So here ends the entries in this diary with the first chapter of our History. The future is in the lap of the gods; I can think of nothing left undone to deserve success.
—Robert Falcon Scott
Scott wrote these words on the night before he set out for his tragic attempt to reach the South Pole. Nonetheless, he expressed the sentiment that everything possible had been done to ensure their success, all possible preparations had been meticulously carried out and the men were well trained for the tasks each had to fulfill. Despite all this, the trip ended in disaster, so the emphasis on training and careful planning is now paramount to any fieldwork in Antarctica. I reflected on this as we were about to undertake our survival-training course, an important part of the modern preparation for any successful Antarctic field trip.
I awoke late next morning and rushed about madly to get ready for survival school. At 8:30 A.M. we departed from Scott Base in the Hagglunds snowmobile with John Alexander and JR, our survival teacher. The Hagglunds is like a giant enclosed tractor that pulls a trailer full of people and their gear along on twin tank treads. We traveled to a spot about six kilometers away from base onto the edge of Ross Island, yet still a reasonably safe distance away from the start of the sea ice, denoted by the pressure ridges formed by the frozen sea ice thrust up near the island 's edge.
That morning we practiced walking up snow slopes and “arresting” techniques. No, this is not how to catch criminals on the ice, but rather what to do if you unexpectedly slip and go into a fast downhill
slide. We were first made to slide down a steep snow slope upside down (head first) then turn ourselves around and stop the slide. I found my first attempt at this to be quite tricky, but after a few tries it became easy, and was actually a lot of fun. The arresting techniques involved getting up speed sliding down the snow slope, then turning and digging in the point of the ice pick in the bank to stop. It can be a little awkward once you are moving fast, upside down, looking up at the sky with your head leading the way down.
We then moved on to the “Chalet” for lunch. It was a marvelous-looking building, akin to a delightful postcard picture of a Swiss Alpine villa. It was actually a mobile house on sleds that could be towed around by a tractor to different locations. It made a comfy shelter in which to have a break from the wind on survival training courses, or if skiing on a day trip out from Scott Base.
After lunch we returned to the snowfield to build ourselves an ice shelter for the night. In the event of losing your tent in a blizzard, or if your sledge with all the gear on it goes down a crevasse, an ice cave is the best form of shelter to get away from the raging winds. To demonstrate this point, each expeditioner must construct either an igloo, above ground, or a below ground ice cave, and sleep the night in it. My group consisted of Rick, from the US Navy media services, and Tony, a US field operations man. Rick and I decided to go for the igloo, but Tony wanted his own personal ice cave. It was bloody hard work cutting the large snow blocks with a saw and building it up in decreasing circles so that it wouldn't collapse in on itself. After about three hours we were finished, the first shelter completed out of all the groups!
We next fired up the primus stove for dinner, a simple yet adequate repast of dehydrated lasagna (just add hot water), tea, crackers, and some instant pudding, all supplied by the US survival school. Others, who knew better, had brought along steaks and scampi, served with chilled champagne and other assorted luxuries. They cooked their meal up on a crude barbecue made from half a 44-gallon drum with spindly iron legs welded onto it. It was permanently kept out at the survival school training area. Those wanting to use the barbie had to bring their own wood from the bases, as it's not an easy job finding anything to burn in Antarctica, apart from penguins and seals near the sea ice, and
they are nowadays protected. In order to light the barbie we used “woofer wood”—a can of petrol was poured over the wood and it was set alight with a mighty woof!
We all huddled around the burning wood for warmth. A roaring fire set outside on the Antarctic landscape in the late evening low light is indeed a peculiar sight, one that I never saw again. Following dinner we shared some port and chatted awhile until about 10:30 P.M. when the cold winds picked up, forcing us all to go inside our cozy ice shelters for the night. I slept very well inside the igloo, although it was a bit cramped for two people, as my feet couldn't extend fully. We now realized with humble hearts why we were the first group to finish, because our igloo was much smaller than the others! Luckily for us Tony built himself an ice cave, with a large snow platform for his bed, so he slept soundly below ground in his icy crypt.
We were all woken quite unwillingly by our unnaturally cheery survival school instructors at 7:30 A.M. The sun was shining and it was not too windy, so we breakfasted alfresco style. This was a simple task, as we only had to boil the primus for water to make tea. We ate dry crackers, tubs of instant pudding, and oranges, a wonderful balance of dietary goodness created by the US Survival School culinary experts.
After packing up the equipment we moved to the glacier to prepare for learning safe “glacier crossing techniques.” This involved first spending an hour learning how to rope up our harnesses and walk around with crampons attached to our boots. Crampons are metallic spiky things that loop around on the soles of your boots so as to grip into the ice when you walk. Then we walked slowly up onto a glacier probing with our ice picks to detect crevasses. On finding one we would test its stability, and then cross it roped up to a partner who would potentially catch you dangling on the end of your rope should the thin ice bridge over the crevasse suddenly give way. Although this didn't happen to me, I was still quite relieved when this part of the training had finished.
Next we had to practice prussocking out of a crevasse and using anchoring techniques for stopping a fall. The first exercise involved having your buddy, who was roped up to you, suddenly throw himself wildly off to one side and you had to drop down and anchor yourself
firmly to the ground using the ice pick and stop the rope from dragging you along with him or her. After this we went to a small ice cliff and practiced in turn arresting our buddy after he or she leaped off the edge. This was essential practice for a potentially life-threatening disaster, as crevasses are an all too common occurrence in real Antarctic fieldwork, as I would later discover.
Next we roped up and went to an ice cliff for a lesson on “rappelling.” Rappelling is just another word for “abseiling” or letting yourself drop down over a cliff while controlling your rate of descent by tensioning your rope. We each abseiled down a twenty-meter ice cliff, and then solemnly waited, watching the others take turns to descend. Others had the chance to descend into a crevasse on a rope ladder, and see first hand what it's like inside one of those virtually bottomless icy chasms. I peered down over the edge into one and could see how difficult it might be to rescue someone who had fallen down into a crevasse. Not only was it a hell of a long way down to the bottom, but also it was just solid, smooth ice walls on each side.
The survival-training instructors told us a few true stories of accidents that had happened near the base when people had strayed away from the flagged safe routes in order to take a short cut over the glacier back to base. They were very unpleasant stories without happy endings. However, rather than dwell on the negative, here is an amazing true story of a crevasse rescue that was successful, as told by Finne Ronne in his book, Antarctic Conquest, about the 1947-48 US Antarctic expedition. On finding physicist Harry Clichy-Peterson down a crevasse, they miraculously rescued him:
While we tied a bowline loop in the end of a rope I called, “What sort of shape's he in?”
“Can't tell. Seems all right, but he's wedged head downward. It'll be a struggle.”
And a struggle it was. On the surface we could only guess what Butson was doing from the quivering of the ropes, as if they were fish lines with fish hooked on the ends. Actually Peterson was so tightly wedged that Butson could not get the loop we lowered him around the victim 's body. Butson therefore had to untie the knot, work the end around Peterson's torso, and tie the knot again.
“All right,” Butson shouted up, “now pull! Carefully!”
Four men heaved on this jury rig. At about the seventh or eighth pull, like a tooth being plucked from its socket, Peterson's body came loose from the jaws of ice. Then up he came, foot by foot, for a hundred and ten feet . . . he survived imprisonment for nearly 12 hours, as his thick alpaca-lined suit had saved him from the cold.
Unexpectedly, a large emperor penguin came sliding in from miles away to watch us. It moved rapidly by coasting on its belly, its little feet pushing it along like a rear propeller engine. On seeing it we all rushed towards it to take photos, as it was the first penguin most of us had seen in the wild. It stayed around watching us curiously, naturally posing for us as we photographed it. Then it headed off again just as quickly as it had arrived, its curiosity about us obviously satisfied.
Emperor penguins live in a large colony at Cape Byrd, the place where Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard marched to in the dead middle of winter in 1911 to collect some of their eggs. Although the journey was only about 70 kilometers, it was in the dead of night and under the most extreme weather conditions that Antarctica could throw at human beings: blizzards and seriously low temperatures. Cherry-Garrard 's book, The Worst Journey in the World, is aptly titled, and covers the whole of Scott's last expedition. The idea at the time was that penguin embryos might show some interesting aspects of their evolution, linking birds with more primitive kinds of vertebrates. The emperor penguins hatch their young in the middle of winter, the safest time away from predators, but they must huddle up in large groups to protect themselves from the weather. The young chicks are tucked under the skin of the males, who brood them while the intrepid females go out to sea in search of food. After a while they change around and the females take care of raising the young. By this time the fathers may have gone for up to three months without feeding. Emperor penguins are the largest of all penguins, and may stand as much as one meter high and weigh up to 30 kilos. They are certainly dignified-looking birds; their colorful orange-rimmed necks and black heads make them quite attractive.
After a quick lunch we packed up our gear and were taken back to Scott Base in the snowmobile. Following dinner that evening I was
reluctantly dragged along to the annual Observation Hill Race at Mactown. Observation Hill is the black volcanic cone overlooking McMurdo Base. It has a large wooden cross on top constructed in memory of the deaths of Scott and his men. I originally didn't intend on running in the event but decided to join in at the last moment, fearing that my lack of fitness before being thrown out into the field would not be harmed one bit by this sudden burst of unplanned sporting activity. I ended up running the race in 13 minutes, from the fire station to the top, ranking 30th out of 50 entrants. We then went to a barbecue organized by the Kiwis from Fischer Catering. Fifty-six Kiwis were employed that year to work in Mactown, but most spent as much of their free time as possible drinking New Zealand beers in the Scott Base bar. Those of us who ran the race were then given vouchers for four free cans of beer. It was worthwhile participating after all, I reflected later.
After the feast we went to the living quarters of one of the Kiwis working at Mactown for a birthday party, where I mingled with about twenty people crowded in a small room. We had some cake but had to leave early as the US regulations prohibited “parties” in the living quarters. The warden for that area gave us the stern message by to leave at once, so the party broke up and we all headed back to our respective quarters for the night.
It was almost Christmas, and I still hadn't been able to get out into the field. No news had come in from Margaret Bradshaw's group, mainly because they were waiting to be picked up by VXE-6 Squadron and could do absolutely nothing to speed up the process. They were at the mercy of the weather and the mechanical fitness of the Hercules aircraft. In times like this it would have been very frustrating for them. After nearly two months working in extreme conditions they wanted nothing more than to get back to base but had to stay put and wait.
I went to bed that night hoping that news of our expedition would come in the next day, anything that would get our mission moving so that I could start doing the job I'd been sent down to do: search for fossils and uncover the secrets of ancient Gondwana.