by Chris Turney
Ernest Shackleton went on to lead the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, hoping to cross the great continent for the first time, but met a similar fate to Filchner. Before he could make land, his ship, the Endurance, became locked in the Weddell Sea ice during 1915 and iconic images taken by Frank Hurley, fresh from his Antarctic mission with Mawson, immortalised the expedition as the vessel sank.
Shackleton led his men through the ice floes to reach Elephant Island at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Leaving most of the men under the leadership of Frank Wild, he proceeded to sail the thirteen hundred kilometres to South Georgia in a tiny boat. Becoming the first to cross the island’s mountains, he then raised the alarm at a whaling station and returned to Elephant Island to find everyone alive. Yet again Shackleton lived up to his towering reputation.
During an expedition to the Antarctic in 1922, again with Wild, the great man died of a heart attack. He was only forty-seven. At his wife’s request, Shackleton’s body was buried at Grytviken in South Georgia, where today his grave looks over the cruise ships that visit the island.
Roald Amundsen returned north after celebrating his success at reaching the South Geographic Pole. But his dream of doing the same in the Arctic was frustrated. The Fram was badly rotted after its travels, so Amundsen had to build a new ship to drift over the pole—and the attempt failed, with the vessel missing the location. Amundsen later flew over the North Geographic Pole in the airship Norge, but after falling out with his brother Leon he struggled with money and was later declared bankrupt. Amundsen returned north yet again—in 1928, to help find a lost explorer—but was sadly lost over the ice, dying aged fifty-five.
Nobu Shirase lived a considerably longer time, in relative poverty, spending most of his life paying off the cost of the Japanese expedition. Finally clear of debt he lived for a further decade, barely surviving on an army pension, and died in 1946, at the age of eighty-five. It was a shocking way to treat a man who claimed, with some justification, to have ‘kindled the latent fire in the hearts of the Japanese’.
In Germany, after World War I, Wilhelm Filchner helped the Kaiser flee to the Netherlands. He never went south again but continued his work in Nepal and Tibet, spending World War II in India, where he made public his anti-Nazi feelings. Filchner died in Zurich in 1957, aged eighty.
Douglas Mawson went on to marry his love, Paquita Delprat, with John King Davis as his best man, and then served in the war as an army major. He later returned to Antarctica as part of the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition, where he explored vast sections of the continental coastline. He was appointed professor of geology at the University of Adelaide in 1920 and died in 1958, aged seventy-six, the last of the great leaders from the Heroic Era of Exploration.
And the man who started it all? Sir Clements Markham died in an unpleasant way that was anything but heroic. In 1916 he was overcome by smoke from a candle that set fire to his hammock. He was eighty-five, and had defended Scott’s efforts over all others to his last day.
The centenary of 1912 is an opportunity to celebrate scientific exploration in the south. No group encapsulates the spirit more than Robert Scott and his South Pole party. Unfortunately, their deaths overshadowed their expedition’s great work—and arguably much of that achieved by the other teams. Heroic tales of sacrifice and endurance in the face of extreme hardship became the main story, to the detriment of almost everything else.
When I started this project I had no desire to add to the commentary on the deaths of Scott and his men. There are many wonderful books on the events surrounding this journey and all give a more comprehensive view of them than I could hope to. But, during my research, I stumbled across a new part of the story, with implications for the way we honour the men’s memory and, more generally, how science is communicated to people outside the profession.
Scott’s fellow explorers were at a loss to explain what had gone wrong. How could one of the best-provisioned expeditions in Antarctica have ended so badly? When told of Scott’s death, Shackleton was incredulous: ‘I cannot believe it is true. It is inconceivable that an expedition so well equipped as Captain Scott’s could perish before a blizzard.’ There is no doubt that the weather played a major role, but might something else have contributed?
With the news of the tragedy, rumours circulated that the full story had not been told: that something else had happened on the ice, something that was being quietly ignored. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was convinced of it. Writing in his diary in January 1914 Cherry reports that he went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields for a meeting with the expedition’s solicitor, Arthur Ferrar, who was also Cherry’s own legal advisor. The response was swift. ‘They would not listen,’ Ferrar insisted when Cherry said he wanted to go before the Antarctic Committee handling the expedition in Britain. ‘They will say you are overstrained. You see, there must be no scandal.’
‘The Committee,’ Cherry noted in the margin of his journal, ‘meant to hush up everything. I was to be sacrificed.’ Nothing was ever proven and Cherry’s concerns were put down to paranoia. But the speculation persisted. To try to understand why, I went in May 2011 to view some of Lord Curzon’s papers held by the British Library.
The first clue was in a short set of notes: seven pages that had been buried in a file for nearly a century. They shed light on a chain of events that was precipitated in April 1913 by Lady Kathleen Scott’s arrival in London from New Zealand, returning after news of her husband’s death. During the month-long voyage Lady Scott had pored over her late husband’s diary and correspondence. Arriving in London on 14 April, she immediately contacted Lord Curzon, in his role as president of the Royal Geographical Society, and arranged a meeting in two days’ time.
Curzon made the meeting notes after what appears to have been a wide-ranging discussion over Lady Scott’s findings. The deaths of all five men were discussed. Oates, it was claimed, most probably took opium before leaving the tent to commit suicide. But the meeting began, unsurprisingly, with talk of her late husband: ‘Scotts words in his Diary on exhaustion of food & fuel in depots on his return. He spoke in reference of “lack of thoughtfulness & even of generosity”. It appears Lieut Evans – down with Scurvy – and the 2 men with him must on return journey have entered & consumed more than their share.’
This must have come as a shock to Curzon. Had one of the returning parties, led no less by the expedition’s second-in-command, taken more than their fair share of supplies? Scott’s Antarctic venture was seen in some quarters as the society’s expedition. If Teddy Evans was even remotely suspected of being complicit in Scott’s death, the RGS might be asked some very difficult questions, particularly as he had since assumed the leadership of the expedition.
Curzon immediately initiated an inquiry, asking several senior RGS members if they would discreetly help him investigate the matter. Most were supportive, but he received a confidential note of caution from Admiral Lewis Beaumont:
As you have seen and talked to Lady Scott you now know that Evans had lost Scott’s confidence to a great extent and that he will be dependent upon what Lady Scott gives him, out of the Diaries and Journals, for the building up of his paper. I think your idea of having an informal meeting of those you name…a very good one—the important point, to my mind, being the necessity of deciding what attitude the Society should take with regard to your questions (a) & (b) that is:- the exhaustion of the supplies of food & fuel—and the conduct of the relief parties. I am not in favour of the informal meeting becoming a Committee of Enquiry—because for the Society to be on sure ground it would have to probe very deep and would have probably to disapprove of what was done in many particulars—it would be different if good could come of the enquiry, but I fear nothing but controversy would come of it.
Curzon was not so sure—but things changed a few days later, when he met Edward Wilson’s widow.
His notes continue with the subsequent meeting he held with Mrs Oriana Wilson. It records
an unknown part of the expedition’s story: ‘Mrs Wilson told me later there was a passage in her husbands diary which spoke of the “inexplicable” shortage of fuel & pemmican on the return journey, relating to depots which had not been touched by Meares and which could only refer to an unauthorised subtraction by one or other of the returning parties. This passage however she proposes to show to no one and to keep secret. C.’
Scott’s dog driver, Cecil Meares, was known to have removed extra supplies from one of the supply dumps, the Mount Hooper Depot. Halfway back across the barrier in 1912, Meares was starving. He had travelled the entire ice shelf on the outward journey, and the extra two weeks meant he and his dogs were desperately short of food. Taking the bare minimum, he left a letter telling the others of his actions.
However, it was not Meares’s removal of the food that Wilson was referring to. The returning South Pole team did not reach Mount Hooper until 10 March, eleven days after Wilson’s last journal entry. The shortage of food must have been elsewhere. But the published version of Wilson’s diary makes no mention of a shortage of fuel or of pemmican.
To check Curzon’s claims, I was fortunate to view Wilson’s original journal at the British Library. The small dark hardback book contains remarkably light writing in pencil. Dates are jotted in the margins and the accompanying text is of varying length before the entries end abruptly, on 27 February 1912. All the material aligns with the published version, but the latter fails to convey a vital characteristic of the journal. Before 11 February, each line is filled with jottings; not one is wasted. After this date there are gaps in the text, with some entries missing entirely.
The key date seems to be 24 February, when the returning party reached the Southern Barrier Depot. Scott was horrified to find there was a large fuel shortage, and could not account for it. It appears there was natural leakage through the lids: something Amundsen avoided by soldering all his tins. In the published version of his diaries Wilson not only fails to mention the fuel shortage in the relevant entry; he does not even remark upon the team having reached the all-important depot. In the original diary there are gaps in the text: the final statement of the day, ‘Fat pony hoosh’, is a separate entry from the rest of the text; half a line, clear of text, precedes it, followed by a blank two and a half lines before the next day’s entry.
Whether someone has rubbed out text is unclear, but the gaps in the diary entry for 24 February correlate with Curzon’s notes. It suggests that one or more individuals did indeed take more than their fair share of food. And this was not the first time. On its return the South Pole team found a full day’s biscuit allowance missing in the Upper Glacier Depot on 7 February, and both Scott and Wilson remarked upon this in their diaries.
Determining nutritional needs for working in polar environments was not an exact science in 1912. Past efforts—most of them operating near sea level—were the principal guide in expedition planning. Low temperatures and high altitudes are massive energy drains when dragging sledges for days on end. As a result, the estimated five thousand or so calories Scott had allowed for each man every day—reasonable for traversing the Ross Ice Shelf—was far too low on the Antarctic Plateau. Contemporary estimates suggest the men probably needed somewhere around double that amount. Scott and his men were starving long before they died. So a shortage of food was the last thing they needed, particularly as—regardless of fuel supplies—the pemmican could have been eaten cold.
The evidence pointed towards Evans’s team as the guilty party. And Lord Curzon could not risk the story getting out. Scott and his companions had been declared heroes. To suggest that one of the returning teams—albeit suffering scurvy—had helped themselves to more than their share of food, contributing to the men’s deaths, would have changed everything. The deaths would no longer be mere ‘bad luck’ but in part due to others’ need for self-preservation: not in the spirit of selfless Antarctic exploration. Survivors’ lives would be tainted and reputations—not least of the RGS, so closely aligned with the expedition—would be damaged.
Lady Scott’s comments had sparked concern, and Mrs Wilson had made the accusation explicit. But there was little appetite for public scandal. Curzon appears to have shut down the inquiry—after 24 April 1913, there were no further references to it.
Newspaper reports expressed suspicions from the start. The Daily Chronicle interviewed Teddy Evans shortly after the Terra Nova reached New Zealand and remarked that the new expedition leader became reticent when asked about shortages on the ice, commenting, ‘I think you had better not touch upon it.’ Some RGS fellows privately expressed fears that more had happened on the ice than was publicly known. On the expedition, Cherry despised the Welshman: ‘I should like to see that man branded the traitor and liar he is,’ he wrote in his diary, and, later, ‘It would be an everlasting shame, if the story of this Expedition were told by the one big failure in it.’ By the end of July 1913 Evans had been removed from the official leadership of the expedition.
Of the returning Last Supporting Party, only William Lashly’s sledging diary has been published, the most popular version apparently reproduced in full within Cherry’s The Worst Journey in the World, some ten years after the events they describe. Although Lashly would later insist their contents were true, the entries appear to have been significantly embellished. Curiously, the original diary entries give no detail on how much food the three men took from the allegedly impoverished depots, despite the definite statements in Cherry’s version; and Evans’s scurvy—a possible justification for taking extra food—is not commented on until the men were halfway across the Ross Ice Shelf, eight days after that given in the popular version when the men were still descending the Beardmore Glacier. There is nothing in Lashly’s diary to refute Lord Curzon’s notes.
If Wilson’s diary entry for the 24 February was partially rubbed out, the most likely candidate is his widow. Oriana Wilson is known to have destroyed some of her husband’s correspondence and, given the record of the conversation with Lord Curzon, she probably always intended to remove the offending statements. But Wilson’s and Lashly’s diaries were not the only expedition accounts altered.
For some years it has been well known that a number of changes were made to Scott’s diary before it was published in 1913. Temperature readings were sometimes altered, derogatory comments about individuals removed. The latter is easy to understand. But some of Scott’s text from the final part of the journey was also changed, seemingly to make the ending more dramatic—as if it was not dramatic enough already.
On 17 January, Wilson wrote at Polheim, ‘we start for home and shall do our utmost to get back in time to send the news home.’ Curiously, in Scott’s published diary there was a similar statement but it was altered, completely changing the meaning. Here the entry read, ‘Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it,’ implying Scott was not sure he would be able to get his team home. Although the reader would have known the ending before they began the book, this published version is odd: if Scott thought they might die, he would not have wasted the best part of a day fossicking for geological samples at Buckley Island.
The actual passage for 17 January reads: ‘Now for the run home and a desperate struggle to get the news through first. I wonder if we can do it.’ (The emphasis is mine.) The edited version gives a completely different view of Scott’s thoughts and, unfortunately, continues to misguide people. Yet you still see the edited version trotted out, time and again.
What both Wilson and Scott were saying is: we need to get back to base before the Terra Nova leaves, so we can tell the world we reached the pole; in the meantime we are staying in Antarctica to continue the scientific work. For the two men the pole was the means to an end: it was the science that mattered. Communicating their success was essential to attracting the precious funding that would support their research efforts.
It is a shame that the complete, correct text in the sledging diaries is not better known. The
nature of the British explorers’ deaths and the editing of their final words has for too long created a fixation on the ‘race’, rather than the bigger story of how the five expeditions of the era worked towards understanding what made Antarctica tick.
By focusing on the race we do these men a disservice. Scott and his men died for science. I hope that, after a century, we can get the balance right and remember the pioneering work they did. It was all about the science—and it is time we remembered them for that.
POSTSCRIPT
Give me ex-Antarcticists, unsoured and with their ideals intact: they could sweep the world.
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD (1886–1959)
With all the celebrations and mourning over the heroics and losses of 1912, the public lost sight of the huge increase in Antarctic knowledge attained. And yet the stories from this time continue to be re-evaluated, and to inspire. Even though we have never been more familiar with this frigid environment, Antarctica remains exciting, otherworldly. If you are fortunate enough to visit it, the vastness, the sense of scale, the brightness, the merging vista of ice and sky, the silence: they are all a blitz on the senses that cannot be experienced anywhere else. For some people, this sparks a need to beat records made by great past explorers and adventurers; for others, to spend long periods at the bottom end of the world, away from families and friends, making scientific measurements to better understand our planet.
The Antarctic continues to offer scientific insights. Mawson’s work from one hundred years ago shows the Southern Ocean is warming at an ever-increasing rate; Filchner’s observations demonstrate that the glaciers on South Georgia have spectacularly retreated; and Scott’s collections are providing valuable insights into the changing biology and carbon cycle of the Antarctic. Some of these samples have even forced change in global regulations. Penguin skins collected during the torturous Cape Crozier trip by Wilson, Bowers and Cherry in 1911 showed beyond doubt that by the 1960s the pesticide DDT had even reached as pristine an environment as the Antarctic, leading to a worldwide ban.