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A History of the Turn-of-the-Century Pursuit of the South Pole
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1903 On New Year's Day, after eight weeks of grueling travel by dog and man-hauling, Scott, Shackleton and Wilson turned northwards away from the South Pole "reluctantly forced to confess that all [their] trouble had been in vain." These three men of the Discovery Expedition, though, had, in Scott's words, "made a greater advance towards a pole of the earth than has ever yet been achieved by a sledge party." Their ordeal, however, was far from over.
On the other side of the world, on 16 June, Amundsen set sail with a crew of six aboard the Gjoa on a double quest, to cross the Northwest Passage by sea and to relocate the Magnetic North Pole. By 1905, he would succeed in both his goals. What the Eskimos taught him would serve him well later in the Antarctic.
That same year, after having heroically saved his men while suffering a wounded leg in the Boer War, Oates was recovering in the luxury his class afforded him, enjoying his greatest passions, hunting and horses. Yet, he seemed to long for a sense of purpose.
Meanwhile, in June, as Midshipman R.N.R. and 2nd Mate on the Loch Torridon, Bowers' ship would achieve a record time across the Pacific. The newspaper San Francisco Call reported: "From Newcastle to San Francisco the big ship swept her way in forty-five days . . . She crossed the Pacific in almost steamship time, and her appearance off the port sent every mariner along the beach into a reminiscent trance, which gave birth to old stories of the days when it took nerve to be a sailorman." Bowers would later prove to be an invaluable sailor on the Terra Nova.
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1909 "The end is in sight. We can only go for three more days at the most, for we are weakening rapidly." On 9 January, only 97 miles from the South Pole, Shackleton with Wild, Marshall and Adams, the Nimrod Expedition's Southern Party, reached the farthest south of any expedition yet. Hungry and exhausted, it would be two months before they were back on the ship.
Six days after Shackleton's party turned north, Professor T. Edgeworth David, Dr. A. F. Mackay and Douglas Mawson of the Nimrod's Northern Party reached the South Magnetic Pole on foot. They still had, however, a more than 400-mile race to safety. On 5 February, after flagging down the ship with a rucksack, they had tea, a bath and dinner. David wrote, "None but those whose bed for months has been on snow and ice can realise the luxury of a real bunk, blankets and pillow, in a snug little cabin."
In March of that year, excited to have read that Shackleton had not made the Pole, Scott announced to Crean, then his coxwain, "I think we'd better have a shot next." Six months after, Scott's next Antarctic Expedition would be officially announced.
A few weeks later, Bowers had a similar response to Shackleton's effort. Then with the Royal Indian Marines in the Persian Gulf, Bowers thanked his sister in a letter "for the cuttings about [Shackleton's Nimrod] South Polar Expedition. I thought it splendid. My only regret was that I was not one of them. If only they will leave the South Pole itself alone for a bit they may give me a chance. Don't laugh!"
On 6 April, Robert Peary, a fifty-six-year-old retired U.S. Navy commander, and Matthew Henson, his African-American servant and companion, reportedly reached the North Pole.
With Peary's conquest of the Pole, the thoughts of adventurers worldwide, Norwegian, French, Japanese, turned southward -- including Amundsen's.
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1911 On 13 December, forty-three days into the Terra Nova Expedition's journey to the South Pole and ten days since he had started man-hauling, Bowers wrote, "I have never pulled so hard, or so nearly crushed my inside into my backbone by the everlasting jerking with all my strength on the canvas round my unfortunate tummy. We are all in the same boat." The next day Meares and Dmitri turned back north with the dogs, leaving three teams of man-haulers continuing southwards, and Wilson reported in his diary that most of them had "lips very cracked by sun -- bleeding and sore -- nose and face also blistered and scabby." Five of them were yet a month from the Pole.
On that very same day, Amundsen and his Fram party were standing at the South Pole. Despite their great accomplishment, Amundsen wrote that "no man has ever stood at the spot so diametrically opposed to the object of his real desires." He could not forget what Peary had taken from him in 1909, the North Pole.
The next morning, on the summer journey to Granite Harbour with other members of the Terra Nova Expedition, Gran woke his tentmate Taylor to report that he had dreamt of a telegram reading: "Amundsen reached Pole 15 December." Taylor recorded the date and time. In a few months back at Cape Evans, they would be looking for Bowers, Evans, Oates, Scott and Wilson every evening. On 10 April 1912, Gran would write finally, "The polar party have still not returned to Hut Point; their fate must be sealed."
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In January 1911 after their long ship journey, the Terra Nova Expedition members enjoyed the bright and relatively warm Antarctic summer weather at Cape Evans despite the hard work and long hours of setting up camp. "Men washed in pools made by the melted snow and drank from cupped hands the clear water bubbling up between the rocks." Ponting, according to Scott, was "enraptured and uses expressions which in anyone else and alluding to any other subject might be deemed extravagant." In Ponting's own words: "It filled one with a sensation of delight to throw back the arms, expand the chest, and, opening wide the lungs, inhale great drafts of the sweet exhilarating air. It made one thrill and tingle to be alive, to have health and strength, and to feel the marvel of it all." (Note that Ponting had been especially seasick.) Teddy "the Skipper" Evans put it simply: "Those were such happy days."
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Amundsen and the members of the Fram Expedition
Olav Bjaaland (front left) wrote about the journey to the Pole: "By letting thoughts wander in over the [Barrier] surface, one finds oneself in a melancholy mood. One thinks of what is to come, the hardships one is going to face, the use one will be, and if we can get there before the Englishmen -- who are surely burning with the same ambitions."
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One day Wilson at Cape Evans "saw the Irishmen sitting smoking on the provision cases outside the hut, as though outside their own shabeen in Kerry. Crean, Forde and Keohane are all Irishmen, but especially Crean who is a delightful creature." Thomas Crean was a courageous and tireless member of the Terra Nova Expedition. On their return from the Pole he and William Lashly, disobeying Teddy Evans' orders to leave him behind, saved Evans' life and were both later awarded the Albert Medal. Soon after arriving home from the expedition, Crean bought himself out of the navy, giving up his pension, for the opportunity to join Shackleton on the Endurance Expedition. He was one of the five picked for the dangerous 800-mile journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
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Marshall, Wild and Shackleton on the Nimrod Expedition turning around a mere 97 miles from the Pole, 9 January 1909. Shackleton figured that his wife would rather have "a live donkey for a husband than a dead lion."
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Captain Robert Falcon Scott."Sometimes it seems to me that hard work is the panacea for all ills, moral and physical."
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An unknown from the Royal Indian Marines, Lieutenant Henry "Birdie" Bowers was initially hired to stay with the ship, but soon after setting sail Scott decided that Bowers, frequently described by Scott as a "perfect treasure," would go ashore in Antarctica. One visitor to the ship in dock described Bowers as "a little man in the hold, rotund of figure and very damp and pink as to his face, with tunic unbuttoned and a peak cap tilted on the back of his head, stowing cases all day long as if his life depended on it."
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Regrettably, Scott did not have Captain Lawrence Edward Grace "Titus" Oates, an avid horseman and a former cavalry officer in the Boer War, select the transport he was to be in charge of from Lyttleton onwards. Instead, Cecil Meares, unfamiliar with horses, had the difficult job of choosing the expedition's ponies. He followed Scott's instructions to buy only white horses because Shackleton had had better luck in his 1907 Nimrod Expedition with the lighter ones. Later, Anton Omelchenko, a Russian jockey from the Vladivostok race course and a member of the expedition, described the vendor as having left "with a plenty big smile." Although Scott was confident in Oates' ability to care for the ponies, up until the end, he erroneously dismissed Oates' apprehension about their condition as groundless pessimism.
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The Terra Nova of the 1910-1913 British Antarctic Expedition artfully photographed by Herbert Ponting. Scott's second-in-command, Teddy Evans, described her as "the largest and strongest of the old Scotch whalers." However, on 2 December 1910, this veteran of the Arctic and Antarctic, overloaded in Bowers' words with "garbage fore and aft," came near to sinking in a force 10 gale.
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Plan of Scott's Cape Evans' Hut. Apsley "Cherry" Cherry-Garrard, editor of The South Polar Times, (Shackleton was the first editor during Scott's Discovery Expedition) wrote that "probably anyone arriving here from England would be surprised to find how much work there is to be done during a long and dark winter. There are ten ponies to be exercised every day and they seem to get fresher every time they go out, and seals have to be killed and skinned. There is constant work on the sea-ice, collecting fish and other animals for scientific work, taking soundings and measuring the tides. With the care of the dogs and ponies, meteorological observations, night watch for Aurora, working up the results of last season's sledging and preparation for the coming season, there is not much spare time . . . And so we live very comfortable . . . and we are all as fit as we can be."
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"We had heard that Scott, relying on his own experience, and that of Shackleton, had come to the conclusion that Manchurian ponies were superior to dogs on the Barrier," wrote Amundsen. "Among those who were acquainted with the Eskimo dog, I do not suppose I was the only one who was startled on first hearing this." Although Amundsen and Scott had in common a distaste for the wasteful killing of animals, whether seal, penguin, pony or dog, Scott was particularly troubled by the suffering of the dogs on the Discovery Expedition, moving him on his last expedition to depend more on ponies and "cars." Nevertheless, many dogs and ponies were sacrificed to make it to the Pole. "The theosophists teach something about us after death coming back in one or another form," wrote Helmer Hanssen of the Fram Expedition, "and I for my part devoutly hope that I do not come again as a draft dog on polar expeditions."
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Bowers (standing on chair), Oates and Meares had the top bunks of what was known affectionately as "The Tenements" by the members of Scott's 1910 Terra Nova Expedition. Cherry-Garrard (barely visible) and Dr. Atkinson were in the lower bunks. Soon after arriving at Cape Evans, finding that no more individual cubicles would fit in the hut, Scott instructed Bowers to build a bulkhead of cases shutting off the officers' space from the men's. Bowers, Oates, Atkinson, Meares and Cherry-Garrard are "all special friends and have already made their dormitory very habitable," wrote Scott. There grew a battle of wits between these five and the scientific staff with the former declaring "Down with Science, Sentiment and the Fair Sex." Moreover, Oates, disgusted by the luxury of a makeshift curtain at the entrance to their shared cubicle, accused Frank Debenham and Griffith Taylor, the geologists, and Tryggve Gran, the Norwegian ski expert, of living in an opium den.
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Snow-bridged crevasses viewed from a more comfortable distance than did the polar explorers. Among their numerous incidents with crevasses, Wilson described his return north from depot laying. He and Cherry were taking one team of dogs following Meares and Scott with another. As Scott took a short cut over a crevassed area close to White Island, Wilson witnessed Meares' and Scott's team disappear. "They looked exactly like rats running down a hole -- only I saw no hole."
(Cecil Meares, multilingual, mysterious and well-traveled in Siberia, Manchuria, India, Tibet, China, Japan and Burma, had likely been involved with British Intelligence before being put in charge of the Terra Nova Expedition's dogs.)
(The Terra Nova, Bowers, Dog and Bunks photographs are copyright Arthur Mitchell 1999, all rights reserved.)
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