Scott reaches the South Pole … and turns desperately for home
17 January 2012
On this day a hundred years ago, Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson, ‘Birdie’ Bowers, Edgar Evans and Captain Lawrence Oates arrived second at the South Pole. Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition had reached it 34 days earlier. Scott wrote in his diary: The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected… Great God! this is an awful place …
This is how an Australian federal parliamentarian remembered this day two decades afterwards: In 1912, that great British explorer, Scott, found his way to the South Pole, being the first to reach it, with the exception of Amundsen, who just forestalled him after secretly organizing an expedition for the purpose. ‘Exception’, ‘forestalled’, ‘secret’: that sense of injustice lingered long in the British world and, with these words, Amundsen was often written out of history.
Even on arrival at the Pole, Scott knew it would be ‘a desperate struggle’ to get home: I wonder if we can do it. They perished on that return journey, three of their bodies found the following spring in a tent eleven miles short of One Ton Depot. They died because of bad planning, because the oil evaporated, the stores were unfairly apportioned, they were starved of vitamins, their strongest man (Evans) weakened, the weather was bad, the temperatures lower than expected, the blizzard enclosed them. And they died because they lost the race. And it was not even supposed to be a race. The awful bitterness of defeat, the sight of that Norwegian flag stark against the snow, a portent they could not deny; these were devastating emotional blows. If they’d been first, would they have got home? This was Amundsen’s private burden. Triumph may have made up for the vitamins. So on this day, with bitter disappointment in their hearts, the British team’s spirit began fatally to ebb away.
Two days ago I wondered what clever twists of commemorative experience Antarctica might still have in store for us. When the leader of the AAE returned from his sledging journey and staggered into Main Base in February 1913 he saw his ship, the Aurora, steaming over the horizon and was forced to spend an unexpected year at Commonwealth Bay. Yesterday when the leader of the AAD returned from his field excursion to the Main Base he saw his helicopter disappearing into the gathering mist and was forced to spend an unexpected night at Commonwealth Bay. After our ceremony in bright sunshine, the weather window quickly closed and the final return flight to the ship had to be suspended. I am sure that Tony Fleming was more reconciled than Mawson was to the prolongation of his stay.
That unexpected Australian year in Antarctica – 1913 – is like a flaw in the mirror, a fissure in the ice, a year that reveals Australian dreams and nightmares about Antarctica. Mawson, an Australian icon in the making, was emaciated and broken as he faced another unexpected year of isolation, angst and reflection. He must have been haunted by questions about the loss of his companions … had Ninnis broken through the lid of the crevasse because he was on foot and not on the sledge? … could Mertz the ski champion have skied home himself? … why had they loaded most of the food on just one of the sledges? And Mawson found himself living with a madman, for the new radio operator, Sidney Jeffryes, gradually slipped into paranoia and delusion. The empty bunks of Ninnis and Mertz seemed accusing, Bickerton (one of the remaining two residents of Hyde Park Corner) sobbed under his blanket at night, and all the men now knew that the katabatics were the winds of Scott’s death. There in that hut at the bottom of the world was a marooned microcosm of Australian society, of transplanted ‘independent Australian Britons’ launching another colonisation. They turned to their science with both devotion and desperation.
This morning, with the exhilaration of the visit to Cape Denison still running in our veins, we were suddenly summoned to the next phase of our adventure, as helicopters readied to take some of the members of the commemorative landing party back to the temperate world. It was time to leave our beloved home on the edge of the sea ice, this remarkable floating community of the Aurora Australis with its warmth, food, conversation and brilliant company. It has been such a privilege to be a part of it. This adventure felt different to my equally wonderful voyage south in 2002-03. Then I was part of a routine re-supply voyage to Casey station. As a ‘roundtripper’, I got to know the incoming wintering expeditioners well, to learn of their pre-Antarctic lives and of what they expected and hoped of their anticipated year away. I witnessed their departure and shared their excitement, saw their intense baptism in the urgency and pressure of the five-day re-supply, and witnessed the ‘changeover’ ceremony, the passing-on of the baton at an Antarctic station. And then, over the next ten days, I effectively (and casually) de-briefed the outgoing winterers. It offered a revealing insight into the most crucial operational exchange in Antarctica, a period of urgent refuelling in every sense, a passing on of learning and wisdom in a matter of days. It was the frantic turnover of generations in Antarctica.
This voyage has remained offshore, self-contained, and complete in itself with its double (and often integrated) purpose of science and history. It has therefore felt like an expedition and thus appropriately commemorative in style too. We have sailed where no-one has sailed before, lived with uncertainty, and spent days in a place of extraordinary and remote beauty, on the fast ice with the penguins. Patience and planning has rewarded us with a virtually windless day in the home of the blizzard. We have deliberately and sometimes accidentally shadowed the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, and our public sense of history has enhanced our excitement and deepened our intellectual commitment. Our voyage leaders – Robb Clifton, Steve Rintoul, Barbara Frankel and Captain Murray Doyle – have been always inspiring and thoughtful. The voyage continues now, and I envy those on board even though they face weeks of intense labour around the clock as they plumb the depths and health of the Southern Ocean on their way to Fremantle in mid-February.
Our Sikorsky S76 chopper lifted us swiftly away from the ship and began our journey home along the coastline of East Antarctica that teased and defied navigators from the mid-nineteenth century. As the Aurora sailed this stretch of coast after leaving the first landing party at Commonwealth Bay, Captain Davis was frustrated that he was unable to push between the pack ice and the land. He had to keep north of the pack and found himself without sight of land or anything else for that matter: The only way to avoid the big bergs was by listening for the roar of the swell about them. Several we heard this way but did not sight. They discovered that they could not trust the maps of either the American exploring expedition of Charles Wilkes or the French expedition of Dumont d’Urville who had both voyaged here in 1840. Percy Gray noted on the Aurora in January 1912 that We … are at the present moment sailing over mountains and all sorts of things discovered by Wilkes in 1840, and no indication of land anywhere near. Gawd knows when we shall find it. Incredibly, Wilkes and d’Urville were both nosing through the mists of this stretch of coast in January 1840, and they even encountered one another – but then suffered a ridiculous misunderstanding. As the ships manouevred together, both in the hope of communication, sails were rapidly hoisted aloft. Wilkes misinterpreted the French intentions, thought he was being avoided and snubbed, and suddenly sailed off in a huff. The two captains never met again, but traded justifications and frustrations in their journals.
From the helicopter on this sparkling day in January 2012, what Davis considered about the dreariest coast in the world is spread out below us in breathtaking splendour. First we pay our respects to B9B behind us, the magnificent tabular berg the size of a country that dominated our voyage. Ahead of us we can see the polar plateau rising gradually inland and its yawning crevasses look deceptively like creases in its sleek skin. Offshore, jagged cracks open out in the sea ice that surrounds the grounded bergs. Soon we can see the station of Dumont d’Urville in its stunning location on a rocky outcrop amongst penguin colonies with the red French ship, the Astrolabe, moored nearby.
I am excited to see this site for, apart from being the capital of French Antarctica, it is also the place where humans in 1952 first studied Emperor penguins for a whole season – and that pioneering expedition included an Australian observer, Robert Dovers (son of George of the AAE). This Pointe Géologie archipelago has been made famous more recently by Luc Jacquet’s 2005 film, The March of the Emperor. The Emperors are not in residence during our visit, for they are winter breeders, but at least I can admire what Bob Dovers called ‘a little Antarctic paradise’. The Australian presence on that 1952 French expedition is another reminder that international cooperation in Antarctica long preceded the Treaty, which was signed in 1959.
We benefit from the Treaty today as we fly in and are warmly welcomed by the French. As the Soviet Antarctic leader, Mikhail Mikhailovich Somov, put it in 1966, Antarctica remains the paradox of our globe; in the most under-developed continent are practised the most advanced ideas in the world regarding friendship between nations. In the coldest continent are to be found the warmest human relationships.
Australia and France cooperated brilliantly in 1989-91 in pioneering and negotiating the Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty which included a ban on mining inAntarcticaand put into place comprehensive and legally binding measures to protect the Antarctic environment.
After a ride in a French piloted squirrel helicopter onto a flat stretch of the glacier behind Dumont d’Urville, we boarded a 1942 Douglas DC-3 (Basler) aircraft with skis and were launched from the ice pad into another stunning aerial traverse of the great white land. For five hours we flew over seemingly endless tracts of ice – some of which are furnishing us with vital ice cores that reveal Earth’s climate history – until we reached the Transantarctic Mountains, the majestic range that spirals into the heart of the continent and up which Amundsen and Scott had to labour in order to reach the heights of the Pole.
Suddenly, rearing ghost-like above the clouds, we see the ethereal Mt Erebus (about 3,800 metres above sea level), volcanic, icy and the undoubted king of its domain. Douglas Mawson was a member of the first party to climb Mt Erebus in March 1908 as part of Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition. The party included Alistair Forbes Mackay and was led by Mawson’s 50-year-old teacher, Professor Edgeworth David (whom Tony Fleming rightly calls ‘the father of Australian Antarctic science’). It feels right that, near the end of our pilgrimage, we should be seeing this mountain where Mawson had his first Antarctic adventure.
Tonight, at a congenial bar in the American station, McMurdo, at 77º 50’ South, we raise our glasses to Robert Falcon Scott and the British team’s belated arrival at 90º – and to Amundsen’s prior achievement too. When Amundsen beat Scott to the Pole, he left him a gift should he too arrive there. The gift was his sextant. Perhaps he chose to leave this object because it was the most potent symbol of his triumph over latitude. I think the most unexamined and astonishing fact about the race to the South Pole in 1911-12 is that the two sledging parties located the same featureless acre of ice on that vast continent. Reaching the North or South Poles was the most abstract of goals. There was nothing there but your own arithmetic.
Scott had a gift for Amundsen, too – an unwilling and tragic gift. Scott’s arrival at the same spot on the endless ice, and his journal accounts of the misery of discovering the Norwegian tent with its gift of a sextant, and the miraculous discovery of those diaries under his head when he and his companions were found dead in their tent later that year – this grim, written evidence was to make Amundsen’s triumph indisputable. The attainment of the North Pole a few years earlier is still subject to endless doubt and controversy, but at the South Pole, Scott’s navigation and documentation corroborated Amundsen’s success.