Terra Incognita (10 page)

‘The pups are weaned,' she announced. ‘It's their teeth raking against the edge of the ice holes.'

Adult Weddells weigh up to 1,000 pounds and are able to live further south than any other seals because they can maintain an open hole in the ice with their teeth. Ann went off to photograph them doing it, and I pressed my ear to the ice and heard the adults underneath calling their ancient song, ululant and ineffably sad.

Later, I recognised the gabled ridged roof and weatherboard cladding of the hut in the distance. It was a prefabricated hut, made in England and shipped south in pieces. I once saw a picture of it taken when it was first erected, not at the foot of a smoking Mount Erebus but in a grimy urban street in Poplar in London's East End. The men had stitched quilts with pockets of seaweed to use as insulation between the walls.

When I pushed open the wooden door I smelt my grandmother's house when I was a child – coal dust and burnt coal – and it was chilly, as it used to be at six o'clock in the morning when I followed my grandfather downstairs to scrape out the grate. The Belmont Stearine candles Scott's men had brought were neatly stacked near the door, and the boxes said, ‘made expressly for hot climates', which some people would say summed up their preparations. The wrappers bore the picture of a West Indian preparing something delicious on a fire under a palm tree. It was the familiarity of the surroundings which struck my English sensibility – blue-and-orange Huntley and Palmer biscuit boxes, green-and-gold tins of Lyle's golden syrup, blue Cerberos salt tubes and the shape of the label on Heinz tomato ketchup bottles. Atora, Lea and Perrins, Fry's, Rising Sun Yeast (‘certain to rise'), Gillards
Real
Turtle Soup – the brand names cemented in our social history. I still lived with many of these products, and the continuum they provided intensified the hut experience. I remembered a very long novel by an American woman called Elizabeth Arthur who had spent some time on the ice. Describing the profoundly moving experience of visiting the hut, she talked about a ‘Hunter' and Palmer biscuit box. To an English sensibility this sounds as odd as ‘Heinzer' baked beans.

A single beam of sunlight fell on the bunk in Scott's quarters, the small space immortalised by Ponting and described by Teddy Evans as the ‘Holy of Holies'. On the desk, someone – a good artist – had drawn a tiny bird in violet ink on the crisp ivory page of a pocket notebook. Unlike Shackleton, Scott separated the quarters of men and officers, and the difference is often deployed to illustrate their contrasting styles of leadership. Wayland Young, Baron Kennet of the Dene and Kathleen Scott's son by her second marriage, has set out a convincing defence of Scott's decision. As far as the state of class divisions in the Navy was concerned, Young wrote that it was ‘unchanged for 1,000 years, so to complain about it now is no more interesting or original than to complain about it in the army of Wellington, Marlborough, Henry V or Alfred the Great'.

They were extremely resourceful. Clissold, the cook, rigged up a device whereby a small metal disc was placed on top of rising dough, and when it reached the right height it came into contact with another piece of metal, and an electrical circuit rang a bell next to his bunk. The battered books included Kipling (of course), and a tiny edition of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
held together with string, in the fly of which a spidery hand had inscribed Milton's ‘When will the ship be here/Come sing to me.' There is something disingenuous about Scott's hut, however, just as there is about the myth. The mummified penguin lying open-beaked and akimbo next to a copy of the
Illustrated London News
had been placed there by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage people, and Ponting's photographs show that Scott's desk is not the original (the replacement was brought over from the Cape Royds hut). The historic huts were often plundered in the early days. Richard Pape visited Cape Evans in 1959 with one of the American Operation Deep Freezes under Admiral Dufek. In his very bad book,
Poles Apart
, he records quite candidly that he pocketed ‘a glass inkwell on which “R.F. Scott” had been painted, also a bottle of Indian ink marked “Wilson”'.

Still, I saw them everywhere. A gap in a row of cuphooks, the dented rubber of a Wellington boot tossed aside, a carefully re-rolled bandage, the whiff of Ponting's developing fluid in his tiny darkroom, a half-spent candle in a chipped candlestick – perhaps it was the whistling of the wind, but I swear I could have turned round and seen them tramping back, spent dogs at their heels.

Later, the public manipulated the myth according to its own needs and ends. A crackpot society called the Alliance of Honour, founded in 1903 and devoted to purity, had spawned flourishing branches in 67 countries by the 1930s. The Alliance was vigorously opposed to masturbation, and the following quotation is culled from its voluminous literature: ‘We may safely assert that among the heroes of that dreadful journey from the South Pole there were no victims of the vice which the Alliance seeks to combat.'

Secondhand bookshops are rife with musty first editions of the diaries inscribed in a Sunday School teacher's best copperplate, rewarding a child for good attendance. I found a 1941 bus ticket pressed inside one of them. It was a tough time to be living in London, and perhaps the diaries helped. During the Second World War the calls of the legend were legion, and they were often voiced by cranks. In 1941 Kathleen received a letter from a woman in New York who said she had borne Scott's illegitimate child when she was fifteen. A handwritten note on the envelope said, ‘The lady is now dead.'

A few years after the war crocodiles of schoolchildren marched through provincial towns and into cavernous cinemas to watch
Scott of the Antarctic
. John Mills had already played countless war heroes, so he was a prepacked role model. By the mid-fifties, however, liberals at least were suspicious of the myth and had lost faith in the concept of England. In Peter Vansittart's recent book of social and cultural commentary,
In the Fifties
, he recalls a game he devised during that period to test the objectivity of his intellectual chums. He would read out a passage from Scott's diaries, including ‘We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end . . .' Assuming that Vansittart was being ironic, the audience tittered. Later he amended the reading to make it sound as if it had come from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944, or from Mao Tsetung, and on those occasions his friends applauded respectfully.

Shibboleths were mocked. Scott became a cliché. In the Monty Python television sketch ‘Scott of the Sahara', the captain fights a 25-foot electric penguin. Similarly, Scott appears as an astronaut in Tom Stoppard's play
Jumpers
, written in 1972. The first Englishman to reach the moon, Scott's triumph is overshadowed by the plight of his only colleague Astronaut Oates. Scott kicks Oates to the ground at the foot of the spacecraft ladder and pulls it in behind him with the words, ‘I am going up now, I may be some time.'

Historical revisionism is as unavoidable as the grave: it pursues leading figures of any age long after their work on earth is done. In the 1970s, when imperialism was widely reviled, Roland Huntford published his joint biography
Scott and Amundsen
(called
The Last Place on Earth
in the States), a passionate book which sought to demolish the Scott myth, suggesting not only that Scott was mortal, but that he was an unpleasant character and a poor leader. According to Huntford, he used science only as an excuse to participate in the race, unlike Amundsen ‘who did not stoop to use science as an agent of prestige'. Nobody had criticised Scott before, and Huntford did so comprehensively. Many felt inclined to agree with him, while the keepers of the flame would have had him sent to the Tower. The book whipped up a blizzard of angry protests, vitriolic reviews and a furious exchange of correspondence and ‘statements' in national newspapers, including lengthy debate provoked by Huntford's assertion that Kathleen Scott had sex with Nansen while her husband was slogging up a glacier and was worried about becoming pregnant. The central argument was over how she recorded the arrival of her periods in her diary. How disappointing it had to come to that.

Wayland Young wrote an article refuting Huntford's criticism of Scott for
Encounter
magazine in May 1980. He demonstrates the weakness of portions of Huntford's scholarship. Others had pressed Huntford on the same points raised by Young, and in October 1979 the biographer was obliged to admit on national television that his description of Scott staring at Oates in the tent at the end to try to force him to his death was based on
intuition
. In short, he got carried away by his own argument. Prejudice is not necessarily fatal in a biography, however, and Huntford's book is intelligent, gripping, full of insight and elegantly written. I enjoyed it as much as any polar book I have read, and a good deal more than most of them. It is a pity that Huntford was quite so obsessed with the destruction of the legend, for if he had reined in his prejudices he could have produced a masterpiece.

A similar controversy raged in the Norwegian press after a book was published portraying Amundsen as a bounder and Scott a man worthy of beatification. KÃ¥re Holt's
The Race
, published in English in 1974, was admittedly a novel; it was nonetheless a useful counterweight to Huntford's book. Bob Headland, archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute, told me that he likes to keep the two volumes next to one another on the shelf, ‘preferably with a layer of asbestos between them'.

‘The Scandinavians', Huntford told me when I met him at Wolfson College in Cambridge for lunch in a dining hall smelling of boiled cauliflower, ‘by and large set out from a country at ease with itself. They have no need for an ego boost. They are not play-acting. The Norwegian will always look for a glimpse of the sun, because he actually wants to be happy.' Self-delusion, he said, was the besetting sin of the British. ‘Scott and Amundsen inhabited totally different mental words,' he added, leaning across the table conspiratorially. ‘You mustn't be deluded by the fact that they were contemporaries. The Scandinavians live in a landscape which has enormous natural power, so that when they go to the polar regions it's sort of an extension of what they are.'

Huntford lived in Scandinavia for many years (‘mainly because I like skiing'). He writes exceptionally well about polar scenery; so well that it is hard to imagine him not hankering to go south himself. When I put this to him, he prevaricated.

‘No,' he said eventually. ‘These are landscapes of the mind, you see.'

He had referred obliquely to a note written by Bowers on the back of one of Wilson's last letters; it apparently indicated that Bowers died last, but Huntford said the envelope had been suppressed by the people at Scott Polar Research Institute in order to maintain Scott's preeminence. When I asked them, they denied it. Who cares? I wanted to know about the power of the human spirit to transcend mortality, and what one human heart can learn from another, not whose aorta packed up first.

∗

At McMurdo the project leaders were giving a series of weekly science lectures. An eminent geologist among them had developed theories on the prehistoric supercontinents in which Antarctica was attached to South America. His name was Ian Dalziel, and I found him nursing a whiskey in the Corner Bar.

‘I used to be a respected geologist,' he said, ‘but now I move continents around like armchairs.' His wife called it playing God. He was Scottish, had defected, but still displayed the characteristic dry wit of the Scots. He had an easy manner which was self-assured without being confident, and he was a repository of stories. He could remember the geologist who used live baby penguins as toilet paper and reported that it was important to keep the beaks out of the way.

As nature's satire on humanity, it was part of the penguin job description to provide mirth for the colonising hordes. Stories from the days before anyone had heard of environmental awareness were legion. Officers would paint bowties on penguin breasts and set the birds loose in the messroom, navy construction workers flung them down seal holes ‘to watch them shoot up', and the 1956 Personnel Manual for Williams Field Air Operating Facility on Ross Island laid out procedures for obtaining a stuffed penguin. Now, abusing a penguin carried a stiffer fine than molesting a person.

∗

I found myself reading a good deal about deserts while I was in the south, and at that time I was engrossed in Thesiger's
Arabian Sands
. Like Antarctica, the heart of the desert was a blank in time, devoid of human history. Both places could be perceived as a gigantic reflection of all you had known of emptiness and loss, if you were minded to internalise the landscape in that way. I felt the reverse. Even sitting in a base which resembled a small Alaskan mining town, I had similar intimations about the cold southern desert to those which Thesiger had in the hot sands of Arabia. ‘Here in the desert', he wrote, ‘I had found all that I had asked; I knew that I should never find it again.'

I finished the book in my office late one night, and the light from the Anglepoise lamp spilled into the dark corridor. Hans, a Danish fish biologist on Art's project, came in and installed himself on the spare chair. We must have been the only people in the building, and it was as silent as a mausoleum. He made small talk for a few minutes, but he was fidgeting, as if he were trying to release an object that had got stuck between the layers of his garments. When he started saying what he had come to say all along, it spewed out like a torrent of coins from a slot machine.

He had fallen in love five weeks before coming south.

‘Britta is fifteen years younger than I, but one day after I met her, I was in love,' he said in his musical Danish accent. ‘The next five weeks were like rushing towards a waterfall, becoming faster all the time. I find a branch to cling to and everything would be OK for a while, but then I would be swept away again. Then comes the day when no branches are left.'