Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
THE FIRST RELIEF party to follow the flagged route onto the ice cap—the team of six, headed by Gino and Scott, supported by Chapman, Rymill, D’Aeth, and Bingham—had a straightforward journey of 130 miles all the way inland to the weather station. Having left base camp on September 21, Chapman’s foursome caught up with Watkins and Scott, who had departed five days earlier but had changed their plans for the Southern Journey en route. With new ski bindings designed by Rymill, and eager, disciplined, well-fed dogs, the men averaged eighteen miles a day on the ice cap itself—so fast that, as Chapman wrote, “it was hard work trotting or walking beside the sledges.”
That team of six arrived at the station on October 2. It had taken Chapman’s contingent only twelve days to make the long trek. D’Aeth and Bingham replaced Riley and Lindsay for the next stint of station monitoring, though Chapman reported, “Riley and Lindsay were quite happy and quite loath to leave.” All eight men crowded into the big domed tent for dinner, where the combined fumes from the Primus and the nonstop pipe-smoking made their eyes stream and gave them trouble breathing. At last the newcomers escaped to their smaller tents to sleep.
On October 4, Chapman, Rymill, Riley, and Lindsay left for base camp, while Watkins and Scott set out to the south to launch their Southern Journey, hoping to cover more than 200 miles to intersect the route of Nansen’s 1888 traverse. Before taking off, Gino instructed Chapman to launch a second relief party as soon as he got back to base camp. The return journey turned out to be much harder than the men expected, as the thermometer plunged, storms and high winds trapped the men for several days, and new snowdrifts played havoc with the sledges. The same conditions during the same days were forcing Scott and Watkins drastically to curtail the Southern Journey. Chapman’s foursome got back to base only on October 14. The downhill trek with much lighter loads had occupied only a single day fewer than the much harder outward journey.
Gino’s parting orders to Chapman on October 4 were characteristic of his optimism and ambition. Chapman was to round up “as large a party as possible” for the second relief mission, and to “start off from base as soon as they could.” Moreover, that party was charged with lugging a wireless set all 130 miles up to the domed tent. If a working radio could be installed at the Ice Cap Station, with regular communication to and from base camp, that would mean a huge boost in safety, morale, and logistical efficiency. Chapman’s team was also supposed to carry enough rations to last the monitors for five months, until the end of March. The plan was to relieve D’Aeth and Bingham from their lonely duties, and to install Wilfred Hampton and Alfred Stephenson (called by their teammates “Ham” and “Steve,” respectively) in their place. Both were Cambridge men, Stephenson having graduated only one month before the Quest left London. He was designated chief surveyor for the BAARE. Hampton was a pilot in the Air Force Reserve, so Gino took him on as the team’s aircraft engineer. So unclouded was Gino’s crystal ball on October 4, as he delivered instructions to Chapman, that he planned for D’Aeth, once returned to base camp, eventually to fly Chapman and Rymill in one of the Gypsy Moths up to the station, land there, and swap the men out for Stephenson and Hampton. This scheme presupposed getting the wireless set to the station to coordinate the plan.
During the first team’s absence up on the ice cap, Courtauld had overseen the invaluable work of getting all the supplies for the second team hauled to the base of the glacier, above which Buggery Bank reared its daunting track. To save weight, all the pemmican for both men and dogs had been taken out of their metal cans and repacked into cloth bags sewn closed by Arpika, Gitrude, and Tina. As Chapman later wrote, “Subsequently this turned out to be a very mixed advantage.” The wireless set presented a major problem. Its charging motor alone weighed 150 pounds. A sledge loaded with such heavy equipment was a sledge that could not carry food.
Taking Gino’s orders literally, Chapman reasoned that “the size of [the party] was only limited by the number of dog-teams available.” Accordingly, he “enlisted” a team of dogs from Angmagssalik, “even though some of them looked as if they had escaped from a circus.” The Tunumiut had never bred and trained their own huskies for long-distance sledging, which was why, before the expedition, Jamie Scott had traveled to the west coast to buy fifty dogs for the BAARE.
Dogs, in fact, would be the main reason for a twelve-day delay in launching the second relief expedition. Chapman was the only one of the available men with any experience in dog-sledging, and his apprenticeship amounted to the first relief journey just completed. Three of the available teams among the dogs still confined at base had never been driven since Scott had acquired them half a year before. Now simply rounding them up turned into an exasperating trial. “In some cases,” Chapman reported, “we had to drive them on to the end of a point and even then they would walk out into the water rather than submit to being caught.” Meanwhile, the days were growing colder and shorter, and a couple of blizzards stymied preparations.
It was not until October 26 that nine men started up the glacier: Chapman, Lemon, Courtauld, Wager, Stephenson, and Hampton in the relief party, with Riley, Lindsay, and Iliffe Cozens (the team’s backup pilot to D’Aeth, in charge of aerial photography) in support. Chapman hoped those three could help the team surmount Buggery Bank and go as far as the Big Flag depot, fifteen miles from base, before turning back.
The team got almost nowhere during the first three days of brutal effort. The blizzards had scoured the whole lower glacier, not just the Bank, down to bare ice. Even pitching a tent became a dicey business. During the first storm, Lemon and Chapman anchored their shelter (pitched on a steep slope that plunged toward a frozen waterfall above a “rocky gorge”) with a metal spike driven into the ice and 600 pounds of gear weighing down the flaps. Lying in their sleeping bags, they listened to the storm rage as night fell. Then:
We dressed and put on our boots, knowing the tent could not stay much longer. Several times the tent-opening blew undone and at about 11 p.m. the end came. After a gust of prodigious force the outer cover was whirled up on one side, and soon blew away, scattering boxes over the edge as it went. We hung on to the poles of the inner tent for a few seconds, being lifted bodily off the ground. Fearing it would carry us down the glacier we let it go. . . . We lay in our reindeer-skin bags for a few seconds wondering if it would be better to risk being blown down the glacier inside the bags or to try to crawl to the other tents.
Chapman and Lemon chose the latter course, jamming themselves inside Hampton and Courtauld’s tent, where the space was so constricted that “we had to turn over by numbers, all facing the same way at the same time.”
At dawn the wind abruptly stopped. The men crawled out of their lairs to assess the wreckage. The charging motor for the wireless had been blown several hundred yards down the slope, but otherwise the damage was “surprisingly little.” Later that day a search party recovered the missing tent in the rocky gorge below, still intact and usable.
It was only on October 30, the team’s third day out of base, that they came to grips with Buggery Bank. There was no hope that the dogs could pull the sledges up the sharp-edged ice, so Chapman organized a block-and-tackle apparatus and the men winched the sledges up by brute force. The effort, Chapman swore, was “more exhausting than anything I’ve ever done in my life.”
The storm had plastered the men’s faces with rime ice. “My eyes were frozen solid,” reported Chapman, “so I compromised and kept only one eye open.” Wager’s beard had congealed into “a mass of ice several pounds in weight.” Stephenson solved the problem by cutting off Wager’s beard altogether.
So it went, day after demoralizing day. During the first storm, two of Courtauld’s dogs had escaped. Now, on the relatively safe slope above the Bank, Lemon left his dogs unattended for a few minutes, only to return to discover that the huskies had torn open a bag of pemmican and scarfed down twenty-five pounds of the dense ration.
Above Buggery Bank, the going was easier, but treacherous, as the team wove its way through a huge crevasse field. Sledge-loads had to be divided, requiring two trips each to get the full cargo a hard-won mile or two forward. Wager and Stephenson roped up and led through the crevasses, probing with their ice axes, but a number of men each stuck a foot through a snow bridge hiding a crevasse before jerking back in fear. Sastrugi regularly overturned the sledges, and the storms continued almost unabated.
On November 2, eight days out, the supporting trio of Riley, Lindsay, and Cozens turned back, still short of Big Flag depot. Trying to anticipate the worst, Chapman had put the team on half-rations early on, for fear the journey to the Ice Cap Station would take so long that the men would be forced to break into the ration boxes intended for the next pair of monitors. All the snafus, all the hardship, seemed to come crashing down on Chapman’s spirit on November 5. In his diary, he complained, “The dogs are in a bad way. We hear them whimpering and many are at large. Things are incredibly uncomfortable. Our fur bags are soaked inside, possibly because we rarely have time or courage to undress. . . . When we wake up, the clothes round our faces are a mass of ice from our breath.” Taking stock, he calculated that the team had traveled only ten miles in eleven days.
The situation forced Chapman to contemplate a grim bargain. To arrive at the Ice Cap Station without ruthlessly depleting the supplies meant for the coming winter months, he would have to reduce the team of six by half. And then push on, working even harder. But which three teammates should he send back to base? He delayed the decision for another four days.
On November 5, Chapman had discovered that his feet were numb, and their condition showed no change by the next day. Terrified of frostbite, he nonetheless kept his agony to himself. The storms kept up, almost without interruption. Excerpts from Chapman’s diary during the next four days of fitful progress:
November 6: Our tents simply can’t last much longer. The dogs have all bitten free [from their harnesses] and are huddled together against the tent for protection. . . .
In the evening the gale became ghastly. . . . We could not hear each other speak and hoar-frost poured over us like snow. The wind must be well over 100 m.p.h. . . . If the tent goes we are corpses.
November 7: Amazed still to be here. Lemon was jammed in between a ration box and a hard drift which has pushed in the side of the tent. I had to go outside and dig it out before he could move. . . .
Read Tess of the d’Urbervilles: a suitable book in this place; elemental strife in both.
November 8: Courtauld’s dogs have eaten all their traces and several harnesses and most of his lash-line. In most cases the heat of the dogs’ bodies lying on the drifts has embedded the traces into solid ice. The rope then gets cut to pieces as we hack them out. . . . Most of the dogs are limping and look half-dead. . . .
November 9: Gale all night and all to-day. My sleeping-bag has half an inch of water inside.
On the eighth, the team finally reached Big Flag Depot. Chapman left a note for Watkins in a tin can attached to a flag. Fifteen miles in fifteen days. . . . At that rate, they could never reach the station.
It was on November 10 that, by the rarest of coincidences, the team ran into Watkins and Scott arriving from the last leg of the Southern Journey. As Chapman recorded the meeting: “Suddenly saw a small moving object in the distance away to the left. A dog? A bear? . . . Went to meet them. They looked absurd, both sitting on top of a vast sledge with a whole galaxy of dogs in a fan before them.” Wager: “Had we or they been fifteen minutes earlier or later we should not have met.”
As related in chapter 7, on meeting the team of six, Gino first assumed they were on their way back from the Ice Cap Station. As soon as he learned the truth, he made a quick and desperate revision to the whole plan for the station, urging Chapman to dump the wireless, focus on bringing out Bingham and D’Aeth, and possibly abandoning the station.
In the cold, the meeting lasted less than an hour. But during that interval, Gino decided which three in Chapman’s team should turn back. He chose Lemon, Stephenson, and Hampton, despite the fact that the last two were slated to relieve D’Aeth and Bingham as monitors through the coming weeks. In their stead, Wager and Courtauld were thrust into that role.
The parting was painful. Wrote Chapman, “I really felt quite sad to see them turn their sledges in the other direction and leave us.” And: “We have arranged to have a dinner in London next Armistice Day.”
Before separating from his companions, Chapman sorted out the best dogs to make three teams with three sledges, each pulled by seven huskies. And “We also took the best of everything they had, sledges, clothes, books, whips.”
Then once more, Chapman, Wager, and Courtauld headed west-northwest, into the infinite blankness of the plateau.
* * *
Meanwhile, more than a hundred miles away, Bingham and D’Aeth kept up their chores at the Ice Cap Station. As it had for Riley and Lindsay during the first stint, the routine of six gauge-reading errands per day, interspersed with endless idle hours inside the domed tent, gave a sense of purpose to the men that kept at bay the eeriness, the psychic abyss, of total isolation in a white miasma ruled only by the ever-changing weather.
By November 10, when the meeting between Chapman’s team and Scott and Watkins took place near Flag 56, Bingham and D’Aeth had manned their outpost since October 4. Both men expected their sentence to last only five weeks, perhaps because on parting, Gino might have promised as much. But by November 10, they had been at their work for thirty-eight days, or three days more than five weeks.
As early as October 30, Bingham had written in his diary, “Hope to see the relieving party some time about this day week.” But November 5 came and went with no sign of sledgers in the distance, as did each of the following five days.
Now, as their service started to stretch beyond five weeks, Bingham and D’Aeth could not resist (just as Riley and Lindsay had not resisted) staring east along the flag-marked route each time they exited the tent, hoping to see those black specks in the distance. As watchers and waiters always try to do, each time the gaze revealed only the eternal snow and sky, the men pretended that it was no big deal to be disappointed—that a few more days of service at the station were nothing to complain about. Thus Bingham in his diary on November 14: “Walked a short way out along the flags to clear them. Judging by the intense cold on one’s face caused by the low temperature I am very sorry for the relief party coming up. No wonder they are behind time.”
The next day: “Rather a nice day with good visibility. Thought we saw the relieving party in the distance, but a mirage made it difficult. Possibly they may arrive tomorrow.”
During their hours inside the tent, all month long the two men had read their books, smoked their pipes, cooked their meals, played cards, and talked for hours. They had also puttered around inside the tent, making little “improvements” to increase the homey comfort of their shelter. The biggest difference for Bingham and D’Aeth, compared to Lindsay and Riley, was the cold. Some of the trips outside to read the gauges, during high winds and lashing snow, were grim errands; and more and more, the men found that they were really warm inside the tent only when the Primus was firing or they lay tucked inside their sleeping bags.
After November 10, Bingham’s diary entries recorded almost daily letdowns in their hopes for relief, even as he strove for stoic acceptance and refused to speculate what might have gone wrong.
November 16. We now examine the back trail with glasses when doing the observations, but with no result.
November 17. Good travelling day. . . .
November 18. Beastly day! High wind with no visibility. . . .
November 19. Nice day and we got a lot of clearing done outside. Still no sign of relief party arriving, so we should get the whole place cleared before their arrival. . . .
November 23. Left the Base ten weeks ago. Nice calm clear day but no sign of relieving party. Walked down the flags a short way to clear them. . . .
On November 15, the men recorded an evening temperature of 51.5 degrees below zero Fahrenheit—by far the coldest yet. The stoic tone of Bingham’s diary may reflect only the brave face he was willing to show on paper. No doubt more and more of the talk the two men shared veered into theories of what might be causing the delay—like Lindsay’s only half-joking scenarios about the base camp hut burning down or the whole relief party falling together into a crevasse.
It’s human nature, in the absence of any real clues about a longed-for event, to plunge into explanatory theories, which tend to get wilder as the resolution is delayed. And as the waiting stretches on without an answer, the refugees often edge into anger, along the lines of, “What the hell are they doing that takes this long?” or “Have they simply forgotten about us?” There’s no evidence that Lindsay, Riley, Bingham, or d’Aeth reached that depth of exasperation. Bingham’s diary resolutely avoids blaming the relief party, or even speculating about disasters causing the delay. If D’Aeth kept a diary, it’s either missing or not accessible. But such was the loyalty of the whole BAARE team toward one another during more than a year in Greenland that it’s possible that the pairs of monitors never did begin to impugn the men who were so overdue in relieving them.
Instead, a new kind of anxiety started to take hold in late November. Bingham signaled it in his diary on the twenty-fifth:
Blowing a stiff gale outside. Everything drifting up fast. The entrance to our tunnel which we cleared this morning is already blocked again. The tent is practically steady, but even with the snow house [protective walls] round it and a layer of drift snow in places feet thick all over it, the buffeting of the wind is quite alarming. Am not fancying the job of doing the 10 p.m. observations. Sorry for the fellows down the trail if they are getting this gale.
It was one thing when Lemon and Chapman’s tent blew away down into the rocky gorge, for there were two other tents nearby for safety. And base camp was only a few miles away. But if the big domed tent at the weather station blew away, or collapsed, or the wind tore holes in it, Bingham and D’Aeth would instantly face a survival predicament against long odds. To build an emergency igloo with the gale raging, or a snow cave burrowed into the ice cap, might have proved beyond the powers of the pair. Even if they could have accomplished that feat, to hang on indefinitely awaiting the relief party might have posed a nearly impossible ordeal.
During the five days after November 25, both men spent hours outside the shelter simply digging out gauges and the exit tunnel itself, as the relentless wind and storm undid their every effort. On the thirtieth Bingham was fooled by an optical illusion that betrayed how desperate the men were for some connection with their teammates. “[T]hought the bits of paper on the snow about forty yards off were the relief party about two miles away,” he admitted to his diary. The men were not out of food yet, partly because their stomachs had shrunk from inactivity and they ate less and less week by week. There were still two unopened ration boxes. “Thoroughly tired of pemmican,” Bingham griped, “and hope the relief party have some meat of some sort.”
December 1 marked the pair’s fifty-ninth day at the Ice Cap Station: eight weeks and three days. By their reckoning, the relief party was now three and a half weeks overdue. There was nothing to do but shovel away the drifts, dig out the exit tunnel, read and record the gauges—and wait.
* * *
With their pared-down loads and the best dogs pulling three sledges, Chapman, Wager, and Courtauld started onward on November 11. It was on that very day that Courtauld first broached the idea of his manning the Ice Cap Station alone through the heart of winter. In his diary, Chapman summarized Courtauld’s earnest proposal. Chapman’s entry mingles his own fervent desire not to give up and abandon the station—the heart and soul of Gino’s whole conception of the BAARE—with the skepticism of a leader responsible for his teammates:
Courtauld says he is used to being alone and is very keen to try the experiment in such conditions. With so many books, a good supply of tobacco and ample food for one man, he says he will be perfectly happy. . . . In England few people objected strongly when Watkins said one of us might have to stay alone at the Ice Cap station in case of necessity, and this looks like the case in point. Anyhow, we can’t decide anything yet: we’ve got to find the station first.
At first the three men made better time than all six had before the chance meeting with Watkins and Scott on November 10. But now a new complication threatened their progress: it became harder and harder to find the flags marking every half mile of the route, thanks to frost feathers occluding the red squares of cloth, the continuing storms, and the shorter hours of daylight. Chapman: “It is an awful strain gazing into the void looking for flags. You simply have no idea what focus to use as there is nothing to focus on. We thought we saw a big dark-coloured object in the distance to-day but found it was a small piece of black paper only 10 yards away.” Later the men would conclude that some of the flags had collapsed and been buried under new snowdrifts.
The first evening, all three men crowded into one tent. But after a bad night, thanks to sleeping bags pressed against the walls unleashing showers of rime, Wager volunteered to man the other tent alone. There were pros and cons to both arrangements. Wager had the luxury of free movement and the chance to dry out his clothes, but he slept colder than his cozier companions. The first night, as he cooked his dinner, he risked asphyxiation by carbon monoxide (just as Scott and Watkins had on the Southern Journey), alerted to the problem only when he couldn’t get his candle to light. After that, all three men cooked dinner in Courtauld and Chapman’s tent, where the camaraderie made up for the cramped quarters. On different evenings they read aloud to one another: Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury, Shakespeare’s King John and Troilus and Cressida, and Alice in Wonderland.
On November 13 the men dined on a small piece of seal meat they had brought from base camp, sending Chapman into a soliloquy on deprivation. By then, like their comrades at the Ice Cap Station, the three sledgers were quite sick of pemmican. “It was the most wonderful delicacy I have ever eaten,” Chapman raved about the seal meat in his diary. “Most people miss so much in life. You can’t realize how marvelous it is to sleep between sheets till you have spent weeks without taking your clothes off in a frozen fur bag on hard snow.” Chapman’s frostbitten toes now thawed enough to cause intense pain, and he watched in dismay as the nails fell off “and the big toes are raw and stick to my socks.” He went on, “I keep stubbing them on the ridges [of snow], causing myself acute agony. We are all too tired to talk.”
The daily marches, marginally better after parting from their teammates, were soon compromised by a host of new problems. Besides the difficulty of finding the route-marker flags, the sledges kept overturning as the men hauled them across ridges of sastrugi, and each morning they wasted precious time untangling the dogs’ traces with bare fingers that quickly grew numb. On November 15, one of the runners on Chapman’s sledge broke in two. “Repaired it with thongs before turning in,” he wrote laconically in his diary.
Most aggravating among the men’s tribulations, because it was so avoidable, was the discovery on the first night that “we didn’t take enough primus prickers from the other people” before the two teams separated. A Primus stove, the choice of expeditions in the cold regions for almost a century, well into the 1970s, came with a crucial tool called the “pricker,” without which it often failed to burn properly or light at all. This device was a small metal handle that held a tiny piece of sharp wire, the end of which had to be jiggered up and down in the fuel spout to clear out the inevitable gunk left from each previous burning. Prickers were incredibly easy to misplace, lose, or break. An expedition without prickers might as well have no stoves. The first night, after many other improvisations, Chapman used the second hand from his wristwatch as a substitute. After that, Wager—“a wizard with the primus”—somehow rigged a lasting remedy (we are not told how). Asphyxiation by Primus fumes, however, continued to pose a nightly threat.
Alarmed by the balky progress, on November 15 Courtauld once more pushed the question of his solo occupation of the Ice Cap Station. At the time, the men were camped next to Flag 90. Only at Flag 262 would they arrive at the station. Twenty-one days out of base camp, the men had covered only a third of the distance to their goal. The numbers won the argument. As Courtauld wrote that night in his diary, “Decided to lighten [Chapman’s] sledge and only take on enough food for one man—self—at Ice Cap. We shall therefore only take four instead of fourteen boxes there.”
Wager still wasn’t buying it. In his own diary, he argued, “It was August’s idea to stay on by himself and he very much wanted to do so. In fact my insistence on staying he has always attempted to dispute, so that there is no question of who stays at the Ice Cap Station. I am most sorry that I am not.”
Only years later did a crucial factor in Courtauld’s volunteering to man the station solo come to light, via passages in his diary. On the journey out, he had developed an intense dislike for Wager, though he was too polite to voice his feelings. Months alone seemed infinitely preferable to an enforced isolation with a man he couldn’t stand.
According to Courtauld’s biographer, Nicholas Wollaston (writing in 1980), Courtauld thought Wager “was too fond of doing other people’s work or telling them how to do it.” In his diary, he characterized his teammate as “fussy, quick-tempered and rude.” Courtauld even suspected that Wager harbored a corresponding dislike for him, though nothing in Wager’s diary hints at such a feeling.
There was another reason for Courtauld’s keenness to man the station solo—one that he guarded even more privately than his annoyance with Wager. He was deeply in love with Mollie Montgomery, whom he had known since they were both teenagers (she was three years younger). By 1928, his passion had burst full-grown, intensified by his fear that she did not reciprocate his feelings. Shortly before the BAARE, though, the two had gotten engaged. He wrote letters to her throughout the Greenland expedition, and addressed her often in his diary.
As he had headed off to Greenland with James Wordie in 1929, a year before the BAARE, he was stricken with remorse and doubt. Why was he leaving? After the ship steamed away from the port in Aberdeen and Mollie waved her farewell, Courtauld sat down and wrote a letter for the pilot to carry ashore. In it he made a solemn pledge: “If only I had the chance of doing something really big, I feel I could do it—for you.” Alone on the ice cap, he ruminated often on that pledge. Enduring the winter months solo in one of the coldest, most alien places on earth, carrying out his duties without fail—that would at last amount to “doing something really big.” But here was a motivating spur that no one else should know about—except Mollie.
The men sledged doggedly on through the waning days of November. Reading between the lines of Chapman’s diary, one senses that he was still not fully committed to Courtauld’s solo mission. But by agreeing to it, and thus jettisoning ten heavy ration boxes, he increased the chances that the daily marches could cover more ground. Far more important than keeping up the weather station through the year was the dire necessity of rescuing D’Aeth and Bingham.
Nevertheless, one setback after another hamstrung the struggle. Random excerpts from Chapman’s diary between November 15 and 20:
Our clothes went hard as soon as we got outside. Most fearful drifts everywhere.
Two miles in five days. It looks as if we shall have to go on till the dog food is finished, then kill off the weaker dogs as food for the others, then—if we find the station—collect Bingham and D’Aeth and manhaul back.
The dogs chewed most of the Lapp thong off [the sledge lashing] last night, which I replaced. They have also eaten all the gut off the snowshoes, which are now useless.
Worst day I’ve ever had. With the sores in my fork [crotch] and frostbitten toes each step is agony. Several times I just couldn’t go on and had to sit down for a few minutes.
Courtauld was having his own problems. His “moccasins” had split open and his feet got dangerously cold. Soon he would develop incipient frostbite in his fingers and toes. The layover days, irksome though they were, provided precious respite from the ordeal of sledging. Inside his tent, Chapman read Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae and Treasure Island. Inside his, Wager immersed himself in Shakespeare’s Richard II and some poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Ever the geologist, he also pondered strata and intrusions. After a rare day that he “thoroughly enjoyed,” he noted in his diary, “I spent the morning thinking over the tectonics of the dyke and plateau basalt formation about Kangerdlugssuaq [sic]. A scheme beginning with thinning of the sial by tension fits the facts pretty well.” In odd moments, Wager seemed disenchanted with the whole journey, complaining on November 19 about “somebody’s remark before we left the wireless that this will be an epic journey—a damned silly one I think in lots of ways.” He did not elaborate on that sour judgment.
Yet all the toil was slowly paying dividends. On November 20, Courtauld wrote in his diary, “Found to our surprise that we had done fifty-six miles from the Big Flag, leaving sixty-two to go.”
After November 20 a new, almost ruthless determination came over the men. Chapman: “It’s just amazing what one can do to these dogs under such conditions. One behaves like an animal and hits them anywhere with any weapon. However they seem quite impervious to punishment either from us or from each other.” On the twenty-first, “Had to kill one of my dogs which was too weak to pull. We can’t afford food for it. Killed it instantaneously with the blunt side of an axe.”
On the twenty-fourth, Tiss, one of Courtauld’s dogs, gave birth to a puppy. The dog’s father licked the snow off it, but “We relentlessly fed it to another team, and the same had to be done with three other puppies which appeared in turn each time we stopped.” Despite having just given birth, Tiss pulled her share of the weight between stops. “Poor brute,” wrote Chapman that evening, “but what else could we do?”
The wretched huskies were ravenous for food, their half-rations finally taking their toll. On November 27 several of them tore patches out of Wager’s tent, even though it was made out of canvas, and broke into a bag that contained only gear, not rations. The next day, “Hynx too weak to pull: I’m afraid he’ll die soon.” Two days later, Hynx collapsed in the snow. Rather than kill the dog, Chapman recorded, “I let him run loose, but he got behind and hasn’t been seen since.”
On top of their struggles with dogs that were starting to play out, the men were finding it harder and harder to find the marker flags. The diminishing hours of daylight made searching for them all the more onerous. A characteristic commentary from Chapman: “Go out on skis to search for flags. We can’t go on till we find them. Found them ¼ mile to the left.” And the next day: “Search for flags in the morning. Found one at last. . . . Went on for two hours by moonlight, luckily finding the flags.”
During these late November days, Chapman observed that one mile per hour seemed to be the team’s limit. Long days spent totaling only four and a half or six miles seemed major accomplishments, yet since some of that distance was squandered in back-and-forth sweeps in search of flags, not all of it could be counted as progress toward the station. By now, all three sledges were in woeful condition. The men spent the whole day on November 22 jerry-rigging repairs (cutting off handlebars, for instance, to repurpose them as struts).
By now, both Courtauld and Chapman were afflicted by frostbitten toes, Courtauld also with frost-nipped fingers. Wager had somehow avoided frostbite. The diaries of the other two men grew clipped, the sentences telegraphic, but Wager still had the energy to write long paragraphs characterizing each dog in his team, musing on Greenland geology, and planning other trips in the future. On the twenty-seventh, he jotted down an oddly bland summation of their leader’s state of mind: “Freddie is I think pretty tired of this trip. He had only just come back from one [the second relief mission, in October]. But so are we all, I fancy.”
On November 29, the men sledged into a region on the plateau that was suddenly more conducive to travel. The surface hardened and the sastrugi became less frequent. With the moon waxing beyond first quarter, the team was able to push on after dark and still find the flags. The next day, Chapman exulted, “How incredible, we’ve done 12½ miles: a record for the trip.” On December 1, despite one of the two Primus stoves refusing to work, which delayed their start, the men still gained ten and a half miles. The day after that, twelve and a half again.
By Chapman’s reckoning, they should now be in the vicinity of the Ice Cap Station. They had reached Flag 236, and 237, they believed, marked the end of the route. Courtauld’s uncharacteristically long diary entry on December 2 vividly captures anticipatory joy turning into inexplicable defeat:
Only half a mile to go. We could hardly get the dogs to go again but at last we finished the half-mile. But where was the Union Jack? We searched in all directions expecting every minute to see it, and then warmth and dryness and food!! It was freezing over sixty degrees [i. e., thirty below zero] and the wind bit through our clothes as if we were naked. We went on a short distance further and searched again, but failed. At last we had to give it up. . . . We slept little that night.
“Terribly disappointed not to find it to-night,” wrote Chapman. In the morning, he dashed out without his windproofs, only to return defeated, his ears frostbitten. “It was the worst pain he had ever known, he said,” noted Courtauld. “As regards the disappearance of the Station, we could not make out what had happened.”
It was only when Wager ventured out later on December 3 and found Flags 238 and 239 farther west that the men began to comprehend their mistake. “According to the book,” Courtauld complained, “the station ought to be at Flag 237.” The “book” was the log of the route compiled by the party that had established it and erected the Ice Cap Station back in August. Perusing its pages once more, the men found the discrepancy. “On a back page,” Courtauld revealed, “were scribbled more flags up to 262.” The men quickly calculated: twenty-five more flags, twelve and a half miles still to go. (None of the three disappointed men addressed in their diaries the obvious question: why hadn’t Chapman, who had followed the flags on the relief mission in October, known where the numbers ended?)
Too impatient to wait for the next day, the men sledged through the early night. Chapman performed some remarkable navigating by fixing sights on Arcturus and Vega. At Flag 260 they stopped “when our sledge-wheel told us we had gone far enough.” The temperature was forty-two below zero but the moon was high ahead of them. Leaving the sledges, they split up, each headed in a different direction. Just before 8:00 p.m., four hours after sunset, Chapman saw the Union Jack. He hiked back to rally his teammates before actually approaching the station. Courtauld was returning to the sledges dispirited from his own fruitless search when Chapman called out to him with the news. “I have never been so suddenly overcome with joy,” Courtauld wrote later that night, “or been delivered in such a short moment from the depths of despair.”
In the moonlight the trio sledged up to the station, which showed only as “a low mound of snow with its tattered flag.” Parking the sledges, they stayed silent as they walked up to the snow wall surrounding the tent, opened the exit door, scuttled along the underground tunnel, and stopped just short of the door in the floor of the tent. Then one of them barked out, “Evening Standard! Evening Standard!” (The Evening Standard, which survives today, was one of London’s leading newspapers.)
Moments earlier, Bingham and D’Aeth had heard a noise that they thought sounded like a minor earthquake—the sound of the sledges approaching. “When we stood at the end of the tunnel and showed our faces,” Chapman wrote, “they were so covered with ice that Bingham and D’Aeth could not recognize us.” Courtauld added, in a masterpiece of understatement, “They were naturally jolly pleased to see us.” Within minutes, the newcomers were “wolfing down the brew they had made for us, and giving them lots of news from the outside world.”
Exhausted and still in pain from their frostbite, Chapman and Courtauld retreated for the night to one of the little igloos built to house the weather gauges, while Wager stayed with Bingham and D’Aeth in the big domed tent. In the morning, all five men shared what Courtauld called “a really late gentlemanly breakfast.” Then, that evening, Chapman prepared a feast, which the men declared the “Ice Cap Christmas Dinner” twenty days before Christmas. He even printed out a formal menu:
MENU
GAME SOUP
SARDINES IN OLIVE OIL
PTARMIGAN
PLUM PUDDING
RUM SAUCE (VERY)
ANGELS ON SLEDGES
DESSERT (DATES AND RAISINS)
MINCEMEAT, JAM, HOT GROG, TEA (WITH MILK)
NOTE—NO PEMMICAN
In his diary, Chapman added, “Though I cooked it, the dinner was better than any other dinner has ever been.”
The men hoped to get off the next day, December 5, but another storm delayed the departure. When the relief party had arrived late on the fourth, they had a single day’s food left for the dogs. Chapman calculated that they now had only enough food for the four returning men for eight days on half-rations. On the fifth he killed one of the dogs to feed the others. The arduous journey from base camp to the Ice Cap Station had taken Chapman, Courtauld, and Wager thirty-nine days. Getting back in eight loomed as an almost impossible challenge.
Early on December 5, Bingham and D’Aeth learned about Courtauld’s plan to man the station alone through the coming months. They were horrified, and argued strenuously against the plan. Each man had a tale about a moment toward the end of their occupation when a trivial event had utterly spooked him. Bingham was alone outside once when the Union Jack caught a gust and flapped loudly. “He bolted back into the tent as fast as he could,” summarized Chapman. On another occasion D’Aeth, also outside alone, had suddenly caught sight of a small screen erected to protect a gauge. Thinking the apparition was a strange man appearing out of nowhere, he too dashed back inside the domed tent. During nine weeks of monitoring, neither man had dared venture very far from the station, and that only along the route of the flags. Despite their smooth companionship during their exile from the rest of humanity, a kind of paranoia had crept over their spirits. How much worse it would be for one man alone, they argued, through the darker and colder months.
Wager’s view was more equivocal. On arriving at the station and discovering that Bingham and D’Aeth had saved more of their rations than expected, he “again half expected to be staying.” But there was still not enough food for two men. And Wager admitted in his diary, “I don’t think I should care for more than one month here by myself.” Another reason for doubting the wisdom of Courtauld’s solitary vigil was that by now, his fingers were frostbitten badly enough that he had trouble closing and opening the snaps and buttons on his clothes.
But the man himself was adamant. Courtauld repeated his whimsical claim that he “rather liked being alone.” He had his books, his tobacco, and plenty of food for one man. He cited Watkins and Scott on Labrador trappers wintering solo deep in the backcountry without mishap. For all his own misgivings, Chapman wanted to believe in Courtauld’s rationalizations. “I must say it would be a thousand pities to abandon the station now,” he wrote in his diary, “since it has been established and maintained with so much trouble.” Of Courtauld’s volunteering for the vigil, he added, “It’s a marvellous effort and I hope to God he gets away with it.”
The four returnees got off by 10:00 a.m. on December 6. The first day out, they covered thirteen miles.
In the end, it took Chapman, Wager, D’Aeth, and Bingham fourteen days to dash back to base camp. It was a gutsy performance, and they managed not to lose or have to kill any more dogs. They were hoping to pick up a food dump they had left at Flag 56, but somehow they missed both the flag and the dump. By December 14 they had run out of both candles and paraffin, so there was no light to read by and all their breakfasts and dinners had to be eaten cold. Five days later, on the last stretch, as they struggled down Buggery Bank, two of the three sledges fell apart, broken beyond repair.
Gino and several Inuit met the worn-out party at the foot of the glacier. “He was more than relieved to see us all safe,” reported Chapman. But earlier that day, out searching in one of the Gypsy Moths for the returning party, on the first day either plane could take off from the finally frozen fjord, Gino saw that there were only four men in the sledging team, which meant that Courtauld must have stayed alone at the station. Gino dropped “luxuries and dog food” to the men on that homeward stretch.
It is striking that none of the three published accounts of the BAARE—those by Chapman, Lindsay, and Scott—expresses much concern about Courtauld’s fate 130 miles away and 8,200 feet higher. On Christmas Day, according to Lindsay, after a sumptuous dinner, “We toasted August’s health and sent many a friendly thought across the snows to him.” Scott acknowledged that, although Courtauld had food that could last, if carefully managed, into the beginning of May, “for every reason he should be relieved as long before that as possible.” But in the next sentence he rather cryptically insists, “The weather was still unfit for sledging.”
Gino thought he had the answer, and it had to do with the Gypsy Moths. At the very least, he believed, one of them could fly up to the Ice Cap Station and drop food and messages and letters to Courtauld. At best, a plane could land at the station, obviating altogether the need for grueling relief missions by dog sledge, allowing an effortless rotation of monitors through the winter months.
As early as November 11, the base camp fjord had been inundated by a fierce blizzard. Returning from an aborted trip to one of the Inuit villages, Lemon and Watkins got bad news from the locals. “The Eskimos cheerfully told them that the blizzards would last till March,” Chapman summarized, “getting worse each time till they would culminate in a really prodigious hurricane at the beginning of March.”
The natives knew what they were talking about. Beginning in December, storms succeeded one another almost uninterrupted, and even on clear days the wind tore violently across the fjord. It would not be until February that a Gypsy Moth was able to make the first of several attempts to fly to the Ice Cap Station. None of those flights would come off as planned.
* * *
On the morning of December 6, Courtauld had watched his four teammates start the long journey back to base. “Coming out again an hour later,” he wrote in his diary, “I could just see them as a speck in the distance. Now I am quite alone. Not a dog or even a mosquito for company.”
At once Courtauld set about drying his clothes and sleeping bag, since everything was “full of ice.” During the first few days, the routine of recording the weather gauges every three hours from 7:00 a.m. till 10:00 p.m. kept him occupied, and his mood was upbeat. But on December 8, only the third day of his sentence, for the first time the sun failed to clear the southern horizon—“and I suppose will not until the middle of next month.”
The next day, Courtauld made an unpleasant discovery. Bothered during his sleep by persistent itching, he changed his underwear, only to discover that they were crawling with lice. “This is what comes of lending one’s sleeping-bag to Eskimos,” he jotted in his diary. Disgusted, he laid out the underwear in the snow outside the tent “in the pious hope the cold will kill them.” At first, the remedy seemed to do the trick; but the lice would return as the larvae deposited all through the inside of his sleeping bag hatched.
Courtauld kept his spirit buoyed by relentlessly “tidying up.” The diary records his daily chores and small delights. On December 11, in the first of many such annotations, he wrote, “Reading [John Galsworthy’s] Forsyte Saga, Vol. II—V. G. [very good]. Even better than Vol. I.” And: “Opened pea-flour and marge today. Found jam made out of cocoa V. G., much better than drinking it.”
But he also reported “Toes hurting, also fingers.” And already he was finding the cold inside the domed tent unpleasant. With the Primus firing, the inside temperature rose to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but with the stove off, it settled around thirty-five degrees. Outside the shelter Courtauld was recording temperatures as low as fifty-six degrees below zero. The only direct link between the double-layered interior and the outside was a metal tube two inches in diameter that poked like a periscope through the roof. It had been devised as an emergency source of air in case the tent got completely buried by snowdrifts. On December 12 Courtauld stopped up the tube, hoping to make the tent a little bit warmer.
That same day, for the first time he noted a problem that would come to be the bane of his existence: “Entrance to tunnel blocked up when I went out for 10 p.m. obs. Had to dig my way out.” He added, “This weather won’t help the others getting back.” At that moment, Chapman and his three companions had covered more than seventy miles along the route home, and they were looking forward hungrily to the food dump at Flag 56 that they were destined not to find.
Smoking his pipe (a gift from Mollie Montgomerie) was a keen daily pleasure, though already he was worried about when he might run out of tobacco. “Found I am only smoking 1.7 ounces a week,” he wrote on December 14. “Tobacco should last at this rate seventeen weeks.” The other great pleasure was reading. The same day, he noted, “Reading [Stevenson’s] Black Arrow, [Stefansson’s] Friendly Arctic, Isaak [Walton]. All V. G. What I shall do when I have finished all the books God knows.”
On that day (a Sunday), his ninth alone, for the first time he recorded the kind of prolonged pipe dream that would serve as temporary escape from the monotonous extreme of the ice cap. “Made out a list for a chap’s dinner when I get home,” he reported. (Such flights of fancy are par for the course among expeditioners in hostile environments, and so often they revolve around food.)
That fantasy was so vivid that Courtauld drew a table plan for the dinner in his diary, with places for thirty-six friends (all men). He lovingly detailed the menu, ranging from oysters as an hors d’oeuvre to courses of grouse and tournedos of beef to pancakes flambés for dessert. He even specified the wines for each course and the brandy to be served as digestif.
Early on, he tried to calculate how long his food supply might last. In theory, if he cut his daily intake to a bare minimum, he should be able to eke out his rations until the beginning of May. But Courtauld rebelled against such self-discipline. Arbitrarily he set March 15 as the date on which, at the latest, a relief party would arrive. As he eventually wrote, “I prefer to eat my cake rather than have it. Carpe diem was a tag which served as an excuse whenever I was hungry.”
On December 13, he played a game of chess against himself. (The diary does not record who won.) He also rebandaged his toes (“both seem quite dead but are gooing”). A few days later: “Tonight unbandaged toes. Unpleasant sight. Left toe-nail came off. Other will soon, I expect.”
Already on the thirteenth, he recorded further troubles with the exit tunnel: “Entrance to tunnel completely stopped up and had to dig myself out for every observation.” The complaints multiplied during the following days. On December 16, “Had a job to get out of the house this morning. Found I was digging up into a vast snow drift, so had to make a hole vertically upwards, and after some time burrowing managed to scramble out.”
Still, through most of December, Courtauld’s morale stayed solid, as his complaints about his toes and the exit tunnel were balanced against moments of happiness or awe (“Aurora wonderful tonight, like purple smoke wreaths twisting and writhing all over the sky”). But December 21, the shortest day of the year, triggered a kind of existential revelation of his self-imposed predicament. “At ten o’clock [p.m.] it was completely still,” he wrote. “The silence was almost terrible. Nothing to hear but one’s heart beating and the blood ticking in one’s veins.”
Christmas Eve brought with it the first wave of melancholy. “How wonderful it would be at home. . . . This time last year was such a marvelous Xmas.” That day he made a grim discovery. Somehow two of the big cans of paraffin had sprung leaks, and four gallons of the precious stuff had drained away. The paraffin fueled both the Primus stove and Courtauld’s lamp, which gave off some heat of its own. Until December 21 he had often run the stove just to heat up the tent. Now he would have to restrict the Primus to cooking only. And at first, he dared not calculate when he might run out of paraffin altogether.
Christmas Day brought an even stronger onset of melancholy. “I wonder what they are doing at home,” he wrote. “I really do not miss the good things of Xmas very much. Though I would rather like a bit of fresh meat and a mince pie, and even more a bit of plum pudd.”
Even more than Christmas at home, he missed Mollie. So private were Courtauld’s feelings about his fiancée that in his diary he gave her the single-letter pseudonym of “W.” “B[etty, his sister] I suppose in Switz. I wonder if she has taken W. with her.” “Pipe (W.’s) going V. G.” And on December 31, among his five resolutions for the New Year: “Get home and ask W. to marry me.” (This despite the fact that they were already engaged.)
In another extended fantasy on the day after Christmas, Courtauld spelled out the specifications for a settled life after he and Mollie had married.
I think I should like a small house in Suffolk between twenty and sixty miles from H[ome]. Should be near for trains and near the sea, preferably Pin Mill. No land except a garden and fewest possible servants. No waiting at table. If any money would rather spend it on a boat than a house. . . . A Brixham trawler would be almost ideal but would probably cost a lot to make it habitable. It would be better to keep her at Falmouth or somewhere on the south coast. . . .
It sounds pretty swank and genteel, but compared to the surroundings in which Courtauld had grown up, that fantasy life figured as almost bohemian.
On January 1 he made a list “of books worth reading taken from Ice Cap library”—implying there were even more at hand he thought not worth reading. The list is twenty-seven titles long, and does not include some of the ones (The Forsyte Saga or Black Arrow among them) that he had already rated V. G. It’s an eclectic roster, ranging from the seriously scholarly (the four-volume Cambridge History of Empire) to novels by Fenimore Cooper and Dickens; from adventure stories such as Dana’s Two Years before the Mast to Under Sail, a lively account of a sixteen-year-old on a sea voyage from New York to Hawaii; as well as popular astronomy books by Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, along with a smattering of poetry anthologies.
Yet in Courtauld’s list of New Year’s resolutions, along with asking Mollie to marry him, were “(4) Give up exploring” and “(5) Collect a library and study: (a) English literature and poetry; (b) Music; (c) Polar exploration with a view possibly to try to write a book about it.”
Those jottings may have been partly tongue-in-cheek, but after almost a month alone in the cold and darkness, despite books and chores and pipe dreams, Courtauld may have been starting to feel the oppressive toll of his solitude. On December 27, a strange event occurred that deeply disturbed him. He described it in his diary:
Just getting to sleep again after 7 a.m. obs. when there was a soft rumbling close to my head which increased and ended in a dull crash. It flashed across my mind as it began that the weight of the snow was too much and the whole house was going to come in on me. However nothing happened so I concluded that the tunnel had fallen in and that I should have a job to get out as the spade would be buried. However that was not so. . . . Hope nothing further happens tonight.
In the absence of a plausible explanation for the rumbling sound and the crash, it is not surprising that the two catastrophes that must have been lurking in his head came first to mind: the collapse of the tent and the sealing shut of the tunnel. But when neither proved to be the case, his fears migrated into the realm of the uncanny and the unknowable. Of such uncertainties, paranoia is born. (Later commentators have speculated that the disturbance might have been caused by the sudden settling of massive layers of snow and ice around the tent—almost like a horizonal avalanche rippling unseen beneath the ice cap’s surface.)
But on January 4, one of those catastrophes seemed to become reality. Courtauld woke on another Sunday to a furious gale shaking the tent. He crawled through the trap door and found, as he had expected, that “the tunnel was snowed up.” He dug it out at 7:00 a.m., and again at 11:00, 1:00 p.m., and 2:30. On his last excavating mission, he discovered that “the back of the tunnel was so full of snow caused by digging out the entrance that I could scarcely wriggle up to it. . . . At 3:30 I found that I could no longer get the snow back from the entrance.” He was effectively trapped inside the tent.
Whether Courtauld felt an onrush of panic that afternoon or not, he forced himself to write a few more rational lines in his diary. “If I cannot get out, I shall have to stay in and the met[eorology] will have to go hang until the wind drops. Then I shall have to find some way of getting out.” But now, the other two fears surged to the forefront of his thoughts—the chance that the metal air tube in the ceiling might get plugged or that the roof might collapse.
If either happened, well, then. . . . Striving for jaunty stoicism, he wrote, “My end should be peaceful enough, and I have four slabs of chocolate to eat during it. Anyhow it won’t be attended by the fuss and frills one’s pegging out at home would.”