It is March 10, 1912, and the dogs are, in fact, not so far away: they are at One Ton Depot, seventy-seven miles to the north. They have been there for six days and now, at 8:00 A.M., Demitri and Cherry-Garrard are getting the two teams of dogs ready to move again. Except that rather than going south in search of Scott, they are heading back to Hut Point.
The sequence of events that have brought them to this point might well form the basis of a comedy were the consequences not so tragic.
To begin with, the last support party to leave Scott, the one with three men, had a devilishly trying time getting back from the Polar Plateau. Eventually, their leader, Teddy Evans, had collapsed with scurvy, close to death. They erected their tent and, while one stayed with Evans, the other, Tom Crean, walked for thirty-five miles to get to Hut Point to raise the alarm.
At that moment, Atkinson was at Hut Point and about to leave with Demitri and the two dog teams to take food and fuel to the Polar Party, just as Scott had requested of him. Instead, they took the dogs to get Evans and brought him back to Hut Point on one of the sledges. Atkinson, the doctor, needed to stay with Evans if he was to have any chance of surviving at all.
It turned out that there was only one man who could be spared to go with Demitri to meet the Polar Party and that was Cherry-Garrard. This, despite the fact that the nearsighted Cherry is nearly blind without his glasses, and, in his own words, lacked the requisite qualifications:
I confess I had my misgivings. I had never driven one dog, let alone a team of them; I knew nothing of navigation; and One Ton was a hundred and thirty miles away, out in the middle of the Barrier and away from landmarks.
Nevertheless, they had left Hut Point at 2:00 A.M. on February 26 and managed to travel surprising well with their two sledges and dog teams, getting to One Ton Depot on the night of March 3, 1912.
It is what happened next that seems so lamentable, so laughable were it indeed a comedy: nothing.
They had plenty of food and fuel for themselves and for Scott’s party to get them from One Ton Depot back to Hut Point. What they didn’t have was much dog food. With all Scott’s confused changes of orders, it turned out that Meares had not depoted any dog food at One Ton Depot, as they had expected. The situation was also exacerbated the day after they got to the depot because Demitri came to the young and inexperienced Cherry-Garrard, who was in charge, and asked that they increase the rations for the dogs because they were “losing their coats.” This left them with only thirteen days of dog rations and Cherry-Garrard wanted to allow eight for getting back to Hut Point. In the six days they were hanging out at One Ton Depot, at least two were fine for traveling further south, even by Cherry-Garrard’s own admission, and the others were probably doable for experienced dog drivers like a Demitri or a Meares. Furthermore, Atkinson had told Cherry-Garrard before he left Hut Point that if Scott and his men were not yet at One Ton Depot when he got there, Cherry-Garrard himself was to decide what to do.
If he went south, Cherry-Garrard rationalized, because of his poor navigational abilities, he might have missed the party on the two good days; and, because of the wind-driven snow on the other four days, “the chance of seeing another party at any distance was nil.” He had calculated that the available dog rations would allow him to go for only a day’s march anyway, unless he killed some dogs to feed to the others; something he was loath to do, especially as Scott had said he wanted the dogs in good shape for the following spring sledging trips that were planned.
And so Demitri and Cherry-Garrard simply sat at One Ton Depot, waiting for Scott. Until now, March 10, when they are turning for home. Ironically, they make “23 to 24 miles (statute) for the day.” It would have been more than enough had they taken some food and fuel that far south.
What seems so unfathomable is that the men with Scott include the two men with whom Cherry-Garrard had taken the perilous winter journey; the two men to whom he certainly owes his own life. Together, they had crossed the line that separates life from death, yet somehow returned. Surely, he owes those men whatever risks it would take to go south on the basis that, perhaps, they are again near that line.
But Cherry-Garrard has managed to convince himself that his friends and his leader are doing fine.
It is March 10, 1912, and the awful stark reality for Scott’s party is that if they move only at the pace Oates can manage, they are all dead men. As Cherry-Garrard and Demitri head back to Hut Point, Scott assesses clinically the risk that Oates poses for the rest of them:
. . . if he went under now, I doubt whether we could get through. With great care we might have a dog’s chance, but no more. The weather conditions are awful, and our gear gets steadily more icy and difficult to manage. At the same time of course poor Titus is the greatest handicap.
The following morning, March 11, 1912, Scott orders Wilson to “hand over the means of ending our troubles.” Reluctantly, the very religious Wilson gives each of them thirty opium tablets, leaving himself with a tube of morphine.
It is March 12, 1912. The Aurora arrives back in Hobart, having dropped Douglas Mawson’s main party at Commonwealth Bay and his Western Party on an ice shelf, which they have named the Shackleton Ice Shelf. As the Aurora motors past the Fram, which is still in the harbor, John Davis and his crew come out on deck and give three cheers for Amundsen.
Later, Amundsen gifts twenty-one of his Greenland dogs to Mawson, including one that he had taken to the South Pole and back, which Davis will take down to Mawson on the Aurora.
The dogs are coming for Mawson, at least.
By now, the scientist has become the predator. With hope of the Terra Nova coming all but gone, Levick and the others set about killing as many seals and penguins as they can get. For those penguins remaining at the little colony Levick had discovered, it is not the impending winter that they need worry about. By March 14, 1912, the men have killed 118 Adelie penguins—all those they can get their hands on—and added them to a food larder. They have also killed nine Weddell seals, of which they have eaten two. Even so, the prospects of getting enough food do not look good: Levick estimates that they shall need twenty seals, and as long as the wind continues to blow relentlessly, the seals choose not to come ashore.
Meanwhile, the men also work at digging out their snow cave using ice axes and whatever else they can use to fashion its sides. All the while, the wind blows. On March 17, 1912, Campbell, Priestley, and Dickason move into the still-unfinished cave. Meanwhile, Levick, Browning, and Abbott remain camped at the place they call Hell’s Gate—the place where they had first landed at Evans Coves—in order to watch for the ship and kill and cut up the seals and the penguins. These men had become the butchers.
For the first time in ten days, Levick writes in his diary:
Abbott, Browning & I have killed & butchered 8 seals, and we have killed about 100 penguins: all the moulting birds that remain. I think we ought to have 20 seals to last us till the spring.
Levick does not look forward to what lies ahead of them: “it is going to be a queer time for us through the dark months.” And, given the conditions right now, God knows what it will be like then.
The wind has blown now from the S.E. for a whole month excepting one day, and we are all exasperated, it is so damned cold and miserable, and frequently prevents our getting about at all when we ought to be getting on with the sealing and work on the cave, and we are losing the sun daily.
As Cherry-Garrard, Wilson, and Bowers found out the hard way, Emperor penguins are able to live and breed during the Antarctic winter. However, they are only able to do so because of some unique physical and behavioral adaptations. To begin with, they are big—huge, by penguin standards, with one Emperor weighing more than seven Adelies stacked together—reducing their surface area to volume ratio and thereby helping to minimize heat loss. When it gets really cold, they huddle together, shifting around so that the individuals on the outside get to take their turn on the inside where they benefit from the huddle’s collective warmth and protection from the wind. They can only do this because they do not have a nest site. Instead, they carry their eggs on their feet. This means having a clutch of only one egg, and a big egg at that. They breed on the sea ice in the lee of ice cliffs, but it must be sea ice that will remain secure throughout the winter. Food is likely to be far away, requiring them to walk many miles, perhaps ninety or more, across the frozen sea ice to open water. They manage this constraint only because they are so darn big, with the males being able to go for three months in the cold Antarctic winter without food in order to get through the courtship period, as well as incubating the eggs on their feet for the entire two months it takes to incubate the eggs. This gives the females time to walk to the open sea, fatten up, and then walk back to the colony with food for the newly hatched chicks. The males even have an incredible insurance policy should their partners be a bit late getting back with food for their chicks: incredibly, the males can break down their own body tissues to manufacture a form of food. Daddy’s milk.
Even if humans like Levick or the small Adelie penguins could somehow withstand the Antarctic winter’s cold, there is no way that either could go without food for long. For the Adelies, this means that when winter arrives they must get away from the icebound Antarctic continent and go to areas where there is open water and access to the food they need.
But where might that be? Ever since Scott’s Discovery Expedition, we had known that Adelie penguins inhabit the continent only during the summer months, but we had no idea how far they went or where. In the dark Antarctic winter, in an environment sheathed in ice and icebergs and subject to vicious storms, following the penguins would seem to be an impossible task. Except, potentially, it could be accomplished by satellites. The big breakthrough came in the 1990s with the miniaturization of electronics and improvements in battery technology needed to power a transmitter that could send a signal to satellites passing overhead more than five hundred miles above the Earth.
It is 1991. I am at Cape Bird as late in the season as it is possible to be. Each summer season, there comes a day in mid-February when the American and New Zealand Antarctic programs must shut down their helicopter operations. I am scheduled to be pulled out of Cape Bird on the last day scheduled for flights.
It is a weird place at that time of year. Instead of bustling activity and noise as during the heart of the penguins’ breeding season, it is quiet and almost deserted. The subcolonies have all lost their structure, the stones that lined their nests now scattered thither and yon. There is a smattering of penguin chicks left. Most are “de-downed,” as Levick would have described them, having grown their survival suits of feathers that will enable them to endure being immersed in the cold Antarctic waters for long periods. Their backs are blue-black, the same shade as the ink in Levick’s Zoological Notes. Their chins are white. Some still sport a few tufts of down on the tops of their heads, but otherwise they are slim versions of an adult penguin, ready to prove themselves in the watery world beyond.
Thick snowflakes have started to fall from skies black with winter’s clouds. The odd down-covered chicks, pathetic runts, stand immobile, their backs plastered with snowflakes, as they wait for death.
The beach has changed too. Gone is the barrier of push ice, that ten-foot-high jumble of huge ice blocks thrown up by winter’s storms, which normally separates sea from land. The exposed beach is black shingle, although there are clusters of small rounded pieces of ice bobbing in the waves and being tossed onto the beach like pieces of flotsam.
The adult penguins that remain at Cape Bird, like the chicks, are largely immobile too: they are molting. Mostly they hang out in little valleys at the base of the cliffs, their loosened feathers carpeting the snow around where they stand, unmoving, conserving all the energy they can. Producing a new set of feathers is energetically very expensive and, while they shed their old feathers and wait for the new lot to grow, their insulation is much reduced. Bereft of effective insulation, the molting penguins are unable to go to sea to feed. Instead, they try to stand close to the cliffs, out of the wind.
Most of the sixty thousand adult birds that breed at Cape Bird do not, in fact, molt there: they leave the colony at the end of the breeding season, fatten themselves up at sea, and then molt elsewhere. That might be on pack ice, icebergs, or ashore at other colonies. When Borchgrevink became the first person to stand on Franklin Island, he discovered massive numbers of molting Adelie penguins there, suggesting that it is a popular molting location for at least some birds in the Ross Sea area. Nevertheless, at Cape Bird, a few adults remain to molt in the colony and, it is possible, some may have come from elsewhere.
I find two adults that have completed their molt and, with help from my colleagues, I attach transmitters to the new feathers on their lower backs using a combination of an epoxy resin and a special tape. It is snowing lightly and it is cold work. I press the transmitter in place with my bare fingers: the five-minute epoxy glue takes more like fifteen minutes to cure in the freezing conditions.
Each transmitter has cost nearly as much as my car. It is unlikely we will ever retrieve them. Nobody has ever done this before. It is unknown if the glue and tape can hold the transmitters to the feathers for the whole winter, and even if they do, the batteries are not strong enough for them to function that long, hence, we will have no way of finding the birds again, except visually. Even assuming these birds return to Cape Bird, with over sixty thousand birds in the colony, finding them will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
No. As I walk away from the birds, which are now standing unfazed with a streamlined bump on their lower backs, I know that I am consigning the equivalent of two cars to spend their future in the same graveyard that holds Framheim: the bottom of the Ross Sea. Such can be the price of science.
That done, we pack our bags just in time as the helicopter lifts us out of there with winter’s telltale storms in cold pursuit.
It is March 17, 1912. Scott’s men are camped, forestalled by a blizzard that is raging outside. It is very cold; now, even at midday, the temperature is -40°F. It is Oates’s thirty-second birthday. He had gone to sleep, perhaps with some assistance from Wilson in the form of morphine, hoping not to wake up. But wake up he does. Somehow, he manages to extricate himself from his sleeping bag and crawl across the legs of his companions. Somehow, with his badly frostbitten fingers, he manages to untie the cords that keep the tunnel-like door to the tent shut tight. According to Scott, “We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death” and “tried to dissuade him.” Perhaps not emphatically, and certainly not effectively. Somehow, Oates manages to crawl through the tunnel door in the sleeping socks that cover his blackened gangrenous feet. He has no need of boots. He has no need of feet. He is not coming back.
Scott records Oates’s last words in his diary:
I am just going outside and may be some time.
That is the last they ever see of him. His body has presumably been covered by the snow from the blizzard when they are finally able to pass through the tunnel themselves and resume their march. They jettison Oates’s sleeping bags, a theodolite, and camera, but, remarkably, “at Wilson’s special request,” Scott consents to the remaining three of them continuing to pull the thirty-five pounds of geological specimens.
Nothing illustrates the differences between Amundsen and Scott more than this: for one, the fact that dogs are the proven means of polar travel and, for the other, the notion that there is something more noble, more grand, in man-hauling. Amundsen had traveled to the South Pole and back with speed and little risk either from a lack of food or meeting the fast approach of winter. He used dogs and skis and never man-hauled a single thing, not even a single mile. And here Scott is, being belted by the first storms of an approaching winter, running out of fuel and food as fast as he is running out of fit companions, and yet he finds noble purpose in still pulling some rocks.
There is something about these dogs from Greenland and Siberia that connect the world’s two polar regions in a way that even Ross and Crozier and Amundsen cannot. It is all about evolution and efficiency. The dogs’ coats, feet, and temperaments have, through a process of evolution enhanced by breeding, made them able to withstand cold, travel in snow, sleep under snow, and eat the wildlife. Their pack-like ancestry made them trainable, malleable, and able to work together as a group given the right dominance. Of course, that all began in the Arctic, where the Inuit had come to rely on them. In the Antarctic, of course, the dogs are not native but they might just as well have been: all the same things applied, right down to being able to be fed on the local wildlife—in this case, seals—unlike ponies and mules, which needed to have all their forage shipped in.
For that reason, the use of dogs persisted in the Antarctic as the most efficient, most evolved means of transport—like a penguin’s streamlined body for swimming in the sea—for more than eight decades after Borchgrevink landed the first dogs at Cape Adare in 1899. In fact, they would probably still be there were it not that one of their advantages—that they eat the local wildlife—came to be seen as a negative.
It is January 28, 1985. The New Zealand Antarctic Research Program is one of the last of all the Antarctic programs to use dogs, and they are to stop within twelve months. Each year, over fifty Weddell seals must be killed to supplement the diets of the dogs, and the public outcry has, understandably, turned public opinion against using dogs in Antarctica, no matter how efficient they are for travel, even compared with more modern means like snowmobiles and caterpillar tractors. There is also concern that they are non-native species, and worse, that they might bring diseases with them to Antarctica.
The first day I arrived in Antarctica, October 18, 1977, a dog team pulling a sledge was there to greet me and a fellow kiwi passenger and take us to New Zealand’s Scott Base, while the Americans were all loaded into a big green military vehicle, with wheels as big as I was tall, to go to the American base of McMurdo, a couple of miles over the hill from Scott Base.
I remember how romantic it felt, being with the dogs. You were so right, Cherry-Garrard, this really is adventure, my boyhood dreams galore. It was still early enough in the season that the sun set behind the mountains, and that evening I wandered along the line of dogs chained by the pressure ridges, each bathed in a golden light that highlighted their thick black, brown, gray-and-white fur. They were big animals, boisterous, and with big brown eyes. It was impossible not to love them, to think of them as more pets than beasts of burden. But then you notice that the spacing of their chains is deliberate and far enough so that they cannot tear each other apart. You are reminded that these are animals that will cannibalize their own for survival; an asset if you are Amundsen, a source of revulsion if you are Scott, and in that, he was not alone.
But now it is January 28, 1985, my last day in Antarctica this season, and it will be the last time I ever see the dogs. My team and I must be taken to our waiting Hercules aircraft, which has landed using skis on the permanent ice runway sited on the barrier, the giant shelf of ice over which Amundsen and Scott had both traveled on their way to the pole. The dog handler offers to take us out to the plane using the dogs.
I sit near the front of the sledge. Once again, the sun is low and the dogs are bathed in a soft yellow light. There are eight dogs pulling the sledge and just as a dog chasing a ball can exude enjoyment, the enthusiasm of these animals as they trot along over the snow-covered surface, tails aloft, speaks of joy. It is what they have been bred to do.
There is no shouting from the sledge master, no cracking of a whip. What I remember most is the serene silence of it all. The huffing of the dogs, the creaking of the runners, and the squeaking of the snow: they all made sounds, yes, but they did so in a way that accentuated the silence of being out there on the barrier, moving smoothly across the ice and snow.
It remains the most beautiful, most in touch with nature form of travel I have ever used. And, yes, I love Weddell seals and understand the arguments against using dogs in Antarctica in our modern era, but I would be lying if I said I was not sorry to see the dogs go.
The very next year at Cape Bird, I have the opportunity to do some man-hauling. A crabeater seal, usually a creature of the pack ice, has come ashore and died. A colleague of mine wants the carcass. The only problem is the dead seal is over two miles from the helicopter pad. It is still early in the season at Cape Bird and the beach is still covered in ice and snow. One of my assistants and I fashion a crude sledge by converting my generator-box-cum-hide, and we opt to man-haul the seal to the helo pad. An adult crabeater seal can weigh up to 660 pounds, although they are more typically just under 500 pounds. This one has been there for a while and is desiccated, presumably losing some portion of its weight. Even so, to us it feels every ounce of 660 pounds. Man-hauling is no fun. There is no romance, nothing noble about it that I experience. If I could have thrown away thirty-five pounds of it to ease the load, I would have. If I were Scott, and my life was at stake and I was hauling the extra weight over hundreds of miles rather than just two, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
It is March 18, 1912, and the conditions for Levick, Abbott, and Browning camped at Hell’s Gate go from bad to worse. “The wind increased to hurricane force, and suddenly one of the tent poles (on the lee side) broke with a snap, and then two others followed, and in a moment the tent was down on top of us, and we pinned down into our bags by it, with a fearful weight of wind on it.”
Things do not look good for them. All their belongings are loosely scattered throughout the tent, they are not in their wind-proofs, and the pressing of the tent on them “produced a helpless suffocating sensation.” Abbott and Levick struggle into their wind-proofs and crawl out from under the tent, leaving Browning lying on their sleeping bags to stop them blowing away. The wind is so strong that they have to crawl on all fours but they are unable to find anywhere sheltered enough to give them “the ghost of a chance” of erecting their spare tent. With severely frostbitten faces, they crawl back under their tent, and there they wait for the worst part of seven hours for the wind to abate, which it does not.
Finally, they crawl out from under their collapsed tent, pile stones on top of it to prevent their sleeping bags from being blown away, and then make their way on hands and knees toward the snow cave. It takes them one and a half hours to cover the half mile, during which they often need to lie flat on the polished ice surface to prevent themselves from being blown backward. “I shall always remember the appearance of Brownings (sic) face,” wrote Levick afterward, “which was dusky blue, streaked with white patches of frostbite, and I suppose the rest of us were the same.”
The others revive them with a hoosh and, as they do not have their sleeping bags with them, the men are forced to sleep two to a bag. Levick, who is chided mercilessly by the other members of the Terra Nova Expedition for being fat, gets to spend “a most uncomfortable night” according to Campbell, sleeping in Campbell’s bag, who the next day declares, “I was squashed flat.”
That day, March 19, the wind moderates enough to allow Abbott, Browning, and Levick to fetch their sleeping bags. From then onward, they inhabit the snow cave, or “igloo,” as they call it, for what will inevitably be the longest, darkest, and coldest of winters.
Levick is not looking forward to it:
. . . the prospect of the winter before us is enough to give anyone the hump I should think . . .
It is the night of March 19, 1912. Scott, Wilson, and Bowers have gotten to within eleven miles of One Ton Depot. They “have two days’ food but barely a day’s fuel.” It is -40°F and a blizzard blows, keeping them in their tent. Scott’s right foot is badly frostbitten: “Amputation is the least I can hope for now.” Wilson and Bowers plan to leave Scott alone and go to the depot to get fuel.
It is here that the reality of the short Antarctic season really bites. For ten days, the blizzard rages unabated and “outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift.”
It is March 29, 1912. It is the end.