On forbidding Elephant Island off the coast of Antarctica, the crew of the Endurance expedition lived for four and a half months while Ernest Shackleton and five crewmen sailed in an open boat across 800 icy miles to get help.

Photo: brytta@istockphoto.com

EXTREME JOURNEYS

& THE MEN WHO MADE THEM

"For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organisation, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time," writes Apsley Cherry-Garrard somewhat misleadingly, for he did not know Mawson, and in some ways Douglas Mawson outdid them all.

Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, writes that he was inspired by British explorer John Franklin's tragic death in 1848 after his two ships, Erebus and Terror, were crushed in North Polar ice. It may seem a strange inspiration, but Amundsen was the first man to reach the South Pole partly because his expert planning included a ship that could not be crushed by ice. Dying in 1928 while trying to rescue a friend from a dirigible crash, Amundsen was equally ill-fated in trying to rescue his Polar achievement from Scott's tragic and luminous death, which transformed the Brits' defeat at the Pole into a victory for both science and the spirit. The reputations of Amundsen and Scott are like twin stars, alternately blazing and dark in the decades after their deaths, yet they shared a great deal – remarkable courage and, perhaps most poignantly, unrelenting anxiety about raising enough money to fund their expeditions.

BEGINNINGS: ROSS, SCOTT, SHACKLETON & WILSON

In the early 20th century no one knew whether Antarctica was a continent. There was, people observed, more information about Mars.

Most of the little that was known had been provided by a few British, Russian, French, Norwegian, and American expeditions in the 19th century. Brit James Clark Ross had located the north magnetic pole in the Arctic with his uncle John Ross in 1833, then led an expedition to Antarctica on the Erebus and Terror (the two ships subsequently destroyed on Franklin's Arctic expedition). Ross avoided the perils of crushing ice while conducting magnetic observations and charting coastline, and in 1841 discovered Victoria Land, the Ross Sea, and the Ross Ice Shelf. Not much had been discovered in the intervening years.

Since founding the Royal Geographical Society » in 1830, Brits had launched a quest to explore the whole world. In the early 20th century they turned their attention to Antarctica. Robert Falcon Scott leads the first exploration in 1901 on the British National Antarctic Discovery Expedition. Cherry-Garrard suggests that "If you want a good polar traveller get a man without too much muscle, with good physical tone, and let his mind be on wires — of steel. And if you can't get both, sacrifice physique and bank on will." Robert Falcon Scott has both body and will, though he was so frail as a child he was not expected to live.

In 1902, Scott sets out to reach the South Pole on sledge and on foot with Ernest Shackleton and Dr Edward Wilson. Shackleton will become a by-word for leadership and endurance. Less well-known is Dr "Bill" Wilson, a superb field naturalist and painter, who had recently recovered from tuberculosis, and whose health would not make him an obvious candidate for Antarctica.

A boisterous boy who had been exploring and sketching the outdoors since he was three, Wilson announced when he was nine that he would become a naturalist. He started by collecting eggs, a fact that will shed some light on why he will make one of the hardest journeys in the world in Antarctica. As a boy he never collected all the eggs in a nest, considering that to be robbery, but took only one in four. At Cambridge he was a rower and peacemaker who was liked for his humour, integrity, and generosity. It is said that he followed a deep Christian code of which he rarely spoke.

Anything that is Bill's is yours if you need it. He fills his rooms with rocks, bones, and specimens and his notebooks with natural history drawings and watercolours. He earns a degree in medicine, works tirelessly treating the poor, and contracts tuberculosis. While recovering from TB, he teaches himself to perfect his outdoor sketches and colour notes for later recapture in watercolours and paintings. Invited to serve as Junior Surgeon and Vertebrate Zoologist on the Discovery with Scott, he leaves for the Antarctic three weeks after a blissful honeymoon with his wife.

In 1902 he finds himself dissecting a dog in the icy wilderness of Antarctica, trying to figure out why the expedition's animals are dying. Travelling where no one ever has before, Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson discover a glorious new coastline and mountain ranges. They survey three hundred miles of coast, but after sixty days of travel the sledge-dogs are collapsing, and all three men are nearing the end of their strength. They achieve a farthest South of 82°; Scott names the inlet there for Shackleton and the cape for Wilson. Most of their dogs have died so they man-haul their sledge. Shackleton is coughing blood. When he cannot walk, Scott and Wilson haul him on the sledge. Suffering from scurvy, so bruised and sore it is agony to be touched, they make it back to camp.

Cape Evans in Winter by Edward Wilson
In England, Wilson had fallen in love with Turner's paintings and their blurred colour boundaries, so prophetic of the soft, shifting colours he finds in Antarctica. In turn, Turner had admired the work of William Hodges, the artist on Captain Cook's 2nd Expedition (1772-1775). Like Hodges, Wilson's paintings combine scientific, cartographic and artistic techniques.

THE NIMROD EXPEDITION

Though he had almost died in Antarctica, Shackleton burned with desire to return. Five years later, having recovered his health and raised the money, he launches the Nimrod Expedition of 1907-09. (British expeditions were named after the ships that carried them.) Shackleton and his team make sledge probes deep into the interior. With him are Aussie Douglas Mawson, who locates the south magnetic pole after a 1200-mile journey, and Frank Wild, who had travelled with Scott on the Discovery expedition, and would travel with Mawson on his heroic return to Antarctica in 1911. The quiet but fiercely determined Wild, Shackleton, and two others travel 1600 miles in an attempt to reach the South Pole. They are just 97 miles away when Shackleton decides he cannot jeopardize his men's lives, and turns back. Shackleton's detailed geographical notes will be carried by members of Scott's subsequent Terra Nova Expedition when they make their attempt on the South Pole.

THE TERRA NOVA EXPEDITION

Scott arrived in Antarctica with Wilson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a large company of men, and a number of ponies and dogs in 1910 for his second expedition He had been fundraising for eight years to pay his men, lease a ship, and buy supplies to cover a two or three-year stay, including wood to build a hut and furniture, oil and paraffin, scientific equipment, tents, sledges, the ponies, the dogs, and the dog food. Along Bill Wilson, who has been working at a hectic pace diagnosing an epidemic among grouse and painting all the birds and mammals of the British Isles from life studies, sends off his last report from on board ship. Scott leaves the ship to conduct additional fundraising. When he rejoins the Terra Nova in southern seas, a gale hits.

The boat is swamped, the pumps aren't working, and appalling seas are smashing through the deck, submerging the furnaces. The dogs, made fast on deck, wash to and fro. Cherry sees Scott, standing on the weather rail of the poop, buried to his waist in green sea. Darkness descends, and the ship looks ready to sink, but their spirits remain high.

"It was a weird night's work," writes Bill, "with the howling gale and the darkness and the immense seas running over the ship every few minutes and no engines and no sail, and we all in the engine-room oil and bilge water, singing shanties as we passed up slopping buckets. . ."

At 11 pm he and Evans and the carpenter finally manage to break through the bulkhead, and repair the pumps. Scott remarks later in his journal, "I was pleased to find that after all I had only lost about 100 gallons of the petrol and bad as things had been they might have been worse. . ." (Scott’s Last Expedition) Until the end, this was his philosophy.

The morning watch was cloudy, but it gradually cleared until the sky was a brilliant blue, fading on the horizon into green and pink. The floes were pink, floating in a deep blue sea, and all the shadows were mauve. We passed right under a monster berg, and all day have been threading lake after lake and lead after lead. 'There is Regent Street,' said somebody, and for some time we drove through great streets of perpendicular walls of ice. (Cherry-Garrard quoting from his diary in The Worst Journey in the World)

The Antarctic summer holds them in a rosy, saffron and pale green spell, but it is not to last:

The position to-night is very cheerless. All hope that this easterly wind will open the pack seems to have vanished. We are surrounded with compacted floes of immense area. Openings appear between these floes and we slide crab-like from one to another with long delays between. . .There could scarcely be a more dreary prospect for the eye to rest upon. (Scott’s Last Expedition)

Slowly the Terra Nova "bumped the floes with mighty shocks, crushing and grinding a way through some, twisting and turning to avoid others. . .like a living thing fighting a great fight". As the ship makes its way toward the thick pack, there is, writes Wilson, a very cheerful sight:

We saw the little Adelie penguins hurrying to meet us. Great Scott, they seemed to say, what's this, and soon we could hear the cry which we shall never forget. "Aark, aark," they said, and full of wonder and curiosity, and perhaps a little out of breath, they stopped every now and then to express their feelings, and to gaze and cry in wonder to their companions; now walking along the edge of a floe in search of a narrow spot to jump and so avoid the water, and with head down and much hesitation judging the width of the narrow gap, to give a little standing jump across as would a child, and running on the faster to make up for its delay. Again, coming to a wider lead of water necessitating a plunge, our inquisitive visitor would be lost for a moment, to reappear like a jack-in-the-box on a nearer floe, where wagging his tail, he immediately resumed his race towards the ship. Being now but a hundred yards or so from us he pokes his head constantly forward on this side and on that, to try and make out something of the new strange sight, crying aloud to his friends in his amazement, and exhibiting the most amusing indecision between his desire for further investigation and doubt as to the wisdom and propriety of closer contact. . . (Wilson, Discovery Natural History Report)

At last they make landfall. Sledging supplies from the ship, the Terra Nova expedition makes camp near the snowy volcano called Mount Erebus. They build a large hut to hold all the men, and bid farewell to their ship, which sails away before it is crushed in winter pack ice. In the light that remains they explore, survey, sketch, photograph, take meteorological observations, study leopard seals and penguins, exercise the dogs and ponies (never easy on ice), and prepare for the journey to the South Pole the following summer.

On a good day the view is beautiful:

The sea is blue before us, dotted with shining bergs or ice floes, whilst far over the Sound, yet so bold and magnificent as to appear near, stand the beautiful Western Mountains with their numerous lofty peaks, their deep glacial valley and clear cut scarps, a vision of mountain scenery that can have few rivals. (Cherry-Garrard)

Winter draws in with dismal cold, fierce gales and perpetual darkness, and it is then, at the very worst time of year, that Bill Wilson, Cherry, and Henry "Birdie" Bowers set out on a five-week journey. It is just a few days after Antarctica's midwinter solstice, June 22, 1911. They are about to discover why Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire in Hell.

Their goal is to reach Cape Crozier, because it is there, in mid-winter, that the Emperor penguins incubate their eggs. Standing four feet tall, the Emperors are the world's largest penguin. The Brits' mission is to collect some of their eggs, and discover whether the embryos contain the missing evolutionary link between birds and reptiles. But reaching the Cape is extremely difficult in summer in daylight, and they are attempting it in the Antarctic winter night.

At twenty-four Cherry-Garrard is the youngest of the three. He had been turned down at first, despite offering to donate a large sum to the expedition, because without his spectacles he is almost blind. When he donates the money anyway, Bill persuades Scott to take him along. Birdie Bowers is short, tough, cheerful, and a terrific organiser. He has already proved unstoppable when saving several men and ponies who were being carried out to sea on ice floes while surrounded by killer whales. Bill, Birdie, and Cherry haul 757 pounds of supplies on their sledges, and steer by Jupiter through the frozen dark. The cold, on average -60ºF (-51ºC) and falling as low as -77ºF (-60ºC), is intense. In Cherry's words:

Of course we were not iced up all at once: it took several days of this kind of thing before we really got into big difficulties on this score. It was not until I got out of the tent one morning fully ready to pack the sledge that I realized the possibilities ahead. We had had our breakfast, struggled into our foot-gear, and squared up inside the tent, which was comparatively warm. Once outside, I raised my head to look round and found I could not move it back. My clothing had frozen hard as I stood—perhaps fifteen seconds. For four hours I had to pull with my head stuck up, and from that time we all took care to bend down into a pulling position before being frozen in.

On the trek their feet become numb, and Cherry and Bill suffer terribly from frostbite. Each night they struggle for an hour or more to get into their frozen bags. Every day they take hours to heat up food, take down the tent, and load up – it is impossible to work any more quickly in the stupendous cold. As they march on toward the cape, they grow colder by the hour, their hearts beating more slowly and weakly, and they long for a hot drink.

. . .tea for lunch, hot water for supper. Directly we started to drink then the effect was wonderful: It was, said Wilson, like putting a hot-water bottle against your heart. The beats became very rapid and strong and you felt the warmth travelling outwards and downwards. Then you got your foot-gear off—puttees (cut in half and wound round the bottom of the trousers), finnesko, saennegrass, hair socks, and two pairs of woollen socks. Then you nursed back your feet and tried to believe you were glad—a frost-bite does not hurt until it begins to thaw. Later came the blisters, and then the chunks of dead skin.

Their spartan diet of 12 ounces of pemmican (dried meat), 16 ounces of biscuit and 4 ounces of butter a day is slowly starving them, but they go on in the frigid dark, with just enough light between 11am and 3pm to see the holes in the snow made by their feet. When the ground becomes very rough, and the temperature is -61°, the strength of all three men is needed to drag just one sledge, and they have to trudge back in their tracks for the second.

After lunch the little light had gone, and we carried a naked lighted candle back with us when we went to find our second sledge. It was the weirdest kind of procession, three frozen men and a little pool of light.

Cherry's teeth are cracking from the cold. The pus in his blisters is frozen. He is exhausted, and finding it difficult to sleep because his whole body chatters with cold. But he refuses to quit, and encourages himself by muttering a little refrain: "You've got it in the neck – stick it, stick it – you've got it in the neck – stick it, stick it, stick it."

"Always patient, self-possessed, unruffled," Bill Wilson regularly asks them, "Shall we go on?" Their answer is always "Yes".

They approach the Barrier, which runs for four hundred miles as an ice-cliff up to 200 feet high, and shoves into the land at a rate of about a mile a year. The Barrier piles up the icy chaos called the Pressure which they will have to navigate in order to reach the small bay where the male penguins stand with their eggs on their feet, waiting for them to hatch. For nine weeks the Emperor penguins are completely dedicated to their eggs. They do not eat, and when they walk, they shuffle, to keep their egg safe on their feet.

A Halo Round the Moon Showing Mock Moons
by Edward Wilson
While travelling below Mount Terror and running downhill, the sledge catching at their heels, they see the moon appear from behind clouds. In the nick of time the moonlight reveals a vast crevasse with a glassy lid into which they are just about to plunge.

They pull themselves up ridges, and slither down slopes, making their way under the towering cliffs and nearing the black lava precipices which form Cape Crozier. Cherry deprecates his own courage and the difficulties of being almost blind half the time since his glasses are always fogging up. He speaks insouciantly of straddling the razor-backed edge of a snow ridge, crevasses to right and left of him, cutting steps when he cannot find a foothold with his crampons, moving step by step towards the Emperor penguins.

. . .it really began to look as if we were going to do it this time, when we came up against a wall of ice which a single glance told us we could never cross. One of the largest pressure ridges had been thrown, end on, against the cliff. We seemed to be stopped, when Bill found a black hole, something like a fox's earth, disappearing into the bowels of the ice. We looked at it: 'Well, here goes!' he said, and put his head in, and disappeared. Bowers likewise. It was a longish way, but quite possible to wriggle along, and presently I found myself looking out of the other side with a deep gully below me, the rock face on one hand and the ice on the other. 'Put your back against the ice and your feet against the rock and lever yourself along,' said Bill, who was already standing on firm ice at the far end in a snow pit. We cut some fifteen steps to get out of that hole. Excited by now, and thoroughly enjoying ourselves, we found the way ahead easier, until the penguins' call reached us again and we stood, three crystallized ragamuffins, above the Emperors' home.

They had built an igloo on Mount Terror to serve as a field laboratory, and bring back three penguin eggs in their mitts. That night a blizzard roars in, and their tent blows away. They try to retrieve their gear, but "solid walls of black snow" flow past them, knocking them to the ground. The roof of their igloo is "wrenched upwards and then dropped back with great crashes". Bill tells them that if the roof goes their best chance is to roll over in their sleeping-bags until they are lying on the openings. They try desperately to keep the blizzard out and the roof on, but the roof of ice and stones flies off with a great roar. Birdie dives for his sleeping-bag. Cherry, already half into his bag, turns to help Bill. "Get into your own," Bill shouts. The next Cherry knows Bowers' head is across Bill's body. "We're all right," he yells, and they all answer in the affirmative, though it seems quite clear they are going to die. They turn over in their bags as the storm rages, and snow piles up over them, singing songs, and trying to think how they are going to make it back to camp without a tent.

How they do we leave you to discover in Cherry's Worst Journey in the World. We note that Bill, always so generous, gives Cherry the eider-down lining to his sleeping bag.

SCOTT TO THE POLE

In November, 1911, Scott's Terra Nova Expedition turns from scientific explorations to make an attempt on the South Pole. Due to lack of communications, Scott is not aware how far ahead of him Amundsen is when he sets out. With Scott are four teams of men laying supply depots. Eventually three teams head back, and one team – Scott, Bill Wilson, Birdie, Lawrence 'Titus' Oates, and Edgar Evans – heads toward the Pole.

After a gruelling trip, they reach the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to find that Amundsen has beaten them there. (After a superbly organized journey, Amundsen had arrived on December 14, 1911.)

On the way back, Bill continues to make detailed geological notes and sketches, and stops to collect geological samples in the area around Mount Buckley, as requested by geologists. Dragging an extra 35 pounds of specimens cannot have been easy, especially when temperatures are dropping, and hauling the sledge over the hard, coarse snow was like dragging it through heavy sand, but they refuse to abandon the rocks. Among them is the first known Antarctic fossil of Glossopteris, an ancient and extinct tree fern that suggested Antarctica had once been temperate and somewhere else. (Continental drift theory will use this rock as evidence.)

By now their return is being dogged by exhaustion and bad weather. They had already covered close to 1500 miles. They are probably suffering from scurvy, and the pemmican, biscuits and tea, never enough for men expending vast amounts of energy every day, are running out. All of them have frostbite, even Birdie, who had never had it before. Descending the Beardmore Glacier, Evans suffers a bad fall, and dies. The four remaining men are approaching a supply depot stocked with food and fuel when a blizzard traps them in their tent for nine days.

Ill with scurvy, on the morning of his 32nd birthday, Captain Lawrence Oates walks out into the blizzard with the words, "I am just going out and may be some time." He has made a last, gallant bid to save his friends by leaving them his food rations.

Scott intends to "stick it out to the end," and continues to hope the weather will lift. In his journal he writes that as their troubles thickened, Birdie's "dauntless spirit ever shone brighter and he has remained cheerful, hopeful and indomitable." He writes to Bill's wife:

My Dear Mrs. Wilson. If this letter reaches you, Bill and I will have gone out together. We are very near it now and I should like you to know how splendid he was at the end – everlastingly cheerful and ready to sacrifice himself for others, never a word of blame to me for leading him into this mess. . .

His eyes have a comfortable blue look of hope and his mind is peaceful with the satisfaction of his faith in regarding himself as part of the great scheme of the Almighty. I can do no more to comfort you than to tell you that he died as he lived, a brave, true man – the best of comrades and staunchest of friends.

My whole heart goes out to you in pity. Yours,

R. Scott

In a last letter to his wife, written in the pages of a book and only released to the public in 2007, Scott writes,

What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better it has been than lounging in comfort at home — what tales you would have for the boy but oh what a price to pay — to forfeit the sight of your dear dear face.

Among his very last words are "For God's sake look after our people." His body, and the bodies of Wilson and Birdie, are found in their tent months later, just eleven miles from a supply depot. With them are their geological specimens and papers.

Cherry, who helps to bury his friends, is devastated. Years later, when he writes up the entire expedition, he recalls that through all the long and difficult miles with his companions, "I never heard an angry word."

Cherry manages to bring the three Emperor penguin eggs, uncracked and uncrushed, safely back to Britain. There they are shuffled around, eventually passing to a Professor Ewart, who examines them closely, but without great enthusiasm.

In 1912, at the age of twenty-nine, Douglas Mawson, an engineer and geologist, makes a journey back from death.

DOUGLAS MAWSON & THE SOUTHERN CONTINGENT

In January of the same year, 1911, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition led by Douglas Mawson arrives to chart the 2000-mile Antarctic coastline directly south of Australia. The Expedition has drawn its team mainly from Australian and New Zealand universities, and raised the indispensable funds from an enthusiastic public. The Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Government, and the Royal Geographic Society also contribute. The expedition's ship, the Aurora, drops geologists, cartographers, biologists, magneticians, wireless operators, photographers, mechanics, surgeons, and sledge-masters at three locations, and they set up bases. Unfortunately the Main Base experiences high winds most of the year, some of them as strong as 200 miles per hour.

Despite relentlessly awful weather, the Australasian expedition completes a number of scientific treks, makes biological, geological, and meteorological discoveries, maps more of the Antarctic than any other expedition, and discovers a meteorite. On November 10, 1912, Mawson sets out with his three-man party, intending to make in one last exploration before January 15, when the Aurora will return to pick them up.

By the end of November, Mawson, and his two companions, Lieutenant B.E.S. Ninnis of the Royal Fusiliers and Dr. X. Mertz, an expert Swiss mountaineer, have crossed the heavily crevassed Mertz Glacier. They start across the "tumultuous and broken" Ninnis Glacier but their progress is agonizingly slow. For three days, they are trapped by a 70 mph blizzard.

When the blizzard ends, they dig themselves, the dogs, and the sledges out of the snow and continue to explore. On December 13 they head on with just one of the sledges. On the 14th, Mertz, ahead on skis, signals that he has spotted another snow-covered crevasse. Ninnis is following Mawson with the sledge and the dogs. Mawson makes it across the crevasse easily, and hears a ghastly scream. He turns to see Ninnis, the sledge and all the dogs have vanished. Rushing to the edge of the crevasse, he and Mertz stare down into a deep, gaping hole where, on a ledge 150 feet below, a dog lies crying, its back broken. Beneath the dog is an abyss. They call into the depths for over three hours, and tie together all their rope. There is no answer, and their rope will not even reach the dog.

They grieve for Ninnis, and face the fact there is little chance they can survive. They are 315 miles from Main Base. They have laid no depots as they had planned to take an easier route back. Ninnis's sledge, pulled by the six fittest dogs, was carrying indispensable supplies, including the tent, and most of their food. The remaining sledge carries only 10 days of rations, and nothing for the six dogs.

Continued in Part 2 »

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