The Worst Journey in the World (5 page)

There are two kinds of Antarctic penguins—the little Adélie with his
blue-black coat and his white shirt-front, weighing 16 lbs., an object of
endless pleasure and amusement, and the great dignified Emperor with long
curved beak, bright orange head-wear and powerful flippers, a
personality of 6½ stones. Science singles out the Emperor as being the
more interesting bird because he is more primitive, possibly the most
primitive of all birds. Previous to the Discovery Expedition nothing was
known of him save that he existed in the pack and on the fringes of the
continent.

We have heard of Cape Crozier as being the eastern extremity of Ross
Island, discovered by Ross and named after the captain of the Terror. It
is here that with immense pressures and rendings the moving sheet of the
Barrier piles itself up against the mountain. It is here also that the
great ice-cliff which runs for hundreds of miles to the east, with the
Barrier behind it and the Ross Sea beating into its crevasses and caves,
joins the basalt precipice which bounds the Knoll, as the two-knobbed
saddle which forms Cape Crozier is called. Altogether it is the kind of
place where giants have had a good time in their childhood, playing with
ice instead of mud—so much cleaner too!

But the slopes of Mount Terror do not all end in precipices. Farther to
the west they slope quietly into the sea, and the Adélie penguins have
taken advantage of this to found here one of their largest and most
smelly rookeries. When the Discovery arrived off this rookery she sent a
boat ashore and set up a post with a record upon it to guide the relief
ship in the following year. The post still stands. Later it became
desirable to bring the record left here more up to date, and so one of
the first sledging parties went to try and find a way by the Barrier to
this spot.

They were prevented from reaching the record by a series of most violent
blizzards, and indeed Cape Crozier is one of the windiest places on
earth, but they proved beyond doubt that a back-door to the Adélie
penguins' rookery existed by way of the slopes of Mount Terror behind the
Knoll. Early the next year another party reached the record all right,
and while exploring the neighbourhood looked down over the 800-feet
precipice which forms the snout of Cape Crozier. The sea was frozen over,
and in a small bay of ice formed by the cliffs of the Barrier below were
numerous little dots which resolved themselves into Emperor penguins.
Could this be the breeding-place of these wonderful birds? If so, they
must nurse their eggs in mid-winter, in unimagined cold and darkness.

Five days more elapsed before further investigation could be made, for a
violent blizzard kept the party in their tents. On October 18 they set
out to climb the high pressure ridges which lie between the level barrier
and the sea. They found that their conjectures were right: there was the
colony of Emperors. Several were nursing chicks, but all the ice in the
Ross Sea was gone; only the small bay of ice remained. The number of
adult birds was estimated at four hundred, the number of living chicks
was thirty, and there were some eighty dead ones. No eggs were found.
^[18]

Several more journeys were made to this spot while the Discovery was in
the south, generally in the spring; and the sum total of the information
gained came to something like this. The Emperor is a bird which cannot
fly, lives on fish which it catches in the sea, and never steps on land
even to breed. For a reason which was not then understood it lays its
eggs upon the bare ice some time during the winter and carries out the
whole process of incubation on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet
pressed closely to a patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and
protected from the intense cold by a loose falling lappet of skin and
feathers. By September 12, the earliest date upon which a party arrived,
all the eggs which were not broken or addled were hatched, and there were
then about a thousand adult Emperors in the rookery. Arriving again on
October 19, a party experienced a ten days' blizzard which confined them
during seven days to their tents, but during their windy visit they saw
one of the most interesting scenes in natural history. The story must be
told by Wilson, who was there:

"The day before the storm broke we were on an old outlying cone of Mount
Terror, about 1300 feet above the sea. Below us lay the Emperor penguin
rookery on the bay ice, and Ross Sea, completely frozen over, was a
plain of firm white ice to the horizon. There was not even the lane of
open water which usually runs along the Barrier cliff stretching away as
it does like a winding thread to the east and out of sight. No space or
crack could be seen with open water. Nevertheless the Emperors were
unsettled owing, there can be no doubt, to the knowledge that bad weather
was impending. The mere fact that the usual canal of open water was not
to be seen along the face of the Barrier meant that the ice in Ross Sea
had a southerly drift. This in itself was unusual, and was caused by a
northerly wind with snow, the precursor here of a storm from the
south-west. The sky looked black and threatening, the barometer began to
fall, and before long down came snowflakes on the upper heights of Mount
Terror.

"All these warnings were an open book to the Emperor penguins, and if one
knew the truth there probably were many others too. They were in
consequence unsettled, and although the ice had not yet started moving
the Emperor penguins had; a long file was moving out from the bay to the
open ice, where a pack of some one or two hundred had already collected
about two miles out at the edge of a refrozen crack. For an hour or more
that afternoon we watched this exodus proceeding, and returned to camp,
more than ever convinced that bad weather might be expected. Nor were we
disappointed, for on the next day we woke to a southerly gale and smother
of snow and drift, which effectually prevented any one of us from leaving
our camp at all. This continued without intermission all day and night
till the following morning, when the weather cleared sufficiently to
allow us to reach the edge of the cliff which overlooked the rookery.

"The change here was immense. Ross Sea was open water for nearly thirty
miles; a long line of white pack ice was just visible on the horizon from
where we stood, some 800 to 900 feet above the sea. Large sheets of ice
were still going out and drifting to the north, and the migration of the
Emperors was in full swing. There were again two companies waiting on
the ice at the actual water's edge, with some hundred more tailing out in
single file to join them. The birds were waiting far out at the edge of
the open water, as far as it was possible for them to walk, on a
projecting piece of ice, the very next piece that would break away and
drift to the north. The line of tracks in the snow along which the birds
had gone the day before was now cut off short at the edge of the open
water, showing that they had gone, and under the ice-cliffs there was an
appreciable diminution in the number of Emperors left, hardly more than
half remaining of all that we had seen there six days before."
^[19]

Two days later the emigration was still in full swing, but only the
unemployed seemed to have gone as yet. Those who were nursing chicks were
still huddled under the ice-cliffs, sheltered as much as possible from
the storm. Three days later (October 28) no ice was to be seen in the
Ross Sea: the little bay of ice was gradually being eaten away: the same
exodus was in progress and only a remnant of penguins was still left.

Of the conditions under which the Emperor lays her eggs, the darkness and
cold and blighting winds, of the excessive mothering instinct implanted
in the heart of every bird, male and female, of the mortality and gallant
struggles against almost inconceivable odds, and the final survival of
some 26 per cent of the eggs, I hope to tell in the account of our Winter
Journey, the object of which was to throw light upon the development of
the embryo of this remarkable bird, and through it upon the history of
their ancestors. As Wilson wrote:

"The possibility that we have in the Emperor penguin the nearest approach
to a primitive form not only of a penguin but of a bird makes the future
working out of its embryology a matter of the greatest possible
importance. It was a great disappointment to us that although we
discovered their breeding-ground, and although we were able to bring home
a number of deserted eggs and chicks, we were not able to procure a
series of early embryos by which alone the points of particular interest
can be worked out. To have done this in a proper manner from the spot at
which the Discovery wintered in McMurdo Sound would have involved us in
endless difficulties, for it would have entailed the risks of sledge
travelling in mid-winter with an almost total absence of light. It would
at any time require that a party of three at least, with full camp
equipment, should traverse about a hundred miles of the Barrier surface
in the dark and should, by moonlight, cross over with rope and axe the
immense pressure ridges which form a chaos of crevasses at Cape Crozier.
These ridges, moreover, which have taken a party as much as two hours of
careful work to cross by daylight, must be crossed and re-crossed at
every visit to the breeding site in the bay. There is no possibility even
by daylight of conveying over them the sledge or camping kit, and in the
darkness of mid-winter the impracticability is still more obvious. Cape
Crozier is a focus for wind and storm, where every breath is converted,
by the configuration of Mounts Erebus and Terror, into a regular drifting
blizzard full of snow. It is here, as I have already stated, that on one
journey or another we have had to lie patiently in sodden sleeping-bags
for as many as five and seven days on end, waiting for the weather to
change and make it possible for us to leave our tents at all. If,
however, these dangers were overcome there would still be the difficulty
of making the needful preparations from the eggs. The party would have to
be on the scene at any rate early in July. Supposing that no eggs were
found upon arrival, it would be well to spend the time in labelling the
most likely birds, those for example that have taken up their stations
close underneath the ice-cliffs. And if this were done it would be easier
then to examine them daily by moonlight, if it and the weather generally
were suitable: conditions, I must confess, not always easily obtained at
Cape Crozier. But if by good luck things happened to go well, it would by
this time be useful to have a shelter built of snow blocks on the sea-ice
in which to work with the cooking lamp to prevent the freezing of the egg
before the embryo was cut out, and in order that fluid solutions might
be handy for the various stages of its preparation; for it must be borne
in mind that the temperature all the while may be anything between zero
and -50° F. The whole work no doubt would be full of difficulty, but it
would not be quite impossible, and it is with a view to helping those to
whom the opportunity may occur in future that this outline has been added
of the difficulties that would surely beset their path."
^[20]

We shall meet the Emperor penguins again, but now we must go back to the
Discovery, lying off Hut Point, with the season advancing and twenty
miles of ice between her and the open sea. The prospects of getting out
this year seeming almost less promising than those of the last year, an
abortive attempt was made to saw a channel from a half-way point. Still,
life to Scott and Wilson in a tent at Cape Royds was very pleasant after
sledging, and the view of the blue sea framed in the tent door was very
beautiful on a morning in January when two ships sailed into the frame.
Why two? One was of course the Morning; the second proved to be the Terra
Nova.

It seemed that the authorities at home had been alarmed at the reports
brought back the previous year by the relief ship of the detention of the
Discovery and certain outbreaks of scurvy which had occurred both on the
ship and on sledge journeys. To make sure of relief two ships had been
sent. That was nothing to worry about, but the orders they brought were
staggering to sailors who had come to love their ship "with a depth of
sentiment which cannot be surprising when it is remembered what we had
been through in her and what a comfortable home she had proved."
^[21]
Scott was ordered to abandon the Discovery if she could not be freed in
time to accompany the relief ships to the north. For weeks there was
little or no daily change. They started to transport the specimens and
make the other necessary preparations. They almost despaired of freedom.
Explosions in the ice were started in the beginning of February with
little effect. But suddenly there came a change, and on the 11th, amidst
intense excitement, the ice was breaking up fast. The next day the relief
ships were but four miles away. On the 14th a shout of "The ships are
coming, sir!" brought out all the men racing to the slopes above Arrival
Bay. Scott wrote:

"The ice was breaking up right across the Strait, and with a rapidity
which we had not thought possible. No sooner was one great floe borne
away than a dark streak cut its way into the solid sheet that remained,
and carved out another, to feed the broad stream of pack which was
hurrying away to the north-west.

"I have never witnessed a more impressive sight; the sun was low behind
us, the surface of the ice-sheet in front was intensely white, and in
contrast the distant sea and its leads looked almost black. The wind had
fallen to a calm, and not a sound disturbed the stillness about us.

"Yet in the midst of this peaceful silence was an awful unseen agency
rending that great ice-sheet as though it had been naught but the
thinnest paper. We knew well by this time the nature of our prison bars;
we had not plodded again and again over those long dreary miles of snow
without realizing the formidable strength of the great barrier which held
us bound; we knew that the heaviest battle-ship would have shattered
itself ineffectually against it, and we had seen a million-ton iceberg
brought to rest at its edge. For weeks we had been struggling with this
mighty obstacle ... but now without a word, without an effort on our
part, it was all melting away, and we knew that in an hour or two not a
vestige of it would be left, and that the open sea would be lapping on
the black rocks of Hut Point."
^[22]