1912 (14 page)

Evenings would often be taken up by lectures: members of the expedition would give talks on all manner of subjects, from
hard-rock geology to the Great Ice Barrier, from Antarctic wildlife past and present to the latest thinking on horse keeping. Simpson was the hardest to impress. His demeanour soon earned him the title Sunny Jim—Simpson's ‘emphatic way of stating things and his vigorous “You are completely wrong in all you say” always amuses us', Debenham noted, but he was a ‘very clear reasoner and one has to be very careful when arguing with him'.

There was good humour as well. After Atkinson gave a lecture on scurvy, ‘Ponting summed up the lecture as disappointing from his point of view as it seemed to him that if he didn't eat seal-meat he would get scurvy and if he did he would get rheumatism.' It was ‘Universitas Antarctica', inspired by Scott's philosophy ‘Science—the rock foundation of all effort.'

The local wildlife was central to Scott's research program, but the appeal went beyond the scientific. The knee-high Adelie penguins that lived around the base enthralled the men. Cherry later wrote, ‘They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts—and rather portly withal.' Another expedition member was so entranced he wrote a popular book on them, devising a musical score to describe the noises they made.

After the first year of the expedition the film
South with Scott
had top billing for its penguin performances. ‘Comic relief is given by the record of an encounter with penguins,' proclaimed the
Manchester Guardian
, ‘whose appearance on the screen, scurrying to and fro like nothing in the world but a crowd of frock-coated old gentlemen in a sack-race, is very humorous.'
The film's success vindicated Scott's belief that Ponting's work would help raise public interest, and with it much-needed funds for the expedition.

Part of the fascination was the penguins' inability to comprehend their new neighbours. Scott wrote of the problems they caused due to their ‘fatuous conduct':

From the moment of landing on their feet their whole attitude expressed devouring curiosity and a pig-headed disregard for their own safety. They waddle forward, poking their heads to and fro in their usually absurd way, in spite of a string of howling dogs straining to get at them. ‘Hulloa!' they seem to say, ‘here's a game—what do all you ridiculous things want?' And they come a few steps nearer. The dogs make a rush as far as their leashes or harness allow. The penguins are not daunted in the least, but their ruffs go up and they squawk with semblance of anger, for all the world as though they were rebuking a rude stranger—their attitude might be imagined to convey ‘Oh, that's the sort of animal you are; well, you've come to the wrong place—we aren't going to be bluffed and bounced by you,' and then the final fatal steps forward are taken and they come within reach. There is a spring, a squawk, a horrid red patch on the snow, and the incident is closed.

By the early twentieth century penguins had been a focus of scientific research for some years. A German expedition in 1882–1883, one of the first in the region, investigated the king penguins of South Georgia. This work led to some of the first insights into penguins' behaviour and breeding habits, but included the unorthodox method of strapping the birds to posts in leather corsets while in captivity. Unsurprisingly, the British did not continue this practice.

Wilson took charge of much of the biological work, observing the behaviour and characteristics of local wildlife,
collecting samples, dissecting and then analysing them under his microscope. In particular, he had developed a passion for the tall, yellow-breasted emperor penguins on the first
Discovery
expedition. Wilson had been transfixed by the discovery of the first colony of these majestic birds on the other side of Ross Island, at Cape Crozier. Visiting the rookery in early summer, during September 1903, he had been disappointed to find the eggs hatched, implying the penguins had mated and the chicks had been born in winter. A later visit suggested the chicks had a mortality rate of around seventy per cent, which seemed remarkably high to the British scientist.

But it was not merely the life cycle of the emperor penguin that fascinated Wilson: the birds were thought to be something of an early evolutionary offshoot. Their full scientific name is
Aptenodytes forsteri
, in honour of Captain Cook's naturalist, Johann Reinhold Forster, who was one of the first to describe these incredible creatures.
Aptenodytes
means ‘featherless diver', referring to the birds' remarkable underwater abilities and their four layers of feathers, which look something like scales. To Wilson, these scale-like feathers hinted at something important.

In 1861 a specimen of a small dinosaur was discovered in a Bavarian limestone quarry. Called
Archaeopteryx
, the find was a revelation. Detailed feathers were clearly visible on two slabs of limestone, along with a toothed jaw and a long bony tail. It pointed to birds having evolved from flying reptiles. Despite being a deeply religious man Wilson was not closed to scientific ideas that might question his faith, and he commented in one of his many reports from the
Discovery
expedition: ‘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.'

The basis of this was a mistaken idea circulating among some academic circles: during early stages of growth, embryos went through different phases of evolutionary history, giving an insight into the origin of a species. If the theory was correct, Wilson needed embryos from various stages of development. Writing on this winter journey, he observed: ‘If vestiges of teeth are ever to be found in birds of the present day it will be in the embryos of penguins which are the most primitive birds living now, and the Emperor is quite the most interesting of them all.' Wilson felt the penguins might be descended from dinosaurs, and foetuses would provide the test.

Previous visits had shown that if you wanted to collect eggs it had to be done in the dead of the Antarctic winter. Wilson asked Scott for Cherry and the appropriately named ‘Birdie' Bowers—so called because of his astounding beaklike nose—to accompany him in an attempt on Cape Crozier. Scott was probably wary of putting several of his key men at risk but accepted that Wilson had been determined to collect samples since his
Discovery
days. Science aside, there would also be other benefits to the expedition—it would help inform Scott about the equipment and food needed on the Antarctic Plateau the following summer.

Skirting the southern side of Ross Island at the end of June, the three men set off towards the emperor penguin colony. They worked their way there and back over five weeks, much of the time in darkness, battling temperatures as low as -60°C and wind speeds of up to two hundred kilometres per hour. At times it was so cold that the sledge runners failed to melt the surface ice, preventing gliding, and forcing the three men to unclip and carry their load forward by hand. Back at the bases, the others had little idea what Wilson's team was experiencing. Cape Crozier is one of the most exposed places in Antarctica, and even when it is relatively calm in McMurdo Sound the
eastern side of Ross Island can be blowing a gale, or worse. The men were exposed to the worst of Antarctic weather.

And yet it is this same environment that emperor penguins call home. The birds gather in winter, during which the males are presented with an egg that rests precariously on their feet, tucked under a fold of skin to keep it warm. As many as several thousand birds huddle and shuffle in one great spiral, each individual taking a turn in the centre. The huddling is thought to reduce body-weight loss by up to one-half and is remarkably effective at preserving the rookery as a viable population. When the chicks hatch during late winter, sometime between late July and early August, the females take over the care and the males return to the sea for a well-earned feed. By December the young birds can fend for themselves. Cherry later wrote, ‘I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an emperor penguin.'

After three weeks of the most trying conditions the three men somehow reached Cape Crozier, in July. Wilson was surprised to see not one hundred birds, having observed far greater numbers on his previous visit. He estimated only one in four or five of the birds had eggs. During a large storm the men lost their tent and the canvas cover of a stone shelter they had built as a temporary base near the rookery. Fortunately the tent was recovered after the winds temporarily abated, and the men returned home, much chastened, bearing five eggs—though two broke on the journey back to the base.

And yet Wilson wished to return and find out why the number of birds was so low. ‘I see no way of deciding this question except by another visit to the rookery—either this year in September or October or next year by August.'

Cherry does not seem to have been keen on the idea. In his later account of the harrowing expedition,
The Worst Journey in the World
, he wrote, ‘The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to
be appreciated: and anyone would be a fool who went again.'

There had been useful lessons. The rations used on the Cape Crozier trip gave Scott important knowledge about the likely needs of the expedition during its traverse of the plateau, with its anticipated colder temperatures. On the equipment front, the three men had found some of the gear sadly lacking. The woollen layers, due to their absorbent properties, froze easily in the cold and proved difficult to thaw in camp; even hanging the socks in the upper reaches of the tent rarely resulted in them drying for the next day's effort. Scott had a ‘sneaking feeling' Inuit fur clothing might be better, but it ‘would have been quite impossible to have obtained such articles'.

The reindeer-fur-lined sleeping bags were awful: the fur became moist from the sleeper's breath, which froze solid when the bag was vacated, forcing the men to re-enter an ice-filled bag the next time, a process that sometimes took up to three-quarters of an hour. The ice added hugely to the weight of the bags at the end of the Cape Crozier mission, increasing them from around eight to a staggering twenty-one kilograms (a typical contemporary down-filled polar sleeping bag weighs three to four kilograms). On the plus side, testing of a double-lined tent for added warmth was an ‘immense success' and the man-hauling harnesses had a significant fringe benefit. During the Cape Crozier trip Bowers had fallen into a crevasse and found to his relief that he was still connected to the sledge. He was hauled out relatively safely—some comfort to a team facing the rigours of an unknown land.

Towards the end of the 1911 winter Scott laid out his plans for reaching the South Geographic Pole. Drawing on Shackleton's method and travel times, he intended to follow the
Discovery
leader's proven route. Nervous of trusting the ponies, dogs or motor sledges to make it up the Beardmore Glacier, Scott made a series of calculations based on the size of the team—and the time, fuel and food—needed to support an assault on the pole. Scott was all too aware of the severe conditions on the 3000-metre-high plateau and, guided by his past experience, made it clear that the chance of a bad season was high. Conscious of the likely October blasts of cold, Scott intended to start south at the beginning of November. He wanted to reach the upper plateau early in December and ideally reach the South Geographic Pole around 22 December, at the summer solstice. As the men travelled south the sun's daily arc across the sky would flatten, so that by the time the expedition members reached the pole it would be tracking across the sky through the day at a level 23° above the horizon, with virtually no dip in elevation. The team could use a theodolite to fix its location to an accuracy of around 1.5 kilometres, more than sufficient to claim the pole. He estimated a total travel time of 144 days, returning to base sometime around 27 March 1912, at the extreme end of summer.