Terra Incognita (9 page)

It was seven o'clock on Saturday night, and I felt depressed. I sat in my office, listening to people next door arguing about fish bait. When this group were out of their office, which was most of the time, they put a sign on their door saying ‘Gone fishin''. Going fishing involved drilling holes in the sea ice and hauling up primeval creatures which survived the depths of the Southern Ocean by producing their own anti-freeze. The project leader was an Antarctic soldier who first came to the ice the year I was born. His name was Art DeVries, and he appeared in my doorway brandishing a small, dead fish.

‘Come fishing tonight!' he said imperiously. I kept a set of cold-weather clothes under my desk, so I put them all on and walked out of the door. A tracked vehicle with DR COOL stencilled on the fender was warming up outside, and various members of the team were fiddling with equipment in the back. Art had a knack of assembling a disparate bunch of research scientists and graduate students, from ex-janitors to an antifreeze specialist he had met at an airport. They were all good fun, and they all smelt of fish.

We drove to a small wooden fish hut on the sea ice in which a battery-operated winch positioned over a hole in the floor was lowering bait 1,500 feet into the spectral depths of the Sound. The bait consisted of fish brought in from New Zealand. Much winching later, the fish which emerged weighed 125 pounds and looked as ancient as the slime from which we all crawled.

‘
Dissostichus mawsoni
– Antarctic cod to you,' said Art as he heaved it off the scales. ‘Phenomenally small brain.'

‘Can you eat them?' I asked.

‘Sure you can. Sashimi cut from the cheeks is kind of nice. But it's the antifreeze everyone's after. Aircraft manufacturers want it to develop a product to prevent airplane wings from freezing.'

When a row of specimens were lying on the floor, the biologists started arguing again, this time about which to keep, talking about ‘nice shaped throats' as if they were judging a beauty contest. Most of their fish were named after explorers:
mawsoni, bernacchii
,
borchgrevinki
. Art had his own – a deep-water bottom dweller called
Paraliparis devriesi
. The Channichthyidae ‘ice fish' which live in slightly warmer Antarctic waters have no haemoglobin at all, and their blood is white.

∗

The Chapel of the Snows was a pink and confectionary-blue Alpine chalet with a stained-glass penguin at the end looking out over the Transantarctic mountains. It was serviced by a Catholic priest and a protestant minister, and on Sunday morning I went to mass. The priest called us the Frozen Chosen. It was after this service that I met Ann Hawthorne, a photographer in her early forties who was over six feet tall with salt-and-pepper hair down to her waist. She came from North Carolina and spoke in a beguiling southern drawl. Ann was also on the Artists' and Writers' Program, and we saw a good deal of one another while we were at McMurdo. She had first come south to take pictures ten years previously, and on that trip she had fallen in love with a pilot and subsequently married him. It hadn't worked out as planned, and I got the feeling that she was back laying ghosts to rest. Ann had an eye for a party, and if we had spent any more time together than we did, we would have got into trouble.

‘Hey, I've borrowed a tracked vehicle,' she said to me triumphantly one morning. ‘I figured we could go to Cape Evans for the day and hang out in Scott's hut. It's about twelve miles along the coast. What d'you say, babe?'

‘Can we drive over the sea ice, then?'

‘Sure we can.'

‘What happens if it gets thin?'

‘We fall in. But that won't happen, because every so often we get out of the vehicle and drill the ice to test its thickness. If it's thinner than thirty inches, we turn back. Trust me.'

Cape Evans was the site of Scott's main hut on the
Terra Nova
expedition. It had almost pushed the smaller one I had visited on Hut Point out of the history books. Hut Point was not intended as a permanent ‘home' and was never used as such. The Cape Evans hut, on the other hand, erected in January 1911, was occupied continuously for two years. In 1915 one of Shackleton's sledge parties from the ill-fated
Aurora
arrived, and they also lived in it intermittently for a couple of years. Preserved by the cold, and recently by the efforts of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust, it stands on its lonely cape, intact, like some icy Valhalla of the south.

Scott named the cape after Lieutenant Teddy Evans, later Admiral Sir Edward, who went on four Antarctic expeditions. He returned home sick in 1911 after almost dying of scurvy and exhaustion on the 750-mile march back to the hut from the top of the Beardmore Glacier. Two years later he went back to Antarctica in command of the
Terra Nova
to pick up Scott and the other men who had remained on the ice. As the ship sailed up to the hut, the officers' dining table was laid for a banquet. Evans, pacing the deck, was worried about the Northern Party. Then he spotted Campbell on shore. They had made it!

‘Is everyone all right?' he yelled across the pack ice.

Campbell hesitated. ‘The polar party have perished,' he shouted back.

Every death is the first death, and so it seemed, at that moment, to Teddy Evans.

∗

For generations, the myth that had been created obscured the fact that Scott was a human being. Just as the image of the band on the
Titanic
playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee' is cemented on to the British national consciousness, along with tuxedoed gentlemen standing to attention as water rises over the razor creases of their trousers, so Scott has been institutionalised as a national icon, and for many years criticising him was a heretical act. Yet he wasn't universally popular in Antarctica. Among the four he took on the last haul to the Pole, Titus Oates wrote home to his mother ‘I dislike Scott intensely.' At times, Scott's leadership was questionable. When everything – food, tents, fuel and depots – was arranged for four-man units, at the eleventh hour he decided that five were to go to the Pole. The perfect hero of the great English myth never existed, just as our national emblems, the lion and the unicorn, never roamed the South Downs.

All the same, there is much that is heroic about Scott. His expeditions still constitute landmarks in polar travel. As a man, rather than a Navy captain, Scott was much more than a wooden product of his background. Like all the best people, he was beset by doubt. ‘I shall never fit in my round hole,' he wrote to his wife Kathleen, and on another occasion, ‘I'm obsessed with the view of life as a struggle for existence.' He was a good writer, especially towards the end of his journey. ‘Will you grow to think me only fitted for the outer courtyard of your heart?' he asked Kathleen. The Antarctic possessed a virginity in his mind that provided an alternative to the spoiled and messy world, and he wrote in his diary about ‘the terrible vulgarizing which Shackleton has introduced to the Southern field of enterprise, hitherto so clean and wholesome'.

Through his writings, Scott elevated the status of the struggle. It was no longer man against nature, it was man against himself. The diaries reveal a sense of apotheosis: the terrible journey back from the Pole was a moral drama about the attainment of self-knowledge. Scott went to the mountaintop, there on the blanched wasteland. He failed to return from the last journey, but in that failure he found a far more precious success. Defeat on this earthly plane was transfigured. The journey becomes a quest for self-fulfilment, and Scott's triumph is presented as the conquering of the self.

Similarly, after George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared into the mists of Everest twelve years after Scott perished, everyone quickly forgot what had actually happened and glorified the climbers' transcendental achievements. At their memorial service in St Paul's Cathedral, the Bishop of Chester used a quotation from the Psalms to establish a connection between Mallory and Irvine's climb and the spiritual journey upwards, referring to it ‘as the ascent by which the kingly spirit goes up to the house of the Lord'. So it was, too, that out of the tent on the polar plateau rose the myth of the saintly hero.

By nimble sleight of hand in their portrayal of Scott, the mythmakers reversed the David and Goliath roles of Norway and Britain. Scott was the gentlemanly amateur who played the game and didn't rely on dogs. Amundsen, on the other hand, was a technological professional who cheated by using dogs. Frank Debenham, Scott's geologist on the
Terra Nova
expedition, wrote in his book
Antarctica: the Story of a Continent
, published in 1959, that both Scott and Shackleton deployed techniques which were slower, more laborious, and failed, but that to criticise them for doing it their way instead of Amundsen's ‘is rather like comparing the man who prefers to row a boat across a bay with the man who hoists up a sail to help himself'. Scott's advocates made a virtue of the fact that he had hauled to the Pole without dogs or ponies, and they still do, but this is disingenuous. He had been perfectly prepared to use caterpillar motor-sledges and took three south on the
Terra Nova
(these were a failure). Furthermore, as Debenham himself wrote, ‘The fact of the matter is that neither Scott nor Shackleton, the two great exponents of manhauling, understood the management of sledge dogs.'

As he lay dying, Scott somehow found the rhetorical language to invest the whole ghastly business with the currency of nobility. This is his greatest achievement, and with it he paved the way for the making of the legend. ‘Had we lived,' he wrote famously, ‘I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.' He even had the presence of mind to recognise the emotive value of altering ‘To My Wife' on Kathleen's envelope to ‘To My Widow'. In a few pages he scorched himself into the national consciousness. By the time the letters and diary reached home the spiritual and the national coalesced perfectly.
The Times
said of Scott's last venture, ‘The real value of the expedition was spiritual, and therefore in the truest sense national . . . proof that we are capable of maintaining an Empire.' King George expressed the hope that every British boy could see photographs of the expedition, ‘for it will help promote the spirit of adventure that made the empire'. On the wilder shores of journalism Scott actually became the nation: ‘Like Captain Scott,' proclaimed
World's Work
, ‘we are journeying in a cold world towards nothing that we know.' True enough.

Scott touched the imagination of the country and exemplified not just England but a strain of Edwardian manhood. Later, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who was there, wrote of Scott and his dead men, ‘What they did has become part of the history of England, perhaps of the human race, as much as Columbus or the Elizabethans, David, Hector or Ulysses. They are an epic.' In the Great War, Scott became a hantly placebo for the soldiers floundering in muddy trenches. Over 100,000 officers and men in France alone saw expedition photographer Herbert Ponting's moving-picture film, and in his book
The Great White South
, Ponting quotes from the following letter despatched by a Forces chaplain ministering to the frontline troops.

When Kathleen Scott died scores of crumpled letters from the front lines were found among her papers, the senders all telling her they could never have faced the dangers and hardships of the war had they not learned to do so from her dead husband's teaching. With Scott, they believed they could rise above it.

Would Scott have become the myth that he is had he lived? I doubt it. The most powerful hero is the dead hero, the one who never loses his teeth. Like Peter Pan, he must never grow old. It is central to the myth of Mallory and Irvine that they died on Everest. Lytton Strachey, who was passionate about Mallory and his Dionysian good looks, perceptively noted before the 1924 expedition even sailed from Birkenhead that the legend of Mallory would only survive if the climber died young. ‘If he were to live,' Strachey wrote, ‘he'll be an unrecognisable middle-aged mediocrity, probably wearing glasses and a timber toe.' Instead, Mallory became Sir Galahad, like Scott before him.

Though it is tempting to indulge the cliché that a national preference for dead heroes is peculiarly British, an examination of, say, Russian polar literature also reveals a large cast of heroic dead. Like most clichés, however, this one is woven with a thread of truth, and Scott would probably have had to stagger back to the hut to cut much ice with North Americans.

When Tryggve Gran, one of Scott's men, emerged from the tent on the plateau after he had seen the three frozen bodies which had lain there through the long polar night, he said that he envied them. ‘They died having done something great,' he wrote. ‘How hard death must be having done nothing.'
¹

∗

The ice was more than four feet thick wherever we drilled it, and an hour after we set out for Cape Evans, around Big Razorback island, we lay down among the Weddell seals.

‘Listen to that,' said Ann. It was a faint scraping sound, like hard cheese on a grater.