With Scott in the Antarctic

by Isobel E Williams

  As Discovery sailed round Cape Crozier en route for the Barrier, Wilson wrote that the shoulders of Mount Terror towered above them; the rock showing through the snow was blood red, he thought due to iron oxides.16 He was keen to see the Barrier at close quarters. It had been well described by Ross and part of Discovery’s brief was to investigate it. The Barrier, later renamed the Ross Barrier, blocks the south side of the Ross Sea like a flat shelf of ice hinged onto the coast. Its undulating surface is intermittently thrown into disarray by high pressure ridges and crevasses. When he saw it at close quarters, Wilson was disappointed; it was ‘not stupendous in any way’ but ‘an endless low cliff of ice, all white, varying from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet’.17 Skelton thought that previous observers had exaggerated the sight, though he did wonder if the Discovery crew found the Barrier less awesome than expected because it was so much smaller than the enormous mountain ranges they had sailed past.18 Discovery progressed along the Barrier, never more than a mile away from it, taking soundings every four hours,19 and dredging beautiful collections of starfish, sea urchins and other treasures. Wilson saw everything with an artist’s eye. He and Scott complimented each other. Scott, a natural writer, described all their experiences expressively and Wilson drew everything evocatively: caves, fissures, bergs, inlets, and wind-blown snowdrifts.

  By late January 1902 Discovery had reached Ross’s furthest position. From here he had reported possible land in the south-east. The Discovery crew, searching ‘from below and aloft’ were unable to see any land and Scott wondered if Ross’s report could have been biased by the strange optical illusions so common in Antarctica.20 He was keen to get to the eastern end of the Barrier and wrote that Discovery was making rapid progress, so much so that not only the engineers but also the engines were eager to see what lay ahead.21 But as they passed Ross’s record they began to see upturned bergs with earth and rock embedded in them. This must mean land. Fog stopped further observations until late on 30 January when they saw ice sheets of more that 100 feet in height. Wilson wrote that these were obviously supported by land and that evidence of land under the ice was becoming increasingly obvious.22 But no actual bare rock was seen until, as the bell rang for the evening meal, ‘real live rock’ was spied high up. This confirmed land and was the first Antarctic discovery of the twentieth century. The land was named King Edward’s Land, after the monarch who had given them ‘Godspeed’.23 Then Discovery turned back for McMurdo Bay. Ice was forming rapidly; they needed to get back to the western bases before they closed off. From their base on McMurdo, sledging parties would set out to explore the continent.

  On her return along the Barrier, Discovery anchored in one of the inlets. A magnetic party went south. Weddell seals were killed for food and skiing was attempted. Scott did not think it was as good a sport as he had expected. The wind had raised irregular waves in the snow, called sastrugi, and predictably everyone fell and fell again. On 4 February the two observation balloons that had been transported all the way from London were finally landed. The idea behind this (some thought foolhardy) ascent, was to get a panoramic view of the southern parts of the Barrier, an idea suggested by Sir Joseph Hooker (1817–1911) the eminent botanist, doctor and traveller. The balloons only had baskets big enough for one passenger and when the first had been filled with hydrogen Scott, knowing ‘nothing whatever about the business’ as Wilson wrote,24 made the first ascent. He rose to 800 feet. He saw the Barrier surface far to the south and could pick out Armitage’s sledge party returning to the ship some eight miles distant. Shackleton made the second ascent and took photographs. Wilson refused an offer to take part. He said it was an exceedingly dangerous amusement in the hands of inexperienced novices. He said that ‘the one man who had had instruction did not go up and if some of these experts don’t come to grief over it out here, it will only be because God has pity on the foolish’.25 The attempt was not repeated. Whilst the sledging party were away Scott, conscious of the dangers of scurvy, ordered the ‘murderous’ killing of yet more seals. By now the team were relatively quick at killing and skinning, but hauling the carcasses back to the ship remained tremendously tiring.26 Wilson got sick of skinning, an endless job.

  On 8 February Discovery, her rigging crusted with ice, re-entered McMurdo Bay and anchored in her winter home. Arrival Bay was a sheltered harbour, safe from ice pressure and with a good shoreline. Wilson wrote that they were protected from the south-east winds by hills. He could see Erebus puffing smoke and Mount Terror, and a mountain range that caught and reflected the pink glow of the sun with its wonderful violets night and morning.27 The crew named their new base ‘Hut Point’. It was to be their base for the next two years. From the base they were to do magnetic surveys, collect botanical and geological specimens and make sledging expeditions. These sledging expeditions included a 960-mile round trip towards the South Pole of which Wilson was one of the three members. In addition he was to create his principle artistic legacy. He painted and sketched tirelessly to create a record of Antarctica, its animals and birds.

  After Discovery anchored, the shore huts and the kennels were erected quickly and stocked with provisions. This was to ensure that any land party was self-sufficient; it was all too possible that sections of ice could break away carrying Discovery with it, or that the ship could be damaged or even sunk by icebergs or shifts in the pack ice. Now the crew faced their first Antarctic winter together. More than forty men, with no communication with the outside world, on a continent bigger than all of China and India. Discipline remained strict. Wilson wrote in his diary that the cook was put in irons for insubordination and there was a lively scene on deck as he fought and was very obstreperous, but that having been left outside during the day, ‘Brett came to his senses when he thought of being out of his bunk and in the cold for the night too’.28 Wilson’s early days ashore were spent in local exploration, testing sledges, skis and crampons and gaining experience with the dogs. Scott had received somewhat conflicting advice about dogs and only three of the officers had had any useful previous experience. Scott’s polar model was the famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) who had made expeditions with and without dogs, but who was uncertain whether dogs or skis would suit Antarctic conditions and who thought that a combination of dogs and horses might be best on the Ross Barrier.29 None of the party had trained full-time with the dog teams, as is now known to be important. Only Armitage, Koettlitz and Bernacchi had used sledging equipment before and when Armitage and Bernacchi tried the dogs they could not control them. Wilson, with the others, had to learn sledge craft. He steeled himself to whip the dogs to get them going. He would also have to steel himself to kill them. He read, walked, climbed and tried to ski, a purposeless activity he thought.

  To the physical dangers of the Antarctic must be added the discomfort of lying in a cramped three-man sleeping bag. Wilson soon experienced all these problems and described the privations, discomforts and dangers of exploration vividly. He was part of the first exploratory sledge journey ever made on the Antarctic. His trip was only for four days, but this was enough to highlight the men’s inexperience. No dogs were taken. Wilson with Shackleton and Ferrar were instructed go to White Island, one of the rock-topped islands on the Barrier south of Hut Point, to find out what lay beyond the island. The three men set off pulling their sledge, decorated with the sledging flag designed by Sir Clements, and displaying the Cross of St George prominently to show that each man was first and foremost an Englishman.30 They set out on 19 February. As they knew nothing about the terrain they took a skiff, in case they had to cross water. They expected to get to the island by nightfall but, ‘Man proposes and God does the rest’.31 They discovered the mirage effects, so problematic in Antarctica. The island never seemed to get closer. Clouds and snow seemed to merge on the horizon making it difficult to make out landmarks and impossible to judge distances; ten miles could look like a mile. During this short expedition the trio pulled at a mile per hour for
twelve hours in snowdrift. They learnt how blizzards could reduce visibility to a few feet. They all got frostbitten. Shackleton’s cheeks and ears were white, Ferrar’s nose also. Wilson’s toes hurt excruciatingly.32 When frostbite happens it is important to try and restore the circulation and Wilson rubbed Shackleton’s ear so hard with gritty snow that he peeled off all the skin and so learnt the benefits of gentle massage.33 The three found that their boots and socks froze together because the sweat from their feet had lined the boots with ice. Only when they camped and pulled on their long fur boots, did their feet begin to thaw. They cooked supper (cocoa, pemmican,34 biscuits, butter and jam) and then began to get into their furs, an exhausting business. He wrote that the furs were simply awful; they got frozen stiff like boards.35 He was troubled by thigh cramps which attacked him whenever he moved and when they got into the furs, ‘the other two were bricks to me … They dressed me first and having dressed me, they put me on the floor and sat on me while they dressed each other. At last we were all in our wolf skins and pimmies and settled off to sleep huddled together to keep warm. We lay on our Jaeger blouses, but the cold of the ice floor crept through and the points of contact got pretty chilly’.36 All three slept in one big bag. Wilson said he longed to turn over but could not, because he would have upset the others. So he laid still, drops of rime dripping on his face and with his nose being tickled by the reindeer skin hairs of his sleeping bag.37

  They would probably not have been aware of just how much the cold affected them. Apart from its direct effect on their body temperature the cold would have affected their movements. Our normal body temperature is 37°C, (or 98’6°F as Wilson would have recorded it), but as the central (core) temperature drops, so our ability to co-ordinate diminishes. At 36°C, our grip strength diminishes and it becomes difficult to put thumb and fingers together or even move the fingers normally. In their little tent even routine tasks would have become a challenge and they would have become slower as they dressed, packed up their equipment, or just moved about the tent. The effort of erecting the tent or getting the cooker to work would have become increasingly difficult. Wilson would not have known the reasons behind this, but he must have been aware that they fumbled slowly with accustomed tasks.

  They knew the importance of layering. To combat daytime temperature they wore Burberry tops and trousers, woollen balaclavas plus windproof coverings and mufflers on their head and neck. Under the Burberries were thick, double-knit woollen vests, woollen shirts and woollen sweaters. On their lower halves they wore thick ‘long-johns’, two pairs of trousers, three or four pairs of socks and reindeer-skin fur ‘finesco’ – which became stiff and immobile in the cold and were topped by puttees to keep out the snow – or boots. Gloves were half mitts, which never came off; removable mitts, which covered the thumbs and fingers; and a third pair of fur mitts, hung around the neck. Wilson also wore a knitted cummerbund reaching from his chest to his hips, anchored by shoulder straps. At night they took their wind suits off and changed their socks for sleeping-socks. Wilson, like everyone else, discovered that perspiration froze quickly and his outer clothes trapped the sweat so that he walked in a sort of armour, rigid and difficult to move in. Nothing could be dried except the socks, which had to be changed night and morning to prevent frozen feet.38 When the day boots were taken off they had to be shaped so that the men could squeeze into them the next morning.

  Late on 20 February, they reached the summit of White Island at 2,700 feet. Here they could look over the goal of their future explorations. They saw a wonderful sight: as far as the eye could see was a level ice plain, the true Great Barrier surface, with a range of high snow-capped mountains, the sun setting behind them, to the west. Shackleton took bearings and angles, Wilson sketched. Then they picnicked on hot cocoa and bacon. They could feel justifiably proud of their achievement. This first exploration was successful in that it established that there was a safe route to get onto the Barrier and then south. This, they thought, would be an ideal first provision depot on the Barrier. The expedition also demonstrated graphically the problems of exploration and the need to get really familiar with their equipment.

  At base-camp in the last days of the Antarctic summer, the men began to improve their sledging and skiing techniques. Scott had also received conflicting advice about skiing and most of the officers and men had no experience whatsoever before their early attempts on the expedition. Scott’s personal experience of snow was that of throwing snowballs at his sisters in Devon.39 When Nansen advised him on skis, neither he nor the ski-makers advised on ski-skins, which would have helped the skis to grip on an ascending gradient.40 The skis that the expedition used were wooden ones; seven feet long and weighing about 20 lbs a pair. Ranulph Fiennes says that Scott sensibly decided to assess skis by trial and error using realistic sledge loads and knowing that the extra weight on the sledges was 100 lbs for five men.41 Scott was very conscious of the ratio of the weight to be pulled versus the pulling power. Skelton later complained of ‘articles being weighed to a hundredth of a pound, instructions being given not to beeswax the thread or to go easy with the brass eyelets on account of the extra weight’.42 Skelton thought Scott was right to be careful but thought that he was fussy and he could not understand why Scott listened to Shackleton so much because Shackleton was just an ordinary ‘gas-bag’.43 Wilson does not comment on this but he would have been aware of the weight implications. By dint of experience the teams found the benefits of skis: crossing crevasses was safer and skis distributed the men’s weight more evenly on soft ground, stopping them sinking deeply into the snow. Scott arranged for the men to practise skiing and Chief Steward C.R. Ford broke his leg when he was several miles from the ship. Wilson and Koettlitz went to get him. They splinted the leg and then brought him back to the ship and set it. Skelton commented acerbically, ‘Of course he is a very clumsy sort of person. I don’t think anybody else would have succeeded in breaking a leg’.44 But Ford was conscious of Wilson’s sympathetic qualities as a doctor, ‘the way he nursed and washed me and fed me when I was ill will never be forgotten’.45

  On 4 March 1902, a party of twelve set out for Cape Crozier, the Cape at the entrance to McMurdo Bay. They were to update the information left in the canisters for the relief ship and to deposit new mail. This expedition proved how right Scott was when he worried about the crew’s inexperience to cope with Antarctic conditions. He wrote later that the sledges had been badly packed and that their knowledge was inadequate about the food, how to set up the tents, how to use the cookers or even how to put on their clothes.46 Wilson was not on this expedition though he took part in the eventual search party and looked after the injured. He wrote that the party took two twelve-foot and two eight-foot sledges, commenting that these would have to be hauled up snow slopes of 500 feet and then carried across a rocky plateau and then down to the sea ice.47 Lieutenant Royds was leader. After four days he decided to plit the group when conditions became atrocious. Himself, Koettlitz and Skelton went on. Nine men were sent back to base under Lieutenant Barne’s inexperienced leadership. When this group became caught in a blizzard, Barne decided to try to make a break for the ship. Two men in the party, Steward Clarence Hare (who had joined in NewZealand) and Able Seaman George Vince, had fur finesco rather than boots on their feet. None of the party had crampons. As they slithered and slipped on the icy surface Hare and Vince got lost. Vince shot down a slope and disappeared forever. Hare, ‘a thin youth of eighteen’, also disappeared, it was feared, permanently. His arrival back at the ship after forty-eight hours, with no signs of frostbite or any other problem was a great relief. Scott ‘looked as if he thought that the dead were really walking in’.48 Hare had been unconscious for thirty-six hours. His last memory was of going towards a patch of rocks, which he hoped would provide some shelter, wearing his heavy woollen blouse and gabardine outer clothes over warm underclothes. Perhaps he survived the sub-zero temperatures because he managed to position himself in the lee of a rock, pulling
his arms inside his blouse and covering the opening in his hood, so saving his hands and face from freezing.49 He must have been covered with enough snow to give insulation and warmth but allowing sufficient air for breathing, a sort of primitive snow hole and a technique since developed for survival in extreme conditions. At base, Hare had no signs of frostbite but was found to be hypothermic. Wilson, ‘deciding to run no risks, put him in blankets in the magnetic observatory at an initial environmental temperature of 17°F, higher than the temperature recorded on the ship which was 0°F, and warmed him slowly to 34°F, when he moved Hare to the sickbay. Hare had no long-term effects.50 Wilson looked after the other survivors too. A seaman had an ear the size of a cricket ball. One man’s fingers were so bad – enormous blebs full of fluid with the ends of the fingers like dark purple grapes – that Wilson thought they would drop off. But the ulcers gradually healed and the nails grew back, though the skin always remained ultra-sensitive.