Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER SIX
At the South Pole
Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without
the reward of priority . . . Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can
do it.
From Scott's diary, January 1912
THE ONLY
other passenger on the fuel flight to the South Pole was a physicist in his late twenties
from Boston. On the way to the ice runway he told me that he had been south before, and was
about to spend a year at the Pole, a prospect which filled him with great joy. He reminded me of an
overgrown puppy.
The sun was shining, and the ice runway was pitted with waterholes. The following day, 17
December, air operations were shifting to the firmer skiway at Willy Field. We picked our way over
to a metal hut on stilts containing a drum of drinking water, a quantity of padded blue plastic chairs,
the usual bewildering array of rubbish bins and a box of yellow earplugs. The walls were bare except
for two brightly coloured waste management posters, and the blue lino floor was smudged with dirty
snow. When we had settled down, the physicist handed me a photograph of his telescope at the Pole.
He was carrying a stash of them in his pocket.
We could see our plane squatting on the ice, attached to umbilical tubes of fuel and tended by
diminutive khaki figures. After an hour, the pilot arrived and announced that we were 'all set'. We
made our way over to the steps of the Hercules. On the Flight Information board in the hold it said,
'Only eight shopping days till Christmas.' As we belted up in the red webbing seats, the pair of us
alone in the cavernous fuselage, a crewman appeared and said, 'As far as emergency exits go, if you
have to, get out any way you can.'
They ushered me up to the flight deck immediately after take-off, and there I stayed for the whole
journey. A crewman gave me a styrofoam cup of coffee, and on the side he wrote '850 miles to
go'. We flew towards the Beardmore Glacier over a window in the clouds, and up ahead the tips of
the Transantarctics pierced the stratocumulus. Scott and his party walked up the Beardmore to get
through to the plateau, and it had become a potent name in the shaping of the legend: Nancy Mitford
called her chilly upstairs lavatory the Beardmore. It was hot in the cockpit, and I fell asleep for a
while, images of small figures and cold Edwardian porcelain flashing through my dreams.
The ten men of the Ross Sea party had manhauled upwards of 1,500 miles over that stretch of
the continent, some of them without washing or changing their clothes for two years, and on that
ice they had laid depots for men who never came; depots which were still there, strung out for 400
miles. They were members of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and their party, led by one-
eyed Aeneas Mackintosh, were storing supplies from the coast to the base of the Beardmore Glacier
for six men, led by Shackleton, who were supposed to be marching across from the other side. At
