For some months the crew were able to survive on their salt beef, smoked bacon, dried fish, ship’s biscuit and beans. A shortage of beer was declared on 8 November (the beer had frozen inside its barrels, bursting them, and then it leaked away) and the explorers began to drink melted snow. The rationing of bread began the same day, and that of wine on 12 November. Not long after, the workings of the clock froze, and from then on time had to be calculated using the ship’s instruments and an hourglass. The wonders of Western Europe that Barents had intended to sell in China were put to unexpected uses that winter. One by one the fine prints were taken from their wrappings and used to fuel the fire.
After ten hard months, the crew left the Saved House to attempt the seas again. They piled supplies into two small boats, Mercury no longer being seaworthy; many things had to be left behind. Barents was to die on the homeward voyage, midway across the sea that now bears his name. Over the centuries, ice overtook the contents of the Saved House, transforming the prints that had escaped burning into frozen papier-mâché blocks. But the house was not forgotten: in Mercator’s map of the northern lands from 1620 ‘t’Behouden huys’ is written from the tip of Nova Zembla across the Kara Sea. The northern coastlines had been charted, but few explorers had landed on the frozen nations coloured green, yellow and pink that stretch between them, on which barely any towns or settlements are marked. This temporary dwelling was an exception. The size of the text gives this tiny encampment the same significance as the whole of the Orkney Isles.
The ruins of the Saved House were discovered by a Norwegian seal hunter in the nineteenth century. Some of the surviving artefacts were sold back to the Dutch government; others were plundered by pilgrims over the years. The prints were transported to Amsterdam, where conservators at the Rijksmuseum slowly separated the frozen layers of paper. Only fragments of the original sheets survived, but these were identified and ordered again and backed with a strong Japanese paper, which shows through in many places. These operations saved the prints – and perhaps even improved them to modern eyes like mine, conditioned to find fragments more romantic than complete narratives.
I peer at the prints, oblivious to the gallery behind me reflected in the glass. I look closer, and the lines etched by the artist dissolve under my gaze. The original sheets of paper pull apart like ice floes and the blank spaces in between seem to possess the raw promise of new ice on the surface of the ocean. Tree branches have been ripped from their trunks. The limbs of soldiers are plates of armour, disembodied. Landmasses become islands. My eye seeks coherence from these fragments, reads the absences as a history of the shifting bodies of water and ice in the Arctic, which promised advancement to explorers, but often clinched them in stasis.
II
I returned to England when my harpsichord duties were done, taking a berth on the overnight ferry from IJmuiden to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I spent my last few euros in the bar, and stood on deck in drizzle watching the port disappear. The propellers boomed below me, churning the water to a bright foam that soon dispersed on the dark sea. When I woke in my bunk later, and drew back the swaying accordion blind to reveal the lights of a coastal town, I had no sense of how far we’d come. The ferry was far out from land, so far in fact, that I could see two lighthouses at once through the oval window, repeating their different sequences of signals, as if endlessly interrupting each other in conversation.
The North Sea was calm and ice-free, but I was looking for a Saved House, somewhere I could hunker down and continue my writing about Upernavik. The Arctic ice had become an obsession that would not release me. I’d scoured opportunities for writers who wanted to live and work in the north, and sent off a couple of applications. While I waited for the responses I had to live as frugally as I could, which meant moving between house-sits. Sometimes I sofa-surfed for a few nights, or spent the night on a train concourse, or holed up in an airport or bus station toilet cubicle, leaning against the door, ignoring the lock when it was rattled by the cleaner early in the morning. I wasn’t writing much, or not as much as I wanted. Too much time was spent packing and unpacking. I began to feel a disproportionate affection for familiar points of departure, such as Golders Green bus station and King’s Cross in London, which punctuated my weeks more consistently than the locations that came between them. The sporadic nature of my work and my lost hours seemed less of a concern when I read in the newspaper of a notebook which had been closed in 1912, and wasn’t opened again until a century later.
Every summer, melting snow carves new channels in the scoria, the cinders that cover Ross Island, a small volcanic outcrop embedded in the ice sheet that surrounds Antarctica. Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910–13 Terra Nova expedition, which aimed to be the first to reach the South Pole, set up base camp on its barren shores. The hut they built still stands today. Once it seemed such expedition sites and the artefacts they held would be preserved for ever by cold temperatures. Now the work of preservation is delegated to conservators who specialize in Antarctic heritage. Lizzie Meek was making a circuit of the hut in the summer of 2012 when she noticed a clump of paper in one of the melt-water streams. When she investigated, she found a notebook, half-buried under the black rocks. Lizzie carefully pulled the sodden bundle free and took it to the field laboratory. As the paper dried she was able to discern pencil marks on some of the pages. Pencils were the writing implement of choice on polar expeditions as ink tended to freeze. But even pencils were not infallible. While writing, Scott reported, ‘not only would one’s fingers freeze very rapidly, but one’s breath would form an icy film on the paper through which it was difficult to make the pencil-mark’. Nevertheless, in this instance the pencil had been sufficient. Lizzie was just able to make out a series of numbers, followed by a few words: ‘ice flowers’, ‘panorama’, ‘spoilt’, ‘missing’, ‘accidentally exposed’.
The text on the title page was still clear: The Wellcome Photographic Exposure Record and Diary for 1910. It was a popular choice of notebook for photographers. The preliminary pages contain reference sections on ‘Modern Photographic Methods’ and information on permits the British photographer might need when working in foreign countries (the polar regions are not included). There is helpful information on everything from fixatives and gold toning to night photography. Conversions between British imperial measures and the metric system. Like my own run-of-the-mill, week-to-view diary, it lists the hours between time zones and British public holidays: a mass of helpful information that is rarely glanced at during the course of a year.
Back in New Zealand, Lizzie’s conservation team separated the pages from their gatherings and repaired the worn areas with tiny pieces of paper, then sewed them together again. The canvas case binding opens onto endpapers decorated with an elegant pattern of a unicorn, which repeats over and over. The metal stud has rusted, leaving a great circular stain in the centre of each page. The paper is only slightly yellowed but its edges have eroded. Lizzie found a name on the flyleaf and realized that she was looking at the exposure notes and subject matter of the glass plates created on Cape Adare by a member of Scott’s Northern Party, George Murray Levick. ‘We seldom find objects that have such a strong personal connection to individual explorers,’ Lizzie says. ‘This has Levick’s signature, it has his handwritten notes. Did it fall off a sledge, did it fall out of his pocket? We don’t know the answer to that, but I bet that he missed it.’
Levick’s journal did not make it back to England, but he and his fellow members of the Northern Party did. In this, the men who were chosen to explore Cape Adare were more fortunate than those selected for the trek to the South Pole. Robert Falcon Scott and a party of four others successfully reached the Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find they had been beaten by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team thirty-four days earlier. Scott and his fellow explorers died on their return journey. Their fate touched many hearts, and donations to a relief fund were generous enough to establish a library in Cambridge, which would hold the results of
past and future polar research. After an email exchange with Lizzie Meek, I decide to pay a visit to the Scott Polar Research Institute, which recently celebrated its centenary, to look at Levick’s photographs.
I arrive early, and find Graham the caretaker blowing the tiny yellow leaves of the acacia tree from the steps. ‘Hoovering the cornflakes,’ he says, wryly. I step over the deciduous breakfast and pass through the glass doors. This museum feels like home to any traveller. People disappear for months or years, and then they come back, their skin raw from the elements, sometimes direct from the airport lugging a rucksack. Conversations are picked up again after a six-month absence. A year or two later, a book or a thesis may be added to the collections. The polar regions aren’t considered exotic here – most people’s minds are on ice, anyway. This is only my second visit, and my research is not sanctioned by any laudable institution or grant, but I’m welcomed warmly. Within moments of spotting me in the building, a researcher disappears to photocopy a report on Operation Iceworm (the secret system of tunnels for nuclear missiles planned by the US military under Greenland’s ice cap). He thinks it will be of interest to me. It is.
In the reading room above the museum, the librarian gives me a pair of white gloves, and a tub containing at least twenty lead pencils. Pens can’t be used here – not, thankfully, because of freezing conditions. She brings out several files containing Levick’s photographs. I have learnt to interpret Levick’s old-school script by scrutinizing the digitized version of his diary. I swivel between the yellowed pages on my screen and the pristine images, arranged in clear archival pockets.
Levick was a surgeon and zoologist, as well as photographer to the Terra Nova expedition. Another member of the party dispatched to Cape Adare, the geologist Raymond Priestley, sniffed at the area – it had been occupied by previous explorers. The Northern Party’s ship had steamed on towards Robertson Bay, examining the coast for an alternative landing place, a region where Scott’s men could make their own mark. They found nothing but towering cliffs and walls of ice. A section of the Dugdale Glacier seemed to offer a chance of landing, but this was rejected; the explorers were later grateful for that decision when the area of ice they had considered camping on sailed past them. Instead, they turned back, and settled for the cape’s safer, ‘second-hand’ surroundings.
A series of nine photographs presents a panorama of the Admiralty Range from the Northern Party’s base at Cape Adare. I imagine Levick setting up each scene, standing on the ridge and steadying his tripod on the uneven surface of the ice, moving the camera gradually sideways for each of the nine shots, careful not to miss a peak of the monotonous range. (Taking photographs was considered the best way to record the geography of the Antarctic so that cartographers back home could draw up maps.) Then he would move in closer to the crags, making studies of the steep outlet glaciers that run between them. In most of these photographs, a member of the party stands in front of the glacier to set the scale, one arm raised as if pointing out a difficult to spot geographical feature – although no one could miss the wall of ice, which fills the frame. The figures look tiny compared to the striations of the ice. Despite their small size, they alter the mood of the composition: this is now an inhabited landscape. These monochrome images can’t do justice to the ice formations which Levick describes in his notebook as ‘ice crystals’, ‘ice floes’ and even an ‘ice tapestry’.
Next, a few images of the hut at Cape Adare. Levick’s home for the year is barely visible: it’s buried in snow up to the windowpanes, as was the baker’s house on Upernavik. I know how welcome the sense of the snow’s enclosure would be, even though it would also remind the explorers how far from home they were. The walls of the hut were just two thin layers of pine boards, stuffed with hessian and shredded seaweed, but they offered shelter and safety for Levick, and storage for his few books and clothes. Inside the hut, Levick took photographs of his five fellow explorers engaging in gentlemanly pursuits. There’s even a self-portrait – he is seated on his camp bed, hands in his pockets, reading and smoking his pipe. Chemicals for developing film are lined up in jars on the shelf above him. Another shot captures him shaving by candlelight, with his mirror propped up on a pile of jackets. The camera flash must have cast a sudden light on the grimy interior, momentarily diminishing the candle’s weak flame.
Such moments of relaxation are rare. Living on the ice requires industry. Many photographs show the men actively shovelling snow or posing for a moment, holding their ice axes. As well as studying the physical environment, the explorers were keen to understand the animals that lived on the ice, the traits that enabled their survival – and which in turn might help mankind to survive. In one photograph, Levick stands over a dead seal. It has been laid out upon a sledge inside the hut, its limp flippers looking eerily like hands. He appears to be paying his respects. A knife lies beside him on the table. In another, Levick is outdoors: he skins and guts a seal, knife in one hand, blood stains on the other. Victor Campbell, the group’s leader, looks on, nonchalantly balancing a cocked rifle under one arm. A later photograph shows Levick sporting long sealskin gloves.
Seals were not the only creatures with whom the explorers shared the ice. Turning back to the panorama shots of the Admiralty Range, the distant mountains smoky with blown snow, I notice some black spots scattered in the foreground. They look like specks of dust on the lens, but when I look more closely, I can make out the pointed tips of the penguins’ wings.
It seems appropriate that, of all the expedition paraphernalia, it should have been Levick’s notebook that lay so long under the ice, as his writings were dogged by self-censorship and silence. At Cape Adare he spent an entire breeding season with the penguin colony. The behaviour he observed there was unexpected. He confided in his notebook that ‘hooligan’ males engaged in ‘depraved’ sexual acts, mating with dead females, abusing chicks, and even trying to breed with other males. His affection for the creatures soon turned to horror. Later, he pasted over his original notes with a transliteration into Greek letters to spare others in the party from discovering the distressing truth about their companions on the ice shelf. On his return to England, fellow zoologists urged him not to include this material in his monograph on penguins. He followed their advice. However, the Natural History Museum has kept a file on Levick, in which there is an offprint, circulated in an edition limited to a hundred copies for close colleagues. The reader is forewarned by a message in bold type on the first page: ‘THE SEXUAL HABITS OF THE ADELIE PENGUIN, NOT FOR PUBLICATION’. Later scientists would confirm Levick’s observations (which seem less surprising today) and did not make any moral judgements on the penguins’ behaviour.
I feel sorry for Levick, his faith shaken by the penguins, and with worse to come. In January 1912, after nearly a year at Cape Adare, the Northern Party were collected by the Terra Nova and taken 200 miles south, where they explored another region by sledge and Priestley collected geological samples. They returned to the main depot as arranged five weeks later, and waited there for the ship to reappear. Meanwhile they charted their immediate location: an outcrop of granite and gneiss, almost completely bare of snow, bounded by glaciers on the west and on the east sloping down to the waters of the bay. They named it ‘Inexpressible Island’. For some weeks they continued to watch for the ship, at last so eager for the sight of it that it began to make its way into their dreams, but, as Priestley wrote: ‘The waters of the bay were lashed to fury by the wind, and all we could see to seaward was one constant procession of white-caps sweeping across the bay.’ Although the stranded party saw only open water, beyond it was thick pack ice, through which the ship was unable to pass.
I find Priestley’s journal on the shelves, and I am so horrified by the men’s predicament that I end up staying in Cambridge an extra day to read it. When I return to the library the next morning, Graham is working his way round the shelves, dusting and straightening. He tells me that when he gets to the end he starts all over again. B
ooks require upkeep, they don’t survive on their own: you learn this when you work with them.
I was beginning to make a home of the Scott Polar Research Institute, just as the explorers I was reading about lost theirs.
The Northern Party found themselves facing the winter alone on Inexpressible Island with only summer supplies. Lacking even materials to build a shelter, the men dug a cave from a deep snowdrift, lining its floor with sealskins and its walls with snow blocks, and creating a door out of biscuit boxes. It was just big enough to hold the six of them lying side by side. Priestley wrote in his diary of a journey back to the ice cave, having visited a depot nearer the coast: they struggled ‘across half a mile of clear blue ice, swept by the unbroken wind, which met us almost straight in the face. We could never stand up, so had to scramble the whole distance on “all fours”, lying flat on our bellies in the gusts. By the time we had reached the other side we had had enough. Our faces had been rather badly bitten, and I have a very strong recollection of the men’s countenances, which were a leaden blue, streaked with white patches of frostbite.’ To add to the indignity, the party’s sleeping bags had been left behind, and they had to share two men to a bag that night. (A return trip to the depot was made to rescue the sleeping bags.)
Some hardships become bearable in retrospect. Levick, who accompanied Priestley on that depot mission, wrote later: ‘It is a pleasing picture to look back upon now, and if I close my eyes I can see again the little cave cut out in snow and ice with the tent flapping in the doorway, barely secured by ice-axe and shovel arranged crosswise against the side of the shaft.’
With scarcely any food remaining, their knowledge of wildlife was more necessary than ever. They bagged as many penguins and seals as possible before total darkness descended, cached them in the snow and settled in for a gruelling winter. Priestley was quartermaster in charge of the meagre stores. He describes the routine:
The Library of Ice Page 6