JAMIE SCOTT AND Quintin Riley outfitted two sledges, rounded up the huskies, and harnessed them into their leads. The mission on which they were about to set out was in one sense a familiar one. Members of the team had performed it three times the previous autumn. But this time a hectic urgency hung over their preparations. A single man, having passed the winter alone, lay waiting in the big domed tent that served as the expedition’s Ice Cap Station. August Courtauld, who had volunteered for the solo vigil at the beginning of December, needed to be relieved from a duty the likes of which had never before been attempted anywhere on earth.
The date was March 1, 1931. From the expedition base camp in a nestling fjord on the east coast of Greenland, Scott and Riley needed to climb through the steep glacial headwall that had given the team fits on every previous foray, then head across the blank immensity of the ice cap, following the red flags planted in the snow at every half mile, until they reached the station, 130 miles inland and 8,200 feet above sea level. The five men who had pioneered the route in August 1930 had spent two weeks in the effort. Scott and Riley hoped their own relief journey would take no longer.
The expedition had chosen as its clunky title the British Arctic Air Route Expedition, acronymed as BAARE. It comprised fourteen men, all but one in their twenties, most of them students or graduates from Cambridge University. Among them, only Courtauld had been to Greenland before, on a pair of modest probes of the ice pack–tormented east coast. But Courtauld was not the expedition leader. That man was Henry George Watkins, nicknamed “Gino” since childhood (despite no family ties to Italy). The BAARE was entirely Watkins’s campaign, a vastly ambitious exploratory attack on the largest island in the world—and one of the least known parts of the globe. Gino devised seven separate mini-expeditions to be carried out across the span of sixteen months. By 1930 he was already the veteran of two previous probes of the geographical unknown that he had organized himself, to Svalbard in the high Arctic and Labrador on the eastern coast of North America. Yet at the outset of the BAARE, Watkins was only twenty-three years old—the youngest of all its members. His youth notwithstanding, Gino’s assault on Greenland would constitute the most daring and fruitful British expedition to the Far North during the previous half century, comparable in its stature among the nation’s polar exploits only to the Antarctic missions of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton two decades earlier.
More than a century after their deaths, Scott and Shackleton are enshrined as legendary explorers. Yet, as even his admirers admit, Gino Watkins has lapsed into the limbo of the “forgotten hero.” The reasons are several. By dying in the early days of his fourth expedition in a fluke accident at the age of twenty-five, he blazed a track across the heavens that winked out like that of a meteor that never reaches earth. Unlike Scott and Shackleton, Watkins was too busy planning each subsequent jaunt to write more than a couple of dry articles for the Geographical Journal. The expedition books were written by his teammates.
Gino remains in some sense the Mozart of Arctic endeavor, the child prodigy who died before his full genius could flower. His schemes were wildly, even arrogantly, bold. Yet he backed up his boasts with an adaptive skill that far surpassed Scott’s or Shackleton’s (who, despite their years in the ice and snow, never learned how to build an igloo or how to hitch dogs to their sledges). With three major expeditions under his belt by the age of twenty-four, Watkins (unlike Scott and Shackleton) had never lost a man.
As multipronged as the BAARE’s goals were, its core feature was the Ice Cap Station. The 660,000-square-mile sprawl of permanent ice that covers all of Greenland but for its thin coastal margins makes it, with its partner in Antarctica, one of the two greatest ice sheets in the world. And its mean altitude of 7,000 feet renders it one of the coldest and most forbidding regions on earth. By 1930, the mystery of the atmosphere above the ice cap was seen by scientists as promising the key to the strange ocean currents that swept the Atlantic, and indeed to the climate of the eastern Arctic itself. The Inuit, who had colonized the coasts of Greenland centuries, maybe millennia, before Norsemen discovered the island, never (as far as we know) dared venture onto the ice cap. Inuit legends populated that interior with monsters, giants, and malign spirits, who despite their remote domain interfered at all turns with human affairs. These were not vague, ethereal beings, but vividly physical creatures, such as the timertsit, a giant with a massive lower jaw from which hung a stone lamp and heating bowl for cooking humans alive.
The ice cap was first traversed in 1888 by a team led by the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. By 1930, it had been crossed several more times by Europeans on even longer routes. But no one had ever tried to winter over in that forbidding center, let alone manage a weather station through twelve continuous months.
Besides that meteorological program, Gino had another scheme in view, the one that supplied the “air route” in the BAARE title. He had noted (as had others) that the shortest line from Britain or western Europe to North America was an arc across the Arctic. Having already earned his own pilot’s license, Watkins now laid out a plan to pioneer such a route. In 1930, the idea of regular passenger flights across the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean (much less the Pacific) seemed hopelessly futuristic. Charles Lindbergh had completed his daring solo flight from New York to Paris only three years earlier, carrying the bare minimum of food and survival gear to offset the necessary fuel.
Any air route from the Old World to the New, then, would have to proceed in short jaunts hopscotching between landing fields not more than 500 miles apart. So Gino sketched a seven-part itinerary: London to the Faroe Islands to Reykjavík to Angmagssalik on the east coast of Greenland; then across Greenland to Disko Bay on the west coast, from which another leg would cross Baffin Island to land near Cape Wolstenholme on Hudson Bay; and thence to Fort Churchill and Winnipeg. The great unknown factor for future pilots along this route lay in the high Greenland ice cap. Thus the year-round weather station might also monitor the storms and winds and snowfall that could threaten or even doom an Arctic air route. Watkins had bought two de Havilland DH60G Gypsy Moth airplanes, carried them in crates to Greenland, and assembled them at base camp. In his grand plan, toward the end of expedition, he would pilot the maiden flight himself from Angmagssalik to Winnipeg.
Although scientific and commercial motives seemed to dictate the aims of the BAARE, closer to Gino’s heart (and to those of his teammates, of whom only one was a scientist) was the old itch to explore, to discover worlds that no one before had ever seen. That itch had first been awakened at nineteen, when, still a freshman, he had attended a lecture by Cambridge don Raymond Priestley, who told stories of his days with both Scott and Shackleton in the Antarctic. Leaving the lecture with his school chum Quintin Riley, Watkins blurted out, “I think we’d better go to the Arctic.”
Four years later, the chance to venture where human beings had never been, to tear the veil from the unknown, was all that Gino Watkins lived for.
* * *
On March 1, Scott and Riley could not have gotten off to a worse start. The passage through the glacial headwall, only two miles from base, nearly stopped them cold. The previous August, teams had seen the dogs’ feet cut and torn on the jagged ice there, and it turned out that the supply of canvas canine booties had been understocked by 75 percent. Even with men hauling along with dogs, the sledges had slid back down the slope or capsized. It finally took a winch and the installation of fixed ropes to get the craft and loads up the headwall, which in disgust the team nicknamed Buggery Bank (euphemized in print as Bugbear Bank).
Now Scott and Riley had to reckon with the weeks in February of gales that had worn the whole surface (even beyond Buggery) “as hard as marble” with “even more formidable ditches and banks.” Having managed to crest the headwall, the two men pushed on to the Big Flag depot, fifteen miles from the coast. This massive supply cache, crowned with a tall flag, was the key to the whole long route to the Ice Cap Station. But only a mile beyond Big Flag, Scott saw his sledge, battered by rock-hard ice, break in half. There was nothing to do but retreat to base camp, which the two disheartened men reached the next day.
Scott asked Watkins to assign another man for the second attempt. With three sledges instead of two, the trio could afford to lose one and still forge on. Gino chose Martin Lindsay, the tallest man in the team and one of the strongest, for the task.
On March 4, the three men set out again. This time they did not even reach the Big Flag depot. The morning had been beautiful, but by midday they were engulfed in a snowstorm so dense they feared they would lose the track. Only three miles beyond Buggery Bank, they called a halt and pitched their lightweight tent. Certain they would reach Big Flag and the camping gear deposited there that day, the men had brought only sleeping bags and a light lunch of biscuits and chocolate. At the last minute, on a whim, Riley had added thirty more biscuits to his lunch bag.
The storm raged on for four days. With no boxes or gear to weigh down the skirts of the tent, the men feared that their shelter would be ripped away if they even dared to try to pack up. They had no Primus stove, so they melted snow cup by cup over a candle flame. As Lindsay reported, “This was a tedious business and it was also a dirty one, for our hands and faces were soon black with soot. The biscuits got fewer and fewer.”
Big Flag was only two miles away—“on a fine day we could have seen [it] from where we lay”—but on the fourth morning the trio gave up. The sledges were utterly buried under new snow. With their only tools, a knife and a cooking pot, they dug out a single sledge and harnessed all the dogs to it. They collapsed the tent and left it there. Sinking knee-deep even on snowshoes, with the dogs so helpless they “might almost have been swimming,” Scott’s party at last abandoned the sledge and made a desperate dash back to base camp, arriving late at night.
A week had been wasted getting nowhere. It was not until March 9 that the relief team launched their third attempt.
Meanwhile, 130 miles away, Augustine Courtauld (known to all his friends as “August”) was beginning to wonder if he had been abandoned. It had not been part of the original plan to have him monitor the weather station solo through the winter. Watkins’s scheme called for rotating teams of two men each to man the station for at most two months at a time. That design worked for the first two pairs, from August through November 1930, though the occupants found their isolation on the featureless plateau spooky and disturbing.
The third resupply, a six-man team led by F. Spencer (Freddy) Chapman, overcame one obstacle after another, as fierce storms and whiteout marooned them in their tents for days at a time, while the dogs grew weak from the toil and barely adequate rations. Having set out on October 25, the team made such poor progress that on November 11 Chapman sent three men back to base to save fuel and food. The remaining trio arrived at the Ice Cap Station only on December 3. A trip that had been expected to take two weeks ended up stretching across five, as darkness and cold intensified day by day. On December 3, knowing they were near the station but crisscrossing the featureless waste unable to find it, the party grew frantic from “frightful disappointment.” At last, navigating in the dark by Arcturus and Venus, Chapman stumbled upon the domed tent and recording gauges “a hundred yards to the left of where they should have been.” The occupants, “at first refusing to believe it could be the relief party arriving,” were overjoyed to be met by their comrades.
By December 3, the relief team had only one day’s rations left for the dogs. The dash back to base camp would be an ordeal under the best conditions. The plan had been for August Courtauld and Lawrence Wager—the team’s geologist and its best mountaineer—to occupy the station through the next shift. But the relief party had had to break into food boxes meant for the third pair of monitors. There were not enough provisions and fuel left for another shift, especially given the difficulty faced by the third resupply mission in just getting there.
It looked as though the station would have to be abandoned. The central campaign of the BAARE teetered on the verge of wreckage.
At this point, Courtauld made an astounding offer. He would be willing to serve the next shift alone. For one man, food and fuel ought to be adequate through mid-March, or, stretching the supplies paper-thin, even into early May.
The pair who had just been relieved at the Ice Cap Station were aghast. Through the night of December 3–4, ensconced in the domed tent, all six men argued back and forth. The station pair rehashed a couple of incidents during their stint in which one man had gotten into trouble, only to be helped to safety by his partner. The psychological toll alone had been extreme. It seemed to them an unimaginable trial for a solo occupant.
In his mild-mannered, almost diffident way, Courtauld persisted in his offer. He rather liked being alone, he said. He cited Gino himself on trappers in Labrador who wintered alone in remote camps without mishap. Courtauld was utterly committed to the expedition’s goal: in Chapman’s telling, he argued that “the winter, when nobody had ever lived on the ice cap, was the most important season for recording the weather.”
Yet another consideration mitigated against the brazen proposal. On the November journey up to the station, Courtauld had developed frostbite of both big toes and fingers, the latter swollen so badly that he couldn’t undo his buttons. Almost perversely, he now used those infirmities to further his case: he didn’t relish the thought of getting worse frostbite on the trek back to base.
At last the other five men gave in. On December 5, Courtauld saw his teammates sledge away. “It was bitterly cold and I didn’t watch them long,” he wrote in his diary. “Coming out an hour later I could just see them as a speck in the distance. Now I am quite alone. Not a dog or even a mosquito to look at.”
Three months later, on March 9, 1931, Scott, Riley, and Lindsay launched their third effort to get to the station and relieve Courtauld. They packed their anxiety into their sledge-loads. Lindsay and Riley knew what it was like to man the Ice Cap Station, for they had served as the first pair of monitors for five weeks after August 30, 1930. They had found the accommodations “very snug and comfortable”; yet as their stint drew toward its end, the inevitable malaise seized their spirits, and they spent many an hour discussing whether they could hike back to base camp without dogs or sledges if no relief party came.
Yet now, in March 1931, Scott, Lindsay, and Riley could not imagine that their own journey might face greater hardships than those Chapman’s team had battled the previous November. But that is what happened.
In November, Chapman and crew had brought along a wireless set, in hopes of setting up radio communications between base and Ice Cap Station. The device, however, made a monstrous sledge load, the generator alone weighing 150 pounds. When the team reached a supply depot at Flag 56, some thirty miles out, they gave up on the wireless set and left it there. Despite that seemingly secure cache, the set was never found again.
Now Scott’s three-man party faced another grim choice. To determine latitude, observations with a theodolite were sufficient—except during storms. But longitude was a far trickier matter. The team had time-set devices, essentially accurate chronometers for determining mean difference from Greenwich. But these gizmos were also bulky, heavy, and fragile; so, mindful of the desperate conditions of the two botched forays, Scott decided to leave them at base camp. The relief party would count on the red flags every half mile, but to know how far west they had gone, they must rely on a time-honored contraption. The sledge wheel was just that: a circular tire lashed to one of the sledges, which counted up the distance traveled foot by uncertain foot. Crude though it sounds, the apparatus had faithfully served many another polar expedition.
By pushing hard on the good days, Scott’s team covered half the distance to the Ice Cap Station in eleven days. From there on, though, their advance sputtered. Many of the half-mile flag markers had disappeared, either blown away or covered by drifts. Scott now attempted even more careful theodolite readings, vexed by a half dozen problems, from the nonappearance of the sun to the difficulty of stabilizing the three tripod legs evenly in the snow to thawing the instrument inside the tent to extract its reading. In the lacunae between red flags, the sledges wove right and left of course, adding false distance to the sledge-wheel count.
Scott’s plan was now to reach the exact latitude of the station (which had been precisely determined) at a point some miles east of the station, then sweep methodically along that contour to a point well beyond where the domed tent ought to be, recheck the latitude, then sweep back, the three men taking separate routes hundreds of feet apart. On March 27 the trio camped at a point they judged to be nine or ten miles east of the station, smack on the right latitude. The telltale marker for the station was a big Union Jack hoisted on a sturdy pole high above the tent. In all the white smear of the world, that landmark ought to stand out plain, visible from a distance.
But now the men swept back and forth for almost three weeks, though confined to their tent by storms on half of the days, and found nothing. Hope gave way to desperation, then to despair. It even occurred to the searchers to blame Courtauld for his disappearance. Wrote Lindsay, “For the last two miles we were all the time expecting to see the station over the next rise. We were confident that we had not passed it by more than half a mile; but we had seen no sign of it. It was difficult to understand how Courtauld could have come to let the station get so drifted over—unless he had met with some misadventure.”
At last they gave up. On their demoralized run back to base, they had to kill two of the huskies to feed the others. Another dog gave birth to a puppy, promptly devoured by other dogs. The men’s own rations had long since been cut to two-thirds.
It was not until April 17 that the team got back to base, “having wandered for forty days in the wilderness,” as Lindsay put it, echoing the Gospel of Matthew. Entering the hut, they broke the bad news to their stunned teammates.
Alone among the men gathered at base, Watkins remained sanguine. He laid out no blame for the team’s failure, but at once started to put together a fourth team, to be led by himself. “He was convinced that Courtauld was all right,” recorded Lindsay, “and nothing could shake his faith.”
Through December 1930 and January 1931, Courtauld had adjusted well to his solitude. His only chores were to crawl out of the tent at regular intervals six times a day and read and record the gauges, and while that gave structure to his life, during storms those errands could become brutal tasks. Yet lying in his sleeping bag, he felt almost lazy, as he contemplated the rigorous work the rest of the BAARE team must be performing.
Courtauld voraciously tackled the library of books stashed in the big tent, reading and rereading his favorites, such as The Forsyte Saga or Jane Eyre. In his thoughts and his diary, he sent loving messages to Mollie Montgomerie, the sweetheart who had become his fiancée shortly before the expedition. Yet as the winter crept on and darkness reigned over the plateau, he grew anxious about the prospect of relief. Unwilling to dwell in ambiguity, he decided that March 15 would be the deadline by which he would expect the relief team to arrive, and at first he adjusted his food intake and the supply of precious tobacco for his pipe accordingly (with a small extra allowance in case his deadline proved wrong).
Gino himself had designed the station. The big domed tent in which the monitors lived was nine feet wide by seven feet tall, its walls supported by strong bamboo wands. Over that a separate fly was draped, guyed tight so that an ample space between tent and covering ensured against snow building up on the walls. A single metal pipe two inches in diameter extended from the roof, delivering life-saving air if the tent somehow got smothered in snow. Around the tent, all kinds of measuring devices—a comb to gauge cloud speed, a cup anemometer to record the force of wind, snow-depth gauges, a maximum-minimum thermometer, and a barograph—occupied their own stations in little snow-block shelters a few feet away from the living quarters.
The crucial design innovation Watkins had made was to provide no door in the walls of the tent, but instead a trap door in the floor that gave onto a subsurface snow tunnel along which the monitor of the day would crawl and emerge from its mouth near the gauges. This worked superbly for the first two teams and through Courtauld’s first few weeks, for in the worst storms none of the blown snow made its way inside the tent. But that same innovation would prove to be the station’s lethal flaw.
In January a hurricane piled snow so thick in the far end of the tunnel that Courtauld had to try to dig it out from inside. When he couldn’t manage that, he dug a sideways tunnel and emerged next to the gauges. Then he stuffed an empty provision box into place in the new tunnel exit, hoping to forestall another blockage. Despite the fix, that glitch in Watkins’s station design plunged Courtauld into dark broodings. In his diary, for the first time he contemplated the possibility of dying during his vigil.
March 15 came and went with no sign of a relief party. After March 27, during the weeks that Scott’s team swept the terrain where the station, they were sure, must stand, Courtauld never heard a sound. Before then, since late February, each time he had emerged to read the gauges, his eyes had swept the eastern horizon hoping to spot the distant speck of the arriving team. In the many hours of down time inside the tent, he faithfully recorded his doings—as well as his hopes and fears—in his diary. Like all Englishmen of his generation, Courtauld had grown up with the legend of the deaths of Robert Falcon Scott’s five-man party returning from the South Pole in February 1912. Only the discovery of Scott’s diary nine months later had revealed the story of the team’s demise in all its tragic glory.
After the January blockage of the original tunnel, each time Courtauld crawled out the side tunnel, it too filled with blowing snow. He pondered carving a shaft straight up from mid-tunnel to the surface, but, realizing that some eight feet of snow covered it, judged the task impossible. In the side tunnel he was soon reduced to a tight caver’s crawl, and from that prone position it took all his strength to push open the hatch door he had improvised with the empty ration box.
On March 17, while Scott’s trio were still struggling up the plateau near the halfway point of the long route, disaster struck. Another fierce gale swept the polar plateau, piling new drifts everywhere. One of them covered the ration-box escape hatch. When Courtauld tried to push it out, he couldn’t move it an inch. The weight of snow on top of it had turned the tunnel into a locked vault. During the next few days he tried to whittle away at the blockage with a knife, but the plug turned to solid ice. “So I am completely buried,” he wrote in his diary.
Forget the gauge readings. From now on, all Courtauld could do was lie helpless and wait for the relief party to find him. No wonder that, ten days after his crypt was sealed, Scott’s party sweeping the plateau saw no sign of human life. No wonder that Courtauld, entombed in the death trap the Ice Cap Station had become, with snow drifted up to the roof of the tent, heard no sound from the searchers.
The days came and went. He ate meagerly, read, and smoked the pipe Mollie had given him. On April 17, the same day that Scott, Riley, and Lindsay staggered, defeated, back into base camp at midnight, Courtauld finished the last crumbs of tobacco. In his diary he wrote, “There is now precious little left to live for.”