The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  Every few days there were bones to be fetched from the dried seal carcasses, seaweed from the beach, penguins from the depot near the icefoot, and seal meat and blubber from the caches where we had stored the dead seals. Heavy loads had to be carried either over the huge boulders . . . or else along the smooth, glistening surface of the icefoot, on which it was necessary to walk with stiff legs, feeling every step with the sole of the foot, and avoiding unevennesses as much as possible.

  Once the meat was back in the cave and unfrozen, it was made into watery ‘hoosh’ or gruel. As time went by various flavourings were introduced to vary the taste of the hoosh: dried seaweed from the beach, seaweed from the cave floor, ginger and citric-acid tabloids and even a mustard plaster from Levick’s medicine box. Seal brains were the only ingredient all agreed were a good addition, but these were hardest to come by. The meat in the hoosh supplemented their strict rations of more familiar food: less than one biscuit a day, a mug of weak cocoa five nights a week, a mug of tea once a week, a little chocolate and sugar, and twenty-five raisins each month and on birthdays.

  As well as providing the substance for their shelter, ice was an important ingredient in their diet. It could be melted down for drinking water, and Priestley notes its use in the hoosh, especially when soaked in seal’s blood: ‘Our one great discovery in the eatable line, was . . . when a seal was butchered, the hot blood melted down into the ice, and the pool thus formed froze solid a few hours later. Then one of us would go down with a pick and shovel and a sack, dig up this mixture of blood and ice, and carry it to the drift. Part of it was then boiled up with the hoosh, and this made a gravy in which it was possible to stand a spoon upright.’

  The daily routine centred around food, with time allowed for torpor; the men who were off-duty lay in their sleeping bags until about eleven o’clock each morning, digesting their first dose of hoosh. After occasional forays into the blizzards, the cave seemed almost snug. Even the worst storms were only apparent from the ‘sibilant hiss of the drift on the roof, or the murmur of an unusually strong gust’. Such sounds were sufficient to increase the men’s feeling of security by reminding them that however bad their lot was, without the walls of ice enclosing them, their chances of survival would have been very much worse.

  After the evening meal was over, the day’s appointed mess-men finished their chores, while the others wrote their diaries or reread old letters from home. Once the mess-men had also turned in, Levick would read a chapter from David Copperfield. This welcome escapism lasted the group for around sixty nights. I imagine their reaction to Dickens’s description of Tommy Traddles in the final chapter, who also lives in a house with ‘no room to spare’, so crowded out by a happy family that he ‘keeps his papers in his dressing-room and his boots with his papers’. Other reading matter followed Dickens: several novels by Max Pemberton, The Decameron, and two copies of the Review of Reviews, which were read from cover to cover, the advertisements relished as much as the articles.

  As a special treat on Sundays, Priestley read aloud from his Cape Adare diary, and the men contrasted their life the previous year with existence in the snow cave. Then Campbell would pull out a pocket edition of the New Testament, and everyone sang what hymns they could remember as bravely as they could. Fortified by music, the men would often protest that they were happier in the ice cave than they had ever been at Cape Adare, but their accommodation had obvious drawbacks. The polar winter was interminably dark, and the cave did not even offer a window onto that darkness. The only source for artificial light was melted blubber, and the soft yellow glow it dispensed was hard won. Priestley describes an ingenious method of making lamps by combining strands of lamp-wick, a safety pin, and a small Oxo tin filled with melted blubber oil:

  The little reading-lamps gave light sufficient to read by if the book was held fairly close to them, but they were of very little use for illuminating the hut generally. Two of them were usually available for the use of the mess-man and cook, and of these one had to be kept handy for the cook to light his spills so that he could examine the hoosh from time to time. The mess-man, therefore, had the use of one lamp, which gave about half as much light as a match. This was just sufficient to throw a small circle of light on the joint he was quarrying, and no more.

  No doubt the smell of lamps tempered the other odours of the space. Cave life was a constant battle between cold and heat, between keeping the stove going and avoiding a thaw. As the weeks passed the sooty walls grew as striated as a glacier, gleaming where the melting ice washed away the dirt.

  ‘The term “smoke” did not seem adequate to express the oily brown fumes which rose from the blubber-stoves,’ wrote Priestley. Luckily Browning offered a word from his West Country dialect: ‘smitch’. Everything was besmitched. As the months passed, their eyes developed ‘smitch-blindness’ and since it became too painful to read, they would doze instead. ‘I myself could never have believed that I could have been happy without something to read,’ Priestley wrote. ‘Yet . . . many times when I could have been reading Hints to Travellers or the Review of Reviews and I preferred to lie and let my thoughts wander at their own sweet will.’ And so they acclimatized. It was a surprise to Priestley, and probably a relief to Campbell, that the party settled down to their new existence in a docile manner.

  I began to wonder about the psychological effect of this lifestyle. Would it be worse to be trapped in the ice unable to return home than to long for the ice but be unable to return to it? The members of the Northern Party formed a strong bond with each other and with the polar landscape, learning its characteristics and how to survive in it – a knowledge they were unable to use in their subsequent lives. Priestley seems almost nostalgic for the ice cave in Antarctic Adventure, his account of that winter. Perhaps the determined camaraderie of the snow cave seemed simple, compared to the war the explorers faced on their return to Europe. Even so, it was a miracle that Campbell maintained discipline in such a demoralizing situation. To do so, he divided the cramped cave into two virtual messes: one for himself, Priestley and Levick, as ‘officers’, another for those of lowlier rank. It was a naval custom that men in one mess were not to pay any attention to conversations held in the other. Towards the end of the winter, as the officers prepared for the long sledge journey south to Cape Evans to join the rest of the expedition, this polite fantasy of privacy was not enough. Since everything could be heard throughout the cave, a silent dialogue was carried out by notebook. In Campbell’s ‘cave-diary’ – alongside his lists of diminishing stores and other calculations – several pages were used to confer with Levick on sensitive matters without the other men’s knowledge. He used the diary to discuss issues of discipline, and express concerns about Browning’s health. His words scrawl haphazardly down the page: he was either too cold to care about lineation or just struggling to see: ‘How about giving Browning a spoonful of brandy?’

  Levick’s response is more precise: ‘I think he’ll be alright now he’s got rid of the stuff . . . If he is not quiet in an hour or so I’ll give him some.’

  The diary’s ‘silent conversations’ have been painstakingly deciphered and dated by Don Webster. His research reveals Levick as a reassuring presence, who shakes off Campbell’s fears for Browning: ‘this morning was a little panic and nothing more.’

  Later in the winter, other men began to struggle. Campbell wrote to Levick: ‘I meant to tell you P. [Priestley] got rather exhausted out today so I suggested his coming in: he tells me he feel [sic] very run down after this last attack.’

  Levick replies: ‘I had a yarn with him when he came in: I told him a tonic he was taking would set him up. I hope it will.’

  It did, and all survived. Levick took a triumphant, overexposed photograph of the six men as they emerged from the cave after seven months. Their sooty garments are silhouetted against the ice, only the sheen in the sun suggesting the filth they have endured: ‘dirty and dishevelled’ as the Freeze Frame cataloguer at Scott Polar R
esearch Institute tactfully puts it. The clothes, encrusted with blubber, would have stood up by themselves. The photographer has to position the camera a good way off to fit six men in the frame: as if in celebration of their escape to freedom the upper half of the image is full of sky.

  The debilitated party took five weeks to sledge to Cape Evans, where they discovered that Scott and his men had met the fate they so narrowly avoided. (Their leader’s last act had been to write in his diary.) Back at the subdued base camp, Campbell set about rewriting his diary, and Priestley borrowed Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s typewriter to type up his own account of the ordeal. Meanwhile, Levick developed the photographs taken at Cape Adare. Despite the long period between exposure and development, and the conditions they had endured that winter, the images were perfect. The ice of Inexpressible Island had kept both the films and plates frozen, so that no chemical reaction could take place.

  III

  These days there’s an annual BBC midwinter radio broadcast to Antarctica, and the relatives of staff overwintering on research stations come into the studio to record short personal messages. Their embarrassed tones are beamed instantly to the other side of the world, and everyone in between can listen if they tune in. Levick and his companions had no such comfort, but they read letters from home until they fell apart, and toasted absent friends. What was it like for the Northern Party, with no possibility of sending a message even to the Terra Nova, nor receiving reassurance that it would return for them? Most polar explorers have had to carry their messages themselves, whether delivering an SOS to the nearest settlement or tucking last letters home safely inside their journals to await delivery later. Hard as it was for explorers to travel across the ice, sledging over crevasses, standing upright in a blizzard, making out the horizon through frost-caked eyelashes, it was equally difficult for messages to travel.

  The Scott Polar Research Institute is the only library I’ve ever been to where people are not told off for whistling. Or shouting. ‘Hugh!’ a plummy voice calls from one bay of books to another, ‘Hugh, do you think it’s worth me talking to that admiral about the briefing?’ I take down a volume of the letters of John Irving, third officer aboard the ship HMS Terror, which was being repaired in Woolwich, and head for a more peaceful alcove.

  ‘My dearest Katie,’ Lieutenant Irving wrote to his sister-in-law on 18 April 1845. ‘Our Terror in her last voyage with Captain Back was so crushed by ice that she could not have been kept afloat another day, when she got in to Loch Swilly. Two years is a long time without any tidings, and perhaps we may be three years at least. Do not give us up, if you hear nothing.’ This was not exaggeration for effect: the voyage was bound to be long. Terror was about to depart on Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to find the final section of the Northwest Passage, an ice-free marine trade route around North America. Katie would have read Franklin’s bestselling account of his first Arctic journey, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea. Just before sailing a month later, on 16 May, Irving wrote again: ‘We take two years’ provisions, and a transport accompanies us with a third year for each ship; so if you do not hear of us for three years, you need not think we are starved.’

  There’s no chance of me starving here. There are punctual breaks for coffee and cake at ten-thirty in the morning and at four in the afternoon. Time is calculated according to the naval watch and sounded on the great brass bell from Scott’s Terra Nova, which sits in state in the stairwell. The honour of sounding the watch is delegated to me this morning: two short bells, then a long one. All work stops. The echoes die away, and there’s a rattling of crockery as the tea trolley is wheeled in and parked beside the spiral staircase. When, I wonder, biting into a brownie, did Irving get his time to write? Did he sit with pen and paper in the mess room after his watch, listening to the hull of the ship straining against the sea and thinking of home as icebergs sailed past on the horizon?

  Back to my desk. Four locations are given in Irving’s letters as he journeyed north. Woolwich and, further down the Thames, Greenhithe, were followed by Stromness in Orkney, and later the Whalefish Islands, Greenland, where the last packet of letters was entrusted to the harbourmaster. Woolwich – Greenhithe – Stromness – Greenland: these names recur in explorers’ letters as the only predictable postmarks in the voyage into oblivion. The ship was the constant, not the lands through which they passed.

  Irving’s letters were often written in haste, but they are characterized by postscripts that relive difficult leave-takings. He tries to communicate his extraordinary travel experiences in a long, last letter to Katie. Firstly, he draws a sketch of his ship in the Greenland harbour. Although it is high summer – ‘probably 10th July 1845’ – ‘there is plenty of ice floating about and scraping our sides, and we have sometimes a little snow.’ He finds the Whalefish Islands (perhaps modern-day Disko Bay) barren and rocky, and notes ‘the openings betwixt some of the islands are choked up with ice’. During his journey he has observed many icebergs, which, he informs Katie, ‘are huge piles of ice and snow floating about. Some are 200 feet high. These are formed by avalanches from the Greenland mountains, which are very high and precipitous, and one sheet of snow to the water’s edge’. Anticipating his lack of opportunity to send a letter, he tells Katie to read ‘the Polar voyages of Parry, Ross, and Back . . . as they describe exactly what will be our difficulties; and you will, I daresay, like to know a little what I may be about for so long.’ He also encloses ‘a little Polar chart’, saying, ‘I have put the track of the Expedition in red, and proposed route dotted red.’ His lines look hesitant, surrounded by the expanse of white paper. I think of the Bellman’s speech in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, published in 1876, two decades after Irving set out:

  ‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,

  Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’

  So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

  ‘They are merely conventional signs!

  ‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

  But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:

  (So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s bought us the best—

  A perfect and absolute blank!’

  ‘As you observe,’ writes Irving from the Whalefish Islands, ‘there must now be a long blank in our correspondence.’ They will set sail tomorrow, ‘in the first place, for Barrow’s strait, and after, as best we can.’

  Irving worries that former expeditions were stopped ‘by a Barrier of ice so thick and solid that the summer, which is only ten weeks long, passed away without dissolving it.’ But he trusts they will be able to find a passage through the ice using charts and their experience – besides, they have a fine library on board, ‘the best books of all kinds, consisting of 1200 volumes, and shall be able to pass the time very well . . .’ Even the ice offers the promise of activity to Irving: before the ship is completely frozen in the crew will be busy ‘sawing the ice and working the ships on, whenever a single mile can be gained’, and parties may be sent off the ship to explore from time to time. Irving was the ship’s astronomer, in charge of winding and comparing the chronometers, those ‘little clocks’ which were accurate enough to calculate longitude (the ship’s distance west or east of Greenwich). So these activities will keep him occupied, he says. He sounds certain, but I wonder if his words convinced Katie.

  After dropping off the last letters, the expedition ships Erebus and Terror were seen on 26 July by a European whaling vessel, making their way north. Then, all their correspondents could do was wait.

  Katie had two years to work through the reading list Irving gave her, by which time, concerned at having heard nothing further of Franklin’s expedition, Lady Jane Franklin, Members of Parliament and the British press urged the Admiralty to send a search party. The disappearance of Franklin became a Victorian sensation and, in the ensuing decades, over thirty expeditions joined in the search. Meanwhile, in the Arctic,
Franklin’s desperate crew had left messages in cairns for whoever might find them. No longer personal correspondence to dearest Katie, these documents address unknown, imagined readers. They demonstrate the authors’ firm faith, not only that someone would read the words, but also that future readers believed in the texts’ existence sufficiently to travel across the icy tundra to find them.

  The regions the British Admiralty had commanded Franklin to chart were haunted by expanses of ice that seemed to defy the seasons. A map by the cartographer R.T. Gould (now in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) delineates the last known movements of the expedition. This map depicts an area marked not by geographical features but punctuated by ominous ‘x’s: the caches of letters, pemmican and bones found by search parties. These clues to Franklin’s disappearance, linked by a red dotted line, eventually peter out in a question mark surrounded by blank paper. (The similarities to the Polar chart which Irving sketched for Katie are poignant.)

  Over time, Franklin’s expedition acquired the attributes of the environment in which it perished, becoming, like the Northwest Passage, a mystery to be solved to win money and glory. But the humans were harder to find than any geographic entity – indeed the final sections of the Passage were pieced together by those looking for the lost explorers. In this muddle of harsh elements, speculative maps and missed connections, the search parties tried to conscript the environment as a mail delivery system. One search expedition trapped eight wild arctic foxes and buckled iron collars engraved with messages around their necks, before releasing them into the tundra, hoping they would be hunted down by Franklin’s men and the messages read. Only one fox was ever seen again, and there was no sign that it ever encountered Franklin during its travels. The collar, now downstairs in the Polar Museum, reads: ‘HBMS ENTERPRISE WQ [WINTER QUARTERS] LAT 71.35 N LONG 117.39 W XX XII [20 December] 1851’.