To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  At the time, many geographers and glaciologists agreed with Borchgrevink that the Great Ice Barrier fronted an ice shelf that might extend to the pole. If it did, Scott reasoned, then while other expedition members were engaged in scientific work at or around the expedition’s Ross Island base, a small, fast-moving sledge party conceivably could cover the 1,700-odd miles to the pole and back in the three months available during the brief Antarctic summer. At least the party could set a new farthest-south record. “It must consist of either two or three men in all and every dog we possess,” Scott reportedly said about the southern party. “Our object is to get as far south in a straight line on the Barrier ice as we can, reach the Pole if possible, or find some new land, anyhow do all we can in the time and get back to the ship by the end of January.”32 The expedition’s physician, Edward Wilson, joined Scott and Shackleton on the trek.

  After wintering over at Ross Island, the southern party left its base on November 2, 1902, with five sledges, nineteen sled dogs, and nearly a ton of supplies, food, and instruments. Eleven days and 70 miles later, the men surpassed Borchgrevink’s old farthest south.

  “The announcement of that fact caused great jubilation,” Scott noted in his diary.33 Two days later he added, “We are already beyond the utmost limit to which man has attained: each footstep will be a fresh conquest of the great unknown. Confident in ourselves, confident in our equipment, and confident in our dog team, we can but feel elated with the prospect before us.”34

  Having virtually no experience on skis, driving sled dogs, or crossing an ice shelf, Scott should have felt less confident. Almost immediately, the dogs began to fail because of poor handling and tainted food. As they failed, Wilson butchered them one by one and fed them to the other dogs. None survived, leaving the three men to do the hauling. Having packed light for quick travel, they ran so low on food that they could think of little else. “Conversation runs constantly on food. We are all so hungry,” Wilson noted while yet on the outbound journey.35

  It grew much worse. Scurvy stalked them by the end, especially Shackleton. Wilson suffered extreme snow blindness as well. “I never had such pain in the eye before,” he noted in his diary for the day after Christmas. “It was all I could do to lie still in my sleeping bag, dropping in cocaine from time to time.”36

  The party’s route traced the Ross Ice Shelf’s western edge, where it abutted the southern Victoria Land shore. No one had seen this coastline before. With magnificent mountains, inlets, and capes, it resembled the seacoast farther north, but glacial ice covered the sea, and the sea life had vanished. “We are now about ten miles from the land,” Scott noted on December 19. “The lower country which we see strongly resembles the coastal land far to the north; it is a fine scene of a lofty snow-cap, whose smooth rounded outline is broken by the sharper bared peaks, or by the steep disturbing fall of some valley.”37 Glaciers had shaped the terrain into an awe-inspiring wonderland, and unlike most other places this was still a work in progress. An artist of considerable skill, Wilson captured the scene in sketches and paintings that, when later displayed, further fed popular interest in the poles.

  Scott could not tell where the ice shelf ended in the south or how far the mountains extended, because, due to insufficient food, the loss of the dogs, and the sickness of all three men, his party advanced only about 300 miles south, or roughly two-fifths of the way from their base to the pole. The men reached their limit on the last day of 1902. “Observations give it as between 82.16 S. and 82.17 S.,” Scott noted. “Whilst one cannot help a sense of disappointment in reflecting on the ‘might have been’ had our team remained in good health, one cannot but remember that even as it is we have made a greater advance toward a pole of the earth than has ever yet been achieved by a sledge party.”38 Then it was a race back on dwindling rations. First Shackleton collapsed with scurvy and either had to walk alongside the sledge or be carried on it, depending on who was telling the story. Then Wilson and Scott fell ill as well but managed to remain in harness pulling the sledge. By this time, all the dogs had perished, and the men suspected that much of their remaining food was tainted. It was touch and go by the end, with the party struggling back to their base on February 3, 1903, after some there had given them up for dead.

  A gifted writer and storyteller, Scott made the most of this harrowing trek upon his return to Britain, where perseverance could matter more than success. “If we had not achieved such great results as at one time we had hoped for, we knew at least that we had striven and endured with all our might,” he wrote in his account of the southern sledge journey.39 A similar line punctuated his public lectures. These speeches and his popular book, The Voyage of the “Discovery,” described the expedition’s other exploits as well, but Scott found the public desirous of records most of all. The polar trek supplied them in the context of an Edwardian tale of resolve in the face of adversity. The Times of London hailed it as the expedition’s “most notable achievement.”40 Telling it in detail took up two long chapters of Scott’s twenty-chapter book. Due to the weakness of his “constitution,” as Scott termed it, Shackleton shouldered a disproportionate part of the blame for the party’s failure.41 “Our invalid,” Scott called him in The Voyage of the “Discovery,” and claimed, regarding Wilson and himself, “we carried him” on the sledge for part of the way back—a claim that Shackleton vehemently denied and that Wilson never affirmed.42 No matter what the truth of Scott’s charge, Shackleton’s troubles on the trek served as an early warning of the heart problems that would later kill him.

  Shackleton never forgot the slight and complained bitterly when Scott sent him home on the relief ship after one year while the expedition remained south for two. Returning to Britain before the others, however, allowed Shackleton to take the spotlight alone for a season and begin planning how he could return south to try for the pole with an expedition of his own. It took five years of effort, but the 1907–09 British Antarctic Expedition to the Ross Sea on the Nimrod, with Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson along from Australia, would elevate Shackleton to the first rank of polar explorers.

  DAVID HAD FOLLOWED NEWS of the Discovery Expedition and eagerly read Scott’s description of Victoria Land’s glaciated Western Mountains. Although best known in Australia for fieldwork that had uncovered the South Maitland coalfields, which established the coal industry in New South Wales and brought incalculable wealth to the state, David’s principal interest in geology was glaciation. As a young geologist in Britain, before immigrating to Australia in 1882 for a position with the New South Wales Geological Survey, he had used the location of erratic boulders, supposedly moved by ice floes from their place of origin, to study the extent and impact of the last ice age on the landscape of his native Wales. Once in Australia, in between his duties for the Geological Survey, David found evidence of an earlier ice age having molded a now virtually ice-free land. He extended this research after joining the University of Sydney’s faculty in 1891. Soon his favorite haunt in New South Wales became the Snowy Mountains, the only place on the Australian mainland with anything like an alpine character. He frequently took his students there for field trips. One of those students, Douglas Mawson, learned to love it as well.

  As the only continent still experiencing an ice age, Antarctica held a special interest for David. He volunteered to examine Antarctic rock specimens brought back by Borchgrevink in 1895, finding them similar to Australian ones. The continents were related, David surmised, except one was still ice covered. This further fed his curiosity about Antarctica, which was apparent in a letter that he sent to Scott prior to the Discovery’s departure from Britain, expressing support for the effort and interest in its geological work.

  At that time, David thought that the University of Melbourne’s new geology professor, John Walter Gregory, would serve as the Discovery Expedition’s shore leader and chief science officer. This would have put the focus squarely on glacial geology because, while doing postgraduate work for Britain’s N
atural History Museum, Gregory participated in the first-ever crossing of Spitzbergen, where he studied the effects of glaciation on the terrain. He then topped this by leading an early scientific expedition to East Africa’s Great Rift Valley—he gave it that name, and its major eastern branch is named for him—and the glaciated equatorial Mount Kenya—his expedition was the first to reach its glaciers, one of which is also named for him. In addition, Gregory had surveyed glaciated peaks in the Alps and Rockies. He knew the power of ice on rock firsthand, viewed Australia and Antarctica as kindred continents, and had a gift for writing popular books about his scientific findings.

  By 1900, when many geographers still thought that the south polar region might consist of a large ice cap grounded on an archipelago of islands, Gregory wrote in his prospectus for the Discovery Expedition’s science program, “There is little doubt that Antarctica is geologically a continent, consisting of a western plateau, composed of Achaean and sedimentary rocks like those of Australia, and of an eastern volcanic chain.” Further tying the expedition’s geologic work to Australian interests, Gregory proposed investigating whether Victoria Land’s Western Mountains represented a southern extension of the mountains that ran along the Pacific Ocean’s western rim, and whether they linked across the interior to the mountains of the Antarctic Peninsula, which he saw as an extension of the Andean range. “In that case,” he wrote, “the great tectonic lines which bound the Pacific to the east and west are connected across the Antarctic area; and if that can be proved the unity of the great Pacific depression will be completely established.”43

  With this and his other research aims, Gregory offered a scientific program worthy of a great national expedition and one that could have shed new light on Australian geology. Scott, however, saw Gregory as a threat to his control of the expedition, which he would retain as the ship’s captain only so long as the men were based on the ship. When the Royal Geographical Society took Scott’s side by authorizing the Discovery to winter in the Antarctic with the men based on board, Gregory stepped aside, along with much of the scientific staff. The controversy became the talk of Britain’s science community. Established researchers were reluctant to take Gregory’s place. (Gregory went on to become a chair at the University of Glasgow and embarked on a succession of other expeditions. These would take him to the remotest reaches of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and ultimately to his death, in 1932 at the age of sixty-eight, when the canoe that was carrying him to a volcanically active region of the Andes overturned in rapids on the largely uncharted Urubamba River in the Peruvian jungle.)

  To fill the Discovery Expedition’s geologist position, Scott eventually settled on twenty-two-year-old Hartley Ferrar, who had graduated with second honors in natural science from the University of Cambridge only one month earlier. It was neither an inspired nor an inspiring choice. By all accounts, Ferrar had spent more time playing sports at college than studying science. Early on, Scott privately dismissed him as a “conceited young ass.”44 Ferrar knew little about glacial geology and was not a quick study. After two largely wasted years, Ferrar salvaged something of his part in the expedition by doing some credible geologic mapping of the Western Mountains in the final summer along with bringing back a representative collection of rock specimens. Still, much remained for a glacial geologist to do in the region. When word of Shackleton’s plans reached Australia, David immediately began lobbying to go along.

  For his part, in addition to multiple treks into the Australian bush, by 1900 David had notched a notable overseas expedition of his own to Funafuti, a then little-known coral atoll in the South Pacific some 2,500 miles northeast of Sydney. A circular strip of land rarely more than 1,000 feet wide and barely a few feet high surrounding a lagoon roughly 10 miles across, Funafuti offered a classic site at which to test Charles Darwin’s 1842 geological theory that atolls were formed by the subsidence of coral-ringed volcanic islands. As the volcano sank below the sea, Darwin reasoned, living coral built upon the remains of older coral to sustain a ring of land above the water. Of course, like Darwin’s unrelated theory of evolution by natural selection, the process required vast amounts of time. After gaining favor over other scientific explanations for coral atolls, by the 1880s, Darwin’s subsidence theory began meeting resistance from creationists opposed to all things Darwinian. This led his supporters within the Royal Society to propose proving Darwin’s theory by drilling into a coral atoll to its supposed volcanic base. They turned to the growing Australian scientific community for help. David threw his weight behind the project.

  At first for David this simply meant soliciting funds from New South Wales for an expedition mainly organized and supported from Britain. When the first attempt failed at 100 feet due to faulty drilling methods, David signed on to lead a second effort in 1897. His expertise as a geologist coupled with his experience drilling shafts for the New South Wales Geological Survey made him a perfect candidate to finish the job.

  Though unmentioned at the time, David also welcomed the chance to defend science and the scientific method from religiously motivated critics. The son of a Welsh minister and a direct descendant of James Ussher, the seventeenth-century Anglican bishop best known for calculating the date of creation from the timeline provided in Genesis, David had a religious upbringing. Then, in what his authoritative biographer depicted as “a real crisis of faith” while a science student at Oxford, he rejected biblical Christianity in favor of a spiritual sense of a guiding providence.45 With the Funafuti drilling project, he could lend support to scientific progress over religious traditionalism while leading a potentially significant and exciting expedition. “It was the duty of every man,” David said in a public lecture given before his Funafuti venture, “to pursue truth, and if religion were not true man should modify it, or hold himself open to some fresh inspiration to lead him to a higher idea of what was called truth.”46 At least until Antarctica came along a decade later, Funafuti offered the opportunity of a lifetime to the forty-year-old David.

  Once on the island, David threw himself into the drilling project, displaying the same traits that would mark his time on Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition: dogged perseverance, boundless enthusiasm, and a ready willingness to do more than his fair share of even the most menial tasks. He would persist at drilling until long after dark and begin again well before dawn. “Twed would eat ship biscuit if I were not here, and would eat that standing over his drill,” his adventuresome wife, Cara, noted in her travel diary, using an acronym for David made from his four initials.47 By jury-rigging the equipment as he went, David managed to drill down over 500 feet by the time he had to depart, with the core still showing coral. While this did not strictly prove Darwin’s subsidence theory, it disproved every alternative hypothesis and won David election to the British Empire’s premier scientific association, the Royal Society.

  After returning from Funafuti, David resumed his work in glacial geology, leading to a breakthrough that cinched his place on the Nimrod Expedition. Building on the work of University of Adelaide geologist Walter Howchin, he developed and publicized evidence from South Australia of a third global ice age that had occurred eons before the two previously known ones. Howchin placed it in the Cambrian era; David thought it was Precambrian. In either case, it rocked the geological world and led to an invitation to speak at the World Geological Congress held at Mexico City in 1906—the first Australian so honored.

  Stopping first in India to view glacial deposits of the second ice age and then in England to speak at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, David arrived in Mexico for the congress near the end of a five-month journey around the world. There, he gave the keynote address on “Climate Changes in Geological Change.” The trip secured David’s standing as one of the world’s foremost glacial geologists. This international recognition added luster to his well-established local reputation as a trusted and well-connected geological surveyor, scientist, and teacher. In 1907, w
hen David asked to travel south on the Nimrod, the cash-strapped and status-hungry Shackleton could scarcely refuse. Indeed, he eagerly agreed.

  While Shackleton cared little about science, he knew that donors and the British exploring establishment did. And when David secured a £5,000 grant for the expedition from the Australian government, on top of wresting donations from local philanthropists and the University of Sydney, Shackleton also agreed to David’s request that Mawson go along too. “Shackleton himself would never have got this [financial] help,” Mawson wrote about the grant; “it was David’s appeal that secured it.”48 David could “charm a bird off a bough,” Shackleton noted.49 Birds of a feather in this respect, Shackleton and David took an immediate liking to each another.

  ONLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD in 1907, Douglas Mawson was already fast on his way to becoming David’s most accomplished student. Like David, who was then twice his age, Mawson was born in Britain, but unlike his mentor, who was educated there and always retained the willowy appearance and polite formality of a Victorian squire, Mawson was reared in New South Wales from the age of two and had the brawny look and breezy manner of a twentieth-century Australian. Both were tough, but only the tall, ruggedly handsome Mawson outwardly showed it. After hearing that David would go south with Shackleton but before learning that he could go too, Mawson, a hearty eater, was probably only half joking when he wrote to his semivegetarian former professor urging him to practice “swallowing and retaining blubber.” Instead, more in line with his character, David had headed off to the Snowy Mountains to learn how to cross-country ski and build igloos. Perhaps recalling his earlier treks with David, Mawson concluded his letter, “Above all, may I be permitted to ask you to be careful in matters pertaining to your personal safety, which you always place in such light regard.”50 Mawson would learn firsthand the futility of giving such advice to David.