Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
other going mad from food poisoning. Sixteen years later Mawson led a joint British, Australian
and New Zealand expedition, and he ended his career as Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at
Adelaide University.
On the
Discovery
expedition Scott's men built a hut on the spur protruding into McMurdo
Sound. The spur became known as Hut Point and the hut was primarily used for storage, though
they also performed plays in it - larky rituals being
de rigueur
. It was subsequently used as an
advance base by other sledging parties.
McMurdo had risen up less than a mile from the Point. The wind was blowing steadily at about
25 miles an hour when I first walked down to the hut, and the exposed flesh between my goggles
and balaclava immediately began to feel as if it were burning. I quickly covered every square inch.
I was already quite used to sub-zero temperatures, but I only had to take off my gloves and glove
liners for five or ten seconds to feel what would happen to me in a high wind if I failed to dress
properly. If I tried to take a photograph without my glove liners when the wind was blowing hard,
however speedily I went about setting up the shot I almost invariably lost sensation in one or two
fingers. I couldn't begin to imagine what the old explorers had suffered when they pushed further
south, month after crucifying month. I saw them with fresh eyes then.
When I entered the hut, the stillness came upon me like a benediction. There was a mummified
seal, a frozen mutton carcass and stacked tins of Huntley and Palmer biscuits. It was colder than
a sepulchre. They used to light a blubber stove, but the heating was always inadequate, according
to the diaries. Shackleton wrote later that 'The discomfort of the hut was a byword of the expedi-
tion,' and when he was back there in 1908 he reported that some men preferred to sleep outside in
their tents, as it was warmer. In the sixties a New Zealander stepped on a mousetrap that had been
brought down by Scott's men to protect the food stores. I wouldn't have fancied a mouse's chances
in those temperatures.
Of course, the Heroic Age didn't suddenly appear on the global landscape like a meteor. It grew
organically out of what had gone before. Nineteenth-century explorers had been gobbled up by
Victorians hungry for role models embodying the aspirations of the age. Peter Fleming wrote in
Bayonets to Lhasa
, his topic about the 1904 British invasion of Tibet, 'By the end of the nine-
teenth century there were few major enigmas left on the African continent. Save for Antarctica,
whose austere secrets were already arousing the competitive instincts of explorers, Tibet was the
only region of the world to which access was all but impossible for white men . . .' But Tibet was
small beer. Press attention shifted from the Dark Continent to the Arctic and thence to Antarctica,
and the conquest of the last white spaces became a metaphor for the triumph of imperialism. The
cultural vacuum of Antarctica provided the perfect
tabula rasa
on which to play out a vision. At
Scott's farewell dinner Leonard Darwin, President of the Royal Geographical Society, said in his
speech: 'Scott is going to prove once again that the manhood of our nation is not dead and that the
characteristics of our ancestors who won the Empire still flourish among us.'
∗
Twenty-four-hour daylight proved irredeemably desynchronising, and watching Mount Discovery
glittering away busily in the small hours was like stealing a march on time.
