The men continue to work on the igloo after shifting into it. The main room is nine feet by twelve feet, with the ceiling being about five and a half feet at its highest point. Naval disciplines are maintained. With his heel, Campbell, the commanding officer, draws a line down the center of the snow cave: one side to mark the mess deck for the men, one side to mark the quarter deck for the officers. The sleeping bags of the three officers are arranged on the right side of the room: first Priestley, who has their precious few stores stacked at the end of his bed to make a small alcove, Levick in the middle, and Campbell at the far end. On the left side there is the small cooking area with its blubber stove, then, somewhat more cramped, the bags of Dickason, Abbott, and Browning. Campbell decrees that what is said by the men on their side of the line is completely up to them and cannot be used against them. Similarly, what the officers discuss on their side of the line cannot be used by the men against the officers. Of course, in the cramped space, they can all hear the conversations of everyone. At first, Campbell insists that they get out of their bags for meal times, but fairly quickly he relents due to the cold, allowing everyone but the cooks to eat in bed. He also insists on having church on Sundays, when he reads from the New Testament and the men sing hymns.
The passageway includes two doorways, constructed using packing cases with canvas flaps, through which the men must crawl. There is a stores area and steps up through a tunnel leading to the outside. They line the internal walls of the main room with blocks of snow that go only half way up the walls, thereby creating a shelf for their meager belongings.
They lie squeezed together on the floor of the snow cave, which they have covered in pebbles and seaweed. Each day, a pair of them makes the morning and evening meals using seal blubber for fuel, which burns slowly emitting a thick black smoke that coats the insides of the cave, the men, their clothes, and everything they touch. At night it is pitch black, but mostly during the days, they lie in what Priestley describes as the “visible darkness” afforded by the faint light emitted from blubber lamps.
Levick has devised the blubber lamps by suspending a string from a safety pin into a tin of oil derived from heating seal blubber. They have a Primus stove with them but very little Primus fuel, so they have crafted a similar arrangement to make a blubber stove.
Levick, aware of the dangers of ill-prepared food, institutes strict rules about the preparation and cooking of their mainly seal meat diet. As it turns out, seal meat is high in vitamin C, which should save the party from dying of scurvy, as Owen Beattie determined had been the fate of the Franklin Expedition. But their acidic diet, with its lack of carbohydrates, has its downsides too: the men are unable to control their bladders. As a consequence, they often wet themselves and are forced to lie in their wet clothes and sleeping bags. Even after placing a can beside each man’s bag, they often cannot make it in time; although they tend to keep such accidents to themselves and lie there in discomfort and silence. All of them, at times, experience diarrhea too, with Browning being plagued by severe diarrhea, sometimes needing to “turn out” eight or nine times in a day. Campbell went outside the cave on one occasion to relieve himself but received such severe frostbite on his genitals that thereafter they fashioned a small alcove near the entrance to the cave and have stuck to relieving themselves there.
Levick describes the misery of their living quarters:
We are settling into our igloo now, and a dismal hole it is too. Our diet of seal meat is producing curious symptoms. Owing I suppose, to the highly acid state of our urine, we have not only the greatest difficulty in holding it, but some of us are actually wetting our sleeping bags during the night in our sleep. Campbell especially suffers from this, and also from bad haemerrhoids.
It is almost impossible to imagine their discomfort and squalor: afflicted by acute diarrhea, wetting their clothes and bedding, and no possibility of cleaning themselves, their bedding, or their clothing, and no possibility of changing them either. Their only option is to lie in the filth, cheek by jowl, their clothes and bedding damp with feces and urine, and in Campbell’s case, blood too. “Dismal hole” does not seem to even begin to describe it.
It is January 12, 2005. I am in Antarctica with my son, Daniel. Before we can head out to Cape Bird, we must undergo survival training, which is carried out in a crevassed area not too far from New Zealand’s Scott Base. We get roped up. We have high-tech clothing, specially insulated boots, crampons, harnesses, carabiners, synthetic ropes, and jumars—mechanical devices for ascending a rope. We know we are going to be gently dropped into a crevasse and then need to climb our way out. Even so, with all our modern gear and our readiness, it is neither psychologically comfortable nor physically easy. I shudder to think how the likes of Scott’s men coped with the frequent unexpected falling into crevasses with the crudest of gear.
To make a shelter, Daniel and I construct our own snow cave, piling up shovelfuls of snow to make a drift, then hollowing it out using the shovel. In the twenty-four-hour daylight of an Antarctic summer, it is a surprisingly comfortable residence for a single night: the light shines translucently through the walls of the snow cave. We have insulated mattresses and double sleeping bags packed with pure down from eider ducks. The air temperature is cold, but not too cold. We are snug. The most surprising thing of all: it is so quiet, insulated from any outside sounds, like the wind. That was the first thing that Campbell noted about their igloo.
But make no mistake: swap it for twenty-four hours of darkness and much colder conditions, make it for seven months and not one night, take away the freeze-dried beef stroganoff and frozen prawns, and the novelty would soon go away. It would quickly become a dismal hole.
And having been afflicted by diarrhea when camped in a polar tent, unchanged in design from those used by Scott, let me just say that there are few activities more unpleasant than sitting over a bucket with your trousers pulled down when it is -20°F and blowing a gale.
As with Antarctica’s penguins, fat would be an ideal asset for the Northern Party to survive in Antarctica. However, Levick and the others are beginning their vigil in poor condition, exhausted from five weeks of hauling sledges, and they have precious little food. As the doctor in the party, Levick takes it upon himself to ration the food strictly and to keep track of everyone’s health. The regimented nature of the party under Campbell’s leadership probably helps with the discipline of eking out the merest of rations.
The real issue confronting Levick and Campbell, however, is that it is simply not enough to get through the winter months of darkness. Somehow, they have to hold back enough food, enough equipment, and enough suitable clothing in order to undertake the two-hundred-mile journey back to Cape Evans when, and if, they eventually emerge from their winter hibernaculum. To do otherwise would be to merely delay their inevitable deaths. Even so, Levick has to ensure that they get through the winter in a condition where they can still walk, let alone pull sledges for two hundred miles in some of the toughest conditions imaginable. It is their only assured means of getting to safety. They cannot just sit there and hope to be rescued before their food runs out.
Hence, from the first day they contemplate a winter in Antarctica with little rations, Priestley is put in charge of their meager food supplies with a clear instruction that he must ensure they have enough in reserve to make the journey south when the sun returns in the spring. In fact, while Priestley acts as quartermaster and doles out the food, it is Levick who fashions their diet and decides how much and of what they shall eat.
Campbell’s insistence upon stowing the best of their clothes and the best of their food in order to allow for spring sledging seems like an extraordinary piece of foresight when their feet and fingers are freezing and their bellies are empty. It is not unlike the equations the penguins must solve for their winter migrations. They must make sure they have new clothes (feathers) and adequate reserves, not just to exist but to propel them through their long journeys.
It is the winter of 1991. The French Argos satellites, orbiting the Earth every one hundred minutes, are picking up signals from the transmitters glued to the backs of the two penguins from Cape Bird. They are able to record the position of the penguins to within a mile or two of accuracy. The birds are following roughly the same path that the Terra Nova took when getting out of Ross Island for the winter. They travel up the Victoria Land coast, passing the Drygalski Ice Tongue, passing Evans Coves, passing Cape Hallett, moving north at an extraordinary average of over thirty miles each day. When they get to Cape Adare at the outer tip of the indentation that forms the Ross Sea, they hang a left and move westward along the part of Antarctica that had proven off limits and unexplorable to Borchgrevink, Campbell’s men, and Mawson. At a certain point, when opposite another massive ice tongue similar to the Drygalski, they turn north, appearing to slow down then and spend the winter fishing in the pack-ice northwest of the Balleny Islands.
All signals are lost from the penguins after five and a half months, most likely because the batteries have become exhausted in the frigid waters, but the data they have furnished are staggering. The penguin that was tracked for the longest traveled over nine hundred miles from Cape Bird to its winter feeding grounds: farther than Amundsen and Scott’s journeys to the South Pole. Except that it did not move in a straight line. The actual distance traveled by the bird was 1,735 miles. Given that the birds must make the return journey to Cape Bird for the start of the new breeding season, that means that their winter migration is likely to mean traveling over three thousand miles. Not bad for a knee-high bird that cannot fly.
I think back to that first penguin I met on that October evening at Cape Bird in 1977. If I had known what I know now, I would not have just bowed, I would have gotten down on my knees to worship this tiny creature that had just returned from navigating its way over three thousand miles through the dark, ice-filled waters of Antarctica in winter. Incredible. No wonder so many do not make it.
It is May 1, 1912. Cherry-Garrard, Demitri, and Atkinson are traveling with the two dog teams from Hut Point to Cape Evans.
Earlier, on April 17, Atkinson had taken three other men with him and left Hut Point on a brave, probably foolhardy, attempt to get to the Northern Party by traveling up the coast like the migrating penguins. The sun had all but disappeared for the winter, it was dark and cold, and the ice conditions were treacherous. After three days’ hard slog, they got only as far as Butter Point on the other side of McMurdo Sound, where they found the sea ice ahead of them was breaking up. They could not go north to meet Campbell’s men any more than the Northern Party could get south to meet them. They depoted supplies at Butter Point and returned to Hut Point. Campbell’s party would have to make do by itself.
It is hard going in the gloom on an ice surface that makes it difficult for the dogs to pull the sledges. One dog, Manuki Noogis, lies down and refuses to go on; they cut him loose hoping that he will find his own way back to the hut at Cape Evans, but he is never seen again. As they near Cape Evans, Atkinson asks Cherry-Garrard if he would go for Campbell or the Polar Party come the spring. Cherry-Garrard does not hesitate, “Campbell,” he replies.
. . . just then it seemed to me unthinkable that we should leave live men to search for those who were dead.
Yet, the responsibility for finding out what has happened to the Polar Party and whether they reached the pole weighs heavily upon Atkinson. On June 14, 1912, a week before Midwinter’s Day, he calls a meeting of all at Cape Evans to discuss their options come the spring.
The thirteen men are all that remain at Cape Evans from the Terra Nova Expedition. The hut is hushed. Any frivolities replaced now by the seriousness of the decision confronting them. Atkinson addresses the men. There are simply not enough of them to mount two search parties. Either they go south to try to ascertain what became of Scott and the Polar Party or they go north to try to rescue Campbell and his men, who, potentially at least, might have survived the winter on seals and penguins, however small that chance might be; unlike the Polar Party members, who have no such chance. On the one hand, they might go south and fail to find any trace of the Polar Party, while Campbell’s men “might die for want of help.” Cherry-Garrard reiterates the moral dilemma they face, much as he had expressed it to Atkinson on the journey from Hut Point to Cape Evans six weeks earlier: “Were we to forsake men who might be alive to look for those whom we knew were dead?”
Atkinson points out that even if they could get to Campbell, it is likely they could do so only five to six weeks before the Terra Nova should return and be able to pick them up anyway. He expresses his own conviction that they should go south. The primary purpose of the expedition has been to get to the South Pole. He suggests that they owe it to the men of the Polar Party and their relatives, as well as the expedition as a whole, to ascertain their fate if at all possible. He puts the two options to the vote. All, including Cherry-Garrard, vote with Atkinson. Only Lashly abstains and refuses to vote at all.
Like Manuki Noogis, then, the decision has been made to cut Campbell’s Northern Party loose and leave them to find their own way back to the Cape Evans hut. The dark truth that settles uneasily on them more certainly than the long black night outside, is that none of them know if, like their dog, they will ever see Campbell, Levick, Priestley, Abbott, Browning, and Dickason again.
The night is at its longest and blackest. It is June 22, 1912, Midwinter’s Day. In the snow cave at Evans Coves, Levick describes it as “a great day of feasting.” He and Priestley are the cooks. They prepare “the most magnificent hoosh, with emperor penguins (sic) hearts and livers, and seals (sic) liver, meat, and plenty of blubber.” This is followed by a “brew of Fry’s Malted Cocoa of the actual strength employed in civilisation, and I think we enjoyed this more than anything.” After this comes “four biscuits and four sticks of chocolate each, and 12 lumps of sugar.”
I have not realised how hungry I have been during the last month or so, till I felt the relief of a full stomach and the absence of a worrying appetite.
They also drink their only alcohol, a bottle of British fortified wine called Wincarnis. Priestley says, “none of the famous wines of the world could possibly taste to us as did this,” although, while chopping meat, he knocks over his mug of the precious wine, spilling it over his sleeping bag. He manages to save less than a tablespoonful, although he good-humoredly maintains this enhances his appreciation of the little wine that remains. Yet like Levick, it is the full-strength cocoa that is his pick of the meal:
The hoosh flavoured with seal’s brain and penguins’s liver, was sublime, the Wincarnis tasted strongly of muscatel grape, and the sweet cocoa was the best drink I have had for nine months.
The importance of the Midwinter’s Day feast in maintaining their mental well-being cannot be overstated. It had sustained them for two weeks beforehand, discussing and anticipating what the menu should contain. And the memory of the treat from the next day forward, when they “once more went back to a subnormal allowance” of food, coupled with the knowledge that “everyday now the sun will come nearer and nearer to us,” suggests that life should improve and there is literally going to be sunlight at the end of the tunnel that forms the entrance to their “miserable hole.”
Campbell wants to ensure that his men, like successful penguins, make it through their own winter and migration. He had set aside the spare clothes they would need in spring and divvied up the rest between them for living in the snow cave. They have shelter and a modicum of insulation from their clothing. What they most lack, what is most critical, is food.
It is July 10, 1912. They are running low on meat and already down to half rations. The men cook in pairs, with a pair cooking the two meals for a day, then having two days off. Levick cooks with Priestley and it is their day to cook.
Campbell, meanwhile, goes outside at midday for a walk down to the beach where he spots a seal, the first they have seen for three months. Rushing back to the igloo, he grabs Abbott and Browning and they head back down to the ice edge where they find a fat cow and a large bull Weddell seal. Abbott stabs the cow in the heart with his knife, but the bull seal is a harder proposition as it heads for the water. Abbott bashes it with his ice axe to little effect and, as a last resort, jumps upon its back, whacking it on its nose with his ice axe, which stuns it enough to bring it to a stop. He reaches out to Campbell for his knife but he does not notice that Campbell has handed him Browning’s knife instead. The handle of Abbott’s knife is bound so as to form a stop between the handle and the blade, but Browning’s is not. Abbott thrusts the knife with all his might into the thick blubber of the bull seal to penetrate its heart. The handle of Browning’s knife is greasy and, without the stop, his hand slides unimpeded down the sharp blade, slicing deeply through the base of the three middle fingers on his right hand.
Campbell sends Abbott back to the igloo while he and the others butcher the two seals. By the time Abbott gets to Levick, “His fur mit (sic) was nearly full of blood which soon froze into a solid block.” Levick faces a difficult choice: his hands are “filthy & soaked with blubber from the stove,” his fingers are “stiff with cold,” and he has only “the guttering light of a blubber lamp held by Priestley.” He opts to dress the wounds in bandages right away rather than risk infection by trying to open the wounds up to see if the tendons have been cut, because even if they have been, Levick doubts that he will be able to find the severed ends and repair them in the dim light with his frozen fingers. Yet he frets about his decision:
I shall feel rotten about it if his tendons are cut, but think it would have been risking serious suppuration if I had attempted enlarging the wounds and picking up the severed ends, even if I had been able to find them in this light, so great was the filth of my hands & whole surroundings.
The next evening, Levick washes and dresses Abbott’s wounds. He observes, “The tendons of three fingers are cut I am sorry to say.”
Two days after finding the two seals, Browning and Dickason find another two and butcher them. Things are looking up on the food front. “We had another double hoosh,” Campbell notes, to celebrate their changing fortunes.
Apart from the physical hardships that living in a hole in a snowbank during an Antarctic winter poses, the psychological hardships are no less of a risk to their chances of surviving the almost impossible. The cold and the perpetual darkness had played havoc with the minds of the crew of the Belgica during the first Antarctic winter endured by men—and that was on a dry ship with plenty of food. Inasmuch as Levick is the Northern Party’s doctor looking after their physical well-being, he also plays a crucial role in attending to their psychological well-being. He recognizes the need to remain cheerful and positive in outlook. Each night, by the flickering light of a blubber lamp, he reads to the men from one of the few books they have with them. First, Boccaccio’s Decameron, followed by the newly published novel Simon the Jester by William John Locke, then Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and afterward, Balfour’s Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Decameron is an unusual choice: the focus of the one hundred stories it contains is often on human sexuality and depravities. Levick, ever one to display his Victorian-bred roots, pronounces it “a most boring production.” However, the parallels with his observations of penguins cannot have escaped him: Boccaccio’s 14th century Italian tales deal with lust, insatiable sexual arousal, deception, and infidelities—all things he had observed in the penguins. And yet, nowhere in the blubber-stained diaries the men keep in their dark cave, in which they discuss food and life in minute detail, is there a single mention of them discussing the behavior of penguins, and certainly nothing in reference to Decameron. Their only references to penguins concern how good they are to eat.
Crucially, Levick becomes Campbell’s confidant. Campbell is a leader in that he makes well-considered decisions, but he is not a leader who inspires, not a person given to emotion, and certainly not one to reach out to the men. Even within the confines of the most wretched living conditions imaginable, he still maintains naval disciplines, including booking Browning for misconduct for turning out late from his sleeping bag to cook the meal.
Levick is able to engage Campbell in a way that the others cannot. He and Campbell spend long hours in the darkness discussing in great detail the various motorbike tours they will undertake when getting back to civilization. This inevitably involves “dining sumptuously at the various inns on the way,” where they discuss ordering the meals in “the most minute particulars, wine and all.”
It is uncommonly cheering to think of the stretches of white dusty road at home at the present time, with green trees and flowers, pretty girls in summer dresses, and all the other things there that make life good, including the motor-bike I’m going to buy when I get back, until one feels inclined to smash down the door of this damned dismal little hole and clear out, only there’s the beastly thin Plateau nosing round outside. It wont (sic) be like this on the Saskatchewan!
Indeed, the Saskatchewan. One journey, in particular, exercises Levick’s imagination. He decides that he will become a writer, “and one of my hottest ideas at present is a canoe trip from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, right through Canada, down the Saskatchewan, and writing about it, with plenty of good photographs.” Campbell, who knows Canada well, helps him by sketching out a map of the journey.
Campbell & I spend hours over planning my trip down the Saskatchewan. He knows the country round Winnipeg and Edmonton, and has shown me the route on a rough map.
It will make the subject for a good book with fine photographs and should not take more than four months, so that six months half pay would easily see me through it.
I write now, to read later, that if I dont (sic) do this trip I ought to be led out and shot.
Led out and shot? At that moment, there are a heap of other things likely to kill him first, not least being the two hundred miles of crevasses and chasms lying between him and safety.