Wilson had spent the days before departure carefully checking his equipment. He knew that his safety depended on little as well as big matters. He sewed on buttons with twine; he checked his skis, fur boots, burberries, headgear and hand gear; and everything on the sledges.32 He wrote to Oriana and he wrote in his diary:
Can anyone, I wonder, realise exactly what it is, leaving the ship and all one’s companions except two, for three months in this desolate region to walk down into a completely unknown south, where as far as one can see nothing awaits one but an icy desert and one literally carries one’s little all on a sledge.33
The men on this historic adventure were very different. Scott was a man used to responsibility. He was ambitious, purposeful, hard-working, temperamental and tended to impatience. Shackleton was also ambitious, but he was more impetuous: an adventurer, an excellent conversationalist, a good organiser and a very hard worker. Wilson’s personality was different. He remained without ambition for personal fame. He was taciturn, but determined, calm and discrete, supportive of the other two and enjoying their confidence. Roland Huntford in his comprehensive book, Scott and Amundsen, describes Wilson as ‘bitter’.34 Nothing could be further from the truth. Wilson was upheld and comforted by the conviction that he was doing God’s will; he was married to a woman who had his entire confidence and who supported him completely. Also he was involved in an activity that was more exactly suited to his interests and qualifications than any alternative could have been. No writing about, or from, Wilson justifies the epithet ‘bitter’. However Scott’s description of the three pulling the sledges is revealing:
It was my turn to drive to-day. Shackleton led and Wilson pulled at the side … Shackleton in front, with harness slung over his shoulder, was bent forward with his whole weight on the trace; in spite of his breathless work now and again he would raise and half turn his head in an effort to cheer on the team … Behind these, again, came myself with the whip, giving forth one long stream of threats and occasionally bringing down the lash on the snow or across the back of some laggard … On the opposite side of the leading sledge was Wilson, pulling away in grim silence.35
Like all explorers the three hoped to push at the frontiers of knowledge. Was Antarctica mostly an ice field or a massive continent? Was there land or water between them and the Pole, or did the ice sheet continue endlessly?
The first day suggested that dog pulling worked better than man-hauling and the three caught up with Barne’s support teams by the afternoon of 3 November. The group was scarcely making a mile per hour and slipping and slithering in their finesco on the hard snow (their boots were too cold to walk in). When they were given the skis their ‘efforts were absurd’.36 They could not budge the weights on the sledges as the surface was irregular and very slippery; no one had advised about the need for underside skins.37 Wilson and his two companions also continued on foot for the next few days. He often had to run to keep pace with the dogs and his legs and knee ached horribly. When he was able to use his skis again, with his single bamboo stick, the going was much easier. A few days into the journey Shackleton started the ‘most persistent and annoying cough’.38 This cough was to continue for days. On 7 November a blizzard kept them in their tent. They lay in their sleeping bags (separate reindeer bags on this expedition) reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, sewing, talking and sleeping, and so the day passed. Snow Petrels circled around, the dogs whined and barked. Shackleton coughed.
The whole group – Scott, Wilson and Shackleton and their support groups – progressed slowly southwards, passing and re-passing each other. After a week, the three men had covered fifty geographical miles and reached Bluff Depot, which Scott had provisioned in October. Here they replenished their sledges and waited for the support party which caught up on the night of 9 November. Shackleton’s cough was very troublesome.39 To help the man-hauling support party to keep up, Scott transferred some of their loads to the dog sleighs. The men found that even with this extra load the dogs pulled so well that Scott decided to alter his plans and go on without the support party. He reasoned that the dogs would still be able to pull as fast as the men, even with loads of over 2,000 lbs.40 David Yelverton, in his book Antarctica Unveiled, says that this decision would have a momentous effect on the party’s fortunes for two reasons: it removed the support that would have allowed Scott to grasp the vast scale of the land that lay south along the route to the Pole and it removed any possibility of Scott, Wilson and Shackleton discovering the pass onto the Antarctic glacier, ‘the gateway’, that, in a later expedition, won such fame for Shackleton.41 In any event the party of fifteen men could congratulate themselves that they were nearly at the seventy-ninth parallel, the ‘farthest south ever reached by man’. Before the support party turned back, Wilson examined them all and found that they were all well and free from any trace of scurvy.42 Photographs were taken, the sledge flags and the Union Jack flying bravely, and the support party turned homeward on 15 November. Now Scott, Wilson and Shackleton faced an empty white wilderness of more than 700 miles stretching to the Pole. Each footstep would be a new conquest of the great unknown. Scott sent his final instructions to Armitage at base saying that if he had not returned before a date when the ship could be frozen in, he should take the ship back to New Zealand, leaving a party at the hut to be picked up the following season. Wilson, brief as ever, said he was glad to have dropped the other parties ‘so we can now shove along as fast as we can’.43
They had hoped that they could continue their good progress with the dogs but their confidence began to diminish almost as soon as the support party disappeared.44 After only one day, on 16 November, the surface snow was so sticky and crystalline that the dogs could not pull and the men had to start relaying. This meant pulling part of a load for a certain distance, returning for the remainder and pulling that too, so covering three miles for each one advanced. They were to continue this back-breaking slog until the night of 15 December: twenty-nine days.45 Even when the load was divided and dogs and men strained at the traces, it was back-breaking work. On the first day they covered only two and a half miles southwards before their lunchtime break and five by the evening, having actually covered fifteen geographical miles.46 Geographical rather than statute miles were recorded, because it was easier to relate these measurements to degrees of latitude. There is a difference between the two measurements. Geographical miles are longer than statute miles; seven geographical miles are equal to just over eight statute miles.47 Two more days on, they had only added eleven miles to their total southward pull. Wilson prayed for a wind to sweep the surface crystals away, ‘The dogs are getting very tired and very slow’. Only five days after separating from the support team, Wilson’s early optimism had given way to mindless endurance, ‘I am afraid we shall disappoint the ship in their expectations of a far southern record’.48 The men tried to encourage the listless dogs by pulling in the traces with them, one in the front, the other at the side, the third using the whip ‘all too frequently’.49
At last, on 21 November, the men woke to sunshine and a cloudless sky that showed distant land in the south-west; new patches cropping up further and further in the distance. Scott and his companions changed their plans, deciding to travel south-south-west instead of due south, reach the land if possible and leave a depot containing much of the dog food, three weeks’ provisions for themselves and anything else ‘not absolutely necessary to our wants’.50 Lighter loads would make it possible for them to cover longer daily distances and they could pick up the depot on the return.51 Wilson thought that anything was more promising than the ‘slow and tedious plod to the south on an ice plain, simply to beat a southern record’. Also he would have something to sketch and maybe they would find something that would explain the extraordinary Great Ice Barrier.52
The snow surface improved and the sledges rode over it, but the men sank still deeper into it with every step they took. The dogs were totally weary and driving them had become ‘a perfectly b
eastly business’.53 They were clearly weakening and the men gradually came to the conclusion that this was as much to do with their food as to the conditions. This was Norwegian torsk (dried stockfish) and had been recommended by Nansen. Scott took the fish instead of the Spratt’s cod liver oil biscuits that he had originally planned to buy.54 Scott thought that the food had deteriorated as Discovery went through the tropics. There was nothing the men could do about this55 and they hoped that the effect was temporary. The only thing that they could do was to kill the dogs by rote, feeding one animal to another. Later, it was found that the food had rotted en route and was covered by a green fungus. The dogs were therefore getting pitifully little nutrition and no vitamins.
As they progressed new land kept on appearing south-west and south-south-west and they journeyed slowly towards it, sometimes helped by winds that allowed them to use sails on the sledges. There were long gaps between the land. They had no feeling that they had discovered anything approaching a continent. They thought that the landmasses ahead of them were islands.
At this stage the three were on full rations. They cooked three times a day. Breakfast was a mug full of fried bacon and pounded biscuit, washed down with two large cups of tea and a dry biscuit ‘or two’. For lunch, biscuits and two cups of hot Bovril chocolate with sugar and somatose. For supper they had two large cups of pemmican, a thick soup of meat, juice and fat, to which was added red ration (a peameal bacon powder mixture), crushed biscuit and powdered cheese, all boiled up in water with salt and pepper and a soup square. To follow this they had hot sweet cocoa boiled with plasma, a hydrolysed protein additive, and dried biscuit.56 Although hunger gnawed at them Wilson thought, wrongly, that they were actually eating enough. His knowledge of the calorie requirements for this type of exertion was, along with everyone else’s, completely inadequate. Mike Stroud, the Antarctic explorer, physician and an expert in stress nutrition, showed that over a sixty-eight day man-haul in 1993, he and Ranulph Fiennes burned well over 7,000 calories per day.57 Wilson, Scott and Shackleton were eating much less, a little over 4,000 calories per day. But even if they had eaten absolutely vast daily amounts, they could probably not have absorbed more than 7,000 calories. Absorption is limited by a metabolic ceiling.58
They tried different ways of marching. They marched by ‘night’ when the sun was lower and ate lunch in the evening and supper at 3a.m. They varied the relay routine, leaving one of the men to put the tent up and prepare the meal after the first relay whilst the other two went back to pick up the rest of the load.59 When Wilson was by himself he made supper and sketched. This gave him his first attack of snow-blindness,60 a problem that was to affect them all too frequently. He was also relieved to have a break from whipping the dogs. But although beating animals was against the grain for all of them, as for other explorers, Wilson always accepted this necessity though he called it ‘a perfectly beastly business’.61
On 25 November, steering by compass and dial, Wilson recorded that they had crossed the eightieth parallel.62 Scott wrote delightedly, ‘All our charts of the Antarctic Regions show a plain white circle beyond the eightieth parallel; the most imaginative cartographer has not dared to cross this limit and even the meridional lines end at this circle’.63 The next day they gave the dogs a day’s rest and as wind swirled around, they rested in their tent and Wilson occupied himself with the surprisingly domestic tasks of darning, mending, cooking and reading Darwin. Then they went on south-south-west towards the land, now only about fifty miles away. They aimed at a gap in the line of apparent islands. Wilson was re-enthused. He thought the snow-covered peaks, bold cliffs and headlands looked beautiful. He wrote that they were all fit and well though their appetites were immense, ‘how we enjoy the food’.64 They added slices of dried seal meat to their lunch to try and satisfy their huge appetites.65
They hoped and thought that they could still achieve something worthwhile. Their ability to keep going obviously depended greatly on their food supply. By 29 November they estimated that at four miles per night it would still take ten more nights of monotonous exhausting grind to reach the land. David Yelverton in Antarctic Unveiled explains that when the three left their support party they had food for eighty-four days. At this stage they had enough for a further eighteen days exploration southwards before they needed to turn back. With reduced rations they could extend this time by three days,66 suggesting the 20 December for beginning the retreat. With no relaying and ten miles per day they could possibly reach 84° S. This would be a significant achievement; they would be well into the area that, as Scott wrote, was blank on everyone’s map. They would be able to record whether land continued that far and if so, whether the land was continuous or split into islands.67 But fate did not favour them. On 2 December Scott, left to prepare the meal, managed to set the tent on fire; ‘luckily’, Wilson wrote, he ‘was able to grab the thing the moment the flame came through to the outside and put it out’.68 They were left with a head-sized hole, which Shackleton had to mend before the next blizzard. On 4 December, Wilson recorded that they had run through the first can of oil too soon.69 This was equivalent to being fifteen days short on the round trip and meant that they stopped heating their midday meal and ate frozen chunks of seal liver, sugar and biscuit instead. Since all the water had to be melted on the stove, their liquid intake would have been reduced. Dehydration is a significant problem with heavy exercise. Overbreathing loses fluid. Their basic fluid intake was already reduced so dehydration must have added significantly to their fatigue.
On 9 December the first dog died. Wilson opened him up and found signs of acute peritonitis. In spite of this the dog was fed to the others and their performance improved immediately. Within a few days they were feeding the eight or nine best dogs with dog flesh as well as fish. Wilson killed them by stabbing each one in the heart. He did not think the dogs had overt scurvy, but he did think that they could have suffered from ptomaine poisoning caused by their fish food.70 This did not stop him feeding the dogs with their dead companions.
Dog don’t eat dog certainly doesn’t hold down here, any more than does Ruskin’s aphorism in Modern Painters that ‘A fool always wants to shorten space and time; a wise man wants to lengthen both’. We must look awful fools at that rate for our one desire is to shorten the space between the land and us. Perhaps Ruskin would agree that we are awful fools to be here at all though I think if he saw these new mountain ranges he might think perhaps it was worth it.71
Progress towards the land continued to be appallingly difficult. On 12 December, relaying, they made three miles. Wilson wrote, ‘Some day we hope to get there and drop some of our load, making a depot that we can pick up on the way home. Then we push south, I hope at a faster rate with lighter loads.’72 Shackleton too wrote that they must plant the depot soon, because they could not continue much longer. But Wilson’s courage did not desert him even though it took them thirteen, rather than ten, days to reach the final depot position and yet another trying to get onto the land over the chaos of ice ridges, crevasses and valleys. But, he thought, it was ‘a wonderful sight’.73
If the dogs were ravenous, so were they. Food was an obsession. They never got into their bags without feeling that they could have managed at least two more suppers. They dreamt of food constantly and ‘food-dreams’ became a regular breakfast conversation. They were either sitting at a table with their arms tied, or grasping at a dish as it slipped out of their hands.74 Sirloins of beef and cauldrons of steaming vegetables also swirled through their dreams. Wilson dreamt that he was shouting unsuccessfully to get a waiter’s attention and that the beef turned to ashes when served up, that a pot of honey that had been poured turned into sawdust. He longed for fresh milk and a big cake.75 Such was the obsession with every last morsel that when they divided everything into three portions, although the man who made the divisions felt obliged to take the smallest share, arguments and disagreements followed. Shackleton solved this problem with ‘the noble game of shut-eye�
�. He got one of them to turn his head away when the food was divided and this man decided who would eat which portion.76 Murderous feelings subsided. It is now known that there are hormones that are important in the control of appetite,77 but the relationship of hormones to hunger dreams is not clear.
Having finally secured the depot (Depot B) on land they pressed on to the south on the night of 15 December. At last, after twenty-nine days, they found that they could advance without relaying, an inexpressible relief, but the conditions remained bad. Wilson recorded good and bad in his diary. That day, the sight of a beautiful double rainbow around the sun, and a good supper, lifted his spirits; but he had to kill another dog. Their only hot meal was supper; their midday meal was a hurried, cold snack. By now they were in a significant negative food-to-energy balance. As their fat reserves burnt up, they would also be losing the muscles essential for strength and stamina. Wilson suffered from pains in his feet, sunburn, chapped skin, cracked, sore, ulcerated lips, skin ulcers, diarrhoea, broken teeth, frostbite and eyes that felt as if they were full of hot sand in spite of cocaine eye drops. He often marched blindfolded because of snow-blindness. He wore leather goggles with slits cut in to see through, or glass and wire goggles with slit leather patches on each side of the glass (plain glass goggles frosted over).78 Wilson’s goggles were bound with velvet and were probably not strong enough to prevent snow-blindness, but they must often have allowed insufficient vision for his artist’s eye and he undoubtedly made the situation worse by taking them off to sketch. Scott wrote that Wilson would sit outside the tent and sketch for a few hours after an exhausting day and was intrigued as to how accurate the sketches were. When he tested them with actual angular measurements he found that they were astonishingly precise.79
With Scott in the Antarctic Page 15