When Your Life Depends on It

by Brad Borkan

  Robert Scott sought him out when setting up the Discovery Expedition since his aim was to unlock the secrets of the Antarctic. Scott spent months planning the mission, assembling the gear, and gathering the scientists and men of the crew who would bring home the successes in science and geographical observation. Other expeditions would follow in his wake, building on those successes. In the following few years, Shackleton, Scott himself, and the Australian Douglas Mawson would carry the flags of the British Empire further into the depths of the Southern Continent. Amundsen (from Norway), as well as others like Charcot (from France), Drygalski (from Germany), Nordenskjöld (Sweden) and Shirase (from Japan), would carry the flags of their own countries, all for the furtherance of geographical and scientific discovery along with their own national pride.

  Regardless of which country they hailed from or what their overall aims were, these expeditions would all need the same essential equipment, and in planning their expeditions, an answer to these four overarching questions:

  1. What is it we want to achieve?

  2. Where is it we want to explore, and how do we plan to get there?

  3. What will we need when we arrive, and for how long?

  4. How is it all to be paid for?

  Determine your goals before you start planning

  One of most important things necessary for success was to have a clearly defined set of expedition goals. They needed a reason to explore the Antarctic: to fill in the empty spaces of the unknown world, to gather data for science’s ever-growing demands, and to fulfil the personal goals of its leader whose vision aspired to something beyond an ordinary scope of work.

  Why, after all, devote so much time and energy to getting a small number of human beings to a remote place that previous experience had shown to be no more than a navigational point on a featureless, colorless, empty, windswept, frozen plain? There was nothing to carry home from the place but themselves and a notebook full of meteorological data that no one else could bring. Why was it so important to men like Mawson, Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen to have this abstract goal of planting the flag of their respective nations in this ice?

  It was an abstract goal in all these cases, yes. But it was a goal that lured all these men, the leaders and their followers to the utmost measures of devotion to duty, regardless of the outcome. Goals were also critical to fundraising, which had a direct impact on the important decision on what type of ship to take.

  Getting there alive: finding a ship capable of surviving storms, ice, and overloading

  The execution of these simply-stated goals was certainly not simple. All of the expeditions faced the challenge of finding the right ship with which to reach the Antarctic shores. The best building material for these ice-breaking ships was wood. It was flexible enough to bend without breaking under the extreme pressure of the moving pack ice that was certain to be encountered. A steel ship could be gored, and sunk.

  The Dundee whalers of the 1890s provided a good model. Decades of experience in Baffin Bay off the coast of Greenland had shown the way: sailing vessels equipped with auxiliary steam power and constructed with good stout frames and planking. Sail power was essential since that reduced reliance on continually using the steam engine. There was no room for many tons of extra coal to drive the steam engine, when the holds were filled to overflowing with the supplies necessary to sustain a shore party for a full year or more. Scott’s first expedition ship, the Discovery, was designed along these proven lines, and launched in 1901 for the express purpose of Antarctic exploration. She filled that role for later expeditions as well; when not exploring, she was engaged by the Hudson’s Bay Company for its Arctic commerce. One of the two surviving expedition ships of the heroic age, she is now a museum ship, permanently positioned afloat at Discovery Point in Dundee, Scotland.

  Like every Antarctic vessel ever launched, she had her limitations: slow, a heavy roller, and profligate of fuel. Shackleton, for his 1907 shot at the Pole, took another Dundee whaler, the diminutive Nimrod. For his next and final expedition in 1910, Scott chose the venerable steam whaler the Terra Nova. Later, Mawson purchased a Scots barquentine, the Aurora, which subsequently found another role in landing Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party in 1915. These older vessels, purchased at a discount, survived to continue later in commercial trades.

  Amundsen’s Fram was Nansen’s former Arctic ship, which Nansen cleverly designed to survive the crushing grip of the ice pack. She had a unique hull enabling the ship to rise if the ice pressure squeezed her too hard. Her new diesel engine needed comparatively little fuel; her schooner sails gave slow but steady progress on Amundsen’s long nonstop passage from Bundefjord, Norway to the Bay of Whales in Antarctica. It is the other surviving expedition ship and is housed today in the Fram Museum in Oslo, the “Home of the world’s strongest polar vessel.”

  In hindsight, Shackleton’s decision to purchase the Endurance for his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914 was unlucky. This ship was new but not designed specifically for exploration work. She had likewise been built to lift in the ice, but her hull—more for the comfort of the hunters for whom she had been designed—was not as rounded as that of the Fram. When the floes of the Weddell Sea closed around her, she did lift—but unfortunately not every time. She sank on November 21, 1915, a victim to the marauding ice.

  These choices were largely the result of what was available when each expedition was in the planning stages, and the percentage of the overall budget that was devoted to the purchase of a ship. The ship—purpose-built and new, or borrowed, or bought from secondhand stock at a bargain price—was invariably the largest single expense, and only after it had been met could attention be paid to the other, equally critical aspects of the enterprise.

  Vital needs: a hut, sledging supplies, food for the men for one or more years

  A failure in long-range planning for even one of these vital elements could, and did, have life and death consequences for the men involved in these expeditions. The needs for housing, at least, were relatively simple to prepare for.

  How many men? The wintering parties varied in number from Scott’s forty-six who lived in the icebound Discovery at Hut Point and just built a shore-based hut for their scientists to use, to Amundsen’s nine at his base named Framheim, built on the potentially unstable Barrier Ice at the Bay of Whales. The huts themselves were simple wooden affairs, designed along the lines of settlers’ houses, with numbered parts for easy assembly on shore. The space between their double walls and ceilings was filled with cork insulation to shield against the cold. Inside, coal stoves supplied the cook’s requirements and kept the air temperature at a balmy 50ºF (10ºC). The fires were kept alight day and night from the tons of coal stacked in sacks outside.

  Over the course of an Antarctic winter, the expedition leaders knew that the men’s minds must be occupied. Lessons from earlier polar work revealed that some men could not take the prolonged darkness and extreme cold that kept everyone indoors for months at a time. Routine and regular work was required as well as providing a library for those of an enquiring mind: lectures and entertainment with a gramophone, games and even slide shows to be enjoyed in the evenings. The Nimrod Expedition brought a printing press and during the long winter months the men wrote and produced a book they titled Aurora Australis. The covers were made from wooden boards from packing crates. Somewhere between eighty and one hundred copies were printed in Antarctica and they are now highly treasured by museums and collectors.

  The dogs and ponies brought for hauling sledges had an equally important value as the companions and warm-blooded wards of the men, who adopted them as pets. Every ship had its working cat; some of them came ashore. Amundsen provided a quintessentially Norwegian luxury: a sauna.

  Food, glorious food

  Even on ordinary working days in the hut, there was as much food as a man cared to eat. Once out on the trail, the fare was simpler. One-pot hooshes were the standard fare for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Powder
ed meat pemmican and dried milk plasmon were added to melted snow thickened with broken ship’s biscuits, and taken hot the moment the mixture came to a boil. Hot tea or cocoa finished off the meal. The cooking pot and pannikins were scraped clean of every last morsel, the men had a smoke and prepared to move on. The sledges were laden with enough to supply the teams with what was assumed to be plenty to supply for their needs during the course of months that the longest journeys would entail.

  How to feed the men? Again, a simple enough computation could determine the number of meals to be served over the anticipated duration of time ashore. All of it but the fresh meat of seals and penguins hunted on the spot would be in some way dried or canned in the relatively unsophisticated means of preservation of the day. This diet was enlivened on frequent occasions with special compositions from the galley, in copious abundance. The standard glory of the European tradition of Christmas was celebrated instead in June, with midwinter feasts hailing the approach of daylight after the darkest and longest of nights. In all of the expeditions the menu for these was as elaborate as the larder would bear, with toasts all around from the carefully rationed stock of alcohol.

  Not all the food was held to be glorious. The locally hunted penguin meat had been aptly described as a combination of “beef, odiferous cod fish, and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce.”2 Not the first choice of any of the men, but when times were rough and food very short, even this revolting combination would allay the pangs of hunger. After the crushing of Shackleton’s Endurance, it led to their ultimate survival. Scott and Shackleton both intended to use the meat from their ponies, and Amundsen that of his dogs, slaughtered along their way to the Pole. Tough and stringy, it was barely edible, but served to give a little more nutritional value to the hoosh and was enjoyed by the surviving dogs.

  The food quantities at least were anticipated and planned for in advance. But the food value of these meals, generous though it seemed to be at more than 4,600 calories per day, was not enough to supply the needs of overworked teams who were man-hauling at high altitudes. As Scott’s and Shackleton’s overland parties discovered, ever-increasing hunger became a scourge that could not be ignored. Those simple meals, coming at lunch and supper, were often the only bright spots in a brutally hard day. Only then would the hunger pangs be erased, and only for a little while.

  Nutritional science was in its infancy in 1900. The word “vitamin” had yet to come into existence. The daily caloric requirements for hard work could only be guessed at. Even though every expedition had at least one physician on the team to treat injuries and frostbite as they occurred, none of those doctors really understood the causes of scurvy, or how best to treat it. While the beneficial effects of fresh vegetables and some fresh meats were well known, the vital component of vitamin C contained in them was not. They only knew that when the men were near shore, and eating the meat of the seals and penguins that were available there, their health was maintained. However, when the field parties were away for extended periods, scurvy was the result.

  The disease had been a concern for centuries. On long sea voyages the men would bruise, then weaken as their muscles became detached within their bodies, suffering joint pain, tooth loss, and eventually death. If they survived, their recovery was often remarkable, the result of the invisible vitamin C in various items of fresh food that became available once they had returned to shore. Seals abounded near the shore; their meat, eaten fresh, provided just enough ascorbic acid to keep the disease at bay. No one knew that drying the meat over heat reduced that value.

  Other shortcomings appeared when the field parties, in an ill-considered attempt to increase the number of days they might advance toward their goal, decided to “spin-out” the ration by decreasing the total amount taken in a day. This had the dual effect of weakening the men, and aggravating their hunger to an intolerable degree. Rather than limit the number of days’ advance, Shackleton and the men of his 1908 South Pole attempt continued well beyond the limits of their ration allotment. Their return to Cape Royds, which was a race against time and starvation, is described in Chapter 10, Will The Results Be Worth The Effort? They made it back by the barest of margins, mere hours before their ship, the Nimrod, departed for civilization for the winter.

  2 Dr. Frederick Cook’s remark based on his experience on the Belgica Expedition 1897-1899.

  Sledging supplies: the real work of the expedition

  The leaders, in planning the expedition, knew that with the arrival of the Antarctic spring the real work of the expedition would begin. A separate list of supplies and materials must now be filled. Nansen’s Primus stoves and annular cooking pots were vital equipment on all expeditions. Canvas tents, capable of being erected in high winds and able to sustain blizzard conditions were designed first to house three men, and later designs could house four or five men. Scott’s three-man sleeping bags used in the Discovery Expedition gave way to the more comfortable, if colder, one-man bags. Preserved food of high caloric content was needed as well as windproof clothing, helmets, gloves and finneskoes—the list was endless, and the quantities a matter of speculation. Big and small details could not be neglected. Should they bring fur clothing, or wool and gabardine? Opinions differed on which was better. Every detail had to be thought out from the relative comfort of an office back home, months or years before the expedition would depart.

  There were additional issues that could not have been anticipated until actual exploration was underway. Sledging equipment evolved over time. They believed in 1901 that sledges required under-runners of German silver, but in the field they learned that sledges performed better without them.

  It was not until Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard’s Winter Journey on the Terra Nova Expedition in 1911 that the special demands of extreme cold-weather sledging became known. In the very deep cold of winter, sleeping bags absorbed the moisture of sweat and breath, holding it there as ice, accumulating each night in ever greater weight. Clothing instantly froze into plates that felt like solid armor around the men when they rose each morning. They had to instantly stand in a man-hauling position or risk having their clothing frozen in an awkward position all day. The snow was so cold it could not melt under the friction of the sledge runners and give the necessary “glide.” This last factor also played a major role in Scott’s inevitable decline on the homeward journey from the Pole in 1912, when the weakened men found the snow beneath the sledges to be like sand under the runners.

  Dogs, ponies, motor sledges or man-hauling: a cold, hard decision

  Each leader had his own ideas as to the transport to be used in the field. In 1900, Scott was a product of his hierarchical Royal Navy experience. Throughout the search for the Northwest Passage, long-distance man-hauling had yielded impressive results; Scott found no particular need to enlist the help of other means. He did bring twenty-three dogs on the Discovery Expedition, but ironically, nobody skilled in their handling. As a result, the success of the dogs as transport was minimal for long journeys, though they did perform well on short journeys. Their health was impacted by being fed dried fish. They all died before their benefit could be fully realized, and man-hauling became their default sledge transport method.

  In 1907, Shackleton realized he needed something better. Taking a cue from the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to the Arctic in 1894-1897, he brought Siberian ponies to the Antarctic to move his supplies south toward the Pole. Despite the fact that they were woefully unsuited for the work, his ponies performed admirably—advancing the necessary supplies as far south as the Beardmore Glacier. Shackleton’s success with ponies convinced Scott to take them as well in 1910 on the Terra Nova Expedition for his own advance on the South Pole.

  Scott’s detailed calculations (derived from previous British experience) seemed to prove Shackleton’s idea about ponies right, but he was not dependent on ponies alone. For the Terra Nova Expedition, he also sailed with three specially adapted motor s
ledges and thirty dogs—all of which would help to move supplies. If all else failed, he would be satisfied to fall back on “good old British man-hauling.”

  Scott’s careful planning seemed to have covered all the contingencies, but did not anticipate the challenges associated with the motor sledges and the early loss of many of the ponies. The remaining animals did their work well, but slowed the pace of the Barrier phase of the journey to the South Pole. There were too few dogs to move tons of supplies quickly. Most significantly, Scott did not anticipate the extent to which the physically gruelling man-hauling would run them down to the point where they could no longer walk. The photo on the cover of this book provides some idea of how challenging this was.

  Amundsen was also a meticulous planner. His tactics, based on his previous experience in the Arctic, led him to a different decision. Rather than try modern methods like motor sledges, his study of Arctic native populations showed that well-trained sledge dogs in the hands of skilful and experienced dog sledge drivers could move heavy loads long distances over the snow and ice. They could transport him and a few explorers to the Pole and back. He knew that ponies, being herbivores, were not really suitable and motor transport for the ice was still experimental.

  Amundsen was dependent on sledge dogs for his transport, but he had a detailed understanding of their needs, and brought with him many more than he would ultimately need. He set sail from Norway with ninety-seven dogs (arriving in Antarctica with 116 dogs, as some had had puppies along the way) and one of the best dog sledge drivers in the world, Sverre Hassel, to manage them. His decision proved to be successful, in that he was able to choose the fifty-five best dogs for his assault on the Pole in 1911.