rocks like those of Australia, and of an eastern volcanic chain. But whether Antarctica is still a continent geographically is less certain; and this question can only be conclusively settled by a survey.” Moreover, he proposed investigating whether Victoria Land’s coastal range represented a southern extension of the mountains that ran along the Pacific Ocean’s western rim, and whether it linked in the south to the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula, which were widely viewed as an extension of the Andean range. “In that case,” he wrote, “the great tectonic lines which bound the Pacific to the east and west are connected across the Antarctic area; and if that can be proved the unity of the great Pacific depression will be completely established.”3
In addition, Gregory planned to take regular geodetic and seismic readings. No previous Antarctic expedition had tried to make such measurements. “The principal geodetic work of the expedition,” he wrote, “will be the continuation of the line of gravity determinations that has now been carried from California across the Pacific to Sydney.” Gregory arranged with the Australian instrument maker and former government astronomer Robert Ellery to supply three pendulums for the expedition’s use in making gravity readings. With these, Gregory hoped to resolve the earth’s precise oblate ellipsoid shape, which was still unknown for the south. “The International Geodetic Commission had expressed their conviction that a gravity survey in the region would be of the greatest benefit to higher geodetic theories,” German polar scientist Georg von Neumayer told the Royal Society’s 1898 Antarctic meeting.4 Discovery also carried a seismometer and duplex recorder to take the first sustained readings of the earthquakes from an Antarctic reference point.
The hunt for fossils stirred the most interest. Virtually none were then known from south of the Antarctic Circle, but because of recognized similarities in the past flora and fauna of the three inhabited southern continents, many scientists believed that Antarctica was once warm enough to sustain life and serve as a link for the distribution of species. To account for the seemingly abrupt, widespread appearance of higher plants in the fossil record of the known continents, for example, Charles Darwin wrote to the former Ross Expedition botanist Joseph Hooker in 1881, “I have sometimes speculated whether there did not exist somewhere during long ages an extremely isolated continent, perhaps near the South Pole” where those plants gradually evolved. Having no conception of continental drift or plate tectonics, geologists postulated receded oceans and ancient land bridges connecting the various southern continents through the polar region. Gregory argued that fossils in Antarctica “alone can settle the problems of zoological distribution in South America, South Africa and Australia.” Further, fossils were then the only means to date rock formations and reveal a region’s geologic history. For these reasons, Britain’s leading expert on biodiversity, Zoological Society Secretary P. L. Sclater, hailed paleontology as “the most promising field” of Antarctic exploration.5 In 1899, British Museum (Natural History) Director Ray Lankester made much the same claim in lobbying for government support of the Discovery expedition.
The six-hundred-page Antarctic Manual assembled by the British Museum’s George Murray for the Discovery expedition devoted five of its eighteen chapters to these three topics. With respect to gathering rocks, the Manual warned, “Rock-specimens collected here and there, without correlative information as to the general structure of the district, are rarely worth the trouble and expense of transport.” Only a systematic regional survey, with specimens from all exposed strata, held much meaning. Sedimentary strata offered the most potential, the Manual stressed, because they held clues to the climate and distribution of land and sea in earlier ages. “The most useful information on these questions may be afforded by remains of animals and plants found imbedded in the rocks,” the Manual explained, particularly the discovery of Glossopteris plant fossils of the type common to Africa, Australia, India, and South America in the late Paleozoic era. Finding Glossopteris fossils in Antarctic rocks from that era would support the theory that these four regions were once linked through Antarctica. If these fossils were also found in older rocks, the Manual noted, it would show that prehistoric global cooling had allowed these presumably cold-climate plants to move north from the Antarctic.6
The expedition’s ambitious geology program largely collapsed after the power struggle between the RGS and Royal Society led Gregory to resign his post as science director, less than three months before Discovery sailed. When naming Gregory to the position, a Joint Committee of the two societies had promised him control over scientific research and suggested that Scott and the Discovery vessel would not remain south over the winter but would simply deposit and retrieve Gregory’s shore party. Instead, Clements Markham and the RGS insisted on modeling the venture after earlier Royal Navy expeditions to the Arctic, with Scott in command and Discovery wintering on-site. Despite the Royal Society’s strong representation on the Joint Committee, the RGS had raised most of the private funds for the mission, and Markham used this leverage to get his way.
The wrangling went on for months. Edward Poulton, a leader of the Royal Society faction within the Joint Committee, made an impassioned appeal on Gregory’s behalf in the journal Nature, arguing that the embattled science director’s “chief subject was Geology, a science which pursued in the Antarctic Continent would almost certainly yield results of especial significance.”7 Poulton’s pleas fell on deaf ears within the RGS and failed to unite the Royal Society. The RGS cared most about geographical discovery; an influential bloc within the Royal Society cared most about terrestrial magnetism. In the end, the expedition’s final instructions gave equal emphasis to these two activities while making only two passing references to geological research and saying nothing about fossils. They placed Scott in complete command, with authority to winter the ship in the Antarctic. Stripped of control, Gregory quit. The expedition’s physicist, William Shackleton, who had supported Gregory’s position that scientists rather than sailors should control the mission, was promptly sacked.
Responsibility for geodetic and seismic studies fell on Shacketon’s replacement, Louis Bernacchi. A veteran of Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross expedition, Bernacchi had hands-on experience taking magnetic readings in the Antarctic but little knowledge of how to use the geodetic and seismic equipment that accompanied the Discovery expedition. Some items broke in transit; others never operated properly. Bernacchi set up the equipment in huts at winter quarters and took regular readings, but researchers who later analyzed the data found them wanting. Worse problems bedeviled the expedition’s efforts at field geology.
With his new ship scheduled to sail in scarcely ten weeks and countless other concerns calling for his attention, Scott struggled to find a geologist to replace Gregory. In light of what had happened, no experienced scientist stepped forward on such short notice. Scott eventually settled on twenty-two-year-old Hartley Ferrar, who had graduated with second honors in natural science from Cambridge one month before his appointment to the expedition’s staff. It was neither an inspired nor an inspiring choice. By all accounts, Ferrar had spent more time playing sports at college than studying science. Aloof and withdrawn, he was treated harshly by the ship’s officers on the Discovery’s outbound voyage. Early on, Scott privately dismissed Ferrar as a “conceited young ass.” Markham described him as “very young, very unfledged, and rather lazy.”8 In the hazing ceremonies that marked the occasion of Discovery’s first crossing the equator, the sailors subjected Ferrar to particularly rough treatment.
Problems persisted after Discovery reached winter quarters. Ferrar kept to himself during the first winter, either holed up in his cabin or poking around the vicinity, which he quickly found uninteresting. “The first thing that strikes one here is the ordinary appearance of the rocks,” he wrote in June 1902, depicting the Hut Point peninsula as “four square miles of bare rock, entirely of volcanic origin”—mostly basalts and trachyte.9 His reports identified five volcanic “craters” or cinder cones in the area, the largest of which he called Observation Hill, but dwelt on the sameness of the rocks. “No particular sequence is indicated by them,” Ferrar complained. “The bare land-surfaces are usually covered to a depth of six inches by a loose cloak of rockdebris” over a permanently frozen base. “Here decomposition and disintegration proceed simultaneously, and any particles loosened by frost from the upper surfaces are at once blown away by the wind,” leaving no clue to the region’s past.10 The rest of Ross Island, he wrote, was more of the same, and he expressed little interest in exploring it. Instead, Ferrar looked across McMurdo Sound to the mountains of Victoria Land, where he hoped to find rock strata with sedimentary layers. There, he wrote during the first winter, “specimens of any rocks in ‘situ’ whether igneous or sedimentary should be collected. If we are lucky enough to find the latter, a careful search for fossils, and a diagrammatic sketch should be made.”11
Although Ferrar accompanied two trips to Victoria Land during the next sledging season, the results were disappointing. The first trip left on September 11, 1902, under the command of Albert Armitage. “My orders were: To proceed to the westward and make a reconnaissance, the primary object being to discover, if possible, a practicable route to the interior of South Victoria Land,” Armitage wrote. “I was to give Ferrar every possible opportunity of studying the geology of the country.”12 Within a week, however, Ferrar developed scurvy, which hindered his ability to conduct research and forced the party to return early without finding a glacial pass leading inland. On one occasion, Ferrar became so exhausted that he collapsed on the ice and but for the aid of a companion would have frozen to death in −45°F weather. Armitage deemed Ferrar unfit for sledging.
Armitage launched his main assault on the western mountains on November 29, 1902, but this time he relegated Ferrar to a support party that never went beyond the foothills. The goal of this Western Sledge Journey was to cross over the mountains to find what lay beyond and perhaps reach the Magnetic South Pole. Without any certain idea of the route and again impeded by scurvy, the main party struggled up first one way and then another to the verge of the Polar Plateau before turning back without venturing onto it.
While Ferrar’s support party turned back early in the journey and found little new, the main party made some promising observations and collections high in the mountains. “Mr. Armitage’s pioneer journey though the mountains proved the existence of plateau features as well as horizontal structure,” Ferrar noted. “The specimens he brought back included a sandstone which . . . suggested the probability of the existence of fossiliferous sediments in the district.” The sandstone layer lay above the mountain’s gneiss base and broad granite shoulders at up to eight thousand feet, Armitage reported, and was topped by a dolerite cap. Reaching this sedimentary formation, which Ferrar called Beacon Sandstone for the Beacon Heights region where it was first found, became the young geologist’s objective for the next year. “Among the questions still to be solved,” he noted in August 1903, “is, what are the ages of these rocks?” His enthusiasm for such questions and acceptance of a supporting role impressed Scott. By the end of the sledging season, Scott described Ferrar as “a changed youth:” “He was objectionable, he is now a non entity and knows it, therefore in time he will be an acquisition to our little band.”13
Ferrar came into his own as a field geologist during the expedition’s final summer. After Armitage’s Western Sledge Journey fell short, Scott tried the route himself in November 1903: up the narrow, icy pass that became known as Ferrar Glacier to its nine-thousand-foot summit, and then charting new ground across two hundred miles of the Polar Plateau. Ferrar went along as far as a sandstone outcrop near the summit. He then split off with one sledge and two sledgers, Petty Officer Thomas Kennar and Seaman William Weller, to gather rock specimens and look for fossils. Scott proceeded west with another sledge and five men. Both parties made Antarctic history.
Because of a severe blizzard that kept the combined team in its tents for seven days at over seven thousand feet, Ferrar’s party had only one month’s rations when it finally separated from the main group on November 11. Scott’s party had rations for a longer trip, but also farther to go. “If I were asked to name the most miserable week I have ever spent,” Scott later wrote of this enforced encampment, “I should certainly fix on this one. Throughout the whole time the gale raged unceasingly. . . . In our tent we had one book, Darwin’s delightful ‘Cruise of the “Beagle,”’ and sometimes one or another would read this aloud until our freezing fingers refused to turn the pages.” He named the place “Desolation Camp.” It stood beneath an immense icefall, on a small patch of hard snow that the men had found on the bare blue ice at the onset of the blizzard.14
Both parties needed to get back to the ship by the end of December to help free it from the sea ice for the return journey to Britain. With little time and much to do, once the blizzard finally ended, the parties set off rapidly in opposite directions. Ferrar’s party man-hauled a jury-rigged, seven-foot sledge that showed the wear of three sledging seasons, broke down frequently, and pulled heavily over rough surfaces due to damaged runners. Scott’s eleven-foot sledge handled only slightly better. The weather was bitterly cold and often windy. “Luck was not with us this trip,” Scott wrote in his diary shortly before the parties split, “and yet we have worked hard to make things go right.”15
From Desolation Camp, Ferrar took a circuitous route down the glacier looking for fossil-bearing sandstone. “I was quite astonished to learn the number of places he had visited and the distances he had traversed in pursuit of his object,” Scott later wrote. “For each specimen of rock which Ferrar brought back was obtained only by traversing long miles of rough ice, by clambering over dangerous crevassed slopes, and by scaling precipitous cliffs.”16
The best finds came from near the top of the sandstone column. In a glacial moraine visited on the first day, Ferrar unearthed detached sandstone blocks darkened by carbonaceous matter suggesting organic origin. “These were our first evidence of Antarctic life in the geological past,” he noted, but their charred condition revealed little about the character of that life and nothing about the rocks’ age. The next day, the party reached an outcropping of sandstone capped with overlaying dolerite. “Imagine my delight,” Ferrar wrote, “when, arriving with bag and hammer at the rock face, I found thin, black, irregular bands in the pure white sandstone.” These bands again hinted at past life without showing distinct fossils or telling the formation’s age.17
Hoping for better finds deeper in the column, the party worked its way down the glacier to lower beds of the sandstone strata, which Ferrar found notably undisturbed but frustratingly devoid of fossils. “Only one of its horizons contained organic remains,” he reported, “and these of a most doubtful nature”: cylindrical casts in the stone from six to thirty-six inches long and half an inch wide. Indistinct, wormlike markings that might or might have organic origin appeared here and elsewhere in the stone.18
Increasingly plagued by snow blindness during the trek, Ferrar nevertheless completed the first credible geological survey of the central Victoria Land mountains. Despite ice and snow covering most of the terrain, by observing exposed mountains, cliffs, and outcrops at various altitudes he managed to chart the relative levels and locations of various rock types. In the main, Ferrar found gneiss, metamorphic limestone, and schist at the base, overlaid by granite, then sandstone with a dolomite top. He did not know it, but he also secured the first recovered fossil showing Antarctica’s ancient link to other southern continents. The official report on Ferrar’s specimens, published in 1907, concluded that they held no certain evidence of organic agency. Twenty-one years later, a British Museum paleontologist in London cracked one of them open to find a fossilized impression from a Glossopteris plant—just what Ferrar had been seeking. In his last season’s work, Ferrar had salvaged something for geology, but as Scott biographer David Crane wrote, “there was a strict limit to what a young and inexperienced geologist plagued by snowblindness and operating with a broken-down sledge and two seamen to assist him could do in less than a month’s exploration.”19
Map of the exposed geological formations around McMurdo Sound by geologists on the Discovery expedition, from Robert Scott’s Voyage of the “Discovery” (New York, 1905).
As Ferrar’s party worked its way down the glacier from Desolation Camp, Scott’s group dashed as far west over the Polar Plateau as possible in the six weeks left for its trek. After ten days, Scott reduced the party to himself and the two strongest sledgers—Petty Officer Edgar Evans and Royal Navy Stoker William Lashly—and sent the others back. “With these two men behind me,” Scott wrote, “our sledge seemed to become a living thing, and the days of slow progress were numbered.”20 They sped across the frigid, windswept, trackless terrain, stopping only for meals and sleep. Traveling rapidly for a month over a continental ice sheet, where no rocks, mountains, or crevasses disrupted the icy scene, offered no opportunity or occasion for studying geology. On the way back, however, after regaining the coastal mountains and starting their descent, Scott’s party literally dropped into the most significant geological find of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.
In a glacial basin over halfway down the mountains at an altitude of about 2,500 feet, Scott’s party came to what looked like a fork in the Ferrar Glacier. The party had ascended the glacier’s eastern arm, but the northern arm looked wider. It too must descend to the sea, Scott reasoned, and perhaps was the glacier’s main outlet. “At this point I had determined to do a small piece of exploration,” he wrote. With the sledge and all the gear, on December 17, the men started down the northern arm, which quickly became steeper than expected. By evening, what Scott described as “a lofty groin of rock” appeared ahead and seemed to block the glacier’s path. The next morning, the men proceeded without the sledge to see what lay before them. The ice became so steep and disturbed that they roped up for safety. Streams of meltwater flowed over the surface of the dwindling glacier. “We descended into one of these watercourses and followed it for some distance, until, to our surprise, it came to an end, and with it the glacier itself,” Scott observed in his diary. “Before us was a shallow, frozen lake into which the thaw-water of the glacier was pouring.” They climbed down the glacier’s snout into a long, narrow, snow-free valley filled with glacial till and some muddy silt. “What a splendid place for growing spuds!” Lashly exclaimed.21
No one had ever seen anything like this in Antarctica: an interior dry valley. Here, anyone could see the land that lay beneath the continent’s ice and snow. Over the next century, it would become the principal place to study continental geology in the Antarctic. At the time, however, Scott simply marveled at the panorama. Towering cliffs adorned by hanging glaciers surrounded a silent, seemingly lifeless landscape of rocky hills, sandy beaches, flowing streams, and a series of lakes, some of them ice-free. “I was so fascinated by all these strange new sights that I strode forward without thought of hunger until Evans asked if it was any use carrying our lunch further,” Scott wrote. “We all decided it wasn’t, and so sat down on a small hillock of sand with a merry little stream gurgling over the pebbles at our feet.”22 After lunch, the men walked over five miles down the valley to where it was nearly blocked by a groin of boulders. They climbed the rocks in hopes of sighting the sea but saw only the valley extending on toward another groin. So they returned the way they came and eventually reached the ship on Christmas Eve.
Scott never forgot what he saw that day. “I cannot but think that this valley is a very wonderful place,” he wrote in his diary. “We have seen to-day all the indications of colossal ice action and considerable water action, and yet neither of these agents is now at work.”23 He knew the valley deserved close study and would send geologists back for that purpose, but it would have to wait for another expedition. With the midnight sun finally melting the sea ice, the men focused all their efforts on freeing the ship and heading for home.
Although Ernest Shackleton left Antarctica before Scott’s discovery of the Dry Valley, he soon heard about it and was struck by the attention it received. In announcing his Nimrod expedition, Shackleton pledged “to continue the biological, meteorological, geological, and magnetic work of the Discovery.”24 When his expedition ultimately wintered directly across McMurdo Sound from Ferrar Glacier, geologizing in the Dry Valley joined his list of objectives along with reaching the geographic and magnetic poles, climbing Mount Erebus, finding fossils, and surveying the region generally. He knew that geological discovery represented an important part of a successful Edwardian expedition.
Organizing his effort rapidly and on a shoestring, however, Shackleton initially picked a geologist even less qualified than Ferrar. Only twenty, Raymond Priestley had completed just two years of college at Bristol when he interviewed for the post. “I was not academically qualified,” he later admitted, but he did answer one question right: when asked, “Would you know gold if you saw it?” he said yes. That was good enough for Shackleton.25 But Shackleton’s touting of the expedition attracted the attention of the University of Sydney’s eminent and energetic geology professor, Edgeworth David, and David’s former student, University of Adelaide mineralogist Douglas Mawson. Having conducted extensive field studies in Australia, both men knew the region’s geology and how to work in harsh terrain. With David’s help, as Shackleton passed through Australia on his way south, he gained funding from the Commonwealth government, and he added both David and Mawson to the expedition’s scientific staff. Together with Priestley, whom they mentored, David and Mawson gave Shackleton the finest team of geologists yet assembled in the Antarctic. All three went on to illustrious careers in science and public service, and were later knighted. They saw much in Antarctic rocks and landforms that Ferrar missed.
Their discoveries began at Ross Island, which Ferrar had found uninteresting. On Mount Erebus and elsewhere, David indentified large quantities of a rare type of volcanic rock that Ferrar scarcely mentioned—kenyte, which Discovery’s original science director, J. W. Gregory, had first found in East Africa. The predominance of kenyte on Erebus, David observed, suggested that it was a continental rather than oceanic volcano and thus buttressed the emerging view of Antarctica as a continent. Ferrar had failed to recognize the extent of kenyte on Ross Island because, as he reported it, “Owing to the difficulties of access, few rock-specimens could be obtained from Mount Erebus itself.”26 Within two months of reaching Ross Island, in contrast, David, Mawson, and four others had climbed to the mountain’s summit and surveyed its crater. Although the party made this ascent mainly for meteorological purposes, David and Mawson collected rock samples and made geological observations along the way.
Further, where Ferrar had reported finding “no particular sequence” in Ross Island’s volcanic rocks, David saw otherwise. Based on a close examination of intrusions and layering, he wrote, “We are now in a position to say that, on the whole, the trachytes appear to have been the oldest rocks, the kenytes to be of intermediate age, and the basalts the newest.”27 Among the basalts, olivine basalt came first, then black basalt. He also indentified some modern kenyte. He made the island’s geologic history come alive for Shackleton and others on the expedition, many of whom became avid rockhounds, gathering specimens throughout the region.
The richest reward from David’s proselytizing came when, on its race to the South Pole, Shackleton’s Southern Sledge Party, which included no geologists, discovered a continuation of Victoria Land’s Beacon Sandstone formation near the summit of Beardmore Glacier at latitude 85° south. It also found a seemingly older limestone series there and brought back rock specimens containing fossils of tiny warm-water invertebrates, Archaeocyatha, from the early Cambrian period. Even more revealing of the region’s geologic history, near the top of the sandstone formation, the party found seven seams of coal. The men stopped to collect samples, including a sandstone fragment with a thin black band that, on later study, appeared to come from the stem of a coniferous tree. “This is the first recognizable fossil plant that has been obtained from the Victoria Land area of the Antarctic,” David wrote. These fossils, he concluded, placed the limestone in the Cambrian period and the sandstone probably in the Upper Devonian or Lower Carboniferous period. The coal appeared to date from the Permian. “The discovery of coal and fossil wood has a very important bearing on the question of the past geological history of the Antarctic continent,” Shackleton boasted at a meeting of RGS members on his return. In finding them, he had bested their man Scott.28
The Southern Sledge Party, which carried the hopes of the entire expedition, consisted of only four persons. Ten others remained behind. In consultation with David, who served as the expedition’s science director, Shackleton ordered a rich program of research and exploration for them. In accord with his instructions, David led a three-man Northern Sledge Party to the South Magnetic Pole. After crossing McMurdo Sound to Butter Point near the foot of Ferrar Glacier in early October, this party followed the west coast of the Ross Sea north for 200 miles to Larsen Glacier, then ascended Victoria Land’s mountains and traversed the Polar Plateau for 250 miles to the magnetic pole. As the expedition’s physicist in charge of magnetic readings, Mawson naturally joined this party, which, because of his and David’s presence, took extensive geological notes and collected rock samples while conducting its magnetic survey. They found that the Beacon Sandstone formation, together with underlying limestone, extended north at least as far as latitude 75° south.
The Northern Sledge Party’s main geological work, however, was supposed to occur at the end of its journey. After conducting the magnetic survey and attaining the magnetic pole, it was to return south to Butter Point by the first week of January and join a three-man Western Sledge Party consisting of Priestley, Philip Brocklehurst, and expedition pony-trainer Bertram Armytage but no ponies. The draft animals had all gone south with Shackleton. Hauling their own sledges, the two parties would jointly explore the nearby mountains and Dry Valley under David’s supervision. Shackleton gave David explicit directions on these points. “I particularly wish you to be able to work at the geology of the Western Mountains, and for Mawson to spend at least one fortnight at Dry Valley to prospect for minerals of economic value on your return from the north,” he wrote. “I consider that the thorough investigation of Dry Valley is of supreme importance.”29 He gave corresponding instructions to the Western Party, which was to leave Cape Royds in early December, conduct initial fieldwork in the Ferrar Glacier region, and then rendezvous with the Northern Party at Butter Point during the first week of January for the first systematic study of the Dry Valley.
The schedule allowed time for Priestley, Brocklehurst, and expedition biologist James Murray to explore the northern flank of Mount Erebus in late November, before the Western Sledge Party departed. No scientist had examined this region, which included the mountain’s oldest main crater, and David thought it might prove interesting. Accordingly, Shackleton left instructions for “a geological reconnaisance” of the area. Five men set out on this effort with a week’s supply of food, Shackleton later reported, “but carried only one tent, intended to hold three men, their idea being that one or two men could sleep in the bags outside the tent.”30 This arrangement left Priestley sleeping outside and four others in a three-person tent when a ferocious blizzard hit on the first night.
The blizzard pinned the party in place on a glacier that sloped down toward rocks and the sea. “Inside the tent for the next three days we were warm enough in our sleeping-bags . . . [t]hough we could not cook anything,” Murray wrote. They survived on dry biscuits and raw pemmican. “The little snow under the floorcloth was squeezed in the hand till it became ice, and we sucked this for drink.” Outside, wrapped only in a sleeping bag and discarded tent cover, laying abreast of a howling wind that threatened to roll him down the slope, Priestley was worse off than the others. “I then tried the experiment of lying head to the wind,” he wrote. “It was in this position that I spent the next seventy-two hours, getting shifted down a yard or two at a time at every change in the direction of the wind.” The others passed him food, but he kept sliding farther from the tent, and no one could see in the storm or stand against the wind. “It may sound like an exaggeration,” Priestley wrote of their position, “but it must be remembered that we were lying on the slopes of a clean-swept glacier. . . . A slip on the ice meant very serious danger of destruction.” On the bare glacier, Priestley did not even have snow. “For nearly eighty hours I had nothing to drink but some fragments of ice that I could prise up with the point of a small safety-pin.” When the storm finally subsided, the party raced back to the hut without conducting any further research.31
Having survived their ill-fated reconnaissance, Priestley and Brocklehurst set out on December 9 with Armytage for the Ferrar Glacier to begin their Western Sledge Journey. “The main object of our journey up the Ferrar Glacier was to examine the Beacon sandstone at any accessible exposures with a view to the discovery of any traces of former organic life,” Priestley explained.32 They initially aimed for exposures near the glacier’s summit, but the midnight sun had made the surface too soft to traverse in the time available. Instead, the party stopped midway up the glacier, where Ferrar’s chart showed another exposure. “The whole of the bluff opposite is marked as Beacon sandstone, and from the face of the cliff here it is easily seen, for at least 3000 feet, to be granite,” Priestley railed. The only accessible sandstone was at his feet, in lateral moraines that carried debris from higher elevations. “The sandstone is very weathered, dropping to pieces in many cases with a single blow,” he complained. “I am faced with the necessity of examining for fossils rocks which I should carefully avoid if I were at home or anywhere else. I have never seen a sedimentary rock that looked more unfossiliferous.”33 Giving up on fossils, Priestley took notes on geology and turned back in time to reach Butter Point by January 1 for the planned rendezvous with David.
Of course, the Northern Party never arrived. On January 1, it was still more than 150 miles from the South Magnetic Pole. Man-hauling heavy sledges on half-rations in extreme conditions, David and his men would not reach the pole and regain the coast until February 2, by which time the sea ice had gone out and they could not proceed south toward Butter Point. Stranded on the coast, they prayed for Nimrod to rescue them. Meanwhile, following Shackleton’s orders, the Western Party waited for David on the sea ice near Butter Point for nearly a month. During this time, the party made only two brief excursions: one to the eskers or “stranded moraines” at the snout of the nearby Blue Glacier and one to the lower end of the Dry Valley, which opened to the sea a few miles northeast of Butter Point.
On January 24, one day before the Western Party was authorized by Shackleton’s instructions to leave Butter Point, the sea ice under its tent broke loose and drifted two miles from shore. “The position seemed to be rather serious,” Armytage later reported to Shackleton, “for we could not hope to cross any stretch of open water, there was no reasonable expectation of assistance from the ship, and most of our food was at Butter Point.” Killer whales began butting against the ice floe. “It is a well-known fact that the killer-whale lives round about the pack,” Priestley noted, “and breaks it up by bumping it in order to get the animals off it for food and outside our tent there were a large school of them playing and one of them bumped directly beneath our tent cracking the ice in all directions.” After eighteen hours of terror, the floe collided with a piece of fast ice. “Not more than six feet of the edge touched, but we were just at that spot, and we rushed over the bridge thus formed,” Armytage reported. “We had only just got over when the floe moved away again, and this time it went north to the open sea.”34
Nimrod rescued the Western Party at Butter Point a day later and on February 4 found David and his men on the coast near the foot of Larsen Glacier. It was a close call for both groups, but Shackleton managed to return home without losing anyone—something Scott could never claim. After picking up Shackleton’s Southern Party at Hut Point and its geological specimens at nearby Cape Armitage on March 4, Nimrod steamed hastily north ahead of the fast-closing winter. It left behind rock samples from the Northern Sledge Journey’s outbound leg that David had stored on Depot Island.
Scott returned to the Antarctic on Terra Nova in 1910, committed to reaching the South Pole but determined not to neglect the Dry Valley. After his Polar Journey and Wilson’s Winter Journey to Cape Crozier, geology and the Dry Valley figured most prominently in his plans. “I have arranged for a scientific staff larger than that which has been carried by any previous [Antarctic] expedition,” Scott explained early in 1910, and “have regarded geology as one of the most important interests which can be served on our expedition.” Accordingly, he named three geologists to the staff. To lead them he recruited Griffith Taylor, one of David’s former students from Australia then studying at Cambridge. Passing through Sydney on his way south, Scott added two more of David’s students, Frank Debenham and Nimrod’s Priestley, who had followed David to Australia after returning from the Antarctic. In deferring to David, Scott hailed him as “probably the best judge in the world of the work which remains to be done and of the men who should be selected to do it.”35 All three geologists were under thirty when Terra Nova sailed and were destined for long and distinguished careers in science.
Having three geologists served Scott’s original plan for the expedition. He envisioned it having two winter bases: a small one on King Edward VII Land at the Ice Barrier’s east end and a large one on Ross Island near the barrier’s west end. The Ross Island base, which Scott placed at Cape Evans midway between Discovery’s Hut Point and Nimrod’s Cape Royds, would serve as the starting point both for his own journey south to the pole and for excursions west into Victoria Land. He planned to send one geologist in each of three directions—east, south, and west—with the senior one, Taylor, going south with the Polar Party as far as Beardmore Glacier. Apparently because of tensions between himself and Taylor, Scott decided to take the expedition’s physicist, Charles Wright, instead of a geologist on his Polar Journey. This left two geologists, Taylor and Debenham, to go west.
The third geologist, Priestley, joined the Eastern Party that was supposed to explore King Edward VII Land, with an eye toward surveying the Ice Barrier’s unknown east side. To lead this party, Scott picked Royal Navy Lieutenant Victor Campbell, whom Debenham described as “the best all round” member of the expedition save Wilson.36 Sailing aboard Terra Nova in search of a wintering site, this party came across Amundsen’s base at Bay of Whales. Conceding the region to the Norwegians, the Eastern Party became the Northern Party, with its winter base at Victoria Land’s Cape Adare, where Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross expedition wintered in 1899. The party’s instructions had listed Smith’s Inlet, on the mainland west of Cape Adare, as a back-up wintering site, but it proved inaccessible. Priestley could do little original geological fieldwork from Cape Adare—a narrow spit of land cut off by cliffs and water from the mainland. The cape’s geology was well known from collections brought back by Borchgrevink. Campbell objected to wintering there, but after steaming to King Edward VII Land and back, Terra Nova was low on coal for the voyage to New Zealand, and its captain insisted on offloading the party. Scott’s hopes that it would explore the Southern Ocean coast westward beyond Cape North never materialized.
All in all, Scott had sketched out a highly ambitious plan for science. Certainly the Discovery and Nimrod expeditions had not attempted anything so bold, and Amundsen did not even offer a pretense of science to mask his polar ambitions. “Doubtless there are those who will criticize this provision in view of its published objective—that of reaching the South Pole,” Scott said of the role for science in his expedition. “But I believe that the more intelligent section of the community will heartily approve of the endeavour to achieve the greatest possible scientific harvest which the circumstances permit.” In addition to the planned excursions from base, Scott took along personnel and equipment to resume the ongoing scientific observations that had marked the Discovery expedition, with Wright taking geodetic and magnetic readings; meteorologist George Simpson keeping weather records; marine biologist Dennis Lillie tow-netting, trawling, and dredging at sea; and invertebrate zoologist Edward Nelson monitoring the marine life and tides in the vicinity of winter quarters. When Terra Nova’s third officer, Scott’s brother-in-law Wilfred Bruce, met Amundsen and his men at the Bay of Whales, he recognized the difference between them and Scott’s team. “They have 120 dogs, and are going for the Pole! No science, no nothing, just the Pole!” he warned. “If their dogs are a success, they are more than likely to be there first.”37
Tapped to lead the Western Party for two sledging seasons, Taylor opened his account of its journeys by describing its area of operations as seen from the expedition’s main base. “As you stand on Cape Evans with your back to the steam cloud of Erebus,” he wrote, “you see across McMurdo Sound a glorious range of mountains running due north and south and rising to 13,000 feet in the south-west.” He called them the Western Mountains, but they were part of a range then known to run from Cape Adare in the north at least to Beardmore Glacier in the south and later found to extend across the continent to the Weddell Sea. “Their southern limit,” he wrote of the mountains in plain sight of Cape Evans, “is the extinct volcanic cone of Discovery, and far to the north one can follow the same range of snow-clad peaks until it merges with the gray line of the horizon.” Koettlitz Glacier stood at the base of Mount Discovery in the south; Granite Harbor lay just over the horizon in the north. Scott gave Taylor and Debenham the task of conducting a geological survey of the mountainous region between these two landmarks, working the southern part in the short first summer and the northern part in the long second summer.38
Getting to work quickly, Taylor’s group headed first for the Dry Valley in the heart of the Western Mountains. Terra Nova had reached Cape Evans on January 4, 1911—two weeks after the summer solstice. Just twenty-three days later, the Western Party launched its initial excursion, which lasted seven weeks. Ferried across McMurdo Sound to Butter Point by Terra Nova on January 27, the party promptly struck west into the interior. “We were to ascend Ferrar Glacier[,] turn around into Dry Valley and explore it thoroughly,” Debenham wrote. “Capt. Scott had entered it from the West [in 1903] and Priestley from the East [in 1909] but no real exploration had been done.”39
“The object of your journey will be the geological exploration of the region between the Dry Valley and the Koettlitz Glacier,” Scott had instructed Taylor at its outset. After surveying the Dry Valley, therefore, the party would head south to the broad Koettlitz Glacier and then return to Ross Island by way of the ice-covered southern end of McMurdo Sound. Because of his interest in the physics of ice, Wright joined Taylor and Debenham on this first Western Journey, which did not overlap with Scott’s Polar Journey. Like Wright, Taylor had more interest in glaciers and physical geography than in rocks and fossils. “He left the more orthodox branches of geology to me entirely, including the collection of samples,” Debenham noted.40 Edgar Evans, who had codiscovered the Dry Valley with Scott and Lashly in 1903, completed the four-person team. They started with a half-ton of supplies and equipment, which they man-hauled on two heavy sledges, but depoted many items, including food, along the way and supplemented their diet with fresh seal meat. With winter coming on, they expected the weather to deteriorate as they traveled and knew that they would add rock specimens to their load.
The party reached the Dry Valley by the customary route—up the Ferrar Glacier to its fork, then down the northern arm. Carefully examining this fork, Taylor determined that two glaciers came together above this point, temporarily uniting “after the fashion of the Siamese twins,” and then split apart, with the Ferrar continuing east to the sea and the other turning north to terminate at the Dry Valley. When Taylor later described this dynamic to Scott and explained that the two glaciers did not mix, Scott named the new glacier, and thus its valley, for Taylor. In his diary, Debenham depicted the scenery as “absolutely ripping.”41
“To our surprise—after five days’ pulling over heavy snow in the Ferrar Glacier—we found no snow in the adjoining valley!” Taylor wrote of his introduction to the place that would bear his name. “Imagine a valley four miles wide, 3000 feet deep, and 25 miles long without a patch of snow—and this in the Antarctic in latitude 77 1/2°S.” Above the glacier’s snout, the valley was carpeted with steep, bare ice sliced lengthwise by meltwater surface streams. “The sledge was almost running away from us,” Debenham wrote of the party’s steep descent.42
After camping for two days above the snout, mapping the valley’s upper reaches and collecting rock samples, the party dropped into valley’s glacier-free lower part. “As we could not take the sledge beyond the glacier,” Taylor noted, “we packed up the tent and sleeping-bags with five days’ food and our instruments, and carried them down toward the sea.” Lacking backpacks, they lugged their supplies on a strap or pole slung over one shoulder or in a swagman’s bundle draped over both front and back. “We looked like a gang of gypsies,” Wright observed. He likened Taylor to “a shop Santa Claus hung about with telescope, android, camera, fur gloves and with some grub.” Debenham added, “This pack humping down Dry Valley was a new departure in Antarctic work, it generally being considered impossible to go away from the sledges for more than a few hours.” The conditions proved ideal for the experiment. “It was warm weather,” Taylor noted, “most of the time we spent in Dry Valley—rising sometimes above freezing-point—and everywhere streams were tinkling among the black boulders.” Everyone seemed delighted with the place: Wright and Evans frequently broke into song.43
The party lingered in the valley for four days, surveying its basic features and fixing its location in relation to known landmarks. The glacier had gouged out the Dry Valley during a period of deep glaciation, Taylor reasoned. The presence of extruded lava on glaciated walls showed that volcanoes had erupted here since the glacier retreated. Granite predominated at the valley’s base, with sedimentary layers and dolerite sheets appearing higher up to create a palette of earth tones. The men repeatedly scaled the ridges to gain a wide view or examine side glaciers. Debenham made an extensive collection of geological samples, while Taylor tried his hand at panning for gold. “There were numerous quartz ‘leads’ in the slates and metamorphic gneisses,” he wrote, “which is always promising, and furnishes the ‘country rock’ of most gold fields. But the quartz was too glistening and pure.”44 While he found no minerals of commercial value, the party was amused by the prospect of a gold rush to Antarctica. Fossils also proved elusive, a fact Taylor blamed on the folded and altered state of the sedimentary rock. On February 7, after traveling nearly to the sea, the men retraced their steps to the glacier, retrieved their sledge, and headed down Ferrar Glacier to Butter Point.
Traveling south and east from Butter Point, Taylor’s party explored ice features along the coast, in Koettlitz Glacier’s deep delta, and around the Ice Barrier’s ragged edge linking Victoria Land to Ross Island. After enjoying idyllic conditions in the Dry Valley, Debenham noted, “We are beginning to experience real Antarctic troubles and we don’t find them pleasant.” The return trip took longer than expected because the rotten late-summer sea ice on McMurdo Sound forced the party south into nearly impassible regions of sharp pinnacle ice and soft snow mixed with glacial till. “With the big sledge much of the work was a stand and pull game,” Wright noted. “The trouble was largely the sand blown over everything—even the heavy snow drifts into which one sinks two feet or so.”45 Evans described it as the worst sledging surface he had ever encountered—and he had been on Scott’s brutal 1903 Western Sledge Journey. “It took us seven days to do the twenty miles to Hut Pt,” Debenham wrote.46 When the men tried cutting across patches of intact sea ice, killer whales harried their efforts by battering the floe. With the approach of winter, temperatures dipped far below zero Fahrenheit.
By noon on March 10, Ross Island seemed so close across the sea ice that Taylor spoke of reaching it by nightfall. Open-water leads sent the men south again, however, and into the teeth of a blizzard. When they finally arrived at Hut Point four days later, they found Scott and twelve others waiting for new sea ice to form so that they could cover the remaining twelve miles to Cape Evans after a near-catastrophic trip to depot supplies on the Ice Barrier for the next summer’s Polar Journey. Scott’s group had lost most of its ponies and nearly some human lives on the rotten sea ice below Hut Point: ice similar to what the Western Party had almost tried to cross. The combined group—seventeen men in all—remained at Hut Point for over a month until stable sea ice reformed. Even then, a blizzard turned what should have been a half-day hike to Cape Evans into a three-day ordeal. When Taylor blamed Scott for this final foul-up, Scott exploded. Describing the incident as a “very bad fracas,” Debenham wrote about Scott, “What he decides is often enough the right thing I expect, but he loses all control of his tongue and makes us all feel wild.”47 Once back at Cape Evans, the Western Party remained there until spring, when Taylor again led men along the Victoria Land coast before leaving the expedition early on Terra Nova’s 1912 relief voyage.
Although more ambitious than its first journey because of the area traversed, the Western Party’s second journey dealt more with glaciers and physical geography than with rocks and fossils. This time, Petty Officer Robert Forde and Norwegian ski expert Tryggve Gran accompanied Taylor and Debenham. Hauling two heavy sledges, they left Cape Evans on November 14, 1911, crossed the sea ice to Butter Point, and then tracked the coast north on the sea ice for fifty miles to Granite Harbor. “Looking to the north we could see nothing but a great barrier wall of ice along the coast,” Taylor wrote about the broad face of Piedmont Glacier, which spilled over most of the shoreline from Butter Point to Granite Harbor. “Except on the capes, no rock was exposed.” As a result, he added, “I don’t take very full geological notes for obvious reasons—we only see a piece of rock about every three days!” They focused instead on surveying. “We had two separate instruments,” Taylor wrote, “a theodolite and a plane-table. With the former I was able to fix far-distant peaks with considerable accuracy, and also by observations on the sun to determine the latitude and longitude of the main stations of our survey. With the plane-table Debenham carried out a unique detailed survey of the coast-line.” He hailed this topographical map as the journey’s chief achievement in physical geography.48
The men reached Granite Harbor on November 27 and settled in for a seven-week stay to study that fjordlike bay in depth. For cooking, sleeping, and storing gear, they built a stone hut on a narrow point of land poking into the bay. “We named the latter Cape Geology, in memory of the chief object of our journey, though we had been able to do very little scientific work so far,” Taylor wrote.49 They surveyed the coast, examined the glacial tongue bisecting the bay, and explored the surrounding granite cliffs and hanging glaciers. Their best chance to geologize came in late December, when they made a ten-day excursion up Mackay Glacier, the massive ice flow that had carved out Granite Harbor. On Mount Suess, a 4,500-foot stranded peakpoking through the glacial ice about ten miles inland, they found the rocks they wanted.
“There was an extraordinary mixture of dolerite and sandstone all over,” Taylor wrote about the exposed ridge behind Mount Suess, where the party camped. “The sandstone . . . did not look hopeful for fossils. However, there was some shale near the tent, which looked more hopeful. We did not find much beyond worm-casts and ripplemarks at first.” He then went off to survey the ridge while Debenham remained behind to examine the shale. By the time Taylor returned, Debenham had hit pay dirt. “He had found some vesicular horny plates,” Taylor noted, which later “were identified as the armour-plate of primitive fish, and probably of Devonian age.” More searching turned up other fish plates, including two-inch-long pieces with distinct keels that Taylor likened to “the red tiles capping a roof-ridge.” These finds added a new dimension to Antarctica’s geologic time scale, he explained, “for Cambrian limestones were known, and Permian coal-measures were indicated by Shackleton’s specimens. These fish plates identified another set of sediments midway between them.” Along the ridge, Debenham also found brown coal.50
Following its advance instructions, the Western Party returned to Granite Harbor in early January. Scott had directed Terra Nova to pick up the party by January 15 and reposition it farther north on the coast for an added month of fieldwork. The day came and went without any sign of Terra Nova. When the ship finally appeared on January 20, it could not push through the late-summer sea ice to pick up the men, and they could not cross the rotten ice to reach it. “We must be an uncommon group of men not to tear out each other’s hair in sheer frustration,” Gran wrote in his diary for January 28. By month’s end, the ship had disappeared and the men began to doubt that it would return. “We had plenty of seal meat and biscuit, but all the other stores were approaching their last week,” Taylor noted. He decided to lead his men south, over the Piedmont Glacier, toward Butter Point, where the party had stored supplies and the ship could perhaps reach them. “We took nothing but what we stood up in, and our notes and the instruments,” Taylor wrote. If all else failed, the party could carry on along the Ice Barrier’s sea edge to Ross Island, as it did the previous year. The grueling trek over deeply creviced glaciers finally ended on February 15, when Terra Nova rescued the party some fifteen miles south of Butter Point.51
After rescuing the Western Party, the ship sailed north to retrieve Campbell’s Northern Party, which it had repositioned to Terra Nova Bay in early January for six weeks of fieldwork following the wasted winter at Cape Adare. At the outlet of several steep glaciers, with moraines rich in debris from the high mountains, the region around Terra Nova Bay was ideal for summer fieldwork but dreadful for a winter camp. Campbell’s hapless men experienced both extremes. Within the first month of their arrival, Priestley and Campbell discovered fossil-bearing sandstone rocks in the moraines, including several containing fossilized wood. When the scheduled departure date of February 18 arrived, however, the ship could not force its way to shore through the newly forming sea ice. It tried twice more in early March, but the captain finally gave up and steamed north to New Zealand for a second winter. “Campbell has certainly had very bad luck throughout,” Debenham commented in his diary for March 4.52 He did not know the half of it. The Northern Party’s summer of fieldwork gave way to a winter of survival.
Of course, Scott’s Polar Party also did not return on schedule in the summer of 1912, forcing the expedition to stay in place for a second winter. Among the scientists, Taylor and Simpson went home on Terra Nova in March and Lillie always worked from aboard ship, but the others remained south with most of the officers and men. Debenham did not know of Priestley’s finds at Terra Nova Bay until the Northern Party returned, but during the winter he received the geological specimens collected by a support party that had accompanied Scott as far as the summit of Beardmore Glacier. “These had mainly been collected in the scattered moraine under Cloud-maker,” a towering mountain on Beardmore’s northern flank, the support party’s leader, Edward Atkinson, reported. “To [Debenham’s] surprise and joy several fossils of plants and small marine animals were found in some of these.”53 Then Priestley appeared in November with yet more Paleozoic fossils, which further filled out the story of Antarctica’s temperate past. Glossopteris fossil finds came next. Following the Northern Party’s near-miraculous return, only the waiting now remained for news of the Polar Party’s fate. Having missed the chance to climb Mount Erebus with Shackleton’s men, Priestley took this opportunity to lead an excursion up the volcano. He collected rock specimens and photographed the crater while Debenham surveyed the cone. This final outing marked the end of the expedition’s geological fieldwork.
By the fall of 1913, Taylor, Debenham, Priestley, and Wright had reassembled for graduate studies at Cambridge, where they reflected on what they had learned about Antarctic geology. “It is now fifteen years since the first landing was made on the mainland of South Victoria Land,” Debenham wrote in 1913. “The tale must necessarily be incomplete, for the difficulties confronting geological investigation in those regions are naturally considerable, but enough has been done to warrant a preliminary interpretation of the known facts.”54 Clearly Antarctica was a continental landmass that once was connected to the other southern continents. This much was settled by the work of the three expeditions.
Comparison of the east coast of Victoria Land with the east coast of Queensland, Australia, by Terra Nova expedition geologist Griffith Taylor, from Scott’s Last Expedition (New York, 1913).
Using fossils finds and evidence of stratification, the geologists pieced together the region’s past. As Ferrar had found, the gneiss, schist, and crystalline limestone came first, laid down underwater in a pre-Cambrian era. “The folding and heating of the rocks has since quite destroyed all evidence of the animal or vegetable life of that time,” Debenham observed, “though numbers of small graphite particles, found in the crystalline limestone, may be the remnants of carbonaceous growth in the ancient coral reef.” Following a long gap presumably caused by uplift of the land above sea level, a layer of limestone from the Beardmore region showed marine fossils from the Cambrian period. A profusion of igneous granites came next, the geologists induced, intruding during a time of uplift after deposit of the Cambrian limestone and before deposit of the late Paleozoic Beacon Sandstone, which reappeared at various sites along with shale, coal, or limestone. “There can be little doubt that these all represent deposits of approximately the same period under slightly different conditions,” Debenham wrote. Next came the dark, igneous dolerite sill, “which stands out on cliff faces, produces pinnacled mountains, and generally dominates the topography.” This sill eroded in diverse and dramatic ways to create Victoria Land’s striking landscape. Fossils found during the Terra Nova expedition fleshed out the story. “The fish-remains from Mt. Suess,” a report from that expedition stated, “point to a Devonian horizon, while the beds containing fragmentary leaves of Glossopteris, viewed in the light of the geological ranged of the genus in other parts of the world, may be as old as Upper Carboniferous or as late as the Rhaetic period.”55
The region’s distinctive modern features, the geologists surmised, arose on this foundation. Taylor compared Victoria Land to Queensland in his native Australia, with a sharp fault line running along the east coast. Breaking along this line probably in the early Cenozoic Era, a high plateau fronted by a dramatic coastal range uplifted in the west while a shallow sea basin sank in the east. “Simultaneously with, and probably as an effect of this faulting, there occurred a great outburst of volcanic energy along the line of breaking,” Debenham suggested. “This outburst is now just dying out, only two volcanoes being still active, Mt. Erebus on Ross Island, and Sturge Island in the Belleny Group.” The glaciers came after this uplift, Taylor reasoned, but before the volcanic activity subsided as the region cooled. “We know from the fossils that warmer conditions existed in Mesozoic times in Antarctica,” he wrote.56 The way Taylor and Wright read the glaciers, however, the cooling seemed over and a new warming under way. Building on the work of prior explorers, their study of Antarctic ice would conclude a final chapter in the science of the Discovery, Nimrod, and Terra Nova expeditions.
Polar journey of Robert Scott, Birdie Bowers, Edgar Evans, Titus Oates, and Edward Wilson (1911–12), from Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World (New York, 1922).
