Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
it does seem to have disappeared from their repertoire of emotions. I found it unfathomable that,
only eighty years after the expedition Cherry describes, things had come to such a pretty pass.
Scott wrote movingly about the value of friendship from the last tent. It was in a letter to J. M.
Barrie. 'I never met a man in my life', wrote the captain, 'whom I admired and loved more than
you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me - for you had much to
give and I had nothing.' How many men must have gone to the grave 'never being able to show',
and how much they could learn from Scott's story.
Scott had been wooed by Barrie, creator of the eternally youthful Peter Pan, after returning from
his first expedition. Barrie would have loved to have gone south. 'I want to know what it is really
like to be alive,' he had written to Scott. After the tragedy had unfolded on the polar plateau, he
identified Scott with Peter. For years he carried Scott's letter around with him, whipping it out at
any opportunity. He said, 'When I think of Scott I remember the strange alpine story of the youth
who fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific companion, one of several who ac-
companied him, all young, computed that his body would again appear at a certain place and date
many years afterwards. When that time came round some of the survivors returned to the glacier
to see if the prediction would be fulfilled, all old men now; and the body reappeared as young as
on the day he left them. So Scott and his comrades emerge out of the white immensities, always
young.'
Scott's son, in later life a distinguished naturalist and conservationist, was named after Barrie's
immortal Peter. Barrie was his godfather, and when the boy was five, he took him to see the
vastly successful
Peter Pan
. After the performance, Barrie asked him what he had liked best. Peter
thought hard. 'What I liked best', he concluded, 'was tearing up the programme and dropping the
bits on people's heads.'
∗
At sixty-seven degrees south and sixty-eight degrees west, Rothera Point sits at the entrance of
Ryder Bay, in the south east of Adelaide Island and about one third of the way down the Antarctic
Peninsula. Adelaide Island was discovered and charted by John Biscoe as he weaved in and out
of the archipelago alongside the peninsula. On St Valentine's Day 1832, he named it after Queen
Adelaide of Sax-Meiningen, queen consort of William IV. The point was surveyed in the 1950s
and named after John Michael Rothera, a surveyor for what later became the British Antarctic Sur-
vey. It was the haunt of Weddells and the occasional fur seal, as well as a proliferation of Adélies
and dominican gulls. The rocks were covered in a type of branchy lichen from a group that ex-
ists in the Scottish highlands. Puffs of surf slapped the shore, and in the bay the bergs resembled
a scene cut from a marble quarry. The maritime climate gave the continent a different dimension
after the fastness of the Ross Ice Shelf.
As I grew familiar with the station, and felt the weight of history behind it, I became aware that
something was missing. I couldn't put my finger on it until in the dining room one day I found
myself staring at a five-foot wide framed photograph of a working dog team captioned 'In memory
of the old dogs'. The ghosts of the dogs roamed everywhere at Rothera. On the duty-rota board in
the dining room, next to the crowded columns headed Night Watch or some other domestic duty,
