Race to the Bottom of the Earth

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  TO DOMINIC

  Amundsen/Scott Antarctica routes 1903–1910

  PART 1

  THE SETUP

  “I write the history of the South Pole! If anyone had hinted a word of anything of the sort four or five years ago, I should have looked upon him as incurably mad. And yet the madman would have been right. One circumstance has followed on the heels of another, and everything has turned out so entirely different from what I had imagined.”1

  —Roald Amundsen, April 13, 1912

  “So here we are practically on the summit and up to date in the provision line. We ought to get through.”2

  —Captain Scott, December 21, 1911

  CHAPTER 1

  THE RACE,

  AMUNDSEN/SCOTT: 1903–1910

  London, England—1906

  Captain Robert Falcon Scott couldn’t shake the darkness. There had been celebrations and honors, parades and royal invitations, but joy was beyond his reach. His gloom was inescapable. Bare, stark, and numb. So much like the Antarctic desert that he had abandoned, summoned home before he could reach his target.

  Scott had turned back before reaching the South Pole.

  In 1903, he had journeyed farther south than anyone had ever before. He had gone to Antarctica and traveled 960 miles across the ice, trying to reach the South Pole. Because of him, England’s flag was closer to the pole than any other in the world.

  But he had missed his mark. To the nation he might be a hero, but in his own eyes he had failed. He hadn’t gone far enough.

  It had been the dogs. He had taken dogs, had intended for them to pull sleds across the ice and up glaciers. Dogs were supposed to be hearty. They were supposed to eat half of what a man did but pull almost as much. They were supposed to respond to orders and mind their human masters. They were supposed to. But it hadn’t worked out that way. “It is odds that the dog rather than the man directs the walk,” Scott had lamented.3 The dogs had turned on him and turned on one another. In the end, the men had ended up hauling the dogs.

  It had been the men, too. They all went snow-blind. Bright sunlight reflected off the ice and snow and burned the men’s eyes. At one point, there was only one working eye among the three people who made the push to the pole. They recovered, somewhat, but then scurvy made them weak and confused. The men could have been better prepared. If only Scott had known then what he knew now.

  Robert Falcon Scott (1905). [Henry Maull and John Fox/Wikimedia Commons]

  He had been so close, only 8° away. He had almost made it. Almost.

  He had to go back.

  It began in whispers. He wrote to a friend, tossed out the idea as if it was just a casual, passing thought: maybe he would try again. Just a hint, a suggestion, a quick note in a letter once or twice that laced possibility to the edge of his sadness.

  Then it began to build. What if, Scott mused, he took motorized vehicles to Antarctica? He had been a torpedo officer in the Royal Navy; machines made more sense to him than animals. He began to ask a few trusted officers from his last expedition—did they think polar cars could help a team reach the South Pole? Could this be his vindication? Their emphatic yes was all Scott needed. Hope had taken hold and given direction to his darkness.

  Quickly then, it grew. Friends, former expedition members, and explorers of all kinds offered help. In 1906, not even two years after his return, Scott decided to embark on a second trip to Antarctica. This was his opportunity, his chance to triumph, where before he had failed.

  Work started at once on the polar motorcars. In Paris, France; Birmingham, England; and Fefor, Norway, great polar explorers and engineers began designing machines. But, in the middle of his planning, Scott was called back to his ship in the Royal Navy, “forced to reinstate myself and get some experience before I again ask for leave.”4 Though he had sailed on great royal yachts from the time he was thirteen years old, he suddenly felt trapped and claustrophobic. “I am dreadfully sick of this [naval] routine,” Scott wrote to his sister.5 He wanted news, and he raced into every port, eagerly searching for updates from his team.

  It took years of designing and redesigning, testing and retesting. In the end, an entirely new vehicle emerged: the motor sledge. Wolseley Motors from Birmingham, England, created a gas-powered crawler with an innovative concept of looped treads in place of wheels. Scott and his wife went to see the final tests in person, ardently hoping that these could be “the key to everything,” he wrote.6 On the long, snowy slopes of Fefor, the motor sledges easily pulled heavy loads up the mountains.

  Sure, they had a way of breaking down unpredictably. Sure, they were heavy. But they weren’t dogs.

  Still, he would take dogs, and ponies, too, just in case. Perhaps this new group, he thought, perhaps these dogs would be equal to the task. If the motor sledges broke, then the ponies could haul. If the ponies grew sickly, then the dogs could work. And, there could be no greater prize than reaching the pole through the purest form of all: man-hauling as they had before.

  Scott wrote that “no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception … when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts … Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.”7 Dogs and ponies could be useful, but man-hauling was the ultimate in honor. This time—this time!—the men would be better prepared.

  Man-hauling in Antarctica. Sledges were pulled by teams of two to five men. [Wikimedia Commons]

  Scott’s two expeditions were less than a decade apart, yet knowledge of how to live and work in polar conditions had changed dramatically. Now, they knew to eat seal meat—fresh and plentiful in the Antarctic waters—to ward off scurvy. No one knew exactly why or how it worked, but eating fresh meat seemed to ensure that people stayed healthy.

  Traveling would be different, too, even beyond the motor sledges. In Norway, Scott had ordered fifty pairs of custom-made skis. The best skis, with the most advanced bindings in the world, would help them over the ice. Their eyes would be better protected this time as well. With dark goggles, they wouldn’t have to fear the sunlight on the snow. Scott put every bit of polar knowledge to work.

  In 1909, Scott made his official announcement. His goal was clear: “The main object of the expedition is to reach the South Pole and secure for the British Empire the honour of that achievement.”8

  Scott had no problem finding volunteers for his crew. On his first return from Antarctica, the nation had cheered. For his second venture, it seemed like all of Britain wanted to be part of his glory. When he announced the Antarctic expedition, more than eight thousand people applied to join his crew on the three-year journey. He chose sixty-five.

  Many were seamen and officers, on loan from the Merchant Marines or the Royal Navy like Scott. They had all volunteered to go. Scott needed men who would watch wi
th constant attention while sailing a ship around ice floes. He needed people with strength to build shelters, perseverance to maintain the base camp, and dedication to simply survive the long, dark polar winters. The expedition demanded courage, but almost more so, it demanded passion. Once they left civilization, there was no escaping the dark and cold. Not a man among them could have second thoughts; there was no turning back.

  Twelve of the crew were scientists: physicists, geologists, biologists, and zoologists. Antarctica, especially the interior where the South Pole lay, was entirely unknown. Scott was excited about a research program that aimed to collect meteorology data, study penguin mating habits, and collect fossils of ancient plants that may have once grown where ice now reigned.

  A few other members of the crew were neither sailors nor scientists. Bernard Day, an engineer who helped design and test the motor sledges, was aboard for vehicle maintenance and to make improvements along the way. Two eighteen-year-old Russians were hired to drive the dogs, a groom was brought on to tend to the ponies, and a champion Norwegian skier was hired to teach the men how to ski in Antarctica.

  Then there was Apsley Cherry-Garrard. He didn’t apply for a defined role. He simply was so excited about the expedition that he had paid Captain Scott £1,000 to buy his way aboard. At first, Scott had refused. But, when Cherry-Garrard told Scott to keep the money anyway, the goodwill won him a spot on the voyage.

  It was a big expedition, hardly a nimble strike force that could move quickly. But Scott had prepared for a long-term expedition rather than a quick dash to the pole.

  In June 1910, they boarded the Terra Nova in Cardiff, Wales. She was a three-masted whaler already tested in the icy Antarctic waters and a steal at only £12,500 (less than half the cost of the Discovery from Scott’s first polar expedition). In the docks, alongside great cargo ships and liners, she looked small and uninspiring. But in the Antarctic waters, she was a powerful fighter. Seven feet of wood reinforced her hull. Scott had already seen her grinding and crushing her way through ice and knew she was equal to the task. She would get them to Antarctica.

  With the crew, basic supplies, and motor sledges aboard, they settled in for the journey. From Cardiff they would sail to Cape Town, South Africa, then on to Melbourne, Australia, and Lyttelton, New Zealand, for additional supplies.

  All sixty-five men knew the risks they were taking. Perhaps Scott had been to Antarctica and back safely, but plenty of others had paid the ultimate price along the way, never to be seen again. As the Terra Nova prepared to depart Cardiff, Scott ordered the entire crew to write their wills.

  They left, each man knowing his duty yet blind to whether he would ever return home.

  They were off. Headed south.

  Christiania (Oslo), Norway—1907

  Roald Amundsen had always loved the ice. He wanted, craved, the prizes of sacrifice. Suffering, endurance, hunger. The greater these hardships, the greater the resulting victory.

  Roald Amundsen (1908). [Ludwik Szacin´ski/Wikimedia Commons]

  He was a tall, muscularly framed man with a long, stern face that hid any secrets. It was a face that could take rain as easily as sunshine and wither a lesser man with a single glance. Roald Amundsen was destined to explore the frozen, dark desert. Roald Amundsen dreamed of the North Pole.

  Growing up in Norway at the end of the nineteenth century, Roald had always looked north. Young Amundsen was transfixed by the stories of daring explorers who sacrificed everything for adventures in the frozen ice worlds of the very northern seas. Even as a child, he exercised and worked his muscles, developing them to endure what the ice would demand. The Arctic was waiting, and Roald couldn’t grow up fast enough.

  “Whatever I have accomplished in exploration,” Amundsen later recalled, “has been the result of lifelong planning, painstaking preparation, and the hardest of conscientious work.”9

  By the time he was thirty-five years old, in 1907, he was an expert skier, a certified ship’s captain, a natural leader, and already an Arctic explorer with experience skiing across one of Norway’s mountain plateaus in the dead of winter. Roald had no trouble convincing anyone that he could be the first person to the North Pole. Raising the necessary funds, however, was a different story.

  The Fram in dry dock. Her curved hull, the structure built to contact the water, is shown held by white braces. The bow, or front, of the ship is pointing out of the page. [National Library of Norway]

  Money slowly trickled in. Bit by bit, though, with donors often contributing out of a sense of patriotism, Amundsen began to scrape enough together to put a down payment on a ship and hire a crew.

  The ship, the Fram, was built specifically for polar exploration. She had been designed by a team of three renowned polar explorers. The sheathing over her hull was built so that it would be torn off rather than fractured in the ice; this way, the Fram stayed watertight, allowing it to avoid cracks and gashes that would slowly sink her. As another safety feature, the hull itself was curved so that ice would lift the ship, rather than crush it. (However, she was nausea-inducing on the open water. She rolled wildly over the easiest swells, a side effect of all these efforts to prepare her for the ice. Her critics snidely remarked that “she is not adapted for very heavy seas, and may turn turtle [roll over].”10) For Amundsen’s expedition, her steam power was replaced with an internal combustion engine, making her the first polar ship to have diesel power.

  The crew, too, was chosen with one goal in mind: to reach the North Pole before anyone else. With only nineteen men aboard, every one of them needed to know how to handle the ship, handle the ice, and handle the fatigue of darkness during the six-month winter. Next to knowledge and fortitude, Amundsen chose his crew based on their ability to keep a positive attitude. Amundsen knew within minutes of talking to a man if he would succeed as part of his expedition or not.

  But then, in 1909, with Amundsen just months away from setting sail, newspapers around the world began screaming the names of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary.

  One of them, or both of them—it wasn’t entirely clear—had reached the North Pole. Amundsen could not be first.

  “This was a blow indeed!” Amundsen later said.11 But he wasted no time grieving for the record that would never be his. Almost as soon as he heard the news, he began to think of a new plan. “If the expedition was to be saved,” Amundsen later wrote, “it was necessary to act quickly and without hesitation.”12

  The North Pole had been claimed, but the other side of the world was uncharted. If the North Pole couldn’t be his, then the South Pole would be. Secretly, Amundsen decided to challenge Captain Scott—who had already announced his expedition—to the South Pole.

  No one else knew it yet, but Scott’s expedition would not be alone in Antarctica.

  Plans would have to be made fast, and they would have to be made in the utmost privacy. “Everything had to be got ready quietly and calmly,” he wrote.13 Amundsen had barely raised enough money to try for the North Pole; if investors heard he had changed plans, they would certainly withdraw their support.

  Amundsen didn’t even tell his own crew that their destination had changed.

  The first thing he did after deciding on his new goal was to order one hundred Greenland dogs. Dogs, he was convinced, “were the only practicable draught animals for use in snow and ice. They are quick, strong, sure-footed, intelligent, and able to negotiate any terrain that man himself can traverse.”14 They weathered the blinding sun and the cold well. And, if they had to, they would eat other dogs as food.

  There was a certain magic about them, a personality and dynamic that made handling the dogs as much of an art as leading people. “The dog must understand that he has to obey in everything,” Amundsen later wrote, “and the master must know how to make himself respected.”15 He didn’t understand Captain Scott and the reluctant English attitude toward dogs. It was their loss.

  But other than putting in an order for the dogs, nothing else in public view se
emed to change. Arctic provisions were still bought. Arctic—not Antarctic—maps were still laid out. The crew still held for their original launch date. Outwardly, Amundsen kept to his stated goal of going north and publicly refocused the expedition on completing scientific research rather than exploration at the North Pole.

  He told only one person of the change in plans: his brother Leon, “upon whose absolute silence I could blindly rely.”16 As the expedition’s manager, Leon could be counted on to make the last-minute changes and alert the right people at the right time and not a moment before. Roald Amundsen trusted no one else.

  The Fram, with Amundsen and his crew, set sail on August 9, 1910. They followed their original plan to resupply and do final outfitting of the boat in Madeira, Portugal, before heading north to the Arctic.

  It wasn’t until three hours before their departure from Madeira—their last port of call before heading into the unknown—that Amundsen called his crew together. Though they grumbled at being disturbed from writing their last letters home and making their own final preparations, they gathered to hear what their leader had to say.

  With his men all assembled in front of him, Amundsen spoke. They were headed south, he said, aiming for the grand prize of first to the South Pole—not the silver prize of second place to the north.

  The men were stunned. It took them several moments to understand what he had said. Then, they began to cheer.

  Amundsen didn’t trust it. Celebration and excitement were good, but shallow emotion could fizzle as quickly as it arose. It was easy to be caught in a moment’s anticipation; it would be much more difficult to weather the hard years ahead.

  One by one, Amundsen pulled each man aside. He asked them, individually, if they would like to leave. They were each given an opportunity to resign without any repercussions.