1912 (13 page)

In Melbourne, en route to Antarctica, Scott received a telegram from Amundsen that deeply unsettled the British team: ‘Beg inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic.' The Norwegians were taking Nansen's ship south.

The cold blast of the Southern Ocean storm hit the
Terra Nova
as soon as it had left the relatively safe haven of New Zealand. The winds of the Furious Fifties threatened the expedition's survival almost before it had started. Men bailed frantically and animals looked on wild-eyed as fierce waves frequently swamped the deck. Supplies and equipment were thrown from side to side. All hands were called to secure the lashings on the small wooden vessel's deck and to work the pumps as the crew struggled to keep the vessel afloat. The British ship was seriously overloaded and there was a real risk it would flounder. Several days of desperate work by all hands managed to keep the vessel afloat, and the
Terra Nova
was saved, but it was a close call.

Scott had set out far too early from New Zealand. The idea was to quickly break through the sea ice, and lay food and equipment depots across the Great Ice Barrier during the southern summer, in preparation for the assault on the pole the following season. Finding the edge of the pack ice on 9 December 1910, the ship then took three weeks to get through.

Even now it is hard to predict when the ice has weakenened enough for sea travel. In 1912 the best you could do was to look at what others had managed on their journeys. Shackleton had broken through in just two days in 1908, but it had been relatively late in the season and the continuous sunlight over several months had done the hard work of softening the ice.

Reaching Ross Island on 4 January, the British decided to set up their winter headquarters in McMurdo Sound. Opting for a small promontory fourteen kilometres north of Hut Point, the site of the
Discovery
base, Scott named their home Cape Evans after his second-in-command. The
Terra Nova
could not pull alongside, though, because of the remaining sea ice. Instead, over the following eight days, the supplies and equipment needed to support a team of twenty-three men for a minimum of two years were unloaded and hauled two kilometres on to shore. Apart from the loss of one of the three motorised sledges, which fell through the sea ice when being taken off the
Terra Nova
, the operation was completed efficiently. By 18 January the hut was up and the men had moved into their new quarters.

During these early preparations Scott discussed his thoughts on the Great Ice Barrier and its relationship to King Edward VII Land with the leader of the Eastern Party, the naval officer Victor Campbell. Scott was convinced the ice to the west of what he called Balloon Bight was afloat; to the east, he argued, the ice most probably sat on land. Scott saw the bay as effectively a permanent feature that would be available to the
Terra Nova
for dropping off Campbell and his team—implying Shackleton
had played fast and loose in his aborted attempt to land there in 1908. The plan was for the Eastern Party to spend the winter in the bay and explore King Edward VII Land the following year.

Reaching their destination on 3 February, Campbell had bad news. ‘We were off the place Balloon Bight should have been, but there was no sign of it. Our sights showed we were south of the old Barrier edge in 1902. About midnight we stood looking into a large bay with a great number of whales blowing.' Priestley, the team geologist, felt vindicated on Shackleton's behalf: the bay was unstable. More importantly, the British found the
Fram
anchored there.

Until the British saw the Norwegian ship, it was not clear where Roald Amundsen was heading; some had thought the Weddell Sea. Now it was evident he was in the same region, and it completely threw Campbell's plans. The British party leader, though, was not convinced by where the Norwegian had placed his winter quarters: ‘We went over to his hut and had coffee. He has put it up about 2 miles from the ship in what I think not a very good place as it is on the E side of the bay and weak pressure ice extends south of it.'

Over coffee Amundsen offered the British the chance to stay and continue their work. A dejected Campbell felt this would not do and opted to leave. Falling back on Scott's orders—‘Should you be unable to land in the region of King Edward's Land you will be at liberty to go the region of Robertson Bay [the immediate west of Cape Adare] after communicating with Cape Evans'—Campbell returned to base, left word of his discovery and took off north, to Borchgrevink's old base at the tip of Victoria Land. Campbell's eastern team had become the Northern Party.

Meanwhile, Scott was laying depots across the Great Ice Barrier for the attempt on the pole next summer. Tins of food, tea, cocoa, oil, horse fodder, spare sledges and matches were all
being cached in a succession of spots across the ice. The plan was to reach as far as 80°S, where the aptly named One Ton Depot would be a major store for the returning parties the following year. However, on the journey south it was clear to Scott that some of the horses were struggling. Oates suggested killing the weakest pony and pushing on. Scott seems to have been a little squeamish and wanted to preserve them for the main effort next season. The overruled cavalry officer responded, ‘Sir I'm afraid you'll come to regret not taking my advice.' ‘Regret it or not,' Scott supposedly retorted, ‘I have taken my decision as a Christian gentleman.' The southernmost depot was laid fifty-seven kilometres short of their target latitude, and the expedition returned to Cape Evans for winter.

Time on the ice had given the men a chance to evaluate their leader. While all recognised his enthusiasm for science, not all were impressed. When out of the room, Scott was commonly referred to as ‘the Owner'. Debenham, in a letter to his mother, summed up his thoughts. ‘I am afraid I am very disappointed in him, tho' my faith died very hard,' he wrote. ‘There's no doubt he can be very nice and the interest he takes in our scientific work is immense, he is also a fine sledger himself and as organiser is splendid. But there I'm afraid one must stop. His temper is very uncertain and leads him to absurd lengths even in simple arguments…What he decides is often enough the right thing I expect, but he loses all control of his tongue and makes us all feel wild…we are, with the exception of the Owner, a very happy family.'

Scientific study continued apace through the winter, even though the new research sometimes made for uncomfortable reading. After working up his field notes from Victoria Land, Debenham wrote: the ‘results are not altogether satisfactory. The fact is we trusted too much to the accuracy of the existing maps. Griff [Taylor] got into a mess with The Owner
by declaring that the “Discovery” mapping was a disgrace.' But, when they were not pointing out flaws, both geologists also unearthed wild swings in the continent's past climate. Sand-filled cracked mudflats within the Beacon Sandstone testified to hot, dry conditions, while rocks of a different geology to the local bedrock were found scattered on surrounding slopes, transported there by an ice sheet that had been far larger in the past. Alongside these efforts, the other scientists on the expedition worked on a range of projects that tried to capture the essence of Antarctica: the formation of ice, ocean temperatures and saltiness, tidal variations, the biology—including parasites—on land and in the sea, variations in the Earth's magnetism, and, of course, the never-ending changes in the weather.

Edward Wilson kept an eye out and offered friendly counsel.

On the value of weather observations
Hints to Travellers
counsels earnestly, ‘Travellers may make useful meteorological observations for three distinct purposes: 1st, for contouring, or determining elevation above the sea; 2nd, for extending our knowledge of climate; 3rd, for aiding synoptic investigation; while for their own daily knowledge of the weather, they will be useful and interesting.' Ideally, measurements were to be made at ‘intervals of 12, 8, 6, or 4 hours, always dividing the 24 hours into equal parts'. Thanks to Simpson's efforts, Scott remarked, there was a ‘first class meteorological station' connected by wires to the hut, allowing it to be monitored by ‘a profusion of self-recording instruments, electric batteries and switchboards, whilst the ear caught the ticking of many clocks, the gentle whine of a motor and occasionally the trembling note of an electric bell', all complementing the observations made by expedition members around the base.

These advances greatly reduced the amount of time the poor observer had to spend outside and, in turn, improved the efficiency of a team with limited staff and many observations to make. Simpson, for instance, was also in charge of the magnetic observations and would spend several hours each day at a dedicated hut set up for taking the various different measurements at internationally agreed times.

The conditions in Antarctica often pushed the equipment to its limits, and breakages were common. As Simpson wrote in his diary, ‘Every hour or so during a blizzard I have to go out, mount a ladder to the roof of the hut, remove the vane head, clean out the snow, and replace it. With gusts reaching 70 miles an hour and the air full of drift, this is no pleasant matter.' In spite of the risks he faced, Simpson took Antarctic meteorology into the twentieth century.

Since Scott's first expedition it had been noticed that the clouds of volcanic gases given off by Mount Erebus would often drift in a different direction to the wind on the lower slopes. Erebus is effectively an enormous weathervane, pointing out the direction of blow at its 3800-metre summit. The limitation of all weathervanes, though, is their fixed position. If you want to know the conditions at different levels through the atmosphere, Erebus is of little use. And yet these observations were needed to help answer vital questions: why did the continent remain so cold during the long winter, and how did the Antarctic fit into the world's weather systems?

To get around the problem at Cape Evans, Simpson released hydrogen-filled balloons, to which he attached thermometers and barometers that were capable of taking continuous measurements. Balloon runs were only possible in calm weather; when all was ready, a slow-burning match was lit under the hydrogen, supposedly safely. As the balloon rose it was followed by a telescope, providing wind direction. When the match burned
away, the instruments fell to the ground, connected to a thread held by the operator, so they could be collected later without too much trouble. At least, that was the idea—in reality it was rarely easy. Erebus helped a little, offering indications to the observers. If clouds of smoke were moving quickly, it meant the balloons would be nigh on impossible to retrieve, and no attempt to launch was made. But if a balloon did go up, the subsequent falling equipment would often disappear over the horizon, invariably leaving Simpson and his assistant with precious few measurements.

By the end of winter 1911 the system was suitably refined, and ten balloon runs were successfully recovered. The results were startling. In contrast to summer, where there was an expected fall in temperature with height, in winter the temperature rose from the surface up to the first thousand metres, then fell gradually. As Simpson put it: ‘if the base is cooled, a layer of cold air forms there which has no tendency to rise and warmer layers rest upon it.' The winter experienced an extreme temperature inversion, and the reason was the brightness of the surface. ‘Of the solar energy which falls within the Antarctic Circle, such a large proportion is lost by direct reflection from the snow that the remainder is not sufficient to raise the temperature of the air to the freezing point before the solstice is reached, and the energy commences to decrease,' Simpson surmised.

Essentially, during the summer the heat from the sun warms the snow relative to the overlying air, but during the poorly lit winter the angle of the incoming rays is so low that most is rapidly lost to space. The result is a counter-intuitive rise in winter temperature over the Antarctic continent. The pervasively cold temperatures first described on the
Discovery
expedition now had a scientific basis.