Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
so difficult that he confided to his diary that he took sedatives before going to parties, and one of
his biographers wrote that it required far more courage for him to face an audience than to cross a
crevasse.
Everything served a grand purpose for Wilson and was a component of an embracing and har-
monious philosophy. Art functioned to help science, which in turn enhanced faith. He was an as-
cetic. Between expeditions he wrote to his wife from somewhere in England that he had begun to
enjoy hotel dinners and to prefer hot water to cold, and that it was a bad sign.
Many people are mystified by Wilson. After their first meeting, Mawson noted in his diary, 'I
did not like Dr Wilson.' While I was having lunch with Roland Huntford in Cambridge, he put
down his knife and fork on the long table in the dining hall smelling of boiled cauliflower and said,
'I can't
stand
Wilson.' Mike Stroud, one of the three who repeated the Winter Journey in 1985,
once told me, 'Wilson's books are so strange. He was a very odd bloke. I don't know what to make
of him.' Robert Graves said he had wanted to put Wilson into his autobiography
Goodbye to All
That
, but couldn't find space. The two met in 1909 and Graves was much tickled by the story of a
penguin who tried to mate with Wilson, though in fact all the bird did was drop a stone at his feet,
which is quite a long way from mating, though perhaps not to a penguin.
In the south Wilson experienced the peace which passes all understanding. He spent the happiest
times in the crow's nest, communing with his God together (as he felt) with his beloved wife Ory.
Towards the end he appears already to have worked himself beyond the earthly plane. 'This is the
most fascinating ideal I think I ever imagined,' he wrote on the plateau, 'to become entirely care-
less of your own soul or body in looking after the welfare of others.' If this is true - and I have
no reason to suppose that it is not - Wilson must have overcome the most powerful of instincts:
survival. In that case, it is not so surprising that he didn't survive.
Bowers, the third member of the team, was called Birdie because he had a beak nose. He was
a peerless worker, indomitably cheerful, never felt the cold and shared, though to a lesser degree,
Wilson's spirituality. That he had bought the fatal British prejudice concerning the moral virtues
of dogless travel is revealed in a letter he wrote to Kathleen Scott. 'After all, it will be a fine thing
to do that plateau with man-haulage in these days of the supposed decadence of the British race.'
He gave his horse, Victor, a last biscuit from his own ration before shooting him.
He was devoted to his mother, and wrote this in a letter to her from the south.
Have been reading a lot and thinking a lot about things. This life at sea, so dependent upon
nature, and so lonely, makes one think. I seem to get into a quagmire of doubts and disbeliefs.
Why should we have so many disappointments, when life was hard enough without them?
Everything seems a hopeless problem. I felt I should never get out, there was no purpose of it.
One night on deck when things were at their blackest, it seemed to me that Christ came to
me and showed me why we are here, and what the purpose of life really is. It is to make a great
decision - to choose between the material and the spiritual, and if we choose the spiritual we
must work out our choice, and then it will run like a silver thread through the material. It is very
difficult to express in words what I suddenly saw so plainly, and it was sometimes difficult to
