by Chris Turney
But the Australians, at least, felt there was a general feeling that British was best. Debenham observed: ‘the Australian is more or less disliked by the Englishmen I’ve met. There is a decided “down” on things Australian in the expedition. It is not altogether explained by the acknowledged tendency we have to “bragging” and “swanking”. At times it is quite absurd, and these fellows will not believe that Sydney is reasonably up to date or that educational methods in Australia are not hopelessly out of date.’
Scott, though, was open to international expertise furthering research on the poles. Believing the Norwegian Roald Amundsen to be heading for the North Geographic Pole in the Fram in 1910, Scott called on the explorer’s home during his visit to test the motorised sledges. As Amundsen was a veteran of numerous polar ventures, Scott was keen to discuss the possibility of synchronising their scientific observations in both hemispheres.
When he failed to see Amundsen, Scott attempted to phone him. Both times the master was not in. Disappointed, the British leader returned home to finish his preparations, and sent scientific instruments identical to his own to the errant Norwegian, so that any data collected could be most reliably compared.
In Melbourne, en route to Antarctica, Scott received a telegram from Amundsen that deeply unsettled the British team: ‘Beg inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic.’ The Norwegians were taking Nansen’s ship south.
The cold blast of the Southern Ocean storm hit the Terra Nova as soon as it had left the relatively safe haven of New Zealand. The winds of the Furious Fifties threatened the expedition’s survival almost before it had started. Men bailed frantically and animals looked on wild-eyed as fierce waves frequently swamped the deck. Supplies and equipment were thrown from side to side. All hands were called to secure the lashings on the small wooden vessel’s deck and to work the pumps as the crew struggled to keep the vessel afloat. The British ship was seriously overloaded and there was a real risk it would flounder. Several days of desperate work by all hands managed to keep the vessel afloat, and the Terra Nova was saved, but it was a close call.
Scott had set out far too early from New Zealand. The idea was to quickly break through the sea ice, and lay food and equipment depots across the Great Ice Barrier during the southern summer, in preparation for the assault on the pole the following season. Finding the edge of the pack ice on 9 December 1910, the ship then took three weeks to get through.
Even now it is hard to predict when the ice has weakenened enough for sea travel. In 1912 the best you could do was to look at what others had managed on their journeys. Shackleton had broken through in just two days in 1908, but it had been relatively late in the season and the continuous sunlight over several months had done the hard work of softening the ice.
Reaching Ross Island on 4 January, the British decided to set up their winter headquarters in McMurdo Sound. Opting for a small promontory fourteen kilometres north of Hut Point, the site of the Discovery base, Scott named their home Cape Evans after his second-in-command. The Terra Nova could not pull alongside, though, because of the remaining sea ice. Instead, over the following eight days, the supplies and equipment needed to support a team of twenty-three men for a minimum of two years were unloaded and hauled two kilometres on to shore. Apart from the loss of one of the three motorised sledges, which fell through the sea ice when being taken off the Terra Nova, the operation was completed efficiently. By 18 January the hut was up and the men had moved into their new quarters.
During these early preparations Scott discussed his thoughts on the Great Ice Barrier and its relationship to King Edward VII Land with the leader of the Eastern Party, the naval officer Victor Campbell. Scott was convinced the ice to the west of what he called Balloon Bight was afloat; to the east, he argued, the ice most probably sat on land. Scott saw the bay as effectively a permanent feature that would be available to the Terra Nova for dropping off Campbell and his team—implying Shackleton had played fast and loose in his aborted attempt to land there in 1908. The plan was for the Eastern Party to spend the winter in the bay and explore King Edward VII Land the following year.
Reaching their destination on 3 February, Campbell had bad news. ‘We were off the place Balloon Bight should have been, but there was no sign of it. Our sights showed we were south of the old Barrier edge in 1902. About midnight we stood looking into a large bay with a great number of whales blowing.’ Priestley, the team geologist, felt vindicated on Shackleton’s behalf: the bay was unstable. More importantly, the British found the Fram anchored there.
Until the British saw the Norwegian ship, it was not clear where Roald Amundsen was heading; some had thought the Weddell Sea. Now it was evident he was in the same region, and it completely threw Campbell’s plans. The British party leader, though, was not convinced by where the Norwegian had placed his winter quarters: ‘We went over to his hut and had coffee. He has put it up about 2 miles from the ship in what I think not a very good place as it is on the E side of the bay and weak pressure ice extends south of it.’
Over coffee Amundsen offered the British the chance to stay and continue their work. A dejected Campbell felt this would not do and opted to leave. Falling back on Scott’s orders—‘Should you be unable to land in the region of King Edward’s Land you will be at liberty to go the region of Robertson Bay [the immediate west of Cape Adare] after communicating with Cape Evans’—Campbell returned to base, left word of his discovery and took off north, to Borchgrevink’s old base at the tip of Victoria Land. Campbell’s eastern team had become the Northern Party.
Meanwhile, Scott was laying depots across the Great Ice Barrier for the attempt on the pole next summer. Tins of food, tea, cocoa, oil, horse fodder, spare sledges and matches were all being cached in a succession of spots across the ice. The plan was to reach as far as 80°S, where the aptly named One Ton Depot would be a major store for the returning parties the following year. However, on the journey south it was clear to Scott that some of the horses were struggling. Oates suggested killing the weakest pony and pushing on. Scott seems to have been a little squeamish and wanted to preserve them for the main effort next season. The overruled cavalry officer responded, ‘Sir I’m afraid you’ll come to regret not taking my advice.’ ‘Regret it or not,’ Scott supposedly retorted, ‘I have taken my decision as a Christian gentleman.’ The southernmost depot was laid fifty-seven kilometres short of their target latitude, and the expedition returned to Cape Evans for winter.
Time on the ice had given the men a chance to evaluate their leader. While all recognised his enthusiasm for science, not all were impressed. When out of the room, Scott was commonly referred to as ‘the Owner’. Debenham, in a letter to his mother, summed up his thoughts. ‘I am afraid I am very disappointed in him, tho’ my faith died very hard,’ he wrote. ‘There’s no doubt he can be very nice and the interest he takes in our scientific work is immense, he is also a fine sledger himself and as organiser is splendid. But there I’m afraid one must stop. His temper is very uncertain and leads him to absurd lengths even in simple arguments…What he decides is often enough the right thing I expect, but he loses all control of his tongue and makes us all feel wild…we are, with the exception of the Owner, a very happy family.’
Scientific study continued apace through the winter, even though the new research sometimes made for uncomfortable reading. After working up his field notes from Victoria Land, Debenham wrote: the ‘results are not altogether satisfactory. The fact is we trusted too much to the accuracy of the existing maps. Griff [Taylor] got into a mess with The Owner by declaring that the “Discovery” mapping was a disgrace.’ But, when they were not pointing out flaws, both geologists also unearthed wild swings in the continent’s past climate. Sand-filled cracked mudflats within the Beacon Sandstone testified to hot, dry conditions, while rocks of a different geology to the local bedrock were found scattered on surrounding slopes, transported there by an ice sheet that had been far larger in the past. Alongside these efforts, the o
ther scientists on the expedition worked on a range of projects that tried to capture the essence of Antarctica: the formation of ice, ocean temperatures and saltiness, tidal variations, the biology—including parasites—on land and in the sea, variations in the Earth’s magnetism, and, of course, the never-ending changes in the weather.
Edward Wilson kept an eye out and offered friendly counsel.
On the value of weather observations Hints to Travellers counsels earnestly, ‘Travellers may make useful meteorological observations for three distinct purposes: 1st, for contouring, or determining elevation above the sea; 2nd, for extending our knowledge of climate; 3rd, for aiding synoptic investigation; while for their own daily knowledge of the weather, they will be useful and interesting.’ Ideally, measurements were to be made at ‘intervals of 12, 8, 6, or 4 hours, always dividing the 24 hours into equal parts’. Thanks to Simpson’s efforts, Scott remarked, there was a ‘first class meteorological station’ connected by wires to the hut, allowing it to be monitored by ‘a profusion of self-recording instruments, electric batteries and switchboards, whilst the ear caught the ticking of many clocks, the gentle whine of a motor and occasionally the trembling note of an electric bell’, all complementing the observations made by expedition members around the base.
These advances greatly reduced the amount of time the poor observer had to spend outside and, in turn, improved the efficiency of a team with limited staff and many observations to make. Simpson, for instance, was also in charge of the magnetic observations and would spend several hours each day at a dedicated hut set up for taking the various different measurements at internationally agreed times.
The conditions in Antarctica often pushed the equipment to its limits, and breakages were common. As Simpson wrote in his diary, ‘Every hour or so during a blizzard I have to go out, mount a ladder to the roof of the hut, remove the vane head, clean out the snow, and replace it. With gusts reaching 70 miles an hour and the air full of drift, this is no pleasant matter.’ In spite of the risks he faced, Simpson took Antarctic meteorology into the twentieth century.
Since Scott’s first expedition it had been noticed that the clouds of volcanic gases given off by Mount Erebus would often drift in a different direction to the wind on the lower slopes. Erebus is effectively an enormous weathervane, pointing out the direction of blow at its 3800-metre summit. The limitation of all weathervanes, though, is their fixed position. If you want to know the conditions at different levels through the atmosphere, Erebus is of little use. And yet these observations were needed to help answer vital questions: why did the continent remain so cold during the long winter, and how did the Antarctic fit into the world’s weather systems?
To get around the problem at Cape Evans, Simpson released hydrogen-filled balloons, to which he attached thermometers and barometers that were capable of taking continuous measurements. Balloon runs were only possible in calm weather; when all was ready, a slow-burning match was lit under the hydrogen, supposedly safely. As the balloon rose it was followed by a telescope, providing wind direction. When the match burned away, the instruments fell to the ground, connected to a thread held by the operator, so they could be collected later without too much trouble. At least, that was the idea—in reality it was rarely easy. Erebus helped a little, offering indications to the observers. If clouds of smoke were moving quickly, it meant the balloons would be nigh on impossible to retrieve, and no attempt to launch was made. But if a balloon did go up, the subsequent falling equipment would often disappear over the horizon, invariably leaving Simpson and his assistant with precious few measurements.
By the end of winter 1911 the system was suitably refined, and ten balloon runs were successfully recovered. The results were startling. In contrast to summer, where there was an expected fall in temperature with height, in winter the temperature rose from the surface up to the first thousand metres, then fell gradually. As Simpson put it: ‘if the base is cooled, a layer of cold air forms there which has no tendency to rise and warmer layers rest upon it.’ The winter experienced an extreme temperature inversion, and the reason was the brightness of the surface. ‘Of the solar energy which falls within the Antarctic Circle, such a large proportion is lost by direct reflection from the snow that the remainder is not sufficient to raise the temperature of the air to the freezing point before the solstice is reached, and the energy commences to decrease,’ Simpson surmised.
Essentially, during the summer the heat from the sun warms the snow relative to the overlying air, but during the poorly lit winter the angle of the incoming rays is so low that most is rapidly lost to space. The result is a counter-intuitive rise in winter temperature over the Antarctic continent. The pervasively cold temperatures first described on the Discovery expedition now had a scientific basis.
Evenings would often be taken up by lectures: members of the expedition would give talks on all manner of subjects, from hard-rock geology to the Great Ice Barrier, from Antarctic wildlife past and present to the latest thinking on horse keeping. Simpson was the hardest to impress. His demeanour soon earned him the title Sunny Jim—Simpson’s ‘emphatic way of stating things and his vigorous “You are completely wrong in all you say” always amuses us’, Debenham noted, but he was a ‘very clear reasoner and one has to be very careful when arguing with him’.
There was good humour as well. After Atkinson gave a lecture on scurvy, ‘Ponting summed up the lecture as disappointing from his point of view as it seemed to him that if he didn’t eat seal-meat he would get scurvy and if he did he would get rheumatism.’ It was ‘Universitas Antarctica’, inspired by Scott’s philosophy ‘Science—the rock foundation of all effort.’
The local wildlife was central to Scott’s research program, but the appeal went beyond the scientific. The knee-high Adelie penguins that lived around the base enthralled the men. Cherry later wrote, ‘They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts—and rather portly withal.’ Another expedition member was so entranced he wrote a popular book on them, devising a musical score to describe the noises they made.
After the first year of the expedition the film South with Scott had top billing for its penguin performances. ‘Comic relief is given by the record of an encounter with penguins,’ proclaimed the Manchester Guardian, ‘whose appearance on the screen, scurrying to and fro like nothing in the world but a crowd of frock-coated old gentlemen in a sack-race, is very humorous.’ The film’s success vindicated Scott’s belief that Ponting’s work would help raise public interest, and with it much-needed funds for the expedition.
Part of the fascination was the penguins’ inability to comprehend their new neighbours. Scott wrote of the problems they caused due to their ‘fatuous conduct’:
From the moment of landing on their feet their whole attitude expressed devouring curiosity and a pig-headed disregard for their own safety. They waddle forward, poking their heads to and fro in their usually absurd way, in spite of a string of howling dogs straining to get at them. ‘Hulloa!’ they seem to say, ‘here’s a game—what do all you ridiculous things want?’ And they come a few steps nearer. The dogs make a rush as far as their leashes or harness allow. The penguins are not daunted in the least, but their ruffs go up and they squawk with semblance of anger, for all the world as though they were rebuking a rude stranger—their attitude might be imagined to convey ‘Oh, that’s the sort of animal you are; well, you’ve come to the wrong place—we aren’t going to be bluffed and bounced by you,’ and then the final fatal steps forward are taken and they come within reach. There is a spring, a squawk, a horrid red patch on the snow, and the incident is closed.
By the early twentieth century penguins had been a focus of scientific research for some years. A German expedition in 1882–1883, one of the first in the region, investigated the king penguins of South Georgia. This work led
to some of the first insights into penguins’ behaviour and breeding habits, but included the unorthodox method of strapping the birds to posts in leather corsets while in captivity. Unsurprisingly, the British did not continue this practice.
Wilson took charge of much of the biological work, observing the behaviour and characteristics of local wildlife, collecting samples, dissecting and then analysing them under his microscope. In particular, he had developed a passion for the tall, yellow-breasted emperor penguins on the first Discovery expedition. Wilson had been transfixed by the discovery of the first colony of these majestic birds on the other side of Ross Island, at Cape Crozier. Visiting the rookery in early summer, during September 1903, he had been disappointed to find the eggs hatched, implying the penguins had mated and the chicks had been born in winter. A later visit suggested the chicks had a mortality rate of around seventy per cent, which seemed remarkably high to the British scientist.
But it was not merely the life cycle of the emperor penguin that fascinated Wilson: the birds were thought to be something of an early evolutionary offshoot. Their full scientific name is Aptenodytes forsteri, in honour of Captain Cook’s naturalist, Johann Reinhold Forster, who was one of the first to describe these incredible creatures. Aptenodytes means ‘featherless diver’, referring to the birds’ remarkable underwater abilities and their four layers of feathers, which look something like scales. To Wilson, these scale-like feathers hinted at something important.
In 1861 a specimen of a small dinosaur was discovered in a Bavarian limestone quarry. Called Archaeopteryx, the find was a revelation. Detailed feathers were clearly visible on two slabs of limestone, along with a toothed jaw and a long bony tail. It pointed to birds having evolved from flying reptiles. Despite being a deeply religious man Wilson was not closed to scientific ideas that might question his faith, and he commented in one of his many reports from the Discovery expedition: ‘The possibility that we have in the emperor penguin the nearest approach to a primitive form not only of a penguin but of a bird, makes the future working out of its embryology a matter of the greatest possible importance.’