Antarctica
is the highest, driest, windiest and coldest continent on Earth and the last terrestrial region to be sighted, explored and mapped. Its winter darkness and shuddering cold make its physical isolation absolute for months on end. No permanent human populati
So, not surprisingly, the material evidence of Antarctica’s earliest explorers and scientific researchers is comparatively fresh and intact. The handful of huts and thousands of artefacts that survive from the earliest expeditions remain virtually as they were left; abandoned during hasty retreats a century ago.
The buildings include Carsten Borchgrevink’s hut at Cape Adare, huts left by Scott and Shackleton in their quest to be first to the South Pole, and others such as Australia’s Mawson’s Huts at Cape Denison. All are evidence of the busy first burst of continental exploration from the turn of the 20th century to the end of World War I. They provide a fascinating glimpse of the lives and endeavours of the men of the so-called heroic era.
Almost 80 years passed between the f irst human footstep (probably planted in 1821 by Anglo-American sealer John Davis) and construction of the f irst building on the continent. In 1898 the converted whaling ship Southern Cross left London carrying a small party intent on wintering on the Antarctic continent. After pausing in Hobart, the vessel headed to desolate Cape Adare, located at the mouth of the Ross Sea. The expedition’s leader, Carsten Borchgrevink, an ambitious Anglo-Norwegian emigrant to Australia, had made a brief landing at Cape Adare in 1895 during an exploratory whaling voyage. Noting the thousands of Adélie penguins available to stock an expedition’s larder, Borchgrevink had determined to return.
Like most aspects of the expedition, the Southern Cross’s two prefabricated huts were Scandinavian. (The privately funded venture was ostensibly British, but most members were from Norway or Lapland.) The huts were of traditional interlocking pine construction, with roofs weighed down by rocks and sacks of coal to keep them from blowing away. Ten men shared the larger, 6.4 x 5.4m, building. Conditions were cramped and squalid. One of the three non-Scandinavians, Tasmanian physicist and astronomer Louis Bernacchi, remarked that with the “accumulated dirt of months, the atmosphere of the interior
became so foul as to be almost unbearable”. Unpleasant but vital shelter, its sturdy walls separated life from death and frigid chaos.
The second (now roof less) hut held stores; an entrance porch linked the two buildings. Inside the accommodation hut, shelves, bunks, a communal table, coal stove, books, papers, bottles and tins remain. Personal graffiti adorns the honey-coloured timber walls; a Primus stove looks set to roar into life. Invented in Sweden in 1892, the Primus would soon become the mainstay of all Antarctic sledging journeys.
In 1901, after Borchgrevink returned to England, the ship Discovery also headed for the Ross Sea region. Led by Commander Robert Falcon Scott, another individual of unbounded ambition, the British National Antarctic Expedition was Britain’s first official Antarctic venture since the discoveries of James Clark Ross aboard the Erebus and Terror, 60 years earlier. The expedition would spend two winters on the ice, but after such a long break in polar exploration, thoughtful planning was often lacking.
The expedition found a site for its hut on a shore of Ross Island, in McMurdo Sound. All seemed well, with easy access to the Ross Ice Shelf and safe anchorage nearby for the Discovery. But the hut was probably more suited to a dusty Australian paddock, right down to its open verandahs. Prefabricated in Sydney, it was roomy enough but also draughty, dingy and inadequately insulated. The structure was “more adapted as a summer house than a polar hut”, believed Louis Bernacchi, who, undeterred by the rigours of returning south, had joined Scott’s scientif ic staff as a physicist.
SO, WITH THE Discovery conveniently icebound nearby, expeditioners opted to exploit the ship’s warmth whenever they could. And the hut became a store, scientif ic observatory, repair shop and somewhere to skin and preserve biological specimens. Ernest Shackleton, third lieutenant on the Discovery, described it as a “place of retreat should any disaster overtake the ship”. But on a less utilitarian level it also became Antarctica’s f irst theatre.
Dubbed the Royal Terror (after nearby Mount Terror), it was the venue for performances by the eager players of the Dishcover Minstrel Troupe. Incongruously, the Discovery Hut (as it is known) now sits cheek by jowl with the US-run McMurdo Station, Antarctica’s largest base.
While Scott’s party was enjoying theatrical performances, on the other side of Antarctica 20 men from Otto Nordenskjöld’s Swedish South Polar Expedition were battling to survive. In February 1903 their ship Antarctic sank in the Weddell Sea. Having struggled over jagged ice to tiny Paulet Island, they wintered there in a 10 x 7m hut of granite slabs roofed with sealskins and ship sails. The hut’s foundation of foul-smelling guano added to their wretched existence, but if not for the 1000 Adélie penguins they’d slaughtered on landing, they might not have lived to be rescued in November. The guano-splattered walls are all that remain, yet courage binds every stone into a monument to the human will.
After that f irst winter in McMurdo Sound, Scott sent Shackleton home on the relief ship Morning. The off icial excuse was a bout of scurvy, but the charismatic junior off icer had sorely tested his leader’s authority. And so arose an atmosphere of bitter rivalry that would goad Shackleton into mounting three Antarctic expeditions of his own and elevate him into the pantheon of explorers.
By 1907 Shackleton had cobbled together a budget expedition and set out from London in a tired, 40-year-old sealing vessel, the Nimrod. His ultimate goal was the geographic South Pole. To appease his rival, Shackleton at f irst steered clear of Ross Island. But impenetrable sea ice forced him to dishonour his gentleman’s agreement and set up his base 32km north of the Discovery Hut on the volcanic scoria of Cape Royds.
The Nimrod carried a simple prefabricated building. Erected, it measured just 10 x 5.8m and sheltered 15 men, with all but Shackleton sleeping in its main space. Unlike gloomy Discovery Hut, Shackleton’s Hut is cosy and light. Its interior is still steeped in the spirit of the early 1900s; the intense patriotism of the Edwardian era shining from the photographs of King
The guano-splattered walls are all that remain, yet courage binds every stone into a monument to the human will.
Edward VII and Queen Alexandra that hang beside shelves still neatly stacked with everyday canned and bottled provisions. A contemporary issue of the Illustrated London News lies on a makeshift bunk. And a pair of socks hanging near the stove sports fabric name tags identifying their owner as T. W. Edgeworth David, the pioneering Australian geologist.
While the Discovery Hut hosted an Antarctic theatre, in Shackleton’s Hut the expedition leader and his men banished the boredom of the winter dark by producing a book of poems, stories and articles entitled Aurora Australis. In 1908 the book became the f irst to be written, edited, illustrated, typeset, printed, bound and published in Antarctica. Paper stock left over from the 100 copies produced still remains in the hut.
IN JANUARY 1909 Shackleton and three companions failed to reach the South Pole, although they came tormentingly close. The door was left ajar for Scott’s return. His British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 became a “succeed at all cost” operation that would elevate the by then Captain Scott to secular sainthood but would famously cost him and four companions their lives.
Scott again tried to reach the Discovery Hut but was blocked by heavy pack ice. He settled on a landing site 25km to the north, naming it Cape Evans for the expedition’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Edward ‘Teddy’ Evans. The expedition’s ship, the Terra Nova, was to retreat north once the shore party was established; there was to be no repeat of the Discovery’s icy impoundment. This meant effective accommodation was critical for the 25 men left behind.
The expedition’s living quarters were built conveniently close to the beach at Cape Evans. At 15 x 8m, the main hut became the largest structure built during the heroic era. It was well insulated and draught-proofed with shredded seaweed quilting and layers of a proprietary membrane called Ruberoid. When it was complete, Scott described it as a “truly seductive home…[that] transcends the word ‘hut’…the finest that has ever been erected in the polar regions”.
To venture into the hut today is to enter what David Attenborough described as a “time warp without parallel”. Beyond a distinctive acrid odour – of worn leather, discarded clothing, paper, blubber soot, decaying tins, old linoleum and abandoned laboratory chemicals – you notice what remains of a wall of packing cases dividing the central space. At first glance, this makeshift structure seems unremarkable, but no other artefact is more evocative of both Edwardian class divisions and the military-naval f lavour of the expedition. The wall separated the ‘wardroom’ – for the 16 off icers, scientists and civilian gentlemen – from the ‘mess deck’ of the lower ranks.
The hut is a hauntingly sad place suffused with tragedy. It is as if the shadows of Scott’s polar party linger within its four walls. At the far end of the hut sits the darkroom in which Herbert Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, brought his vivid images to life. Just metres away, Ponting took one of his most famous photographs – of Scott in his ‘den’ writing his journal. Scott was an eloquent wordsmith; his writings secured his heroic legacy, and Ponting captured him at his finest, doing what he did best.
Today, this most sacred of Antarctic inner sanctums is bereft of the personal effects seen in Ponting’s photograph, yet the physical space alone is enough to stir the emotions. It’s as if Scott has just gone outside and will be back soon.
But then, such feelings are common to all these extraordinary Antarctic places. They still shout with vibrant life and resound with the suffering, endurance, courage and an unyielding spirit of adventure.
Of the 17 huts or hut groups from the heroic era, six are gone. Framheim – Roald Amundsen’s Ross Ice Shelf base – and Mawson’s western base were long ago carried away on calving icebergs. Among the surviving structures, seven are substantially intact and four others are ruins. Under the 1961 Antarctic Treaty they’re all designated Historic Sites and Monuments. They’re internationally protected, and combined government and private efforts now ensure their survival.
The New Zealand-based Antarctic Heritage Trust cares for the Ross Sea huts, while during the past 20 years the Mawson’s Huts Foundation has coaxed Australia’s heritage back from the brink. Each of these historic places is now a popular tourist destination – a time warp without parallel.