In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the psychological damage done by polar explorations was usually overlooked: during that Victorian Age particularly, it wasn't the sort of thing one talked about. Suffering of that sort was a weakness at odds with the public image of the explorer as stoic, manly hero. Frederick Cook's describing how his shipmates on the Belgica grew isolated and depressed is a rare revelation. So was Jean-Baptiste Charcot's account of the voyage of the Pourquoi-Pas? IV, a three-masted French barque he had had built to chart sections of the Antarctic coastline starting in 1908. Even on this splendidly outfitted vessel, replete with three laboratories and a scientific library, disaster could not be averted. (Years later, in 1936, his ship would be struck by a violent storm near Iceland and wrecked on reefs. All but one of her thirty-one crew members, including Charcot, would perish.) The stately ship ran aground and then was quickly encircled by thickening ice. The men had to hastily put together igloos for the winter. Largely inexperienced in polar conditions, they grew despondent in the gathering darkness and fell victim to a variety of ailments, ranging from scurvy to swollen limbs to shortness of breath. Their anxiety about being cut off indefinitely from the rest of the world was magnified by their communal confinement. With considerable understatement, Charcot would later note that his men, increasingly aware that their life together “with no possibility of finding distraction from temporary failure of nerves, with no hope of being able to take a meal alone or in other company, has its painful moments.”32 Neither on the ship nor on the ice was there a single place where they could “shut themselves in” alone. Contact with others became insufferable not because they had changed, but because their “weaknesses or defects [were] no longer under the mask by which…one hides them in ordinary social life.” Fascinated as well as perplexed by this phenomenon, Charcot—both a physician and an explorer—pondered making a study of the “psychology of the restricted community.”
But it would take nearly a century for social scientists to investigate how constant companionship during polar explorations can be as devastating as isolation. What should provide comfort can end up only making a long imprisonment worse. In writing about these deleterious effects in 2008, anthropologist Lawrence Palinkas and psychologist Peter Suedfeld pointed out that being forced to live together for many months without interruption in the Arctic and Antarctic can make individuals suspicious of their mates to the point of paranoia.33 They come to believe that others are hoarding food, not doing their share of the work, or plotting against them.34 During one of the expeditions led by Charles Hall, a carpenter named Nathaniel Coffin became so obsessively fearful that he imagined other crew members were trying to drill a hole into his quarters so that they could spray carbonic acid on him and kill him.35 (It was later established that Coffin had been wounded in the head during the Civil War and subsequently discharged from the Union Army, and that it was this old injury that had caused him to go insane.36)
Not all commanders were unmindful of this lurking danger. Amundsen, for one, recognized that conflicts between the expedition leader and the ship's captain had often been the undoing of voyages to the Arctic, producing “incessant friction, divided counsels, and a lowered morale” among the crew. To avoid such outcomes, the Norwegian explorer had resolved to learn how to pilot a ship himself, so that all the decision-making would lie in his hands.37 Amundsen and some other leaders also tried to minimize resentment by treating their men more democratically—as Kane had given his Grinnell party a chance to vote on whether or not they should stay on for the Arctic winter. But, as Kane had discovered, loosening the reins of power sometimes only invited more dissension. Leaders could not reassure their men that all would be well. They, too, were helpless. All they could do was maintain the pretense of being in control. For that to happen, commanders needed opportunities to be by themselves and reflect. This helped to keep them from losing their sanity. As much as he worried about his men's deteriorating morale on the icebound Jeannette, George De Long also knew that he had to get away from this depressing situation now and then in order not to succumb to it. So, on many a night, he would slip away from the ship unnoticed, enjoying this precious solitude to absorb new energy and see the world differently. And this interlude worked its magic. From a hundred yards away, his ship looked like it had been “dropped out of fairyland,” while the Arctic sky took on the “grandest, wildest and most awful beauty.”38 Amid this nocturnal splendor, De Long could also understand more clearly what was happening to his party—how the “melancholy of the polar darkness, the claustrophobic dread that could set in while one was living under conditions of near imprisonment—the whole Arctic experience was a perfect incubator for insanity.”39
For the men back on the Jeannette, fitfully sleeping on their damp bunks below decks in total silence and darkness—aware that when they awoke many hours later the silence and darkness would not have gone away, that their breakfast would be the same that they had been eating for months, that everything they would do during their waking hours would be the same as it had been the day before and the day before that and the day before that, stretching back further in time than they cared to recall—acutely aware that their shipboard life would unfold in this totally predictable and unchanging way for months come, as if it were the script of a play they had been ordered to perform, always playing the same roles and delivering the same lines, for no apparent reason and for no apparent audience—for them, there were no such restorative respites as De Long could occasionally enjoy. For these trapped souls and for the thousands of others who had already faced the same fate in the polar world, and the thousands more yet to come here, there would be no such reprieve. Here they lived outside of time and outside of space. They had no past and seemingly no future. There were not dead, but they were not truly alive either. Their existence was a pointless absurdity, and they had no way out of it. No wonder they turned on each other. At least that provoked some sort of change—the only way to shatter the frozen sea inside their heads.
In the end, all he had left was the blunt stub of a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. The other two—Wilson and Bowers—lay still in their bags and likely close to death if not already dead, and so Scott was all alone with his thoughts and his flickering hopes that some modicum of redemption could be salvaged at the end of his life from what must have felt like a horrible cascade of failure. First, they had failed to beat the Norwegians to the Pole; then—with the bitterly cold wind barreling into the tent like an inept cat burglar—they had failed to make it back to One Ton Depot; after that, they had failed to take the more “natural” and ambitious step of setting out in that direction in a blizzard so that they could at least die nobly “in their tracks”; and finally they had even failed to spare themselves this final ignominy by swallowing the morphine tablets and slipping peacefully into unconsciousness. (Suicide was considered “against the code” by which they had lived.1 Still, Oates had made that choice—by walking out of the tent to die in the snow—and they had admired him for doing so.) So here they were, so close to getting back, but fading away helplessly in this hellish spot, not going out like medieval knights charging on horseback with leveled silvery lances, but flat on their backs, incapacitated by hunger and weakness as their faint, misty breaths gradually ebbed into nothingness.
Mindful of his imminent demise and all that it implied, Scott found some consolation—as he so often did—in words. For him, it was poignantly fitting that the end of his physical existence and the end of his journal-keeping would coincide. One was only fulfilled through the other. His elegant, evocative prose expressed all that his life had striven to be but never succeeded in fully becoming: with these words—his lance—he would transcend the cruel and unjust fate he had been handed and achieve another kind of victory. The pencil and paper would record how his code of honor and willingness to sacrifice his life for a greater cause had not faltered at the end and would thus lay down a legacy for generations to come. Death be not proud, indeed.
In extremis, Scott did not summon up Donne's defiant words, but instead scratched out a long farewell that blended acceptance with stern admonition—the parting words of a father about to go over the trenches and hurl himself against the hot steel pouring from the machine guns, of a brave man who realizes his message for posterity lies not in what he is going to accomplish but in the fact that he will end his life nobly. (In one of his last letters, he would make this explicit: “But we have been to the pole and we shall die as gentlemen.”2) This they will long remember. Holding the paper firmly, with his numb fingers still exercising enough control, he first scribbled, “It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more—R Scott.” Then, seemingly overwhelmed by despair and a welling sense of finality, he added, “For God's sake look after our people.”3
And then, presumably, he closed his eyes to await his death, snugly cushioned by his two loyal companions, flinging an arm protectively across Wilson's frozen body, which was leaning against the tent pole. “The Owner,” this shy and complex man who had led this British Antarctic Expedition all the way to the South Pole as he had vowed he would—but arrived too late to grab the brass ring—was now hoping for better luck in his afterlife. If nothing else, his words would ensure that—words that flowed from his pencil with a felicity and grace that belied this sorry ending, in this godforsaken place, and thus would be remembered long after any of the errors or miscalculations on his part would be forgotten. Words would extract triumph out of the maw of defeat and death: “Once short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more,” as the “Holy Sonnet” penned over three centuries before by the ailing Dean of St. Paul's had prophesied.4 In life, words had served him as a soothing balm against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that his kindred spirit, Hamlet, had so eloquently rued. In his writings—in the main, the journals he kept during his two Antarctic journeys—Scott had attained a degree of power and mastery denied him during his journeys across unpredictable, treacherous ice and snow, and in the face of much misfortune. Alone at his desk, hunched intently over his desk in his winter quarters at Hut Point, with pencil in one hand, smoldering pipe in the other—with photos of his wife, Kathleen, and two-year-old son Peter arrayed on the wall to his left and a jumble of books and gear behind him—Scott entered into a kingdom of his own making—a splendidly constructed place where the heroic spirit he had admired since his Victorian childhood could flourish, where each stroke of the pencil expanded its dominion a little farther, soaring above and beyond unforeseeable mishaps and unpleasant setbacks as a black, funeral veil would drape and conceal a pained face beneath.5 It was this thirst for the lofty and the ethereal that had made Scott insist—foolishly, because he was the expedition leader—on being the first person to ascend in a balloon over what he had just named “King Edward VII Land” during his penultimate Discovery expedition. The diminutive and occasionally indolent “Con,” whom a bemused father had dubbed “Old Mooney” for his tendency to lose himself in dreams, had first envisioned a glorious life of adventure by burrowing into the rosy yarns popular among English boys in his day. Later, as commander of the Terra Nova party, he had stocked the ship's library with volumes by his good friend J. M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Never Grow Up—the impish free spirit for whom Scott would name his son), Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Rudyard Kipling, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles was a particular favorite), preferring these fictional diversions to the musty, dog-eared volumes on polar expeditions entrusted to him by his mentor and fellow Royal Navy officer, Clements Markham.6 (Scott read Darwin, too, but one senses he was more dismayed than enlightened by the naturalist's depiction of the base impulses driving humankind.7)
As a writer, one of Scott's greatest gifts was his ability to express empathy and compassion during times of great adversity. Unlike so many of his naval predecessors, who tended to stick dutifully to the facts, he was not uncomfortable registering his feelings. This was certainly so when it came to the hardships suffered by the animals that he had brought south—the ponies (“wretched creatures”) who had stood stoically and mutely for weeks on board a violently rocking Terra Nova as it had plowed through heavy seas south of New Zealand, and the shivering shipboard dogs, whose “pathetic attitude, deeply significant of cold and misery” apparently touched him more than the suffering of his men.8 Another strength was his capacity for hope. Despite being unsure of himself at times, Scott came across in his journals as a blithe optimist, someone who was always surprised when things went wrong. (The first published version of his journal was redacted to omit any incidents that showed Scott in an unfavorable light.9) Trials and tribulations in Antarctica were treated lightly. At one point, stuck in the coastal pack, with icebergs swarming around the ship like ravenous polar bears, threatening at any instant to crash headlong into the ship, disaster may have loomed, but in Scott's telling this incident was only a lark: “Everyone is wonderfully cheerful; there is laughter and song all day long,” he noted on December 17, 1910. Still trapped in the ice on Christmas Day, he added: “In spite of the unpropitious prospects everyone on board is cheerful and one foresees a merry dinner to-night.”10
In describing their hauling supplies ashore in early January, Scott seemed so caught up in this happy turn of events—“It's splendid to see at last the effect of all the months of preparation and organisation”—that the disaster that ensued (the sinking of a motorized tractor) seemed to have caught him blindsided, like a man gazing so reverently at the sunset that he fails to notice that his house is on fire. His descriptions of setting up camp read like the brochure for a guided tour. The hut the men hastily erected was not just adequate, but the “most perfectly comfortable habitation,” the finest ever built on the continent, and they were “simply overwhelmed with its comfort.” In spite of the plunging temperatures outside, the men carried out their tasks “indefatigably”: each was “in his way a treasure.” Scott's praise knew no bounds: “For here and now I must record the splendid manner in which these men are working. I find it difficult to express my admiration for the manner in which the ship is handled and worked under these very trying circumstances.” As the Antarctic darkness deepened that May, Scott expressed none of the gloomy thoughts of earlier explorers during this grim, seasonal transition. Instead, he saluted the esprit d'corps that prevailed inside their quarters: “With me there is no need to draw a veil; there is nothing to cover. There are no strained relationships in this hut, and nothing more emphatically evident than the universally amicable spirit which is shown on all occasions.”11
Like a proud father hovering over his boys, Scott could not decide which one he loved the most. Of Wilson, he wrote: “There is no member of our party so universally esteemed.” Bowers was singled out for his “indefatigable zeal, his unselfishness, and his inextinguishable good humour.” When Bowers, Cherry, and Wilson staggered back to Hut Point from Cape Crozier, barely recognizable with faces and clothes blackened by blubber, Scott saw only knights whose heroism was attested by their having made it back alive. Typically, he viewed their extraordinary excursion as raw material for a motivational narrative: “It makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling,” he noted, with just a tinge of authorial envy.12
After Scott's diaries were readied for the presses, all derogatory comments about his men having been expunged, the journals projected an image of the Southern Party as a band of jovial, pluckish English gentlemen who had remained coolheaded under tremendous stress and then embraced their martyrdom gallantly and without complaint.13 (Such editorial “cleansing” was often done before expedition journals were published.14) Even taking this pruning into account, Scott's optimism comes across as hopelessly naïve—a fatal character defect. As the months went by, and things did not go smoothly for the Terra Nova party, he was slow to adjust his outlook. A dismaying series of setbacks—drowned ponies, the sunken tractor, roaring blizzards caused by Antarctica's “mysterious”
weather—were recounted like sudden, unexpected thunderstorms that temporarily keep boys inside and postpone their fun, not as hints of lurking doom. These incidents could not put a dent in what he really relied on, and that was the fiber of the men at his side. This remained unbending until the end. As reality sunk in on the way back from the pole, Scott's words of praise turned into pity: it was “poor” Oates and “poor” Wilson who were now suffering helplessly, much as the ponies had on board ship.
Still, in his last letters to their friends and family members, Scott went out of his way to hallow these men who had put their trust in him, finding the right phrases to soothe the anguish of his recipients. Writing to Oates's devoted mother, Caroline, who had persisted in calling her son “Baby Boy” for several years after his birth, and who would worship at the altar of his memory for the rest of her life, Scott offered spiritual consolation, although he was an agnostic: “The ways of Providence are inscrutable, but there must be some reason why such a young, vigorous and promising life is taken,” he jotted inside the indifferent tent. In a letter to Barrie, Scott obliquely referred to Oates's decision to commit suicide as another noble gesture: “we have done everything possible, even to sacrificing ourselves in order to save sick companions.” But, here, too, his praise was calculated. Scott coupled his wish that this selfless act set “an example for Englishmen of the future,” with the more pragmatic admonition that “the country ought to help those who are left behind to mourn us.”15 In a flattering postscript aimed at eliciting Barrie's financial help for Scott's widow and son, the explorer wrote: “I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me—for you had much to give and I nothing.”16
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