Antarctica: Nature’s own preservative

Shackleton's Nimrod Hut. (Source: Flickr)

One of the striking things one encounters when reading about Antarctic exploration is how well preserved the sites of the explorer’s activity are today, even a century after they were abandoned. There are no grasses to overgrow the huts, no insects to harvest crumbs, and the cold temperatures prevent even bacteria from being an issue. The air, too, is almost totally free of pollutants. Consequently, those fortunate enough to visit the sites where Scott and Shackleton (for instance) made their bases find them much the same as they were at the time.

A recent news item noted that bottles of scotch left over from Shackleton’s 1907 Nimrod expedition were discovered under some snow. The scotch, shielded by the snow from the more extreme temperatures, was still sloshing around in the bottle. Goodness, but I’d like to try some of that.

Shackleton's old scotch, c.1907.

Even more remarkable is how well organic materials are preserved. The photograph below shows a workbench in Scott’s Terra Nova hut, located at Cape Evans. The penguin on the workbench has been dead for a hundred years. The newspaper on the left is a copy of the 29 February 1908 edition of the Illustrated London News.

That penguin looks well-preserved, mind you, but I am not sure that I would want to eat it.

Sinfonia antartica

 

Piper Kerr with Emperor Penguin, taken during the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, 1902-4. This photo has nothing whatsoever to do with the Sinfonia antartica. (Source: Royal Scottish Geographical Society)

Ralph Vaughan Williams was asked to provide music for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, which was a dramatization of Scott’s last expedition and quest for the South Pole. Upon completion of the film score he re-worked the music into his Symphony No.7, which he titled “Sinfonia antartica”. (Note the dropped ‘c’; the title is in Italian and so follows the debased Latin convention.)

The symphony is notable especially for the inclusion in the orchestra of a wind machine, which produces a kind of blustery whirring sound as of a tremendous storm sweeping across a snow field to buffet one’s tent. The symphony is in five movements, each prefaced (in the score, and sometimes, rather awkwardly, in performance) by a literary quotation.

When I listen to this symphony at home, I like to huddle over my Primus stove eating hoosh during the first three movements, and then climb into my reindeer-hide sleeping bag during the final two.

Here is the last movement of the symphony, which is prefaced in the score by this quote from Scott’s journal: “I do not regret this journey; we took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, therefore we have no cause for complaint.” It is performed here by the Halle Orchestra led by John Barbirolli. The wind machine can be heard to good effect especially during the final minute.

Roald Amundsen

Roald Amundsen was a man of many accomplishments, one of which was that he led the first expedition to successfully reach the South Pole. He had also been to the North Pole, and had led the first successful traversal of the Northwest Passage. He was a consummate professional who knew exactly what he was doing, and executed his plans with care and precision. He made it look easy.

If you have ever wondered why the men who explored the polar regions did what they did, it is illuminating to recall Amundsen’s childhood in Norway. As a young boy he had been fascinated by Franklin’s attempt to find the Northwest Passage, and apparently he even tried eating his shoe to see whether he could survive in those harsh conditions. In his book Roald Amundsen: A Saga of the Polar Seas J. Alvin Kugelmass tells us this about Amundsen’s boyhood:

During the months when the weather was fiercest, from November through April, he was rarely home on his days off from school. He went out, usually alone, to traverse the craggy mountains that ring Oslo. He preferred to be alone, for he wanted to test himself against the rugged terrain and the elements without having to explain to a school chum why he was doing so.

There was something in him that pushed him out to the margins.

It is easy to admire Amundsen, but it is hard to love him. Part of the pleasure of reading about Antarctic exploration and adventure is that one can admire the dogged determination and heroic perseverance of the explorers in the face of overwhelming difficulties. They struggled for their lives  in unimaginably harsh conditions, and we are amazed at them, whether they succeeded or not.

Amundsen, precisely because of his cool professionalism, rather spoiled things from this point of view. He arrived on the scene, with his dogs and his skis and his small group of men. His objective was to reach the South Pole, and he did so. His account of the journey is rather perfunctory: they skied a certain distance, camped, did a bit of scouting, had a good sleep, and then continued the next day. There is none of the struggle and agony that one finds in Scott’s journals, for instance, and also none of the warmth and heart. Amundsen completed his journey, there and back, without any major problems.

He reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, after a journey of almost two months. At that point Scott and his party were already well into their trek, and they arrived just over a month later to find the Norwegian flag flying at the Pole.

Amundsen never returned to Antarctica, but he did continue his activity in the Arctic. In 1928, when he was 55 years old, he boarded an airplane to help search for an airship, the Italia, which was flying exploratory missions in the north and had crashed. His plane was lost, probably in the Barents Sea, with Amundsen and the others on board presumed dead. Their bodies were never found.

Amundsen at the South Pole.

Cherry-Gerrard: The Worst Journey in the World

The Worst Journey in the World
Apsley Cherry-Gerrard (National Geographic Adventure, 2002)
574 p. [1922]

‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and the most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.’

Cherry-Gerrard was one of the members of Scott’s final Antarctic Expedition. He survived the ordeal, and, drawing on the journals and letters of many of the Expedition’s members, he compiled this thorough account of their triumphs and tragedies. It is a riveting story, well told. The book has been named, at least once, as the greatest adventure book ‘of all time’.

The Worst Journey in the World makes a good companion volume to Scott’s own journals, but not, I would argue, a good substitute. It does include extensive excerpts from Scott’s journals, including the heart-breaking final entries in their entirety, but without the sustained immersion in Scott’s own voice I found that it lacked the emotional punch of the unedited original.

What one gains over Scott’s journals is context. Cherry-Gerrard includes material from both before (on the journey from England to New Zealand) and after (the search for Scott and his companions) the period covered by Scott’s journal, and in between-times he fills out the picture considerably. It is probably the best single account of the Expedition’s overall activities and achievements.

There are two aspects of the Expedition, in particular, which get relatively little mention in Scott’s journals, but which Cherry-Gerrard justly describes as among the most incredible survival stories in the annals of exploration.  The first was the plight of the so-called Northern Party, and the second was the Winter Journey, the ‘Worst Journey in the World’ which gives this volume its name.

The Northern Party was a group of six men who were landed by ship during the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 at a position about 200 miles from the Expedition’s main lodge. They were to carry out scientific surveys; they had six weeks’ provisions. When the allotted time elapsed, they were dismayed to find that the ship, prevented by thick ice, did not return. As winter bore down upon them they dug underground snow caves and lived inside them, subsisting on seal and penguin, through the entire Antarctic winter. They suffered dysentery and scurvy, but with the coming of spring they mustered the effort to sledge their way back to safety, and all survived. It was an astounding feat. They named the spot where they were stranded Inexpressible Island.

It would be hard to imagine a worse time than living underground in a small snow cave for months on end, with perpetual darkness and blizzards raging above, eating mostly blubber.

They ate blubber, cooked with blubber, had blubber lamps. Their clothes and gear were soaked with blubber, and the soot blackened them, their sleeping-bags, cookers, walls and roof, choked their throats and inflamed their eyes. Blubbery clothes are cold, and theirs were soon so torn as to afford little protection against the wind, and so stiff with blubber that they would stand up by themselves…

Such miseries I would never wish on anyone. Yet we also read this:

There were consolations; the long-waited-for lumps of sugar: the sing-songs — and about these there hangs a story. When Campbell’s Party [the Northern Party] and the remains of the Main Party forgathered at Cape Evans [the site of the main lodge] in November 1912,  Campbell would give out the hymns for Church. The first Sunday we had ‘Praise the Lord, ye heavens adore Him,’ and the second, and the third. We suggested a change, to which Campbell asked, ‘Why?’ We said it got a bit monotonous. ‘Oh no,’ said Campbell, ‘we always sang it on Inexpressible Island.’ It was also about the only one he knew. Apart from this I do not know whether ‘Old King Cole’ or the Te Deum was more popular. For reading they had David Copperfield, the Decameron, the Life of Stevenson, and a New Testament.

What can one say about this amazing passage? It summons up a whole world that has passed away. Ask yourself what songs we would sing together — if we sang at all — upon finding ourselves in their position. I am confident that the Te Deum would not be high on the list. The sense of camaraderie and shared culture that this passage evokes seems impossible today.

Bowers, Wilson, and Cherry-Gerrard before beginning the worst journey in the world. (Source: Freeze Frame - Scott Polar Research Institute)

The centerpiece of the book is Cherry-Gerrard’s story of the Winter Journey, which he undertook with two others (Bowers and Wilson, both of whom later perished with Scott after reaching the South Pole). Their journey had a scientific intent: to collect Emperor Penguin eggs for study. Emperor Penguin eggs must be harvested in the dead of winter, and the nesting site was approximately 60 miles from the Expedition’s main lodge. It took them five weeks to complete the trek, and Cherry-Gerrard summed it up this way:

Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror.

It was dark, first of all. It was cold; on some nights the temperature dropped below –60°C (–75°F). They made painfully slow progress. They were beset by blizzards. When they reached the penguin nests, at their furthest distance from safety, their tent blew away. That they survived to tell the tale was a testament to their determination, resourcefulness, and incredible powers of endurance. It is an amazing story.

Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Gerrard after completing the worst journey in the world. (Source: Freeze Frame - Scott Polar Research Institute)

Scott’s ill-fated expedition set one of the last century’s great examples of courage, spirit, and endurance. This is probably the best overall account of where they succeeded, and where they, tragically, failed. It is tremendously exciting to read, and is warmly — so to speak — recommended.

Sea leopards

If we exclude the Orca, which roams all over the world and is not especially associated with Antarctica, then the most fearsome creature inhabiting the Antarctic waters is the Sea Leopard, sometimes also called the Leopard Seal.

The Sea Leopard, bane of Antarctic bathers. (Source: National Geographic)

The Sea Leopard is a nasty piece of work. It grows to a size of up to 4 m (12 ft) and weighs as much as 600 kg (1300 lb), which makes it way bigger than a regular leopard. It has enormous, sharp teeth, and lots of them. It can open its jaw to an angle of 160°, as shown, the better to swallow large objects like penguins, seals, and human children.

I am told that when travelling in regions frequented by sea leopards, it is recommended that one wear sharp, ice-climbing crampons and carry a sharp stick so as to kick and stab the sea leopard if it attacks, and that one keep a whistle handy in order to summon help from one’s fellows.

During Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, one of the men was pursued across the ice by a ferocious sea leopard. The story is told succinctly in Shackleton’s book South!:

One day a huge sea-leopard climbed on to the floe and attacked one of the men. Wild, hearing the shouting, ran out and shot it.

When they opened the sea leopard they found in its stomach dozens of freshly eaten fish, as well as several crampons, a handful of whistles, and a long, sharp stick.

Scott: Journals

Scott of the Antarctic
The Journals of Scott’s Last Expedition
Robert Falcon Scott (Prospero Books)
521 p.

These are the journals which Robert Falcon Scott kept during his last, heroic, disastrous expedition to the South Pole. Late in 1910 he and his crew departed New Zealand amid much fanfare. The expedition was planned to last until 1913, through two Antarctic winters, and had a wide-ranging scientific mandate to study the geology, meteorology, and biology of Antarctica. At the heart of the expedition, however, was a heroic quest: Scott intended to be the first man ever to reach the South Pole.

His journals begin by telling of the various hardships that they endured as they sailed to Antarctica, landed, established a camp, and began their work. Scott was a regular diarist, writing nearly every day, and though of course much of what he recorded was routine — co-ordinates, weather, and so on — he was also a keen observer of his fellows and of the spectacular environment in which they worked. He was a fine writer too; though the journals were never meant to see the public eye in this rough form, they read well and better than well most of the time.

It was Scott’s second time leading an expedition to Antarctica, but they still had much to learn, and a great many things went wrong in those first months. They were struck by a hurricane en route and nearly sank. They were lodged in the pack ice, which surrounds the Antarctic ocean like a ring, for three full weeks before breaking through. (Shackleton, a few years earlier, had taken just a few days.) When they landed, they lost one of their three motorized sleds through the ice. Ponies, which were supposed to pull the heavy supply sleds, died at an alarming rate. Scott maintained an optimistic attitude, but it was clear that not all was going according to plan.

Perhaps the greatest blow, upon arrival, was the discovery that Roald Amundsen, the great Arctic explorer, had also landed in Antarctica, also with the intention of reaching the Pole. Scott’s ship discovered Amundsen’s camp just a few hundred miles down the coast from Scott’s camp. They knew that he was a formidable challenger, as, of course, he turned out to be. Scott responded in his journal quite calmly and prudently though:

The proper, as well as the wiser, course for us is to proceed exactly as though this had not happened. To go forward and do our best for the honour of the country without fear or panic.

The trek to the Pole began late in 1912, as the Antarctic summer began. Their task was formidable: to walk over 800 miles through ice and snow, taking down their camp each morning and setting it up again each evening, pulling their supplies of food and clothing with them. I think that it is difficult for us today to imagine how dangerous this trek was. They had no radio contact; if something went wrong, no-one would know, and there would be no help. The route they followed was not entirely uncharted, for they followed the path Shackleton had made a few years previously on his abortive effort to reach the Pole, but nonetheless they had no-one to rely on but themselves.

A large group started the trek, pulling many supplies, and periodically along the south-bound route they would establish a supply depot for the return journey. At each depot, a certain number of the group turned back, so that the ranks grew fewer as they progressed. At the final depot, just five went forward to the Pole.

The story is well-known, so I hope I am not giving anything away. After walking for over two months, they did, on 18 January 1913, finally reach the Pole, only to discover a Norwegian flag planted in the snow: Amundsen had beat them.

At the South Pole, 18 January 1912. L to R: (standing) Wilson, Scott, Oates; (seated) Bowers, Evans

Exhausted, they turned around and began the return journey. At this point one detects a change of tone in the journals. Scott remarks more often about their being tired, or discouraged. It is easy to understand that they were disheartened; it would have been one thing to return home as heroes, but to face that long march knowing that their thunder had been stolen must have been terribly demoralizing. They struggled.

As summer wore on, Scott began to worry about the onset of winter and their slow progress. The ice conditions made their sledges very difficult to pull, such that they were frequently scraping, like dead weight, behind them. They began to develop frost-bite, and terrible blisters. It began to get cold. They managed to maintain a pace that brought them back to the depots before they exhausted their food supply, but just barely.

The last weeks of their journey are heart-breaking to read. One of the five, Edgar Evans, began to deteriorate and kept falling behind, his feet terribly frost-bitten. One day he collapsed in the snow, throwing off his gloves and hat, in a kind of frenzy. They took him into the tent, but he died in the night. They continued, and another man, Titus Oates, began to weaken. One night, as a blizzard raged around them, he left the tent, saying, “I may be some time”. He never returned, and they all understood that he had sacrificed his own life in an attempt to save theirs.

The final three — Scott, Edward Wilson, and Birdie Bowers — carried on, but slowly and falteringly. There was a major depot of food 130 miles from home, and the party got within 11 miles of it. They had two days of food remaining, and could probably have made it, but a blizzard hit. For eight days the storm raged, and they could not, and finally did not, move any further.

The closing pages of the journal are remarkable for their pathos. There, in that tent, awaiting death, Scott wrote a series of letters, in the hopes that someday they would be discovered and delivered. Most moving are those to his wife, and to the wives and mothers of the men who died at his side. They reveal Scott as a man of great integrity and courage, and they were difficult to read without tears.

I have done a fair bit of reading in the ‘adventure and exploration’ literature. These journals of Scott rank with the very best.

**

The British Library has made excerpts from Scott’s journals available online for viewing through their “Turning the Pages” site.

Bad Antarctic weather

An Antarctic blizzard.

As we all know, Antarctica is cold. The principal reason for its being cold is, of course, its high southern latitude, but to this are added a number of other augmenting factors: the air is extremely dry, so solar energy is not absorbed by surface-level water vapour; the continent is mostly covered with snow and ice, which reflects the solar energy away; there are no major bodies of inland water, which would tend to have a moderating influence; and Antarctica has a high average surface elevation.

When we say that it is cold down there, we mean it. The mean temperature in the interior of Antarctica is –57°C (–70°F). Temperatures on the coastal areas are milder, but still chilly: at McMurdo Station on Ross Island, for instance, the average temperature in August is just –28°C (–18°F), though in January it rises to –3°C (27°F). Temperatures tend to be higher still on the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches furthest north.

As an illustration of these general features, the miracle of the Hinternet allows us to check the current conditions at several Antarctic locations:

• South Pole (Amundsen-Scott Station)
• Magnetic South Pole (Vostok Station) [well inland]
• Ross Island (McMurdo Station) [coastal]

Sure enough, it’s cold.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Antarctica is technically classified as a desert, and this despite its being almost totally covered in frozen water. The reason is that its average annual precipitation is very low: less than 5 cm (2 in). This is comparable to the Sahara. There are a few rare spots in Antarctica, called ‘dry valleys’, that are not snow-covered; it is estimated that it has not rained in these spots for about 2 million years.

Antarctica has terrific storms. In the winter the wind-chill temperature can fall to –100°C (–150°F). Blizzard conditions can reduce visibility to the length of one’s arm, and the storms can continue for weeks. The fierce blizzards are compatible with the low precipitation: they tend to consist of blowing, rather than falling, snow.

Finally, it is worth noting (again) that the coldest naturally occurring terrestrial temperature ever measured was in Antarctica, at the Russian Vostok Station. That temperature was –89.2°C (–128.6°F).

With such thoughts in mind on this St. Valentine’s Day, why not stay warm by snuggling up under a blanket with your sweetheart?

Bach in Antarctica: audiovisual edition

Today we reprise an old favourite: Bach in Antarctica.

Inspired by the delightful absurdity of this concept album, I here provide my own variation on the theme. The video below is of the Prelude to Bach’s Suite for solo cello No.1, BWV 1007 and the audio link underneath it plays Adélie penguin calls. To experience my “mash-up”, which I call Suite for solo cello with penguins, one need simply play both simultaneously. The combination is dynamite. For best results, you may wish to turn the volume up for Bach and down for the penguins — but not all the way down, surely.

Bach (courtesy Mischa Maisky):

Penguins (courtesy Jungle Walk):

Robert Falcon Scott

Robert Falcon Scott is one of the two or three greatest figures associated with Antarctic exploration. Born in 1868, he was a British Navy man who had a fairly conventional career until, when in his thirties, his imagination was captured by news of an Antarctic expedition in the works. He applied for a position, and in the end was chosen to lead the effort. Eventually he was to go to Antarctica twice, at the helm of two celebrated expeditions.

The first is known as the Discovery Expedition; it lasted from 1901-4. This was the largest and most ambitious expedition to Antarctica up to that time, and is one of the centerpieces of the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration. Like Scott, most of the crew had no experience in polar regions, and they had to learn quickly how to survive in the harsh conditions. One crew member, George Vince, was swept over a precipice to his death shortly after the expedition landed. Another, holding the post of third lieutenant, was a young Ernest Shackleton, the man who would become one of Scott’s few rivals in the quest for Antarctic greatness.

The Discovery, temporarily beset by ice.

The Discovery Expedition had a wide-ranging scientific programme, and conducted surveys and studies in meteorology, geology, and zoology. Its base was established on Ross Island, at the southern tip of Hut Point Peninsula. The hut in question was constructed by the expedition, and remained a touchstone for later expeditions as well.

The expedition passed two summers in Antarctica, from 1902-3 and from 1903-4. During the first the expedition made an attempt to reach the South Pole. Three men — Edward Wilson, Ernest Shackleton, and Scott himself — with supply support from other expedition members, set out for the Pole. They used dogs to pull the supply sledges and they tried to travel on skis, but their lack of experience was an impediment, and they made slow progress. After nearly two months of trekking they had covered about 480 miles, but were still over 500 miles from the Pole. Faced with a shortage of food, they turned back. On the homeward journey they began to show signs of scurvy, and limped into base camp weakened, but safe. Though they had fallen far short of their chief objective, they had nonetheless been further south — to latitude 82°17′ — than anyone before them.

During the second summer Scott led another group, consisting of William Lashly and Edgar Evans, west from Ross Island, over the mountains and, for the first time, onto the Polar Plateau. They marched out, pulling their own supplies this time in a system that came to be called man-hauling. They covered several hundred miles before turning back. At some point they lost their navigational tables and in consequence were forced to make careful, and slow, progress homeward. Both Scott and Evans once fell into a deep crevasse, and were lucky to survive. They eventually returned to camp after about two months on the trail.

Man-hauling (Source: Natural History Museum, UK)

Scott’s experiences on these two journeys convinced him that dogs were more trouble than they were worth, and he favoured man-hauling as a means of transporting supplies. This decision, rooted (as Amundsen later demonstrated) in a lack of relevant experience, was to have fateful consequences when Scott returned for his second attempt at the Pole.

After returning to England, Scott wrote a book about the expedition called The Voyage of the Discovery, and it made him a household name. Regrettably, I have not read the book myself.

Aboard the Terra Nova.

The second expedition, called the Terra Nova (these expeditions are all named after their ships), was launched about a decade later, lasting from 1910-13. Again the expedition was well-stocked with scientists and had numerous scientific objectives, but the central challenge was to reach the South Pole. Supplies were laid in the early months of 1911 and, after wintering again on Ross Island, they set out late in 1911 for the Pole. The trekking party was initially large, but at predetermined stages small groups of men would drop supplies and turn back, so that the party thinned as it proceeded, leaving in its wake supplies for the return journey.

The story of what transpired is well known: five men, including Scott, did succeed in reaching the South Pole — only to find a Norwegian flag planted in the snow. Roald Amundsen, who had made a name for himself as an Arctic explorer, had beat them to the goal by several weeks. Understandably, they were disheartened as they turned to face the 900 mile return journey, and they made slow, and increasingly slow, progress, pulling their supplies behind them every step of the way. They began to suffer the accumulated weight of frostbite, malnutrition, intermittent snow blindness, and poor snow conditions. Eventually their progress stopped altogether. The bodies of Scott, Edward Wilson, and Birdie Bowers were discovered the following summer by a search party; the others, Titus Oates and Edgar Evans, lay dead some distance further south and were never found. Scott’s journals from this journey are justly famous, and not only because of their tragic finish.

Scott’s reputation as a great Antarctic explorer has been challenged by those who allege that his death was brought about by his own incompetence. There may be something to the allegation, but for me the amateur aspect of Scott’s expedition is part of the appeal. They were not seasoned professionals like Amundsen, but ordinary men chasing extraordinary ends. That, it seems to me, is reason enough for admiration. Scott is one of the most admirable figures in the annals of Antarctic exploration.

The monument raised over the bodies of Scott, Bowers, and Wilson.

Antarctica explored

Detail of Antarctic coastline, from Wilkes Map (1840). (Source: New Zealand History Online)

After the first landing on the Antarctic Peninsula, in 1821, further exploration proceeded slowly. A number of expeditions, often government sponsored, explored the waters around Antarctica, discovering the main island groups and mapping sections of the Antarctic coastline. It became gradually clear that there was a large continent at the Pole, not just a group of islands. Brief landings were made here and there, but no substantial exploration of the interior was undertaken.

In the 1840s a British naval expedition led by James Clark Ross made a bold approach to the continent. Ross was a seasoned polar explorer who, a decade previously, had been the first to reach the North Magnetic Pole. On his Antarctic expedition he ploughed through a very substantial ice pack and broke through to a previously undiscovered bay, now known as the Ross Sea in his honour. He charted the region carefully, and that area eventually became the preferred landing place for the later, more famous, British expeditions.

James Clark Ross in profile, with a map of the Ross Sea. (Source: Antarctic Overseas Exchange Office)

From roughly the turn of the twentieth century to roughly the end of the 1920s, a period now called the “heroic age” of exploration, there was a flurry of Antarctic activity. Expeditions from Britain, France, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Norway all made their way to the southern continent, with various ambitions and various degrees of success. It would be too tedious and time-consuming for me to enumerate each of these expeditions — Wikipedia, in any case, lays things out very clearly — but let me draw attention to a few highlights:

• In 1899 the British Southern Cross Expedition, led by Carsten Borchgrevink, was the first to spend a winter on the Antarctic mainland.
• In 1902-3 the British Discovery Expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott, set a new record by trekking south to latitude 82°17′.
• In 1908-9 the British Nimrod Expedition, led by Ernest Shackleton, reached latitude 88°23′ before being forced to turn back. Other expedition members reached the South Magnetic Pole.
• Late in 1911 a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole. Members of the British Terra Nova Expedition, again led by Robert Falcon Scott, achieved the same goal early in 1912. More on that anon.

As is clear from this brief list, the principal achievements were made mostly by the British. In those days before the First World War the idea of British Empire was still a living one, and they seem to have regarded Antarctica as somehow their own — not in any formal sense, but almost naturally. Few others, in any case, were willing to mount the effort required. I find it interesting to see that the Americans were entirely absent from Antarctic exploration in this period.

Before the month is through, I’ll return to some of these expeditions to look at them more closely. Without this post, however, there would have been an awkward gap between the initial discovery of the continent and the particular events of particular expeditions. I hope that the gap has been at least partially papered over now.