Cape Evans is one of the many spurs of Erebus and the one that stands closest under the mountain, so that always towering above us we have the grand snowy peak with its smoking summit. North and south of us are deep bays, beyond which great glaciers come rippling over the lower slopes to thrust high blue-walled snouts into the sea . . .

Ponting . . . declares this is the most beautiful spot he has ever seen . . . .

—Robert Falcon Scott

When the mercury hovers between 21°F to 36°F in Antarctica it's positively tropical! This was the case on Saturday, 9 November, so we decided to take advantage of the great weather and do a shakedown trip on the skidoos to Cape Evans and Cape Royds to visit the historical huts and see the Adelie penguin colony. We straddled our skidoos about 9:30 A.M. and rode straight to Cape Royds. There was virtually no wind when we set off—ideal skidooing conditions. We scooted passed Cape Evans, deciding to get as far as we could while the weather was fine, and then slowly make our way back to Scott Base stopping at other sites of interest along the way. We arrived at Cape Royds about noon.

Cape Royds is the site where Shackleton's hut was erected for the 1907-09 British Antarctic Expedition. It is situated on a prominent black volcanic rock outcrop that is home to many thousands of little Adelie penguins. These penguins grow to about 70 centimeters high, and have black faces with white rings around the eyes, black backs, and white bellies. At the time of the year we visited them they were busy making nests for the mating season. We watched the males carrying

around tiny rocks in their beaks and placing them delicately to make a ring of stones for the female to nest in.

Adelies are one of only two penguin species, the other being the emperor penguin, that breed on the shores of the Antarctic continent. Adelies spend their winters in the pack ice out on the sea where temperatures are slightly warmer than on the land. In spring the male Adelies make long journeys over the sea ice to return to their colonies, like the one at Cape Royds, where they diligently hunt for their old nests and refurbish them for the new mating season. The females then arrive and help their mates with the nest building. The eggs are then incubated for about a month and the young brooded for about four weeks. The interesting thing is that since their arrival back at the colony to renovate the nest and undertake courtship, the males have not eaten for almost three weeks, and after the female lays the eggs, the males take the first incubation watch. They lose nearly half their body weight before being able to have another feed. From here on the males and females alternate every three days or so, feeding at sea and bringing back food for their young chicks in their crops.

These beautiful little penguins seemed to have no fear or concern at all about us being there. By walking carefully amongst the penguins, then sitting down still, I could watch them very closely as they would happily carry on their work walking around me. It must have been easy for the early explorers to procure penguin meat whenever they needed to. In many cases it supplemented their regular diet or was a major part of it during times of extreme isolation away from base. Victor Campbell's Northern Party of Scott's 1910-13 Terra Nova expedition became stranded away from the base as winter closed in upon them. The six men lived for over six months in a fairly small ice cave, subsisting largely on penguin and seal meat, although not without some gastric problems. Here is a quote from Campbell's account of one mealtime:

We made a terrible discovery in the hoosh tonight: a penguin's flipper. Abbott and I prepared the hoosh. I can remember using the flipper to clean the pot with, and in the dark Abbott cannot have seen it when he filled the pot. However, I assured every one that it was a fairly clean flipper, and certainly the hoosh was a good one.

We watched the Adelie penguins for about an hour and occasionally observed some interesting behavior. One lone little penguin, well away from the rest of the crowded rookery, came in tobogganing on his belly across the ice, then popped upright onto his feet when he reached the volcanic rock. It was amazing how fast he could scoot along like this. It does make you wonder why he went out by himself in the first place when all the action was happening at the rookery, but I suppose he must have had his own penguinine reasons that we mere humans could never comprehend.

Shackleton's hut stood proudly on the rocky bank not far from the penguin rookery. It commanded wide sweeping views of the oily blue Ross Sea with its huge floating icebergs. One very large iceberg was still there from Shackleton's day as captured in the photographs of the 1907-09 British Antarctic Expedition.

The hut is now beautifully restored with all the items inside in actual position, based on the original photographs. The old sledges hang from the roof, and the items of food are still out on the shelves made from packing crates. I examined a can of Aberdeen Marrow Fat and thought to myself that they really must have been desperate to eat such high cholesterol food to survive. Only later did someone explain to me that this was merely a brand name for green peas. In many cases the early expeditions required much funding to get started and any sponsorship for food was welcomed. On Scott's expeditions his men were often photographed either scoffing down a well-known can of baked beans, or holding up a certain product for future endorsement. The other items of food left in the hut included many packets of hard plasmon biscuits, the staple diet of sledging parties when mixed with pemmican to make up a “hoosh.” One packet was open on the table with a few broken biscuits displayed. I presumed that this was for those who wished to try the food, so I broke off a very small fragment and ate it. It tasted like hard, flavorless cardboard. Nonetheless, on a long sledging journey, the biscuits mixed up in the hoosh would have provided valuable carbohydrates and dietary fiber.

Outside the hut the remains of the “car” can be seen along with the makeshift kennels where the dogs lived, now filled with ice and snow. Snow-covered bales of hay, used for feeding the ponies, are nearly piled

up near the kennels. It must have been a harsh environment for the animals, but they were breeds adapted to the cold and rarely suffered during the early expeditions. Raold Amundsen took 97 dogs on his ship Fram when he set sail for Antarctica but he records that during the first week of their sledging journey to the South Pole, on Friday, 15 September 1911, it was so cold that two of the dogs froze to death after they lay down.

Unlike Scott's two huts, Shackleton's hut at Cape Royds is small yet gives the impression of having been better organized. Much has been written on the differences between these two great men and although I am no expert in matters of historical perspectives I did have a feeling that this hut had a happier, less military coziness about it than either of Scott's huts. All ranks were in together here. Shackleton didn't like to alienate himself from his men; he wanted to share their space. Scott, in all fairness, came from a naval background where it was more or less expected at the time to house the officers in separate quarters from the other men. After an hour or so of examining the hut and its contents we carefully closed up the shutters over the windows, locked the front door, and silently stepped outside into the 1990s once more.

Outside in the sea ice in front of the hut was an enormous berg, a gargantuan milky white crystalline mass of ice, framed in all its grandeur by a pale blue sky above and deep blue sea around its girth. The black volcanic prominence was alive with myriads of busy little penguins, looking somewhat akin to swarms of formally attired ants from a distance away.

Our next destination was Scott's hut at Cape Evans, the base from which he and four of his men left for the South Pole in November 1912, never to return. Cape Evans on a perfect day is a magical site, as vivid and powerful a place as Scott described it. The huge smoking cone of Mt. Erebus broods over the restored grey wooden hut. A big, black wooden cross rests on the low volcanic hill behind the hut as a permanent reminder of the bittersweet mix of bravery and tragedy that made that expedition so famous. In contrast, a short distance away from Scott's hut was a modern demountable base with a humming windmill harnessing the vast wind power of the region. This was the Greenpeace Base.

The first thing I recall about stepping into Scott's hut at Cape Evans was the huge scale of it. It was a big building with an outer covered stable area for the ponies. As I entered the building I recall bumping my head on the lintel, not because the door was so small, but because the build-up of snow had raised the ground level considerably higher compared to when Scott and his men were there.

As with Shackleton's hut, every artifact inside the Cape Evans hut was placed back in its original position, matching the interior scenes from Ponting 's early photographs as closely as possible. The long dining table had a single large pewter mug at its head—Scott's mug. Behind there lay Ponting's darkroom where many of the earliest photographs of Antarctica were developed and printed. Wilson's biological laboratory was nearby with a stuffed emperor penguin placed on the table next to various dissecting instruments. In the corner around from there were Scott 's modest sleeping quarters. His small, portable bunk still had his fur sleeping bags and various pairs of socks hanging up around it. It is quite a humbling experience to actually lie down on Scott' s bed and stare up at the wooden ceiling in the same manner as he did some 80 years earlier, trying to imagine his thoughts as he arose on Wednesday, 1 November 1911, the day he set off for his march to the South Pole.

Once more, as I've said with respect to the other huts, the feeling of the moment, that these men were only here yesterday, is hard to suppress. If there are such things as “ghosts” in the scientific sense, then there must reside the essential memories of those men; their imprints in time hanging in the very ether of the hut's moody air.

We spent some time looking at the items, reading some of the old magazines they had left lying around, and just drinking in the dank atmosphere of the place. It was a fairly dark hut, deliberately having few windows so as to brace up to the strongest winds, but well enough constructed to survive the harsh winter onslaughts of some 80 or fiercer Antarctic winters.

All around the hut, I thought that actual parts of the men from Scott 's expedition must now remain, somehow minutely integrated with the local environment. The sweat on the ground, the shed flakes of skin and frozen particles of their bodily excrescences, must still exist

within or around that area. No dust mites or insect scavengers exist here to break down the microscopic organic debris shed by a large band of humans and their animals. I thought about this deeply one day and it dawned on me that here, more than anywhere on Earth, are to be found the forensic ghosts of past people.

In Noel Barber's book, The White Desert, he recounts an extraordinary meal he had prepared by Australian Antarctic veteran Sir Hubert Wilkins, who delved into a hidden cache of food that Scott had left in a hollow halfway up the hillside in case of an emergency, such as if the main hut burned down.

I ate the strangest meal of my life, a meal cooked and tinned at least fifty years ago, but which due to the natural refrigeration of the Antarctic, was just as good as new . . . The meal was excellent and there were hundreds of tins of it. The cheese was rather high, and tended to crumble when we opened the tin, but it was quite edible. The biscuits still retained much of their original crispness. There were score of tins of English vegetables, some wonderful greengage jam—I tested that, too—boxes of Quaker Oats, Cerebos salt, and Coleman's mustard in huge tins and all in well nigh perfect condition. The only thing that had gone bad was some corned beef.

After leaving Scott's hut we walked up to Observation Hill to examine the cross erected in memory of all who died on Scott's last dash to the pole. The large cross was made of Australian jarrah^★ and had engraved upon it the immortal words of Tennyson's poem “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, but not to yield.”

We pondered this in silence for a few minutes, taking in the magnificent view of the whole area, then ambled slowly down to the Greenpeace Base.

A small Turkish man from Australia, nicknamed “Oz,” was maintaining the base while the other members were out on various environmental observation missions. He warmly greeted us and invited us in for afternoon tea. This small but modern base was even more up-market that Scott Base in its advanced technology. It had a kind of Swiss laboratory feel about it, brightly lit with sterile white fluorescent lights and displaying a preponderance of leafy green plants sprouting from the hydroponics corner. Oz treated us to fresh plunger coffee,

chocolate biscuits, dried fruits, and nuts, and was more than happy to chat to us about the role that Greenpeace plays in Antarctica.

Right from their first arrival in Antarctica they had been monitoring the large American McMurdo Base to check that waste material was being carted away rather than dumped and that the local wildlife colonies were not in any danger from the expansion of human activities around the bases. Their job was simply to let the rest of the world know what went on down here environmentally. In addition to the fairly modern base they had set up at Cape Evans, they had a few demountable fiberglass “igloos” plus some polar tents and could camp out at various locations to carry out their observations. One such “advance base ” was a little structure not far from Scott Base, from which even the New Zealanders were under their scrutiny.

In general terms relationships were good between Greenpeace and Scott Base, although the US military personnel and USAP scientists were officially told not to have any contact at all with the Greenpeace base. Nonetheless, we heard about several of the US scientists who had called in on Greenpeace for “unofficial” friendly visits during the time we were around Scott Base. It was one of the few places you could call in for a social visit, provided, of course, that you had your own transport.

Before departing from Cape Evans we collected a sample of the rock from the Mt. Erebus lava flow, a peculiar variety of basalt called “kenyite” (originally after a type of volcanic rock found in Kenya). On our way home we stopped at the famous ice wall of the Barnes Glacier where Scott's photographer, Herbert Ponting, shouted to hear his echo, and we all emulated him by yelling as loud as we could and listening to the echo reverberating off the distant hills.

A few kilometers further on we reached a long river of protruding ice known as the Erebus Ice Tongue. We found some large caverns and explored inside one. The light was a deep blue shining down through the thin ice ceiling above. This experience gave me two scary thoughts. First, it gave me the eerie feeling of what it must be like down the bottom of a crevasse. Second, by looking up at the thin ice cover above, I could see just how dangerous walking around on ice floes could be. Inside the ice cave I saw amazing interplays of subtle light on the jagged

shapes of ice stalactites hanging down from the overhead slits. Frank Wild, the geologist on the main eastern journey of Mawson's 1912 expedition, expressed his feelings of joy and awe at seeing ice sculpture at its natural finest:

At the actual point of contact was what might be referred to as gigantic Bergschrund: an enormous cavern over one thousand feet wide and from three hundred to four hundred feet deep, in the bottom of which crevasses appeared to go down forever. The sides were splintered and crumpled, glittering in the sunlight with a million sparkles of light. Towering above were titanic blocks of carven ice. The whole was the wildest, maddest, and yet the most grandest thing imaginable.

We jumped on our skidoos and raced back to Scott Base after this full day of exploring. It was exhilarating to ride the skidoos, two up, like sitting pillion on a motorcycle, almost flat out at about 16 miles/hour across the flat sea ice. These sleek machines are powered by 500 cc two-stroke motors so are capable of generating a considerable amount of power, especially as in this case where they were not pulling heavy sledges. Still, it is rare that you can drive the things with any degree of speed, as it takes almost perfect conditions. Then, the trouble with going fast is that you generate a significant wind-chill factor on your face and gloved hands, which soon becomes uncomfortable, and eventually forces you to slow down and put on extra clothing. The wind-chill is about 1 degree for each knot of wind speed, so even though it was quite warm at 23°F, at 16 miles/hour it drops your comfort level to about −22°F, which can be rather cold on the nose. We arrived back at base at around 7:30 P.M., relieved to discover that they had saved dinner for us, complete with some Australian table wine left over from some official function. It was a perfect end to what was arguably one of the most interesting days I had ever spent in Antarctica.

I kept myself busy the next day working in the Scott Base science lab on their Mac computer, writing a summary article on Antarctic dinosaurs for the Scott Base Times newsletter. That evening I tried to make a phone call back home to my family but gave the operator the wrong number. Instead I reached the Royal Melbourne Golf Club. When I told the man I was calling from Antarctica he sounded a bit doubting over the authenticity of the call and hung up. “Just another prank call from Antarctica,” I guess he thought.

I tried again and eventually reached my family. It was wonderful to hear my wife and children's voices over the phone. I relayed the news that all was going well so far and that we were to be put into our field site within the next couple of days. After that I could not expect to hear any news from home for about a month into our trip, when we expected a helicopter to reach us with fresh supplies and any letters or parcels from home.

We were going on our recon flight the following day. I was excited by the prospect of getting a chance to see the lie of the land where we would be venturing. Most importantly, as I had good eyesight, I knew I could probably spot the characteristic mottled layers of the fossil-rich Aztec Siltstone. It would be a most interesting day.