"At first it seems inexplicable when one considers how highly his work is
now appreciated. From the point of view of the general public, however, I
have always thought that Ross was neglected, and as you once said he is
very far from doing himself justice in his book. I did not know that
Barrow was the bete noire who did so much to discount Ross's results. It
is an interesting sidelight on such a venture."[11]

In discussing and urging the importance of the Antarctic Expedition which
was finally sent under Scott in the Discovery, Hooker urged the
importance of work in the South Polar Ocean, which swarms with animal and
vegetable life. Commenting upon the fact that the large collections made
chiefly by himself had never been worked out, except the diatoms, he
writes:

"A better fate, I trust, awaits the treasures that the hoped-for
Expedition will bring back, for so prolific is the ocean that the
naturalist need never be idle, no, not even for one of the twenty-four
hours of daylight during a whole Antarctic summer, and I look to the
results of a comparison of the oceanic life of the Arctic and Antarctic
regions as the heralding of an epoch in the history of biology."[12]

When Ross went to the Antarctic it was generally thought that there was
neither food nor oxygen nor light in the depths of the ocean, and that
therefore there was no life. Among other things the investigations of
Ross gave ground for thinking this was not the case. Later still, in
1873, the possibility of laying submarine cables made it necessary to
investigate the nature of the abyssal depths, and the Challenger proved
that not only does life, and in quite high forms, exist there, but that
there are fish which can see. It is now almost certain that there is a
great oxidized northward-creeping current which flows out of the
Antarctic Ocean and under the waters of the other great oceans of the
world.

It was the good fortune of Ross, at a time when the fringes of the great
Antarctic continent were being discovered in comparatively low latitudes
of 66 deg. and thereabouts, sometimes not even within the Antarctic Circle,
to find to the south of New Zealand a deep inlet in which he could sail
to the high latitude of 78 deg.. This inlet, which is now known as the Ross
Sea, has formed the starting-place of all sledging parties which have
approached the South Pole. I have dwelt upon this description of the
lands he discovered because they will come very intimately into this
history. I have also emphasized his importance in the history of
Antarctic exploration because Ross having done what it was possible to do
by sea, penetrating so far south and making such memorable discoveries,
the next necessary step in Antarctic exploration was that another
traveller should follow up his work on land. It is an amazing thing that
sixty years were allowed to elapse before that traveller appeared. When
he appeared he was Scott. In the sixty years which elapsed between Ross
and Scott the map of the Antarctic remained practically unaltered. Scott
tackled the land, and Scott is the Father of Antarctic sledge travelling.

This period of time saw a great increase in the interest taken in science
both pure and applied, and it had been pointed out in 1893 that "we knew
more about the planet Mars than about a large area of our own globe." The
Challenger Expedition of 1874 had spent three weeks within the Antarctic
Circle, and the specimens brought home by her from the depths of these
cold seas had aroused curiosity. Meanwhile Borchgrevink (1897) landed at
Cape Adare, and built a hut which still stands and which afforded our
Cape Adare party valuable assistance. Here he lived during the first
winter which men spent in the Antarctic.

Meanwhile, in the Arctic, brave work was being done. The names of Parry,
M'Clintock, Franklin, Markham, Nares, Greely and De Long are but a few of
the many which suggest themselves of those who have fought their way mile
by mile over rough ice and open leads with appliances which now seem to
be primitive and with an addition to knowledge which often seemed hardly
commensurate with the hardships suffered and the disasters which
sometimes overtook them. To those whose fortune it has been to serve
under Scott the Franklin Expedition has more than ordinary interest, for
it was the same ships, the Erebus and Terror, which discovered Ross
Island, that were crushed in the northern ice after Franklin himself had
died, and it was Captain Crozier (the same Crozier who was Ross's captain
in the South and after whom Cape Crozier is named) who then took command
and led that most ghastly journey in all the history of exploration: more
we shall never know, for none survived to tell the tale. Now, with the
noise and racket of London all round them, a statue of Scott looks across
to one of Franklin and his men of the Erebus and Terror, and surely they
have some thoughts in common.

Englishmen had led the way in the North, but it must be admitted that the
finest journey of all was made by the Norwegian Nansen in 1893-1896.
Believing in a drift from the neighbourhood of the New Siberian Islands
westwards over the Pole, a theory which obtained confirmation by the
discovery off the coast of Greenland of certain remains of a ship called
the Jeannette which had been crushed in the ice off these islands, his
bold project was to be frozen in with his ship and allow the current to
take him over, or as near as possible to, the Pole. For this purpose the
most famous of Arctic ships was built, called the Fram. She was designed
by Colin Archer, and was saucer-shaped, with a breadth one-third of her
total length. With most of the expert Arctic opinion against him, Nansen
believed that this ship would rise and sit on the top of the ice when
pressed, instead of being crushed. Of her wonderful voyage with her
thirteen men, of how she was frozen into the ice in September 1893 in the
north of Siberia (79 deg. N.) and of the heaving and trembling of the ship
amidst the roar of the ice pressure, of how the Fram rose to the occasion
as she was built to do, the story has still, after twenty-eight years,
the thrill of novelty. She drifted over the eightieth degree on February
2, 1894. During the first winter Nansen was already getting restive: the
drift was so slow, and sometimes it was backwards: it was not until the
second autumn that the eighty-second degree arrived. So he decided that
he would make an attempt to penetrate northwards by sledging during the
following spring. As Nansen has told me, he felt that the ship would do
her job in any case. Could not something more be done also?

This was one of the bravest decisions a polar explorer has ever taken. It
meant leaving a drifting ship which could not be regained: it meant a
return journey over drifting ice to land; the nearest known land was
nearly five hundred miles south of the point from which he started
northwards; and the journey would include travelling both by sea and by
ice.

Undoubtedly there was more risk in leaving the Fram than in remaining in
her. It is a laughable absurdity to say, as Greely did after Nansen's
almost miraculous return, that he had deserted his men in an ice-beset
ship, and deserved to be censured for doing so.[13] The ship was left in
the command of Sverdrup. Johansen was chosen to be Nansen's one
companion, and we shall hear of him again in the Fram, this time with
Amundsen in his voyage to the South.

The polar traveller is so interested in the adventure and hardships of
Nansen's sledge journey that his equipment, which is the most important
side of his expedition to us who have gone South, is liable to be
overlooked. The modern side of polar travel begins with Nansen. It was
Nansen who first used a light sledge based upon the ski sledge of Norway,
in place of the old English heavy sledge which was based upon the Eskimo
type. Cooking apparatus, food, tents, clothing and the thousand and one
details of equipment without which no journey nowadays stands much chance
of success, all date back to Nansen in the immediate past, though beyond
him of course is the experience of centuries of travellers. As Nansen
himself wrote of the English polar men: "How well was their equipment
thought out and arranged with the means they had at their disposal!
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. Most of what I prided myself
upon, and what I thought to be new, I find they had anticipated.
M'Clintock used the same things forty years ago. It was not their fault
that they were born in a country where the use of snowshoes is
unknown...."[14]

All the more honour to the men who dared so much and travelled so far
with the limited equipment of the past. The real point for us is that,
just as Scott is the Father of Antarctic sledge travelling, so Nansen may
be considered the modern Father of it all.

Nansen and Johansen started on March 14 when the Fram was in latitude 84 deg.
4' N., and the sun had only returned a few days before, with three
sledges (two of which carried kayaks) and 28 dogs. They reached their
northern-most camp on April 8, which Nansen has given in his book as
being in latitude 86 deg. 13.6' N. But Nansen tells me that Professor
Geelmuyden, who had his astronomical results and his diary, reckoned that
owing to refraction the horizon was lifted, and if so the observation had
to be reduced accordingly. Nansen therefore gave the reduced latitude in
his book, but he considers that his horizon was very clear when he took
that observation, and believes that his latitude was higher than that
given. He used a sextant and the natural horizon.

They turned, and travelling back round pressed-up ice and open leads they
failed to find the land they had been led to expect in latitude 83 deg.,
which indeed was proved to be non-existent. At the end of June they
started using the kayaks, which needed many repairs after their rough
passage, to cross the open leads. They waited long in camp, that the
travelling conditions might improve, and all the time Nansen saw a white
spot he thought was cloud. At last, on July 24, land was in sight, which
proved to be that white spot. Fourteen days later they reached it to find
that it consisted of a series of islands. These they left behind them
and, unable to say what land they had reached, for their watches had run
down, they coasted on westwards and southwards until winter approached.
They built a hut of moss and stones and snow, and roofed it with walrus
skins cut from the animals while they lay in the sea, for they were too
heavy for two men to drag on to the ice. When I met Nansen he had
forgotten all about this, and would not believe that it had happened
until he saw it in his own book. They lay in their old clothes that
winter, so soaked with blubber that the only way to clean their shirts
was to scrape them. They made themselves new clothes from blankets, and
sleeping-bags from the skins of the bears which they ate, and started
again in May of the following year to make Spitzbergen. They had been
travelling a long month, during which time they had at least two very
narrow escapes--the first due to their kayaks floating away, when Nansen
swam out into the icy sea and reached them just before he sank, and
Johansen passed the worst moments of his life watching from the shore;
the second caused by the attack of a walrus which went for Nansen's kayak
with tusks and flippers. And then one morning, as he looked round at the
cold glaciers and naked cliffs, not knowing where he was, he heard a dog
bark. Intensely excited, he started towards the sound, to be met by the
leader of the English Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition whose party was
wintering there, and who first gave him the definite news that he was on
Franz Josef Land. Nansen and Johansen were finally landed at Vardo in the
north of Norway, to learn that no tidings had yet been heard of the Fram.
That very day she cleared the ice which had imprisoned her for nearly
three years.

I cannot go into the Fram's journey save to say that she had drifted as
far north as 85 deg. 55' N., only eighteen geographical miles south of
Nansen's farthest north. But the sledge journey and the winter spent by
the two men has many points in common with the experience of our own
Northern Party, and often and often during the long winter of 1912 our
thoughts turned with hope to Nansen's winter, for we said if it had been
done once why should it not be done again, and Campbell and his men
survive.

Before Nansen started, the spirit of adventure, which has always led men
into the unknown, combined with the increased interest in knowledge for
its own sake to turn the thoughts of the civilized world southwards. It
was becoming plain that a continent of the extent and climate which this
polar land probably possessed might have an overwhelming influence upon
the weather conditions of the whole Southern Hemisphere. The importance
of magnetism was only rivalled by the mystery in which the whole subject
was shrouded: and the region which surrounded the Southern Magnetic Pole
of the earth offered a promising field of experiment and observation. The
past history, through the ages, of this land was of obvious importance to
the geological story of the earth, whilst the survey of land formations
and ice action in the Antarctic was more useful perhaps to the
physiographer than that of any other country in the world, seeing that he
found here in daily and even hourly operation the conditions which he
knew had existed in the ice ages of the past over the whole world, but
which he could only infer from vestigial remains. The biological
importance of the Antarctic might be of the first magnitude in view of
the significance which attaches to the life of the sea in the
evolutionary problem.

And it was with these objects and ideals that Scott's first expedition,
known officially as the British Antarctic Expedition of 1901-1904, but
more familiarly as 'The Discovery Expedition,' from the name of the ship
which carried it, was organized by the Royal Society and the Royal
Geographical Society, backed by the active support of the British
Government. The executive officers and crew were Royal Navy almost
without exception, whilst the scientific purposes of the expedition were
served in addition by five scientists. These latter were not naval
officers.

The Discovery left New Zealand on Christmas Eve 1901, and entered the
belt of pack ice which always has to be penetrated in order to reach the
comparatively open sea beyond, when just past the Antarctic Circle. But a
little more than four days saw her through, in which she was lucky, as we
now know. Scott landed at Cape Adare and then coasted down the western
coast of Victoria Land just as Ross had done sixty years before. As he
voyaged south he began to look for safe winter quarters for the ship, and
when he pushed into McMurdo Sound on January 21, 1902, it seemed that
here he might find both a sheltered bay into which the ship could be
frozen, and a road to the southland beyond.

The open season which still remained before the freezing of the sea made
progress impossible was spent in surveying the 500 miles of cliff which
marks the northern limit of the Great Ice Barrier. Passing the extreme
eastward position reached by Ross in 1842, they sailed on into an unknown
world, and discovered a deep bay, called Balloon Bight, where the rounded
snow-covered slopes undoubtedly were land and not, as heretofore,
floating ice. Farther east, as they sailed, shallow soundings and gentle
snow slopes gave place to steeper and more broken ridges, until at last
small black patches in the snow gave undoubted evidence of rock; and an
undiscovered land, now known as King Edward VII.'s Land, rose to a height
of several thousand feet. The presence of thick pack ahead, and the
advance of the season, led Scott to return to McMurdo Sound, where he
anchored the Discovery in a little bay at the end of the tongue of land
now known as the Hut Point Peninsula, and built the hut which, though
little used in the Discovery days, was to figure so largely in the story
of this his last expedition.

The first autumn was spent in various short journeys of
discovery--discovery not only of the surrounding land but of many
mistakes in sledging equipment and routine. It is amazing to one who
looks back upon these first efforts of the Discovery Expedition that the
results were not more disastrous than was actually the case. When one
reads of dog-teams which refused to start, of pemmican which was
considered to be too rich to eat, of two officers discussing the ascent
of Erebus and back in one day, and of sledging parties which knew neither
how to use their cookers or lamp, nor how to put up their tents, nor even
how to put on their clothes, then one begins to wonder that the process
of education was gained at so small a price. "Not a single article of the
outfit had been tested; and amid the general ignorance that prevailed the
lack of system was painfully apparent in everything."[15]

This led to a tragedy. A returning sledge party of men was overtaken by a
blizzard on the top of the Peninsula near Castle Rock. They quite
properly camped, and should have been perfectly comfortable lying in
their sleeping-bags after a hot meal. But the primus lamps could not be
lighted, and as they sat in leather boots and inadequate clothing being
continually frost-bitten they decided to leave the tent and make their
way to the ship--sheer madness as we now know. As they groped their way
in the howling snow-drift the majority of the party either slipped or
rolled down a steep slippery snow slope some thousand feet high ending in
a precipitous ice-cliff, below which lay the open sea. It is a nasty
place on a calm summer day: in a blizzard it must be ghastly. Yet only
one man, named Vince, shot down the slope and over the precipice into the
sea below. How the others got back heaven knows. One seaman called Hare,
who separated from the others and lay down under a rock, awoke after
thirty-six hours, covered with snow but in full possession of his
faculties and free from frost-bites. The little cross at Hut Point
commemorates the death of Vince. One of this party was a seaman called
Wild, who came to the front and took the lead of five of the survivors
after the death of Vince. He was to take the lead often in future
expeditions under Shackleton and Mawson, and there are few men living
who have so proved themselves as polar travellers.

I have dwelt upon this side of the early sledging deficiencies of the
Discovery to show the importance of experience in Antarctic land
travelling, whether it be at first or second hand. Scott and his men in
1902 were pioneers. They bought their experience at a price which might
easily have been higher; and each expedition which has followed has added
to the fund. The really important thing is that nothing of what is gained
should be lost. It is one of the main objects of this book to hand on as
complete a record as possible of the methods, equipment, food and weights
used by Scott's Last Expedition for the use of future explorers. "The
first object of writing an account of a Polar voyage is the guidance of
future voyagers: the first duty of the writer is to his successors."[16]

The adaptability, invention and resource of the men of the Discovery when
they set to work after the failures of the autumn to prepare for the
successes of the two following summers showed that they could rise to
their difficulties. Scott admitted that "food, clothing, everything was
wrong, the whole system was bad."[17] In determining to profit by his
mistakes, and working out a complete system of Antarctic travel, he was
at his best; and it was after a winter of drastic reorganization that he
started on November 2, 1902, on his first southern journey with two
companions, Wilson and Shackleton.

It is no part of my job to give an account of this journey. The dogs
failed badly: probably the Norwegian stock-fish which had been brought
through the tropics to feed them was tainted: at any rate they sickened;
and before the journey was done all the dogs had to be killed or had
died. A fortnight after starting, the party was relaying--that is, taking
on part of their load and returning for the rest; and this had to be
continued for thirty-one days.

[Illustration: THE LAST OF THE DOGS--E. A. Wilson, del.]

The ration of food was inadequate and they became very hungry as time
went on; but it was not until December 21 that Wilson disclosed to
Scott that Shackleton had signs of scurvy which had been present for some
time. On December 30, in latitude 82 deg. 16' S., they decided to return. By
the middle of January the scurvy signs were largely increased and
Shackleton was seriously ill and spitting blood. His condition became
more and more alarming, and he collapsed on January 18, but revived
afterwards. Sometimes walking by the sledge, sometimes being carried upon
it, Shackleton survived: Scott and Wilson saved his life. The three men
reached the ship on February 3, after covering 960 statute miles in 93
days. Scott and Wilson were both extremely exhausted and seriously
affected by scurvy. It was a fine journey, the geographical results of
which comprised the survey of some three hundred miles of new coast-line,
and a further knowledge of the Barrier upon which they travelled.

While Scott was away southwards an organized attempt was made to discover
the nature of the mountains and glaciers which lay across the Sound to
the west. This party actually reached the plateau which lay beyond, and
attained a height of 8900 feet, when "as far as they could see in every
direction to the westward of them there extended a level plateau, to the
south and north could be seen isolated nunataks, and behind them showed
the high mountains which they had passed": a practicable road to the west
had been found.

I need note no more than these two most important of the many journeys
carried out this season: nor is it necessary for me to give any account
of the continuous and fertile scientific work which was accomplished in
this virgin land. In the meantime a relief ship, the Morning, had
arrived. It was intended that the Discovery should return this year as
soon as the sea-ice in which she was imprisoned should break up and set
her free. As February passed, however, it became increasingly plain that
the ice conditions were altogether different from those of the previous
year. On the 8th the Morning was still separated from the Discovery by
eight miles of fast ice. March 2 was fully late for a low-powered ship to
remain in the Sound, and on this date the Morning left. By March 13 all
hope of the Discovery being freed that year was abandoned.

The second winter passed much as the first, and as soon as spring arrived
sledging was continued. These spring journeys on the Barrier, with
sunlight only by day and low temperatures at all times, entailed great
discomfort and, perhaps worse, want of sleep, frost-bites, and a fast
accumulation of moisture in all one's clothing and in the sleeping-bags,
which resulted in masses of ice which had to be thawed out by the heat of
one's body before any degree of comfort could be gained. A fortnight was
considered about the extreme limit of time for such a journey, and
generally parties were not absent so long; for at this time a spring
journey was considered a dreadful experience. "Wait till you've had a
spring journey" was the threat of the old stagers to us. A winter journey
lasting nearly three times as long as a spring journey was not imagined.
I advise explorers to be content with imagining it in the future.

The hardest journey of this year was carried out by Scott with two seamen
of whom much will be written in this history. Their names are Edgar Evans
and Lashly. The object of the journey was to explore westwards into the
interior of the plateau. By way of the Ferrar Glacier they reached the
ice-cap after considerable troubles, not the least of which was the loss
of the data necessary for navigation contained in an excellent
publication called Hints to Travellers, which was blown away. Then for
the first time it was seen what additional difficulties are created by
the climate and position of this lofty plateau, which we now know extends
over the Pole and probably reaches over the greater part of the Antarctic
continent. It was the beginning of November: that is, the beginning of
summer; but the conditions of work were much the same as those found
during the spring journeys on the Barrier. The temperature dropped into
the minus forties; but the worst feature of all was a continuous
head-wind blowing from west to east which combined with the low
temperature and rarefied air to make the conditions of sledging
extremely laborious. The supporting party returned, and the three men
continued alone, pulling out westwards into an unknown waste of snow with
no landmarks to vary the rough monotony. They turned homewards on
December 1, but found the pulling very heavy; and their difficulties were
increased by their ignorance of their exact position. The few glimpses of
the land which they obtained as they approached it in the thick weather
which prevailed only left them in horrible uncertainty as to their
whereabouts. Owing to want of food it was impossible to wait for the
weather to clear: there was nothing to be done but to continue their
eastward march. Threading their way amidst the ice disturbances which
mark the head of the glaciers, the party pushed blindly forward in air
which was becoming thick with snow-drift. Suddenly Lashly slipped: in a
moment the whole party was flying downwards with increasing speed. They
ceased to slide smoothly; they were hurled into the air and descended
with great force on to a gradual snow incline. Rising they looked round
them to find above them an ice-fall 300 feet high down which they had
fallen: above it the snow was still drifting, but where they stood there
was peace and blue sky. They recognized now for the first time their own
glacier and the well-remembered landmark, and far away in the distance
was the smoking summit of Mount Erebus. It was a miracle.

Excellent subsidiary journeys were also made of which space allows no
mention here: nor do they bear directly upon this last expedition. But in
view of the Winter Journey undertaken by us, if not for the interest of
the subject itself, some account must be given of those most aristocratic
inhabitants of the Antarctic, the Emperor penguins, with whom Wilson and
his companions in the Discovery now became familiar.

There are two kinds of Antarctic penguins--the little Adelie with his
blue-black coat and his white shirt-front, weighing 16 lbs., an object of
endless pleasure and amusement, and the great dignified Emperor with long
curved beak, bright orange head-wear and powerful flippers, a
personality of 61/2 stones. Science singles out the Emperor as being the
more interesting bird because he is more primitive, possibly the most
primitive of all birds. Previous to the Discovery Expedition nothing was
known of him save that he existed in the pack and on the fringes of the
continent.

We have heard of Cape Crozier as being the eastern extremity of Ross
Island, discovered by Ross and named after the captain of the Terror. It
is here that with immense pressures and rendings the moving sheet of the
Barrier piles itself up against the mountain. It is here also that the
great ice-cliff which runs for hundreds of miles to the east, with the
Barrier behind it and the Ross Sea beating into its crevasses and caves,
joins the basalt precipice which bounds the Knoll, as the two-knobbed
saddle which forms Cape Crozier is called. Altogether it is the kind of
place where giants have had a good time in their childhood, playing with
ice instead of mud--so much cleaner too!

But the slopes of Mount Terror do not all end in precipices. Farther to
the west they slope quietly into the sea, and the Adelie penguins have
taken advantage of this to found here one of their largest and most
smelly rookeries. When the Discovery arrived off this rookery she sent a
boat ashore and set up a post with a record upon it to guide the relief
ship in the following year. The post still stands. Later it became
desirable to bring the record left here more up to date, and so one of
the first sledging parties went to try and find a way by the Barrier to
this spot.

They were prevented from reaching the record by a series of most violent
blizzards, and indeed Cape Crozier is one of the windiest places on
earth, but they proved beyond doubt that a back-door to the Adelie
penguins' rookery existed by way of the slopes of Mount Terror behind the
Knoll. Early the next year another party reached the record all right,
and while exploring the neighbourhood looked down over the 800-feet
precipice which forms the snout of Cape Crozier. The sea was frozen over,
and in a small bay of ice formed by the cliffs of the Barrier below were
numerous little dots which resolved themselves into Emperor penguins.
Could this be the breeding-place of these wonderful birds? If so, they
must nurse their eggs in mid-winter, in unimagined cold and darkness.

Five days more elapsed before further investigation could be made, for a
violent blizzard kept the party in their tents. On October 18 they set
out to climb the high pressure ridges which lie between the level barrier
and the sea. They found that their conjectures were right: there was the
colony of Emperors. Several were nursing chicks, but all the ice in the
Ross Sea was gone; only the small bay of ice remained. The number of
adult birds was estimated at four hundred, the number of living chicks
was thirty, and there were some eighty dead ones. No eggs were found.[18]

Several more journeys were made to this spot while the Discovery was in
the south, generally in the spring; and the sum total of the information
gained came to something like this. The Emperor is a bird which cannot
fly, lives on fish which it catches in the sea, and never steps on land
even to breed. For a reason which was not then understood it lays its
eggs upon the bare ice some time during the winter and carries out the
whole process of incubation on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet
pressed closely to a patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and
protected from the intense cold by a loose falling lappet of skin and
feathers. By September 12, the earliest date upon which a party arrived,
all the eggs which were not broken or addled were hatched, and there were
then about a thousand adult Emperors in the rookery. Arriving again on
October 19, a party experienced a ten days' blizzard which confined them
during seven days to their tents, but during their windy visit they saw
one of the most interesting scenes in natural history. The story must be
told by Wilson, who was there:

"The day before the storm broke we were on an old outlying cone of Mount
Terror, about 1300 feet above the sea. Below us lay the Emperor penguin
rookery on the bay ice, and Ross Sea, completely frozen over, was a
plain of firm white ice to the horizon. There was not even the lane of
open water which usually runs along the Barrier cliff stretching away as
it does like a winding thread to the east and out of sight. No space or
crack could be seen with open water. Nevertheless the Emperors were
unsettled owing, there can be no doubt, to the knowledge that bad weather
was impending. The mere fact that the usual canal of open water was not
to be seen along the face of the Barrier meant that the ice in Ross Sea
had a southerly drift. This in itself was unusual, and was caused by a
northerly wind with snow, the precursor here of a storm from the
south-west. The sky looked black and threatening, the barometer began to
fall, and before long down came snowflakes on the upper heights of Mount
Terror.

"All these warnings were an open book to the Emperor penguins, and if one
knew the truth there probably were many others too. They were in
consequence unsettled, and although the ice had not yet started moving
the Emperor penguins had; a long file was moving out from the bay to the
open ice, where a pack of some one or two hundred had already collected
about two miles out at the edge of a refrozen crack. For an hour or more
that afternoon we watched this exodus proceeding, and returned to camp,
more than ever convinced that bad weather might be expected. Nor were we
disappointed, for on the next day we woke to a southerly gale and smother
of snow and drift, which effectually prevented any one of us from leaving
our camp at all. This continued without intermission all day and night
till the following morning, when the weather cleared sufficiently to
allow us to reach the edge of the cliff which overlooked the rookery.

[Illustration: THE EMPERORS ROOKERY]

"The change here was immense. Ross Sea was open water for nearly thirty
miles; a long line of white pack ice was just visible on the horizon from
where we stood, some 800 to 900 feet above the sea. Large sheets of ice
were still going out and drifting to the north, and the migration of the
Emperors was in full swing. There were again two companies waiting on
the ice at the actual water's edge, with some hundred more tailing out in
single file to join them. The birds were waiting far out at the edge of
the open water, as far as it was possible for them to walk, on a
projecting piece of ice, the very next piece that would break away and
drift to the north. The line of tracks in the snow along which the birds
had gone the day before was now cut off short at the edge of the open
water, showing that they had gone, and under the ice-cliffs there was an
appreciable diminution in the number of Emperors left, hardly more than
half remaining of all that we had seen there six days before."[19]

Two days later the emigration was still in full swing, but only the
unemployed seemed to have gone as yet. Those who were nursing chicks were
still huddled under the ice-cliffs, sheltered as much as possible from
the storm. Three days later (October 28) no ice was to be seen in the
Ross Sea: the little bay of ice was gradually being eaten away: the same
exodus was in progress and only a remnant of penguins was still left.

Of the conditions under which the Emperor lays her eggs, the darkness and
cold and blighting winds, of the excessive mothering instinct implanted
in the heart of every bird, male and female, of the mortality and gallant
struggles against almost inconceivable odds, and the final survival of
some 26 per cent of the eggs, I hope to tell in the account of our Winter
Journey, the object of which was to throw light upon the development of
the embryo of this remarkable bird, and through it upon the history of
their ancestors. As Wilson wrote:

"The possibility that we have in the Emperor penguin the nearest approach
to a primitive form not only of a penguin but of a bird makes the future
working out of its embryology a matter of the greatest possible
importance. It was a great disappointment to us that although we
discovered their breeding-ground, and although we were able to bring home
a number of deserted eggs and chicks, we were not able to procure a
series of early embryos by which alone the points of particular interest
can be worked out. To have done this in a proper manner from the spot at
which the Discovery wintered in McMurdo Sound would have involved us in
endless difficulties, for it would have entailed the risks of sledge
travelling in mid-winter with an almost total absence of light. It would
at any time require that a party of three at least, with full camp
equipment, should traverse about a hundred miles of the Barrier surface
in the dark and should, by moonlight, cross over with rope and axe the
immense pressure ridges which form a chaos of crevasses at Cape Crozier.
These ridges, moreover, which have taken a party as much as two hours of
careful work to cross by daylight, must be crossed and re-crossed at
every visit to the breeding site in the bay. There is no possibility even
by daylight of conveying over them the sledge or camping kit, and in the
darkness of mid-winter the impracticability is still more obvious. Cape
Crozier is a focus for wind and storm, where every breath is converted,
by the configuration of Mounts Erebus and Terror, into a regular drifting
blizzard full of snow. It is here, as I have already stated, that on one
journey or another we have had to lie patiently in sodden sleeping-bags
for as many as five and seven days on end, waiting for the weather to
change and make it possible for us to leave our tents at all. If,
however, these dangers were overcome there would still be the difficulty
of making the needful preparations from the eggs. The party would have to
be on the scene at any rate early in July. Supposing that no eggs were
found upon arrival, it would be well to spend the time in labelling the
most likely birds, those for example that have taken up their stations
close underneath the ice-cliffs. And if this were done it would be easier
then to examine them daily by moonlight, if it and the weather generally
were suitable: conditions, I must confess, not always easily obtained at
Cape Crozier. But if by good luck things happened to go well, it would by
this time be useful to have a shelter built of snow blocks on the sea-ice
in which to work with the cooking lamp to prevent the freezing of the egg
before the embryo was cut out, and in order that fluid solutions might
be handy for the various stages of its preparation; for it must be borne
in mind that the temperature all the while may be anything between zero
and -50 deg. F. The whole work no doubt would be full of difficulty, but it
would not be quite impossible, and it is with a view to helping those to
whom the opportunity may occur in future that this outline has been added
of the difficulties that would surely beset their path."[20]

We shall meet the Emperor penguins again, but now we must go back to the
Discovery, lying off Hut Point, with the season advancing and twenty
miles of ice between her and the open sea. The prospects of getting out
this year seeming almost less promising than those of the last year, an
abortive attempt was made to saw a channel from a half-way point. Still,
life to Scott and Wilson in a tent at Cape Royds was very pleasant after
sledging, and the view of the blue sea framed in the tent door was very
beautiful on a morning in January when two ships sailed into the frame.
Why two? One was of course the Morning; the second proved to be the Terra
Nova.

It seemed that the authorities at home had been alarmed at the reports
brought back the previous year by the relief ship of the detention of the
Discovery and certain outbreaks of scurvy which had occurred both on the
ship and on sledge journeys. To make sure of relief two ships had been
sent. That was nothing to worry about, but the orders they brought were
staggering to sailors who had come to love their ship "with a depth of
sentiment which cannot be surprising when it is remembered what we had
been through in her and what a comfortable home she had proved."[21]
Scott was ordered to abandon the Discovery if she could not be freed in
time to accompany the relief ships to the north. For weeks there was
little or no daily change. They started to transport the specimens and
make the other necessary preparations. They almost despaired of freedom.
Explosions in the ice were started in the beginning of February with
little effect. But suddenly there came a change, and on the 11th, amidst
intense excitement, the ice was breaking up fast. The next day the relief
ships were but four miles away. On the 14th a shout of "The ships are
coming, sir!" brought out all the men racing to the slopes above Arrival
Bay. Scott wrote:

"The ice was breaking up right across the Strait, and with a rapidity
which we had not thought possible. No sooner was one great floe borne
away than a dark streak cut its way into the solid sheet that remained,
and carved out another, to feed the broad stream of pack which was
hurrying away to the north-west.

"I have never witnessed a more impressive sight; the sun was low behind
us, the surface of the ice-sheet in front was intensely white, and in
contrast the distant sea and its leads looked almost black. The wind had
fallen to a calm, and not a sound disturbed the stillness about us.

"Yet in the midst of this peaceful silence was an awful unseen agency
rending that great ice-sheet as though it had been naught but the
thinnest paper. We knew well by this time the nature of our prison bars;
we had not plodded again and again over those long dreary miles of snow
without realizing the formidable strength of the great barrier which held
us bound; we knew that the heaviest battle-ship would have shattered
itself ineffectually against it, and we had seen a million-ton iceberg
brought to rest at its edge. For weeks we had been struggling with this
mighty obstacle ... but now without a word, without an effort on our
part, it was all melting away, and we knew that in an hour or two not a
vestige of it would be left, and that the open sea would be lapping on
the black rocks of Hut Point."[22]

Almost more dramatic was the grounding of the Discovery off the shoal at
Hut Point owing to the rise of a blizzard immediately after her release
from the ice. Hour after hour she lay pounding on the shore, and when it
seemed most certain that she had been freed only to be destroyed, and
when all hope was nearly gone, the wind lulled, and the waters of the
Sound, driven out by the force of the wind, returned and the Discovery
floated off with little damage. The whole story of the release from the
ice and subsequent grounding of the Discovery is wonderfully told by
Scott in his book.

Some years after this I met Wilson in a shooting lodge in Scotland. He
was working upon grouse disease for the Royal Commission which had been
appointed, and I saw then for the first time something of his magnetic
personality and glimpses also of his methods of work. He and Scott both
meant to go back and finish the job, and I then settled that when they
went I would go too if wishing could do anything. Meanwhile Shackleton
was either in the South or making his preparations to go there.

He left England in 1908, and in the following Antarctic summer two
wonderful journeys were made. The first, led by Shackleton himself,
consisted of four men and four ponies. Leaving Cape Royds, where the
expedition wintered in a hut, in November, they marched due south on the
Barrier outside Scott's track until they were stopped by the eastward
trend of the range of mountains, and by the chaotic pressure caused by
the discharge of a Brobdingnagian glacier.

But away from the main stream of the glacier, and separated from it by
land now known as Hope Island, was a narrow and steep snow slope forming
a gateway which opened on to the main glacier stream. Boldly plunging
through this, the party made its way up the Beardmore Glacier, a giant of
its kind, being more than twice as large as any other known. The history
of their adventures will make anybody's flesh creep. From the top they
travelled due south toward the Pole under the trying conditions of the
plateau and reached the high latitude of 88 deg. 23' S. before they were
forced to turn by lack of food.

While Shackleton was essaying the geographical Pole another party of
three men under Professor David reached the magnetic Pole, travelling a
distance of 1260 miles, of which 740 miles were relay work, relying
entirely on man-haulage, and with no additional help. This was a very
wonderful journey, and when Shackleton returned in 1909 he and his
expedition had made good. During the same year the North Pole was reached
by Peary after some twelve years of travelling in Arctic regions.

Scott published the plans of his second expedition in 1909. This
expedition is the subject of the present history.

The Terra Nova sailed from the West India Dock, London, on June 1, 1910,
and from Cardiff on June 15. She made her way to New Zealand, refitted
and restowed her cargo, took on board ponies, dogs, motor sledges,
certain further provisions and equipment, as well as such members of her
executive officers and scientists as had not travelled out in her, and
left finally for the South on November 29, 1910. She arrived in McMurdo
Sound on January 4, 1911, and our hut had been built on Cape Evans and
all stores landed in less than a fortnight. Shortly afterwards the ship
sailed. The party which was left at Cape Evans under Scott is known as
the Main Party.

But the scientific objects of the expedition included the landing of a
second but much smaller party under Campbell on King Edward VII.'s Land.
While returning from an abortive attempt to land here they found a
Norwegian expedition under Captain Roald Amundsen in Nansen's old ship
the Fram in the Bay of Whales: reference to this expedition will be found
elsewhere.[23] One member of Amundsen's party was Johansen, the only
companion of Nansen on his famous Arctic sledge journey, of which a brief
outline has been given above.[24] Campbell and his five companions were
finally landed at Cape Adare, and built their hut close to
Borchgrevinck's old winter quarters.[25] The ship returned to New Zealand
under Pennell: came back to the Antarctic a year later with further
equipment and provisions, and again two years later to bring back to
civilization the survivors of the expedition.

The adventures and journeyings of the various members of the Main Party
are so numerous and simultaneous that I believe it will help the reader
who approaches this book without previous knowledge of the history of
the expedition to give here a brief summary of the course of events.
Those who are familiar already with these facts can easily skip a page or
two.

Two parties were sent out during the first autumn: the one under Scott to
lay a large depot on the Barrier for the Polar Journey, and this is
called the Depot Journey; the other to carry out geological work among
the Western Mountains, so called because they form the western side of
McMurdo Sound: this is called the First Geological Journey, and another
similar journey during the following summer is called the Second
Geological Journey.

Both parties joined up at the old Discovery Hut at Hut Point in March
1911, and here waited for the sea to freeze a passage northwards to Cape
Evans. Meanwhile the men left at Cape Evans were continuing the complex
scientific work of the station. All the members of the Main Party were