Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Though it is tempting to indulge the cliché that a national preference for dead heroes is pecu-
liarly British, an examination of, say, Russian polar literature also reveals a large cast of heroic
dead. Like most clichés, however, this one is woven with a thread of truth, and Scott would prob-
ably have had to stagger back to the hut to cut much ice with North Americans.
When Tryggve Gran, one of Scott's men, emerged from the tent on the plateau after he had seen
the three frozen bodies which had lain there through the long polar night, he said that he envied
them. 'They died having done something great,' he wrote. 'How hard death must be having done
nothing.'
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The ice was more than four feet thick wherever we drilled it, and an hour after we set out for Cape
Evans, around Big Razorback island, we lay down among the Weddell seals.
'Listen to that,' said Ann. It was a faint scraping sound, like hard cheese on a grater.
'The pups are weaned,' she announced. 'It's their teeth raking against the edge of the ice holes.'
Adult Weddells weigh up to 1,000 pounds and are able to live further south than any other seals
because they can maintain an open hole in the ice with their teeth. Ann went off to photograph
them doing it, and I pressed my ear to the ice and heard the adults underneath calling their ancient
song, ululant and ineffably sad.
Later, I recognised the gabled ridged roof and weatherboard cladding of the hut in the distance.
It was a prefabricated hut, made in England and shipped south in pieces. I once saw a picture of
it taken when it was first erected, not at the foot of a smoking Mount Erebus but in a grimy urban
street in Poplar in London's East End. The men had stitched quilts with pockets of seaweed to use
as insulation between the walls.
When I pushed open the wooden door I smelt my grandmother's house when I was a child -
coal dust and burnt coal - and it was chilly, as it used to be at six o'clock in the morning when I
followed my grandfather downstairs to scrape out the grate. The Belmont Stearine candles Scott's
men had brought were neatly stacked near the door, and the boxes said, 'made expressly for hot
climates', which some people would say summed up their preparations. The wrappers bore the
picture of a West Indian preparing something delicious on a fire under a palm tree. It was the fa-
miliarity of the surroundings which struck my English sensibility - blue-and-orange Huntley and
Palmer biscuit boxes, green-and-gold tins of Lyle's golden syrup, blue Cerberos salt tubes and the
shape of the label on Heinz tomato ketchup bottles. Atora, Lea and Perrins, Fry's, Rising Sun Yeast
('certain to rise'), Gillards
Real
Turtle Soup - the brand names cemented in our social history. I
still lived with many of these products, and the continuum they provided intensified the hut exper-
ience. I remembered a very long novel by an American woman called Elizabeth Arthur who had
spent some time on the ice. Describing the profoundly moving experience of visiting the hut, she
talked about a 'Hunter' and Palmer biscuit box. To an English sensibility this sounds as odd as
'Heinzer' baked beans.
A single beam of sunlight fell on the bunk in Scott's quarters, the small space immortalised by
Ponting and described by Teddy Evans as the 'Holy of Holies'. On the desk, someone - a good
artist - had drawn a tiny bird in violet ink on the crisp ivory page of a pocket notebook. Unlike
