Antarctic Discovery
Frustrated by poor weather conditions during the last days of our allotted time around the Antarctic peninsula, our captain and expedition team decide to head back north and around to the leeward islands and in particular James Ross Island. They take a rare opportunity of having melted ice through the Antarctic Sound to get to the Weddell Sea and to explore areas that are seldom visited. As a result, all of the crew are as excited as the guests.
The realisation that we have spent over two weeks here in a super powered technologically advanced ship and have only scratched a tiny, tiny portion of this continent brings home its utter vastness. Another inescapable truth is the hostility of the environment which again, we have only witnessed the tiniest iceberg tip of. It is surreal to see it from the coddled insulation of the boat whilst carrying the knowledge that if one was left behind for only a few hours, certain death would follow.
On a planet so explored and populated, it is a weird and astounding thing to have a piece of terra firma equivalent in size to the USA and Mexico combined with nothing on it but some wildlife and ice that averages a thickness of one mile deep. For so long in man’s history, the seventh continent (or sixth or eighth depending on how picky you want to be in defining these things) remained an undiscovered enigma. The stuff of dreams and fairytales.
in between times of over pampered dining and chilling in the outdoor jacuzzi, I have filled up my head with some of the place’s history and how early pioneers endeavoured to uncover its frosty secrets. Proportionally, the size of this new wisdom gained is probably no bigger than an acorn to a mighty oak but you’ve got to start somewhere right?
In the beginning
Like everything, and according to Fat Boy Slim, ‘It began in Africa’. Well, kind of. It was actually what was left of prehistoric Gondwana once It began to split apart around 180 million years ago when, one by one, vast blocks tore away starting with Africa and then South America. What remained drifted slowly southward to become Antarctica and Australasia. And there the new continent sat minding its own business and gradually getting colder and colder as the polar ice caps formed to eventually, some 3 million years ago, sweep away the last remnants of the vegetation and life forms that matched it to its erstwhile continental sisters.
Due to the exclusive nature of the sea flow called the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, advancing glaciers from multiple ice ages were prevented from reaching other major landmasses and so, unlike its polar opposite, the migration of terrestrial mammals such as polar bears didn’t happen. So there the continent lay in splendid isolation with only birds, penguins and seals to keep it company.
I see no ships
It is thought that is was those clever boffins of Greek philosophy that, right after figuring out that the world was more or less spherical (apologies to any flat earthers that will find this statement offensive), considered that there must be some southerly land mass to balance out the North. They consulted with Mystic Meg for some naming ideas but, struggling with any originality, they ended up with a bit of a cop out of just calling it the opposite to the Arkitos (Greek for ‘bear’) which had been assigned it’s tag from alignment to the star constellation Ursa Major (aka the ‘Great Bear’). So, translated from the original name of Antarkitos, the continent’s name means; ‘Bit of land that we don’t know exists but let’s suppose that it does and we are going to name it after the thing on the opposite side of the the round-ish thing called the globe where there is a place called opposite the bear which refers to a group of stars that if you have had a lot of wine and you squint a bit looks like it might be a bear’. It’s all Greek to me.
We found calm waters around Snow Hill Bay where a whole new landscape awaited. Seldom, or perhaps never visited before, walking on ‘Yeeha Beach’ truly felt like discovery.
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The slowly evolving penguins of the frozen continent continued life oblivious to all of this and would probably still be bothered by nothing more than ‘Oi! that’s my stone’ and ‘Oh shit there’s a seal’ had man’s insatiable appetite for world domination and killing whales for food not been given the power of ships that were evolving at a much faster rate.
Early sailor boy adventurers of the 15th and 16th centuries slowly worked out for sure what the Greeks had realised before breakfast on day one of composing their Haynes Manual of How the Earth Works and reported back to base that if you keep sailing in one direction for long enough, you end up back where you started. Entertaining the reality of a lost southern continent was still a sign of insanity though and the place was given the fairy tale name of Terra Australis Incognita giving all power to the flat earthers who maintained that this round world bollocks was just a trick and even if it wasn’t, you could still drop off the bottom if you weren’t careful. After all, Ushuaia wasn’t called ‘Fin del Mondo’ for nothing.
Captain James T Kirk’s (more commonly known as James Cook) voyages of the southern oceans in the 1770s made him famous for being really really nasty to indigenous people in New Zealand (the flightless Moa bird was pretty pissed of with the Māoris before that but that’s a whole other story), but he also did a bit of sailing around where no man had gone before and he was the first guy to cross the Antarctic circle. He spotted loads of floating ice islands and some had bits of rock embedded into them. He almost definitely realised that this meant that there was some land somewhere nearby but didn’t want to admit defeat so went back home and said ‘no man will ever venture further south than I have done and the lands that may lie to the south will never be explored’.
It’s life Jim but not as we know it
Such a statement from old Cookie was only ever going to lead to a whole bunch of other people trying to prove him wrong and by 1840 one explorer after another had spotted proper land in amongst the ice and so it was that some 2000 years after the ink was long dry on the papyrus, modern man had got the proof they needed to convince everyone that those Greeks were damned clever chaps even though they were wrong about the bear bit. It was also concluded that there was miles and miles of bugger all there and, unless you wanted penguin for dinner every night, there was no point in going back. Besides, everyone had had a go at naming stuff like islands, rocks and big lumps of ice so there’s no point in going back for that either.
Wrong again! Turns out that there were loads more bits of barren rock just waiting for a name and, more importantly, there was a spot on the globe where no man had ever ever been before: the South Pole.
So, with the help of the new fangled invention of steam powered ships, a whole gang of new explorers set about the task of being the first man to stick a flag Pole into the hallowed spot and in 1897, the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration began. National bragging rights and fame for all eternity were at stake as well of course as a load of economic wealth and scientific development which meant that it was pretty easy to get funds for Flashman like adventures to the icy southern climes.
The gruelling reality of the often three year long expeditions though was not quite as glamorous and actually, there was way more chance of getting frostbite, scurvy or getting fatally stuck in ice than unfurling your flag and returning home in time for tiffin and a shower of glory. They kept going back though and between 1897 and 1909 these were the key ones with how close they got:
An extract from one of the many on board lectures. Thankfully they were streamed to the cabin TV which meant that one could avoid the crowded lecture hall and the Americans within it who could never resist letting out a whoop when anyone said USA…
None of these made it to the Pole though and although the enthusiasm for funding waned, the bitter rivalry between the pioneers themselves intensified with blame, mistrust and devious tactics becoming commonplace. This built up to the crescendo of the epic and much documented race to the Pole in 1911 between Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. Who won is of no doubt but why it all went wrong for the runner up is still much debated and a quick look on line will give you diametrically opposing views on who the villains and heroes were. Here is my conclusion from what I have read and heard in the last few weeks including the excellent book Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge:
Background
Both men had been part of separate expeditions to the Antarctic; Scott on the Discovery and Amundsen on the Belgica. Both had travelled with other key players in the game but with different outcomes and whilst Amundsen had remained close to the influential Fridtjof Nansen, Scott famously fell out with Shackleton and forever remained a bitter rival. As a prequel to the Pole race, Shackleton had laid down the gauntlet by getting within 90 miles of the hallowed spot only to realise that the mission was unviable. He had shown the presence of mind to turn back and save his life and the life of his companions.
Fridtjof Nansen in 1890 or is it Rik Mayall as Lord Flashheart?
Strategy and character
Norwegians come with an innate self confidence that can only arise from a certainty of being accurate and correct in all they do. At the same time this race of people manage to pull off a modest demeanour that is inoffensive to all that they meet (unless your name is Scott). I guess that if you know absolutely that you are right about everything that you do then you don’t need to ram it down everyone else’s throats. Just be at one with what you know and if others don’t get it well that’s their lookout. This certainly seemed to be the case with Amundsen who built a team of equals around him to take on the single minded target of creating and winning a race for discovery. The fact that there might be someone else trying to compete was immaterial if you know absolutely that you have the best people around you, the best strategy, the best equipment and most of all, you have 100% belief that you are going to reach the goal ahead of any other contender.
Guile and cunning were also pretty useful tools which Amundsen expertly deployed when he diverted the destiny of his planned expedition to plant the first national flag at the North Pole and headed south instead. After all, what was the point in going to the North Pole when the Americans had already got there? There was no loss of face because clearly that was too easy a mission! There was no fear about letting down his sponsors either because, in my estimation, he knew that any potential grumblings about a lack of scientific exploration would be quickly overlooked when he would triumphantly return home as a national hero having successfully stuck a Norwegian flag at the last spot on earth that no man had been to before.
His single minded aim to reach to South Pole was ruthlessly planned and Amundsen had the good sense to not only accept the lending of Nansen’s ship but also to take his advice that the only way to succeed was to take dogs to pull the sleds across the polar dessert. He set sail in the Fram with enough dogs to get him to the pole but also enough to kill and eat on the way back thus saving space for more nourishing vitamin C rich food and ensuring the speediest transit possible. His crew included expert dog handlers as well as an Olympic champion skier. Why wouldn’t it?
Scott, on the other hand, was weighed down with a whole load of expectation arising from British Empirical guilt and hampered by a vacuous need to be loved and admired. Team members were picked on past favourites and an old boys network of purchased preference. After all, it was better to have someone their because they knew your uncle Tommy rather than a bunch of experts that had spent their whole life in an icy climate wasn’t it? He was also a victim of perceived past failures to his paymasters who had grumbled that the Discovery voyage had not only failed to reach to pole but also hadn’t come back with enough scientific data. So he left out the superior exploration skills that Shackleton had to offer because he had fallen out with him, he had a flawed ship in the Terra Nova which leaked like a sieve from the day it left Cardiff due to poor riveting work of additional ice plates and, most importantly, he had an astonishing lack of clarity in what he was trying to achieve. He also had a shit strategy for how to get across the ice hedging his bets on some ponies, some new fangled motor sleds even though they hadn’t worked for Shackleton and some dogs but nobody who knew how to handle them.
You really need to be doing stuff in the polar summer to have any chance
The short falls of Scott’s strategy in the choice of transport was clear to him at the end of the first polar summer that was used by both expeditions to set their respective base camp depots in readiness for a viable escape route back from the pole in the following year. The motor sleds either ended up in the sea trying to get off the Terra Nova or broke down, the dogs were good but impractical because they always arrived anywhere ahead of anyone else as well as being unruly and the ponies couldn’t cope with the cold or walking across the snow. He was too sentimental to see the sense in eating the donkeys when they needed to be put out of their misery and constantly whinged about the violent nature of the dogs.
There is debate about when Scott knew about his competitors switch of polar destinations and perhaps he thought that it was just a wind up until the two parties crossed paths on the Ross ice shelf. Apparently oblivious to the telegram that Amundsen had sent from Australia stating his intent, Scott was angered by the brashness of his competitor and his perceived lack of sportsmanship at blatantly making the story into a future Hollywood box office blockbuster. It just wasn’t cricket and it was not fair!
Beryl has him wanting to go and box ears but instead he sulked off to his winter camp of wood shacks and tents leaving the Norwegian team snug in their large ice town of igloos and underground chambers where the ski champion spent months honing the skis for extra speed.
The routes to the Pole
End game
September 1911 came around and Amundsen was ready to charge knowing full well the importance of getting back before the harsh winter months returned again. He was too impatient though and returned to base camp six weeks later. He set out again on October 20th with a nine man and one hundred dog team on the shortest route possible even though it was unchartered. He dropped down to five men and half of the dogs for the last leg and, in spite of being held up for eleven days in bad weather at the 3000m ridge, made it to the Pole on December 14th 1911 full of dog and vitamin C. He had time to leave a cheery note for Scott and spend a full two days getting the exact spot of the Pole buttoned down by using a mercury level to measure the angle to the sun which was at a 360° constant before heading back to base with a diminishing number of dogs and a full tummy. He returned to Framheim by 25th January with a fit team and a few anxious looking dogs well before the Polar winter started kicking in.
Meanwhile, Scott waited until the better certainty of decent weather when his ponies might cope with the conditions and finally set out for the Pole on 1st November with twenty seven men and everything that they could carry. Although the length of the journey was sixty miles longer than the crew of the Fram, it was on a route that had already been mapped by Shackleton and therefore theoretically safer.
It must have been a real bummer for each team not knowing how the other was doing but from the laborious notes made by Scott (that were clearly written in a partial manner for a later audience) it seems to me that he already knew he’d lost as he continued to moan about everything from bad sportsmanship, his team (that he picked), the ponies and the bad weather. Perhaps to build in an excuse for later, he maintained the pretence of the importance of scientific discovery to the end. If it’s not a race I can win, it’s not a race! (I have made this up but it is an implied truth). He crawled along at 10 miles a day compared to the speedy 15 miles a day that his opposites were achieving in a fraction of the time resulting in an inevitably later date of arrival to the goal.
The mortally fatal error for the British team was made on 4th January 1912 when Scott decided to take five men forward to the end and not the four that had been planned all along. By this time, the ponies were all done for and there was no choice but to proceed on foot and to man haul the heavy sleds. It’s such a poor joke to realise that his team consisted of a guy who didn’t have skis, another that suffered perennially from snow blindness and one that had a dodgy leg from an injury sustained in the Boar war. Scott must surely have known that he was sealing the fate of him and his men.
They did, however, make it to the end on 17th January only to find that they had been thoroughly beaten. “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.” He didn’t bother to check the accuracy of Amundsen’s findings and there is some dispute that tragically, he hadn’t actually found the right flag pole!
Disconsolate and malnourished, the British team started the long journey home but, as we all know, never made it back. A mischievous collection of factors hampered progress including bad weather, having to haul everything by hand, scurvy arising from poor and inadequate diet, lack of fuel at depot points (in fact it had evaporated in the freezing weather), injury to one of his team in a crevice fall and crucially, the misplacement of the last depot called One Tonne. Edgar Evans died of his injuries before the remaining four were stopped by blizzards just 11 miles short of One Tonne and they got no further. Sometime around March 25th 1912, Scott, Wilson and Bowers perished with Oates having gone for his infamous short walk eight days earlier on his 32nd birthday.
When the remains were later found, over 150lbs of fossils were found with them. Was it really worth lugging that back to an early grave?
How they are remembered
To this day, the British posh bods still grumble about foul play and how unfair it is that some Johnny Foreigner queered the pitch. As for the Norwegians? I don’t think that I need to do more than point out the name of our ship and it’s sister ship The Fritdjof Nansen…
Trying to recreate the life threatening experience of the pioneering South Pole explorers is a tricky thing to achieve when it is so counter intuitive to the bubble wrap health and safety culture of the modern world. The excursions laid on by Hurtigruten try hard though and the nearest that it got for me was with the snow shoe trek where they did manage to conjure up some feeling of isolation in the white wilderness. We clomped clumsily in alien plastic footwear across the virgin snow in the face of a bitter northerly wind and found what felt like hitherto unseen rocky inlets and a bunch of penguins that maybe weren’t quite so used to the red coated foreign invaders. At one point the low cloud closed in on us and visibility dropped. Luckily, we had ELEVEN! In our group who with a mournful foghorn bellow managed to keep the group into a cohesive huddle.
Interest in the frozen continent was pretty subdued after that with nothing more for anyone to prove, no more bits of rock to put a name to and nothing to really gain from freezing your nuts off. So, not much happened apart from a few scientists hanging out in corrugated tin huts for years at a time trying to get away from their respective mothers in law.
The Antarctic Treaty was signed by 55 Countries in 1959 with the noble goal of declaring that ‘Antarctica will be used for peaceful purposes only’ and ever since, no single country has laid claim to the frozen waste. Didn’t stop the Americans sticking a Star Spangled Banner at the Pole though. Whoop! Whoop!
The British base at Stonington Island last used in 1970s