Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Cape Evans I had seen a cross to the three who had stayed in the Antarctic; Wind Vane Hill, they
called it. Back at home, nobody ever carved statues of the Ross Sea party to adorn public squares.
It was partly because the survivors got home in the middle of the Great War.
Like Scott, they didn't feel they had struggled in vain. Dick Richards, the party's physicist,
wrote later, 'That the effort was unnecessary, that the sacrifice was made to no purpose, in the end
was irrelevant. To me, no undertaking carried through to conclusion is for nothing. And so I don't
think of our struggle as futile. It was something that the human spirit accomplished.'
On 6 May 1915, before they had unloaded all their supplies, the ship blew away. They had to
make trousers out of canvas tents left in the Cape Evans hut by Scott. Later, Mackintosh fell sick,
and another man, Ernest Joyce, took over the leadership by default. He was a complicated charac-
ter whom Shackleton engaged after seeing him ride past the expedition office in London on top of
a number 37 bus. (Exactly how this occurred, I cannot say. I like to think of Shackleton glancing
out of the office window and, as he catches sight of Joyce riding contentedly past on the top deck,
being struck by inspiration. Recognising his man, Shackleton sprints after the bus until he is able
to leap on and collar the hapless Joyce.) Mawson almost took Joyce south in 1911, but there was
a row about Joyce's drinking in Tasmania, so he wasn't asked. On the first page of his topic,
The
South Polar Trail
, Joyce says that the hardships 'were almost beyond human endurance'. 'If there
is a hell,' he wrote, 'this is the place, and the sleeping bags are worse than hell.'
Twenty-five months after they had left the fleshpots of civilisation, Shackleton came to get
them, aboard
Aurora
. They never forgot what they had endured. In a footnote to his text, Joyce
said that when they got home they were frequently invited to festivities in London which went
on into the early hours, and afterwards they would find destitute people on the Embankment 'and
line [them] up at the coffee stalls'. When he was ninety, Dick Richards said that he hadn't yet re-
covered.
There was a padre with them, Spencer-Smith, who died of scurvy after weeks lashed to the
sledge, often unconscious. Then, when they had laid the depots and got back to Hut Point, Mack-
intosh, who had recovered, and V. G. Hayward, who was in charge of the dogs, their minds fogged
by suffering, set out across the fragile ice for the other hut at Cape Evans. They were never seen
again. It has been said that Shackleton made a rare error of judgement in choosing Mackintosh. He
might have done so out of loyalty, because Mackintosh had lost his eye on Shackleton's previous
expedition, aboard
Nimrod
.
When I woke up, I had spilled the coffee over my windpants. The crew were pointing out of
the window. I looked out too, but I couldn't see anything. Then I spotted a smudge. It was a small
patch of snow groomed as a skiway, and a cluster of black dots. Feeling confused, I looked at my
watch. It had taken three hours.
The first thing I saw when we landed was a twelve-foot poster-board of Elvis and a signpost
marked 'Graceland'. The geodesic dome in the middle of the station flashed in the bright sunlight.
It was very noisy when we climbed down the steps, as it was too cold to shut down the engine, and
the snow was knuckle-hard. A man approached me, bulky as a yeti.
'Welcome to South Pole,' he shouted in my ear, and together we walked down through a
tunnel into the dome beneath a sign announcing that the United States too was welcoming me to
