The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (20 page)

It is exactly the same as when you are telling a friend a dream. You describe a series of incidents, like the plot of a film. I was in that place and I said this, and then … But the same series of incidents, involving the same people, can be a different dream. It is the atmosphere that is the point. And how to convey that? Feebly you say: The dream had such a strong flavour, it was so compelling, don't you see? Really, it was like … but what shall I say? It had a quite unmistakable flavour or taste, and whenever I find myself in a dream with that atmosphere, then I know that …

And that is the end of it. No communication possible, unless someone else had the same dream, and that you have to take on trust. In waking life, of course, people did have the same dream, quite unarguably, went through the same events,
experienced the same atmosphere
; so when you say,
Do you remember?
indeed they do, you both do, and you may well exchange a smile that says how impossible it would be to explain that atmosphere to someone who did not live through it.

The records of the two expeditions, Norwegian and British, are of two different emotional events, from different climates of experience. Hard to believe they took place at the same time, in the same place, and with ostensibly more or less the same goals, equipped with men of the same type, many of them known widely as professional explorers, men who knew each other or of each other, and who respected each other's achievements.

But, first, those aspects of the British expedition which at the time were not noticed or questioned at all; for I believe those biases that are the result of the unconscious assumptions of a time are precisely those which people later on marvel at most.

The national biases are still with us, though they are modified, or have shifted ground.

There were no women on the expeditions. At that time the women who were demanding rights were being beaten by policemen, forcibly fed in prisons, derided and jeered at by fine gentlemen, generally ill-treated and often enough by other women. It was simply not possible for women to be on the expeditions. Nor is it a question of blaming anyone, for the idea would not have surfaced. Yet I wonder how many girls lay awake at night, fiercely resentful of the bondage of gentility, their enforced ‘weakness', thinking: ‘If only I was there, I'd show them.' ‘I
know
I could be as brave and resourceful as they are!' ‘Oh, the bitter tears of unused and patronized and frustrated women!' These are quotations from letters between women, just before the First World War.

Yet women had contributed to nineteenth-century exploration. There were women at work then. There was Isabella Bird, for one.

Behind these dramas of the polar expeditions is a frieze or backdrop of women – no, ladies – who stood elegantly about in their drooping fettering garments, smiling wistfully at these warriors of theirs – and for the most part this is a silent cloud of witnesses. They saw their men off from ports in England, and travelled to New Zealand to take part in farewells, and welcoming ceremonies, and official dinners, and they received reams of letters, and were loved in the reverential, grateful, worshipping way that was how these things went on, then.

There is, to say the least, evidence that they did not always see things as their men did.

As for the wives of other ranks, they said even less.

Which brings us to the class divisions, so rigid, that you read saying Oh no, it really is
not
possible. Yet they were taken for granted. Were basic. Were right. Natural. Good for discipline. Were, one cannot help suspecting, something to do with God, virtue, the divine order and, most certainly, the divinely ordained greatness of England. (It was always
England
these men apostrophized, not Britain, a compromised and adulterated word, and idea.)

There were officers and there were men, and they had separate eating and sleeping places, even in the most extreme situations; and the names of the officers were known to every man, woman and child throughout the British nation, while those of the men were less known though they did the same dangerous and difficult work. Even when six men were holed up for a long Antarctic winter, in an ice cave, with every possibility they would all soon die of cold and starvation, the class divisions were rigidly kept, with the concurrence of both sides that this was the only possible way to do things; officers lay on one side, and men on the other, and they all supported each other with the tenderest solicitude.

It was the influence of the British navy, of Scott, that was the source of the inflexibility over class: there were those, Shackleton among them, who thought it ridiculous. But the navy surely had nothing to do with this pervasive mood or style of the 1910–13 expedition, so fervent, so exalted, for the British team were engaged in some very high enterprise, a desperate, dangerous, life-and-death business … but at once it will be objected that Amundsen's effort was just as dangerous and heroic. Very true: just because he succeeded so magnificently, it doesn't mean he couldn't easily have died with all of his team. He took chances, as he said himself – diced with death, as they say. But no one died, and there is nothing in what Amundsen wrote that suggests he expected to die.

That the British were not supported by their government, that their ship was so inadequate and dangerous, that there was so much suffering because of it, certainly contributed to the emotional note: we against the world, we this small band of brothers doing our duty against such odds!

Yes, there is a danger, writing about that time which is so unlike ours, of misinterpretation. For instance, this word
duty.
Their devotion to their tasks and responsibilities was total, because of their attitude to duty. To us now (1980), it is an absurd word, and few of us would dream of putting an ounce more effort into anything than we have to. On the contrary, people who lie, cheat, and get away with it are admired rather than not. In those days children were taught to be responsible, honourable, reliable, and the men on those expeditions judged each other and themselves by these standards. But the 1910–13 expedition particularly was distinguished by lofty exalted emotionalism; and though it was linked with duty to England, God, science, and their best selves, surely it was all beyond what was necessary?

It seems to me that everything they did has to be seen in this other light: they were, engaged, or the key people were, particularly Wilson, and some consciously, in an attempt to transcend themselves. This was the real driving force of the expedition from the very first, and before all the setbacks and difficulties, the neglect by government, the mishaps and the mistakes that gave the emotional impetus. But probably if the expedition had gone well things would not have been so different, given the natures of the men involved. This need to break out of our ordinary possibilities – the cage we live in that is made of our habits, upbringing, circumstances, and which shows itself so small and tight and tyrannical when we do try to break out – this need may well be the deepest one we have. At any rate, it can be observed all the time and everywhere. (And probably accounts for the enthusiasm with which people throw themselves into wars, but that is a subject outside my scope here.) Every one of us thinks wistfully of the times when we were able to go without sleep for days, work so far beyond our ordinary capacity we don't know how we did it, perform what seem to our pedestrian selves as miraculously airy feats.

There was the affair of the King Emperor Penguin eggs. Edward Wilson, doctor, biologist, artist, explorer, writer, wanted to obtain some of those eggs, partly because an object of the expedition was to get specimens of bird, animal, and fish life, partly because it was believed that the study of the embryos of the birds would throw light on evolution.

These penguins hatch their eggs in the middle of the Antarctic winter, in the cold black dark, and in inaccessible places. The men had already been working at their limits for months. They were overstrained and overtaxed and, clearly, overwrought. To go off in search of these eggs was folly. Scott thought so, and tried to dissuade Wilson. Wilson himself, once they were on their way, thought so, was anguished because of what he had brought the others into: but of course it was not in the spirit of the thing that they should turn back. The other two men were ‘Birdie' Bowers, a man of such moral and physical qualities that he stands out, even among those others who were so well equipped with them, and a young man of twenty-four, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who later wrote the best book about the expedition. Here is a quotation:

The book is
The Worst Journey in the World
, and the chapter called ‘The Winter Journey' is about the getting of the eggs. The last chapter, called ‘Never Again', has a startled, bleak feel to it, though it was clearly written in high emotion, and analyses his conclusions about the expedition as a whole. But even then, ten years afterwards, writing with bitter hindsight, the rhetorical glory-making spirit of the expedition breaks through thus, in a passage of common sense about future polar exploration:

This means, apparently, that in some mystic way the ice and snows of the Antarctic will bear Scott's body back
home
, triumphantly to England; and if it is being objected that this is the merest rubbishy nonsense, you are wrong: you see, you are leaving the atmosphere of the time out of account.

But, the Winter Journey … it was very cold, and it was very dark. It is not possible to understand what it was like, for you can say so-and-so below zero, and understand nothing even if you have experienced such temperatures – for almost certainly you were well fed and well clothed, and anyway only out for a moment or two. It could take them four hours in the ‘morning' to ease their frozen selves out of their frozen or sodden sleeping bags and to get their limbs working. They reached the point where they didn't care if they fell into crevasses. When they got back to base, their clothes had to be hacked off them, in chunks. Or there is a glimpse of them on a deadly cold but still night, since for once there were no blizzards or winds, the three of them bent stiffly over, their bodies chattering – ‘When your body chatters, you can say it is cold …' – 
with a candle
, trudging miles through the awful snow to bring a sledge – the sledges had to be fetched in relays.

It took six weeks, this impossible journey. They were nearly killed. It was luck, that they survived. When they reached their destination, they had to climb down dangerous cliffs of ice, in pitch-darkness of course, with frostbitten fingers, to reach penguin level, but found their way blocked by walls of ice, and had to worm themselves through and almost could not get back. And then there was a blizzard worse than they imagined was possible, and their tent blew away and … everything bad that could happen, happened. During all this Wilson wrote in his diary, taking his gloves off for a few seconds at a time to do it, and Bowers made his meteorological observations, and the three of them loved each other, absolutely, and were ready to die for each other, which of course they were in fact doing, since if they had not got back, their interdependence, their trust, would have amounted to that. I read this part of the book expostulating ‘No, really, stop it! This is crazy, this is insane, what are you doing it for?' What? Well, to get embryos for the Natural History Museum, and for the glory of England. But what were they really doing? Now that is a very different thing! What comes from these wonderful, appalling pages is the distillate of the spirit of the whole expedition.

When they got their eggs back to England and to the Natural History Museum, of course some stupid official could not be bothered with them, or with the eggs: did not know who they were. But this script was still being written by an artist who knew how it should be: to have these heroic madmen actually welcomed, the eggs taken in the trembling awe they merited – no, too much of an anticlimax. And the first of the scientists to examine the eggs missed an essential point, so one could say that the enterprise had been wasted. If you look at it from that point of view. Which was not Cherry-Garrard's: here is the last paragraph, the summing up:

Notice here too the fine gentlemanly scorn for commerce, a spirit which is by no means dead with us.

The Winter Journey was only one of the impossible heroisms bred by the spirit of the expedition.

Here is another. Six men, officers and other ranks, were on a scientific trip, to collect specimens and observe conditions, intending to meet the ship, which was due to pick them up as soon as the ice made it possible. But such were the conditions that it was on the cards the ship would not get through and they would not be picked up. I repeat that they were quite aware of the possibilities. Yet they failed to equip themselves properly. No ship: and they were then faced with surviving until the next Antarctic spring without suitable clothing, or food, or equipment. They dug a hole under the snow, described by a later expedition as a dog kennel. They killed some seals and some penguins. They put themselves into the hole, and kept burning a small stove, fed by seal oil, which filled the cave and blackened the walls and them with greasy smoke. Officers on one side, men on the other, united by loving concern, they lay in their filthy and inadequate sleeping bags, singing songs of a religious and patriotic sort, and talking about England and food. There was, of course, only blubber and penguin to eat, and not much of that. To get their water to boil took an hour or so. They had diarrhoea. They were not however discouraged, and kept themselves going for six months through the Antarctic night by the most intelligent and determined discipline. When the ordeal was over – and when they had gone into the ice cave it was after four months of exhausting exposure and under-feeding – they made a dangerous way back to base, where they were greeted with the news of the deaths of Scott's party. These greasily black, half-starved ghosts then at once volunteered for duty, and went back to work.