ABOUT ANTARCTICA
Antarctica is a continent of superlatives. It will surprise no one that it is the coldest of Earth’s six continents, but how many of us are aware that it is also the driest and windiest, and has the highest average elevation above sea level? It is also larger than one might assume, with a land area almost twice the size of Australia.
Although there had been speculation about the existence of Antarctica for many hundreds of years, the first confirmed sighting of the continent was not made until 1820, by a Russian naval expedition led by the Estonian captain Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen. If only he had had a catchier name, maybe it would have been named after him.
Much of the coastline was mapped by the British Antarctic expedition of 1839-43 led by James Clark Ross, commanding the two ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Their names were duly immortalised in the Ross Sea, Ross Ice Shelf and the volcanoes Mount Erebus and Mount Terror.
Even after Britain had literally put Antarctica on the map, the doomed Franklin Arctic expedition of 1845 helped to put polar exploration firmly on the British Admiralty’s back burner for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The hostility of the environment, and the lack of obvious resources to exploit, also deterred exploration of the interior.
All this changed at the turn of the twentieth century, with the launch of the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901-04, led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott in the specially built RRS Discovery. This made a number of important geographical and scientific discoveries, though an attempt to reach the Geographic South Pole was aborted on 30 December 1902 at 82°17′S, after progress was slowed by frostbite, snow blindness and the early symptoms of scurvy.
The subsequent British Antarctic Expedition of 1907-09 was led by Ernest Shackleton, who had been a junior officer on Scott’s Discovery expedition but had returned home in a relief ship in 1903, at Scott’s insistence, after his health collapsed on the arduous trek towards the Pole. The experience imbued him with a powerful determination to return to the Antarctic and outperform Scott. Although he failed in his primary objective of reaching the Geographic South Pole, Shackleton set a new record by reaching 88° 23′ S, less than 100 nautical miles from the Pole, while other members of the expedition became the first to climb Mount Erebus and reach the Magnetic South Pole.
The British Antarctic Expedition of 1910-12, commonly known as the Terra Nova Expedition, saw Scott return to the Antarctic with the primary objective of becoming the first to reach the Geographic South Pole. This became a race with the Norwegian Roald Amundsen after the latter abandoned his original plan to become the first to reach the North Pole following its conquest by the Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary.
The Amundsen expedition went comparatively smoothly, reaching the Pole on 14 December 1911 and returning safely to its base, helped by its mastery of skis and dog sledging (and what came to be regarded by the British as an unsporting willingness also to use dogs as a source of fresh meat). Scott’s team reached the Pole five weeks later, on 17 January 1912, to the bitter disappointment of finding that Amundsen had beaten them to their goal. Scott famously wrote in his diary: “The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected ... Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”
Scott’s expedition turned from disappointment to tragedy as the five man Polar party attempted to return to base. Edgar Evans was the first to succumb to malnutrition, frostbite and injuries, dying on 17 February 1912. The four survivors were hampered by some of the worst weather ever recorded, and found their supply depots short of fuel. Man hauling their supplies, they made painfully slow progress of less than five miles a day. Lawrence Oates, who was badly affected by frostbite and feeling the effects of an old wound from the Boer War, became convinced that his slowness was jeopardising the survival of them all, and walked out of the tent into a blizzard on 17 March, with the immortal words “I am just going outside and I may be some time.”
This sacrifice did not save the other members of the team. Scott, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers got within 11 miles of the expedition’s One Ton Depot but were halted by a fierce blizzard on 20 March, and their supplies ran out. They are presumed to have died on 29 March, when Scott concluded his diary with these words:
“Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people.”
A search party found the tent containing the frozen bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers on 12 November 1912 and recovered Scott’s diary and other personal effects before erecting a snow cairn over their remains. Oates’s body was not found, but the search party erected a cairn and cross near the point where he was presumed to have died, with the inscription “Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L. E. G. Oates, of the Inniskilling Dragoons. In March 1912, returning from the Pole, he walked willingly to his death in a blizzard, to try and save his comrades, beset by hardships.”
The heroic age of Antarctic exploration concluded with the Imperial Trans-Antartic Expedition of 1914-17, led by Ernest Shackleton, which failed in its primary objective of completing the first crossing of the continent from coast to coast, but entered legend after Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, was trapped and then crushed and sunk by sea ice. Shackleton and five of his team endured a 14 day journey in an open boat to South Georgia, where three men then crossed the unexplored interior to reach the manned whaling station at Stromness and summon help to rescue the remainder of the expedition from the Antarctic Elephant Island.
Antarctic exploration between the two world wars was largely conducted by air, with the United States taking the lead. The first humans to stand at the Geographic South Pole after Scott were the crew of the US Navy aircraft that landed there on 31 October 1956 as the precursor of airlift that shortly afterwards established the permanent Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station as a research base.
The Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1956, led by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sir Vivian Fuchs was the third to reach the Geographic South Pole by land and the first to do so by motor vehicle, as well as the first to complete an overland crossing of the continent via the Pole.
A Norwegian explorer, Børge Ousland, completed the first unassisted solo crossing of the Antarctic in January 1997.
The South Pole today, like Everest, is a place that can be reached by those with deep enough pockets through a variety of commercial expedition operators. But it remains perhaps the most hostile environment on earth, with the average temperature at the height of the Antarctic summer reaching only an average of around -28ºC (several degrees colder than one of Iceland’s cold stores), compared with midwinter lows of -80ºC.
Although In The Footsteps of Legends will benefit from the latest in 21st century knowledge about nutrition, communications, weather forecasting and medical support, no one should underestimate the sheer physical challenge of completing the 140 mile, 19 day crossing of the Antarctic plateau, with each man hauling everything he needs to support himself on a specially designed pulk.
