Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South

Captain Mostyn Field

IT WOULD BE HARD to exaggerate how little Scott and his men knew of the world they had chosen for themselves. Armitage and Koettlitz had the dubious pleasure of an Arctic winter together during the Jackson – Harmsworth expedition to call on, but when it came to interpreting their immediate environment that was of no more real use than Bernacchi’s experience with Borchgrevink some three hundred miles to the north of McMurdo Sound.

‘The whole place had a weird and uncanny look and reminded me of the desert in “Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came”,’ Shackleton decided, but in practical terms that was of only limited help. They were deep in a ‘bay’ formed on the east side by Ross Island, on the west by mainland Antarctica, and on the south by the Great Barrier. Were the conditions that they had met with typical of McMurdo for this time of the year? When did the ice in the harbour they had chosen go out? When would they be able to find a secure anchorage for Discovery? How big were the tides?

With the end of the summer season only a matter of weeks away, the clear priority was to ready themselves for winter. A convenient spot had been found on a bare, flattish plateau close to Discovery, and work immediately got under way erecting the three huts brought with them from New Zealand. ‘We have landed all the dogs,’ Scott was soon noting with characteristic impatience, ‘and their kennels are ranged over the hillside below the huts. They complain bitterly, but they are a good riddance from the deck, which is again assuming some appearance of cleanliness … It is surprising what a number of things have to be done, and what an unconscionable time it takes to do them … Much work is before us when the huts are up: we must land a store of provisions and a boat for emergencies; then there are the instruments to be seen to, more seals to be killed for the winter, arrangements made for fresh-water ice, sledges and tents to be prepared, and a hundred and-one details to be attended to.’

At the heart of this growing shantytown was the ironically dubbed ‘Villa Gregory’, a thirty-six-foot-square ‘settler’s bungalow’ with overhanging eves and veranda that had been constructed in Australia and shipped down with their other stores. It had been designed originally with an independent shore party in mind, but one look at it on the quay at Lyttelton had been enough to leave Scott’s men knowing there was nothing they would sooner avoid. ‘There was … the uncertainty of the long Antarctic night,’ Bernacchi wrote with the nightmare memory of Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross expedition to sharpen his relief, ‘which I had experienced at Cape Adare, in a tiny hut, fifteen feet square, lashed down by cables to the rocky shore. The night there had been shorter than we would now experience, as we had been farther north, but officers and men, living together in so restricted a space, ten of us in all, had found tempers wearing thin long before it passed. To those who had not yet experienced the polar darkness, anticipating was probably worse than realisation, and some feared the results of nervous irritation before the winter passed. That was an experience, however, from which Discovery saved us. A winter in “Gregory’s Lodge” might have been little better than a repetition of the boredom and irritation engendered at Cape Adare. With Discovery our home, each officer had his own sanctum, and the men in their quarters could enjoy their leisure in their own way. The friction of conflicting tastes was eliminated from the beginning.’

With every available day of light precious, there was little chance of boredom for officer or man in these first weeks ashore. In addition to the Villa Gregory there were two asbestos-covered huts for magnetic observations, the larger of the two for differential instruments and the smaller for absolute instruments against which daily observations could periodically be checked. ‘They and all that pertained to them were Mr. Bernacchi’s special business,’ Scott wrote of the arcane mysteries of these huts, ‘and many times a day this officer could be seen journeying to and fro in attendance on his precious charge. Within the larger of the huts, mounted on a solidly bedded oak plant, could be seen three small instruments, set at different angles, but each containing a delicately suspended magnetic needle … [recording] on rolls of sensitised photographic paper … the declination, horizontal force, and vertical force … of the earth’s magnetic pull.’

It was a tyrannous routine at the best of times – still more so in winter, on the ‘international term days’, when comparative readings in Discovery and the German ship Gauss had to be taken every two hours – but for sheer despotic misery it probably took second place to Royds’s. As Scott’s First Lieutenant he was responsible anyway for the day-to-day running of the ship, and on top of his normal duties he was also the expedition’s meteorologist, condemned summer and winter, fair or blizzard, to an icy two-hourly circle of the expedition’s barometer, thermometers and anemometer.

With each of the officers doing a night shift in turn, and their own separate disciplines to look after, there was no one in the wardroom who was idle. There was such a disparate range of tasks to cover that they tended only to meet at meal times, dispersing in between to their specimens and microscopes, their rocks and ice-holes and dredging equipment or, in the case of Michael Barne – utterly indifferent to cold or hardship – to his lonely treks across the ice in a thankless search for variations in sea temperatures.

For the men, too, there were seals to kill, penguins to hunt, snow ramps to build, ship sides to bank, water to collect and Discovery’s winter awning to be prepared. ‘Routine while the light lasts,’ Williamson recorded in his journal:

AM

5.45 – call hands, coffee

6.15 – hands fall in for work, ice ship generally

7.00 – one hand from each mess to clean out mess deck

8.00 – breakfast

9.00 – hands turn to work as necessary

PM

12.00 – dinner

1.30 – hands turn to, work as necessary

5.00 – supper, finish for day, if all goes well.

From the first, however, Scott had made it clear that he was not interested in making work for its own sake, and for a man who obsessively filled his own time he was surprisingly tolerant of what the men did with theirs. On the nineteenth-century naval expeditions in the Arctic officers had traditionally taught their men to read and write, but in a different world and a different navy Scott recognised that there were no courses that would not either patronise or bewilder a crew who filled in their spare hours with anything from Darwin’s Origin of Species to interminable games of shove ha’penny.

But for all that he allowed a fairly relaxed regime, he could be tough when he needed to be, and their first days in McMurdo provided him with an unwanted opportunity to put down his marker. ‘The cook Mr Brett getting troublesome,’ the Dundee shipwright James Duncan noted with a nice understatement in his journal for 10 February, ‘had to be taked two [sic] by the Captain.’ ‘Had trouble with the cook this morning,’ Scott recorded more explicitly. ‘He had been insolent to Shackleton on Saturday & when brought up was insolent to me – I put him in irons, being much reviled during the process. 8 hours brought him to his senses and a condition of whining humility – He is a wretched specimen of humanity.’

This might not sound very attractive, but if journals are anything to go by, there was not a soul on the ship who would have raised a finger to save Charles Brett from a lot worse. Brett had been taken on at the last minute in New Zealand to replace the original cook who had been dismissed, and even before they had reached McMurdo his blend of idleness, dirtiness and empty brag had made anything that Scott could do to him seem no less than his due.

Considering the mix of men on board, in fact, and the restrictions and strains they had to live under, there was astonishingly little need for Scott to use a heavy hand at any time in the south. ‘There was one [William Hubert] who found himself in serious trouble for his epicurean tastes,’ Bernacchi recalled of one of the rare exceptions to this general harmony,

a merchant seaman who must have signed on in a moment of mental aberration. He was not made for Polar exploration. He did not like the Antarctic or anything to do with it, and had been heard, during one of the very cold autumn sledging journeys, to sit up in his sleeping-bag and with chattering teeth apostrophise the night – ‘Fancy me from bloody Poplar, on the bloody Ice Barrier, in a bloody sleeping-bag, gorblimey!’

No doubt on the mess deck he applied the same adjective to the cake which caused the trouble, though when the ship’s company was paraded in strict naval style, so that he might make his complaint with due ceremony, he only demanded mildly of the captain, as he fished an offensive lump of something from his pocket – ‘Do you call this caike?’ Scott had no sense of humour when discipline was infringed upon, and discipline demanded surely that a man who approached his commanding officer in such a way be ordered to instant execution.

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With the routines of wardroom and mess-deck life firmly established, the scientific work under way and the shore settlement taking shape, Scott’s next priority was to come to grips with Discovery’s immediate environment. ‘Names have been given to the various landmarks in our vicinity,’ he wrote in the middle of February of their first, touching steps at appropriating the alien landscape of Ross Island. ‘The end of our peninsula is to be called “Cape Armitage” after our excellent navigator. The sharp hill above it is to be “Observation Hill”; it is 750' high, and should make an excellent look-out station for observing the going and coming of sledge-parties. Next comes the “Gap”, through which we can cross the peninsula at a comparatively low level. North of the “Gap” are “Crater Heights”, and the higher volcanic peak beyond is to be “Crater Hill”; it is 1,050 feet in height. Our protecting promontory is to be “Hut Point”, with “Arrival Bay” on the north and “Winter Quarter Bay” on the south; above “Arrival Bay” are the “Arrival Heights”, which continue … to a long snow-slope, beyond which rises the most conspicuous landmark on our peninsula, a high precipitous-sided rock with a flat top, which has been dubbed “Castle Rock”.’ ‘Eyes’, too, ‘were turning to the south, the land of Promise –’ Scott noted on 13 February: ‘many are the arguments as to what lies in the misty distance, and what nature of obstacles the spring journey will bring to light – the optimistic look for a smooth clear ice-foot but I fear there will be many surprises when we get beyond our present vision.’

Four days later the work on shore was sufficiently in hand for Scott to think of their first sledging reconnaissance towards the nearby islands on the Barrier, and on 17 February Shackleton won a toss of a coin with Barne for the pleasure of leading it. The ice around the end of their peninsula was showing signs of breaking up, and the next day Scott told off three seamen to haul a sledge over the ‘Gap’ in readiness for Shackleton, Wilson and the young geologist Ferrar to start the next morning.

It was a historic occasion, because it was not only the first test of the men, but the first test too of the equipment over which Scott had struggled so long before Discovery sailed. The tents they had brought were bell-shaped and made of either a green Willesden canvas or thin gaberdine, stretched out over five bamboo poles that met at the top to give a height of five foot six and a diameter of about six feet. There was an entrance hole two and a half feet in diameter with a funnel-shaped door, another hole at the top for ventilation, and a valence or ‘skirting edge’ that could be weighed down with blocks of snow and ice to keep out drift. With a waterproof canvas floorcloth that could double up as a sail, the whole weighed about thirty pounds – the minimum, Scott reckoned, to withstand Arctic conditions.

The Discovery expedition had the advantage of recent polar experience to call on when it came to their tents – among Markham’s papers survives a note on tent design from Belgica’s Frederick Cook – but their sleeping bags show how much a matter of trial and error their equipment necessarily was. On this first journey they were experimenting with a kind of ‘night suit’ made out of reindeer or wolf furs that had been bought in Norway, but experience would soon prove these virtually impossible to get in and out of, and Scott had them converted into bags – either single or, more typically, ‘three-man bags’ weighing forty pounds (twice that by the end of a long journey with the accumulation of ice) – made with the fur inside, an overlap at the head and the sides, and a large flap that could be drawn over when everyone was inside and toggled down. ‘The warmest position,’ Scott wrote – almost anticipating, it would seem, one of the posthumous criticisms that he always took the centre berth – ‘was the middle, but it was not always preferred. As an offset for his increased comfort it was the duty of the centre occupant to toggle up the bag – a task which, with bare cold fingers was by no means pleasant, and generally occupied a considerable time.’

The sleeping bag was an even more vital piece of equipment than the tent, Scott reckoned, and not far behind it was their cooker. He was prepared to concede that the nutritional value of the food would in theory be the same hot or cold, but ‘as regards the heating of food’, he later remarked with measured understatement, ‘I can only say that I should prefer to be absent from a party who had decided to forgo it’.

The cooker they used was of Nansen’s design – his greatest contribution to sledging requirements, a grateful Scott believed – an adaptation of a modern form of heating lamp that consumed paraffin in a vaporised state. The most vital requirement of any cooker in Antarctic conditions was heat efficiency, and Nansen’s design of concentric lightweight aluminium containers, with the heated gases circulating around the central pot, usefully expended 90 per cent of the heat coming from the lamp beneath.

It was not just for the cooker that they had to thank Nansen, because their sledges, made in Christiania, similarly showed the benefit of his experience. The typical soul-breaking, iron-shod tenfooter of the McClintock era had taken seven men to pull, but Scott’s ash sledges were lighter, narrower and more flexible, with most of the joints made of lashings to allow for an almost snakelike movement, slightly wider runners, rounded beneath, an overall width of one foot five inches, and a length that varied from seven feet (too stiff) to the ideal, forty-odd pound eleven-footer, and a twelve-footer that was ‘just beyond the limits of handiness’.

As important as their sledges was their sledging costume, and give or take individual touches of whimsy, this was the same for officers and men. A warm thick suit of underclothing formed the innermost layer, followed by a flannel shirt or two, a sweater, pilot-cloth breeches and loosely cut jacket, lots of pockets for knives, matches, goggles and whistles, and an outer suit of thin gaberdine from Messrs Burberry to keep out the biting wind.

For the hands there were fur or felt mitts – Scott swore by his wolfskin – over long, woollen half mitts – but when it came to headgear, there was more individualism. In the glare of summer a broad-rimmed felt hat would usually be worn over a balaclava, and in the colder weather a camel-wool helmet with gaberdine cover, or simply two woollen balaclavas under the gaberdine cover – Scott used just one, augmented by an extra thickness of material to protect the ears – and a pair of goggles made out of smoked glass, slitted leather or, in Scott’s case, a sliver of wood, blackened on the inside and pierced with a cross-shaped aperture.

Most vital of all on the march was the protection of their feet, and for this there was nothing to touch the reindeer-fur boot or finneskoe made in Norway. The pressure of time had meant that their supply was of a variable quality, but a properly made pair, bulked out with a couple of pairs of socks, or in Lapp fashion, an insulating nest of sennegrass, would stand weeks of hard travelling on the ice.

There was one further, more controversial piece of equipment that stemmed from Scott’s journey to Norway, and that was their skis. Since Nansen completed the first crossing of Greenland on ski their possibilities for polar travel had been obvious, but between a man who had had his first pair of skis at two and a party of British seamen using them for the first time lay a gulf that no cursory practice on an ice floe in the pack or on the slopes above the Discovery hut was going to close. There was a profound disagreement on the subject from the start – Armitage loudest in the antiskiing faction, Skelton noisiest in their defence – but Scott himself would always remain oddly ambiguous about their use. Alongside the ultra-competitive Skelton he was probably the best skier in the party, but after an early conversion to the pro-ski faction he relapsed into a scepticism that nothing in his expedition experience could shift. ‘It was found that in spite of all appearances to the contrary,’ he would later write – and not from any doctrinaire opposition, but with the experience of months on the ice behind him, ‘a party on foot invariably beat a party on ski, even if the former were sinking ankle-deep at each step; while to add to this, when the surface was hard, ski could not be used, and had to be carried as an extra weight and a great encumbrance on the sledges … It will be seen, therefore, that our experience has led me to believe that for sledge work in the Antarctic Regions there is nothing to equal the honest and customary use of one’s own legs.’

That Scott was wrong would be only too bitterly demonstrated, but whether he was wrong at the time, with the men and equipment that he had at his disposal, is another matter. If he was guilty of anything it is probably that he was enough of a believer to make his men more competent, but against that it has to be recognised in his and their defence that, hauling on foot, Scott’s men would comfortably match in terms of miles anything that Nansen achieved with skis on the Greenland icecap.

All these matters, however – and the all-important issue of sledging rations that the long journeys of their first full season would expose – still lay in the future as Shackleton and his party finally set off.

(#litres_trial_promo) The weather was fine, but with a bitter southerly wind soon getting up, and White Island seeming to recede with every step they took towards it, it was not long before any illusions of knight errantry were brought to a brutal end. ‘At 11.30 the wind was worse than ever and we were all simply done,’ Wilson wrote after a day’s hauling that had seen them manage no more than an exhausting mile an hour,

so we decided to camp at once and wait until the wind had dropped. Up to this time Shackle’s face had suffered most from the cold. His cheek was constantly going dead white in one place, and Ferrar’s nose went too. My face wasn’t troubled, but the moment we halted and started to unpack … the cold and the snow drift and the wind were so bad that we all began frostbites …

However we dug out our trench and shoved the poles into the flapping business and … got our footgear off. The ski boots were frozen to the socks, so that both came off in one and it took us all we knew next morning to tear the socks out. The sweat of one’s feet had lined the boots with ice. We got into our long fur boots and our feet began to get comfortable. Then we got our supper cooked, hot cocoa and pemmican and biscuit and jam and butter, and then we began to get our furs on, an awful job in a small tent, but it was too bad to go outside, as our furs would have been filled with drift in no time. The other two were bricks to me now. They dressed me first, as I was constantly getting cramp in the thighs whenever I moved, and having dressed me, they put me on the floor and sat on me while they dressed each other. At last we were all in our wolfskins … and settled off to sleep huddled together to keep warm …

By 3.30 a.m. they had had as much as they could take, but exhausted again after four hours’ marching, they pitched camp still two miles short of White Island and slept until four that afternoon. After a meal they trudged on to the island, and with their tea frozen in the water bottles beneath their tunics, roped themselves together to begin the freezing climb to the 2,300-foot summit of the highest crater. ‘As far as the eye could see was a level ice plain,’ Wilson wrote of the view from the top, all the misery of the journey momentarily forgotten in the significance of what they were looking at: ‘the true Great Barrier surface, and no Antarctic Continent at all. On the west coast-line ran a series of promontories formed by splendid mountain ranges, and beyond them all was the setting sun just dipping below the horizon. Shackle took bearings and angles and I made a sketch, though we were nearly frozen doing it.’