1912

by Chris Turney

  After considerable interaction with the local wildlife the Kainan-maru hugged the coast and made one last, major discovery: the team reached the very edge of King Edward VII Land and the start of the Great Ice Barrier. Now, finally, the eastern limit of the barrier was firmly fixed. Ross had first found this impressive feature of Antarctica in 1841 and defined the westernmost edge at McMurdo Sound; Shirase’s expedition located the last piece of the puzzle at what they called Okuma Bay. For a small ship it was an impressive achievement: the Japanese succeeded where Ross, Scott and Shackleton had failed.

  In Okuma Bay the men observed an unusual phenomenon. On 29 January they saw large bergs with rocks embedded in them. As early as 1839, before Charles Darwin became a household name, the great scientist had observed that few if any icebergs in the northern hemisphere had been found to contain rocks, and yet this appeared quite common in the Southern Ocean. In another of his prescient contributions, Darwin described some of the early sealing expeditions and suggested, ‘Transportation of fragments of rock by ice throws light on the problem of erratic boulders which has so long perplexed geologists. If one iceberg in a thousand or ten thousand transports its fragment, the bottom of the Antarctic Sea and the shores of its islands must already be scattered with masses of foreign rock, the counterpart of erratic boulders of the northern hemisphere.’ The rocks on the seabed signified past convoys of bergs had been released into the Southern Ocean from an undiscovered land in the south.

  By collecting a sample the Japanese hoped to improve their understanding of the geology of King Edward VII Land. Much as Shackleton had collected geological samples on the Beardmore Glacier, this was a chance to collect material from the largely inaccessible coast. A small boat was sent out; frighteningly, after the crew had collected mud and gravel samples from the floating ice, one of the nearby bergs rose dramatically out of the ocean, having calved off the shelf floor, accompanied by the sound of thunder. Ice and water were thrown violently into the air—miraculously, the men survived.

  There were other ways to collect scientific samples that were considerably safer, at least for the expedition members. Today we are not supposed to approach any animal so that it alters its behaviour, but in 1912 all the Antarctic expeditions captured seals and penguins for food and scientific samples. During much of the Japanese explorers’ time in the Antarctic, penguins were caught. One of the ‘important guests’ captured earlier was strangled for food and the contents of its stomach analysed. Three stones were found, each around six millimetres in diameter. Finding the rest of the stomach was made up of small fish and realising they could not feed their new guests, the men killed the other birds using chloroform; but, as the official report remarked later in rather macabre fashion, ‘it still took a long time for them all to die.’

  Penguins have long been known to have stones in their stomachs. Even today, though, the reasons for this are uncertain. Ideas range from helping with ballast while diving, to digesting stones to help break down food in the gizzard, to accidentally mistaking rock fragments as fish. Regardless, many of the stones collected seem to come from the seabed, providing a handy way of gaining insight into the local geology below the ice and waves.

  Reaching the Bay of Whales on 1 February the Japanese were shocked to see that the bay had changed completely. In two weeks most of the sea ice that had covered the area on their arrival had broken up and drifted out of the bay, to be replaced by drifting floes and ice lumps of different sizes. With the conditions too poor to get Shirase and his men off the ice, the Kainan-maru stayed offshore overnight. Unlike Amundsen, the Japanese feared the stability of the barrier around the bay.

  Shirase and his six men were hurriedly loaded on board over the next two days, when conditions temporarily improved. Once again the weather deteriorated and the ship was forced to leave in haste on 4 February. Twenty dogs were left behind, marooned on an uninhabited ice shelf, chasing the departing vessel with howls of anguish. The loss was felt deeply: Shirase remembered them in his morning and evening prayers to his final days. With heavy hearts the Japanese turned north and headed home, via New Zealand.

  Shirase and his men returned heroes: ‘we left the country out of favour of the people and were welcomed back into public favour and recognition.’ Despite there being no national tradition of exploration or whaling in the Antarctic region, the team had come home safely after making a sizeable contribution to the scientific understanding of Antarctica. Shirase was immediately invited to regale the imperial family with stories from the expedition. The achievement was widely celebrated and a parade in Tokyo was dedicated to the returning explorers. Telegrams were received from afar, including one from Edgeworth David, written as soon as he heard of their safe return to Wellington, congratulating Shirase on his scientific success in the south.

  Shortly after, the M. Pathe film of the expedition was shown around Japan and China, raising the profile of the expedition still further. It also raised a phenomenal amount of money, estimated to have been in the order of ¥100,000, but this all went to M. Pathe; Shirase had sold the rights for a fraction of this amount. And yet, even with all the publicity, not everyone was convinced of the leader’s claims about his exploits. No doubt to Shirase’s chagrin, his home town was highly sceptical, and it was only when the film was shown that the locals believed him.

  A Record of Antarctica, the official expedition report, hints at a Japanese territorial claim while inviting the reader to ‘the wonderful realm of Antarctica, where the wild ice of mountains towers high into the sky and the rising sun now shines in splendour by both day and night, and shall never set’. But the expedition’s story and almost all of its discoveries were, naturally, reported in Japanese. Few overseas were aware of their findings, beyond a small number of individuals who had contact with Shirase’s team—most prominently, David—or who read the occasional brief report in western newspapers and journals. The film of Shirase’s expedition was not distributed globally. Books were the primary means of telling the world about the Japanese exploits, and they were in a language not many outside Shirase’s homeland understood.

  Consequently, an expedition that had left for Antarctica amid much controversy returned to applause and, almost as quickly, to anonymity. The bulk of the scientific results were published as a series of appendices at the back of the official account of the expedition, and remained largely untapped. Although an English translation of these reports was released as a series of discrete papers in the Japanese journal Antarctic Research during the late 1950s, the papers were only picked up by the small research community that is Antarctic science. The rest of the world carried on much as if the Japanese expedition had never happened.

  The language barrier is typified by the expedition’s original public claim to succeed or perish in the attempt on the pole. In Japanese the word Nankyoku, the objective of the expedition, means both Antarctica as a whole and the South Pole. To those in the English-speaking world who took notice, the effort appeared a failure: the team did not reach the pole. But in Japan the expedition was billed a success and public statements stressed the great significance of the discoveries.

  The team’s findings made a particular contribution to understanding King Edward VII Land, and how it and the barrier related to Antarctica as a whole. The Norwegians had collected samples from King Edward VII Land, and reported, ‘They consist of granitic rocks and crystalline schists, and are identical with those brought by the southern party from Mount Betty beside Axel Heiberg Glacier in 85°S. Moreover, they agree so closely with the rocks of South Victoria Land that we can now say that an identity of structure has been established all round the Ross Barrier. Edward Land undoubtedly seems to belong to the Plateau formation of Victoria Land, and the presumption grows in strength that the Ross Sea is a rift valley.’

  The Norwegians were only partially correct. The samples the Japanese collected around Antarctica, including those found within the penguin stomachs, were not entirely the same as those taken in
Victoria Land. The volcanic rocks supported the evidence of rifting in the Earth’s crust, but pointed to an early formation of King Edward VII Land, separate to the eastern Antarctic. The failure of the Japanese to find the most recent rock types of Victoria Land only reinforced this conclusion. Hints of a geological connection to New Zealand suggested a much more complex history than first thought.

  Fortunately, because of his friendship with Edgeworth David, Shirase had been happy to send examples of his geological samples to the Australian. The results of David’s analysis were incorporated into a later report on the geological work of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, guaranteeing at least some of the Japanese science was known to a wider readership.

  There were other equally important findings. Alongside the weather and ocean observations, the Japanese were able to show just how quickly the ice scape could change. After the Norwegians had departed in the Fram, the Japanese were in the area long enough to report that the Bay of Whales was considerably larger than had been supposed. By the time Shirase left, the bay had opened up fifty kilometres into the interior.

  The expedition also provided observations on the make-up and movement of the Great Ice Barrier. During the Dash Patrol, halfway to their furthest point south, Shirase crossed what we now know to be Roosevelt Island, in the eastern part of the barrier. At the time, this prominent feature in the landscape was not known to be an island. Conditions were poor and the gradient uncertain, but the 300-metre-high ‘small hill’ was south of a towering ‘ice cliff’ that ‘looked as if it had been thrown up by some cataclysmic event, such as a volcanic eruption’.

  The Norwegians had also been intrigued by the area. They felt this same snow-covered rise to the south of the Bay of Whales must be land, and the hummocks in the immediate area were disturbances caused by the flow of ice around it. It was a fundamental observation. Today, this ‘small hill’ is the origin of some of the largest tabular bergs released into the Southern Ocean.

  Scott’s suspicions about the region had been right: the eastern Ross Sea was an important part of the Antarctic story.

  Not six weeks after the Tokyo parade for Shirase’s men, Emperor Meiji died and the nation went into mourning. The emperor who had heralded a new start for Japan had passed away—and so, it seemed, had the nation’s interest in Antarctica. This could not have come at a worse time for Shirase. There had been talk of continuing the research in the Southern Ocean for a further two years, but the funding simply was not there: the extra year south had added a lot to an already huge bill. Though Shirase had returned home a hero he was also met with bad news. Fundraising had continued after the expedition sailed, but there remained a major shortfall: ¥53,000.

  There was not enough money to pay the salaries owed, and rumours circulated that the Supporters’ Association had spent far too much on entertainment. True or not, it still meant Shirase was left to meet the commitment. Unlike Shackleton’s case, the government did not step in, and with no imperial champion Shirase was left largely on his own, financially crippled. The Kainan-maru was sold to its previous owner, Gunji, for ¥20,000 and returned to fishing. The remaining money had to be raised through a string of different ventures.

  Shirase spent the next five years touring Japan, giving lectures. He sold his house in Tokyo, too—but it was not enough. During the years 1921 to 1924 Shirase returned to the Kuril Islands to put his knowledge of foxes to good use. By managing a fur farm he was able to earn some of the money owed. He returned to mainland Japan and grew his own vegetables to live off. Yet Shirase’s interest in Antarctica did not wane. In 1927 he finally met Amundsen, when the Norwegian visited the imperial family in Tokyo to show them the details of a planned flight over the North Geographic Pole.

  In an attempt to gain wider recognition of the Japanese effort, Masakichi Ikeda appears to have assumed the role of the official expedition scientist. He sent a map to the Royal Geographic Society in London, incorporating the Japanese Antarctic findings with those of Amundsen. In it, Ikeda names two prominent mountains in King Edward VII Land as Mount Nobu and Mount Okuma, while the inlet at the eastern extremity of the Great Ice Barrier was declared to be Murakami Inlet, after one of the major expedition supporters—though it eventually became Okuma Bay.

  The map was duly noted, filed away in the archives, and forgotten. Indeed, the society and its most senior people seem to have ignored the expedition after this. The secretary of the RGS, Scott Keltie, wrote to Lord Curzon in September 1912 and remarked, unimpressed, ‘A member of the Japan Antarctic Expedition has sent to the President a note of some of their discoveries, which do not amount to very much. I suppose I had better acknowledge it?’ Sir Clements Markham’s history of polar exploration, Lands of Silence, makes no mention of the Japanese effort and no reports on their findings were made in the society’s journal for years.

  It would be another two decades before Japan’s effort in the south was properly acknowledged. In 1929 the pioneering American air explorer Richard Byrd flew along the edge of the Ross Sea and named many of the features he saw on the way. Bays identified and reported by the Japanese were renamed, and when alerted to this they protested loudly. It was not really Byrd’s fault, as no English translation of the expedition report was available at the time, and he dutifully published an article in the American Geographical Society’s Geographical Review that gave the names Kainan Bay and Okuma Bay to two of the most prominent spots.

  It was probably as a result of this renewed attention that, in the same year, the Norwegian Ivar Hamre published his short summary of the expedition. The Japanese were finally finding their way onto the map, long after the other 1912 expeditions had received credit for their work. Shirase petitioned his government to accept as a gift the region of the Ross Sea where the Japanese flag had been raised, allowing it to make a territorial claim. The offer was turned down. Shirase saw tremendous opportunities to exploit the south, later writing: ‘Study the treasures under the Antarctica and make use of them even after my death.’

  By the early 1930s Japan’s presence in the Southern Ocean was increasing: whaling vessels frequently headed south, prompting interest in the region at home, while the Japanese Polar Research Institute was established in 1933 and Shirase appointed honorary president. But the government still would not settle Shirase’s final debts and these were only fully repaid in 1935, not long before he died. In 1981 a statue of Shirase flanked by penguins was placed in the grounds of the temple close to where he was born, and in 1990 a dedicated museum was opened in Nikaho. Today the circular building and its staff provide a unique insight into the Japanese expedition. Each year, on 28 January, there is a festival dedicated to Shirase called the Walk in the Snow: a tribute to a man who briefly inspired a nation and never gave up his belief in the importance of Antarctic exploration.

  The official narrative of the expedition summed up the Japanese effort: ‘Leaders in unity unify their followers.’ This was not strictly true, as there had been some notable disputes on board—but these were nothing compared to the German Antarctic Expedition of 1911 to 1912, led by the hapless Wilhelm Filchner. Although not hamstrung by debt, as the Japanese had been, the German expedition south saw attempted murder, mayhem and a hefty dose of madness. And yet it was one of the most important expeditions of them all.

  Modern weather station in the Heritage Range of the Ellsworth Mountains, 2011. Photo taken by Chris Turney with an Eastman Kodak No. 2 Folding Autographic Brownie (model 1924–1926).

  CHAPTER 6

  LOCKED IN

  Wilhelm Filchner and the Second German Antarctic Expedition, 1911–1912

  Facts send theories to the four winds.

  SIR CLEMENTS MARKHAM (1830–1916)

  On the morning of 16 July 1910 change was in the air. The fine summer weather southern England had enjoyed during the first half of the month was on the wane. London awoke to a fresh northerly breeze and reports of an impending storm. But the poor conditions did little to dampen the enthusiasm of a
small, select crowd at Waterloo station, gathered to officially send off Robert Scott and the British Antarctic Expedition. Flowers and gifts were presented; there were huddled exchanges.

  Shortly before the train was due to set off for Southampton and a waiting ship, the British leader and his wife boarded, with Ernest Shackleton crying out, ‘Three cheers for Captain Scott!’

  Scott looked back and, with a wave of his bowler hat, shouted: ‘See you at the Pole.’

  But the call was not directed at Shackleton. It was to a smartly presented army officer planning to lead a German expedition south at the same time, Wilhelm Filchner.

  Born in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth in 1877, Filchner seemed destined for a career in the arts. As a young man he had displayed an uncanny talent for painting copies of masterpieces. But the call to adventure proved too strong. By fifteen he had turned his back on canvas and oils, and joined the Prussian Military Academy.

  Filchner first came to public prominence at twenty-three after an infamous lone journey on horseback through the Pamir Mountains of central Asia. Sponsored by the army, his sojourn led to accusations of spying and a ban from travelling in Russia, making his book Ein Ritt über den Pamir a national bestseller—and his name as a daring German explorer.

  Buoyed by success, Filchner went on to develop an impressive scientific background, studying among other things geophysics and the latest surveying techniques. His newfound skills were soon put to good use when he was given the leadership of a national mapping expedition of the Earth’s magnetic field in Tibet. Commendations and honours swiftly followed the successful expedition, and Filchner’s reputation for successfully blending science and adventure was assured.