by Chris Turney
Unaware of just how poorly funded the expedition was, David continued apace with scientific planning, purchasing equipment—often out of his own limited funds—so that the team could make the most of its time in the south. With news of the Australian role in the expedition, the local newspapers trumpeted David’s plans. Out of the woodwork came former students of his, chief among them Douglas Mawson, a Yorkshire-born, tall and prematurely balding young geologist who was in the field at the time of the newspaper announcement. On 28 September 1907 Mawson wrote to David: ‘I should have dearly loved to have gone myself and shall in any case be with you as far as my imagination can carry me.’ Mawson was fascinated by the prospect that Antarctica held the key to one of the great geological unknowns: why living and fossilised plants and animals were commonly found across South America, Africa, Madagascar and Australia.
David had asked in his 1904 Dunedin lecture whether Antarctica was home to the remarkable Glossopteris, a fossil plant that dominated the geological record during the Permian period, some 299 to 251 million years ago in Australia, Africa and India. With its distinctive tongue-shaped leaves, and growing up to eight metres in height, it appeared to be a form of tree fern but produced seeds. The most obvious explanation for it being found across the southern continents was an ancient land link to Antarctica, allowing wildlife to freely move between the continents.
Some half-century earlier Joseph Hooker had first remarked upon the similarity of southern flora and asked whether the islands in the Antarctic region were ‘the remains of some far more extended body of land’. His friend Charles Darwin was inspired and suggested that the Antarctic region might indeed hold the key to the distribution of many species, speculating that it played a role in the explosion of seed-bearing plants. In 1859, in his world-changing On the Origin of Species, Darwin ruminated about the similarities of plants in New Zealand and South America. He suggested that ‘this difficulty partially disappears on the view that New Zealand, South America, and the other southern lands have been stocked in part from a nearly intermediate though distant point, namely from the antarctic islands, when they were clothed with vegetation, during a warmer tertiary period, before the commencement of the last Glacial period.’
Darwin wrote to Hooker in 1881 about how his ideas had developed: ‘I have been so astonished at the apparently sudden coming in of the higher phanerogams, that I have sometimes fancied that development might have slowly gone on for an immense period in some isolated continent or large island, perhaps near the South Pole.’ By the early twentieth century scientists had gathered a wealth of evidence pertaining to this theory. Large-horned tortoises known as Meiolania had been discovered in Australian and Patagonian rocks spanning what was thought to be tens of millions of years; living species of South American frogs had closely related cousins living in Madagascar; and marsupials were known to exist in both Australia and South America. The great Austrian scientist Edward Suess was the first to hypothesise that there must have been one large landmass that had united the southern continents. In 1885 Suess called it the lost continent of Gondwanaland.
The Antarctic Manual summed up Suess’s evidence succinctly a few years later, stating that the evidence pointed to the possibility that ‘communication by land existed between the continental masses of the Southern Hemisphere and the Antarctic continent.’ Like Atlantis, these bridges must have sunk below the waves in the past. Antarctica’s fossil record offered a means of testing the concept of a land bridge.
This intrigued Mawson, and David approached Shackleton about the young geologist joining the expedition. Reassured by the senior man’s recommendation but aware Priestley already filled the role, Shackleton appointed Mawson for the full duration of the expedition as physicist. Around this time, it seems Shackleton also invited David to lead the scientific program, rather than just having the Prof stay for a short visit. Shackleton now had serious scientific clout on his expedition, and it was all largely down to luck.
Setting forth under the banner of the British Antarctic Expedition, the Nimrod headed south from the New Zealand port of Lyttleton on 1 January 1908 with a team of twenty-three men. Shackleton was still short by £20,000: everything depended on the success of the expedition and the hope that future funding would eventuate. With Shackleton unable to pay for the coal required to sail the Nimrod all the way to Antarctica, the New Zealand government and the Union Steamship Company agreed to help cover some of the costs by towing the expedition ship 2430 kilometres through the stormy South Ocean, to the edge of the sea ice. With the ever-present threat of floundering, the crew were called night and day to station, keeping the pumps going and hoping the ten-centimetre-diameter steel cable between the ships would hold. The journey took fifteen days.
Shackleton was probably the closest thing polar exploration had to a warrior poet, and he relished the challenge. David recalled later that, when conditions were particularly bad, ‘Shackleton, in lulls between the fiercer gusts, could be heard reciting Browning—always a danger signal. He knew much of Browning and George Meredith’s poetry by heart, and lived in their higher sentiments in moments of extreme danger.’
When the impoverished flotilla finally reached the northern edge of the Ross Sea ice, two weeks later, the lifeline between the two vessels was cut and the tow ship departed for New Zealand. On board were letters from the expedition members for loved ones back home, including an epistle from David to his wife—who was apparently strong-willed and less than pleased about David’s presence on the expedition—announcing his decision to stay the full year.
Starting out relatively late from New Zealand did have advantages. Exposed to continuous sunlight, the sea ice that had built up in the Ross Sea over winter was now melting, allowing the Nimrod to make quick work of breaking through what remained and reach the Great Ice Barrier just a week after being released from the towline. But it was far from plain sailing. The Great Ice Barrier, at the other end of the Ross Sea, is not a stagnant block. Ice moves towards the sea at a rate of about a metre a day and, at the ocean margins, large pieces can break off to form flat-topped icebergs sometimes many kilometres wide.
Shackleton later recalled fondly in his book of the expedition, The Heart of Antarctica: ‘About 3 am, we entered an area of tabular bergs, varying from eighty to one hundred and fifty feet in height [around twenty-five to forty-five metres], and all the morning we steamed in beautiful weather with a light northerly wind, through the lanes and streets of a wonderful snowy Venice…A stillness, weird and uncanny, seemed to have fallen upon everything when we entered the silent water streets of this vast unpeopled white city.’
Reaching the Great Ice Barrier, Shackleton pushed east, at pains to stand by the agreement with Scott and establish a base at Balloon Bight. When he brought the Nimrod alongside the bay he was shocked to see the coastline had changed drastically; it was no longer recognisable as the one the British had flown above in a balloon. Instead, Shackleton found hundreds of whales inhabiting a markedly different bay, which suggested the area was highly unstable. It was too risky to base his efforts there. Renaming the spot the Bay of Whales, Shackleton probed the Barrier beyond, towards King Edward VII Land, but realised he now risked trapping the ship in the ice—and with it the success of the expedition. To get the ship home that season, he had to establish a base before the short summer ended.
Shackleton resolved to cut his losses and return to McMurdo Sound. There was consternation among those on board, but Shackleton had limited time and funds. It was already the end of January and the Nimrod had to head north before the end of February if it was to reach warmer climes safely. One week later the expedition reached Ross Island. Landing at Cape Royds, some forty kilometres north of the old Discovery base, and working at a frenzied pace, the expedition members unloaded the supplies from the Nimrod, assembled the wooden hut that was to be their home for the next year and waved farewell to the ship before it departed north, three weeks later. The men left behind set about getting ready
to hunker down for the two-month winter darkness and prepare for the assault on the poles the following summer.
Never had men been left so far south alone. To the young members of Shackleton’s expedition, Antarctica must have seemed otherworldly. The vastness of the landscape, coupled with the extreme swings in light, temperature and sound, could unsettle the strongest of characters. Now they also had to deal with physical isolation from the outside world—and proximity to one another. Antarctic explorers were like the seafarers of the past, forced to rely upon their comrades for company.
The sentiment was captured by Darwin’s colleague and friend Thomas Huxley, who wrote: ‘how utterly disgusted you get with one another! Little peculiarities which would give a certain charm and variety to social intercourse under any other circumstances, become sources of absolute pain, and almost uncontrollable irritation, when you are shut up with them day and night. One good friend, a messmate of mine, has a peculiar laugh, whose iteration on our last cruise nearly drove me insane.’
The situation would only be exacerbated by continuous darkness. Now known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, the absence of natural sunlight is understood to have a debilitating effect on people. The experiences of de Gerlache and Borchgrevink had shown that, with individuals left to their own devices during the long winter night, depression and listlessness could easily set in. It was critical that everyone be kept busy and a strict routine followed.
To see off any problems, fieldwork was carried out in earnest, the men exploring their immediate surroundings and collecting samples in anticipation of the winter darkness. Shackleton sent David and a small team to make the first successful ascent of nearby Mount Erebus, helping to maintain morale while also allowing him to test the mettle of future sledging-party members. On their return David and Priestley were out all hours during the remaining sunlight, gathering geological samples scattered around the base. Murray collected biological specimens from nearby lakes, while Mawson investigated the structure of the local ice. During the day ‘a miscellaneous assortment of cameras, spectroscopes, thermometers, electrometers and the like lay in profusion on the blankets,’ Shackleton later wrote; the Prof ‘made a pile of glittering tins and coloured wrappers at one end of his bunk, and the heap looked like the nest of the Australian bower bird’. This cornucopia of scientific equipment in and surrounding David’s and Mawson’s bunks earned that part of the hut the label Pawn Shop.
During winter the team kept weather observations, wrote up the geological samples they had collected, took magnetic measurements, analysed the plant and animal life they had found, and made observations on the ‘mysterious Aurora Australis’—the southern equivalent to the Aurora Borealis in the north—that lit up the night sky. It was enough to keep the demons at bay and, during spare time, the men’s discussions inevitably wandered to how the news of their base’s location was being taken in London. Scott, they decided, was just going to have to live with it.
To prepare for the expedition Shackleton had travelled across Europe and spoken to anyone who would give him the time of day, building on his experiences in the south. Inevitably, much of this advice came from those who had worked in the Arctic. And the most important of them all was Fridtjof Nansen, who lived in the newly independent state of Norway.
Nansen is probably the closest thing to the father of polar exploration. This moustachioed giant was the driving force behind many expeditions, and anyone who was interested in making a serious play in these regions would seek his advice.
Born in 1861 in Norway when it was in political union with Stockholm, Nansen grew up in a small town just outside the capital, Oslo, then called Christiania. By age twenty-seven Nansen had gained a doctorate in zoology for his pioneering work on the central nervous system of lower invertebrates, ideas that later proved to be some of the founding principles of modern nerve theory. But Nansen’s passion was skiing, then a little-known pursuit outside Scandinavia. He would frequently go for long-distance trips over the mountains of Norway, competing in national competitions. Sensing this approach might provide a new method of polar exploration, he decided to undertake what would prove to be one of the greatest journeys of all time.
In the late 1880s no one had yet traversed Greenland and it was still thought possible the interior might be ice-free. Taking the brave—possibly foolhardy—decision to land on the ice-strewn east coast, where the only option was to head west, Nansen left for Greenland the day after defending his PhD research to ruffled academics. The skis proved a huge success and, dragging sledges filled with supplies and equipment west, his team made the first crossing of what was found to be an enormous ice sheet.
The success propelled Nansen onto newspaper front pages and he became a national figure, pursued for any number of similar adventures. In 1883 he wrote, ‘After my return from the Arctic, I will go to the South Pole and then my life’s work will be finished.’ Instead, Nansen set about pioneering a fresh approach to reach the North Geographic Pole. Although Ross had reached the North Magnetic Pole in 1831, subsequent expeditions had failed to reach its geographic counterpart. Most had made their attempts by dragging sledges north from the Canadian coastline. Admiral Sir George Richards wrote that sledges ‘dragged like ploughs’: ‘There will never be any more Arctic sledge travelling…I would confirm anyone who proposed such a thing in a Lunatic Asylum.’ Nansen took a similar view.
Favouring the idea that the North Geographic Pole was surrounded by sea ice, and recognising the direction that driftwood took across the Arctic, Nansen came up with an imaginative alternative: drive a boat into the sea ice on the Eurasian side of the Arctic and float over the North Geographic Pole. It was inspired thinking, but no vessel was known to be capable of surviving the pressure of being locked up like this for months on end. Nansen had the germ of an idea for a unique ship, and he worked hard to secure financial support from the Christiania Geographical Society in 1890, and later the Norwegian government and king.
No one had attempted to design a ship to be deliberately trapped in ice. Most earlier polar explorers had made do with converted sealing and whaling vessels. Nansen wanted his ship to be ‘round and slippery as an eel’. Rather than resisting the ice pressing in from the sides, the ship would lift above it: a rounded hull would avoid the grasp of the ice in ‘the way a cherry pip squeezed between thumb and forefinger pops into the air’. It was designed to be prodigiously strong; the living quarters were fully insulated with a combination of natural materials that included reindeer hair, felt and linoleum; there would even be a windmill to run a generator for electric lighting. The ship was christened Fram, Norwegian for ‘forward’, by Nansen’s wife, Eva, and launched in late 1892.
This plucky vessel, now housed in a dedicated museum in Oslo, would go on to play a major role in the events of 1912. At thirty-one metres in length, the rounded bilge of the Fram is reminiscent of an enormous cockleshell. Individual cabins and communal working spaces bathed in light from triple-glazed skylights make the vessel seem roomier than it really is; indeed, it is not hard to imagine using it for research today.
Though the Fram’s design was conceptually brilliant, Nansen could not get his ship far enough along the Siberian coast before it became trapped in the ice. The ship did drift towards Greenland, but not over the North Pole. Realising they would fall short, Nansen, with a colleague, Hjalmar Johansen, decided to ski with sledges and dogs to the pole from the Fram at its furthest point north. The two men managed to get within 3° of the North Geographic Pole but were forced to work their way back when it became clear that they did not have enough supplies. Unable to find the Fram on their return, the Norwegians pushed on to the northern shore of Franz Josef Land, a collection of islands off the Siberian coast.
Overwintering in the northern darkness, Nansen and Johansen stumbled across a British expedition based on the southern side of Franz Josef Land the following year. This was a serendipitous meeting, with implications for polar exploration in the south. The Jackson–Har
msworth Expedition was led by an eccentric British adventurer, Frederick George Jackson, who had applied to join Nansen’s expedition and been rejected. Jackson then decided to launch his own expedition to the North Pole. Discovering that Franz Josef Land was an archipelago, Jackson realised he could not reach the pole. Instead, he spent his time exploring the islands, making scientific measurements and shooting the local wildlife—including more than one hundred polar bears—south of 81°N.
Before leaving, he had visited Nansen’s brother in Norway, taking away with him a package of letters ‘soldered up in a zinc case on the chance of seeing something’ of Nansen. Just as Stanley met Livingstone, so Jackson greeted Nansen. Once the Norwegian had asked after his wife and whether his country was at war with Sweden, Jackson handed over the letters.
Advice from Nansen and Jackson helped Ernest Shackleton in his preparations, for polar exploration was still far from an exact science. Practical experience was vital in planning, and the same people regularly turned up on different expeditions, sharing experiences and observations—sometimes at a cost. Albert Armitage, who became Robert Scott’s second-in-command on the Discovery expedition, went north with Jackson. During the exploration of Franz Josef Land, Jackson had dogs and ponies to help transport the sledges of equipment and supplies. Two of the ponies died early on, and the expedition was forced to fall back on the one remaining beast for a large part of their haulage. The final pony later died while the accompanying dogs survived—yet Jackson raved about the use of horses in polar exploration to anyone who would listen, and was dismissive of canine teams. His obsession rubbed off on Armitage, who took the idea south and shared it with Scott and Shackleton in 1901.