Antarctica

  On they climbed. The sun wheeled around in the blue-black sky, until when Val looked back the glare off the sea ice was blinding. She checked her watch: though it was still sunny midafternoon, it was nine P.M. She had wanted to reach the saddle in the spur ahead of them, to give them a view of the Axel Heiberg below, but it was too late to continue. “Time to camp.”

  So they pitched the dining tent and their little sleeping domes, and then in the nylon blue incandescence of the diner they got three pots of ice on the stove. In the violent blue light of the team tent everyone tended to look like morgue photos of themselves, but Jack did not seem to mind this effect, as he kept glancing at Val while they wolfed down the hors d’oeuvres: taste of smoked oysters, sip of tea, glance at Val, three little taste treats, repeated over and over. And a bit of a come-on too. But Val had had a lifetime’s experience ignoring such looks, she could ignore men across a whole broadband of registers, from outrageous flirtation to demure appreciation to neutral obliviousness to cold warning to gross insult. Back in the world she would have ignored him in a really dismissive way, the back of her hand to him; but as he was a client, she kept it oblivious.

  Besides, it was hers and Ta Shu’s night to cook, and cooking made one generous. The two of them sat by the stove tending the rehydrating spaghetti sauce, cooking the pasta, frying hard bread in garlic butter, and passing out cup after cup of hot tea. Val did not always enjoy cooking for even as small a group as this, but Ta Shu with his fractured English and his unusual ideas about food (he wanted to put ginger in the spaghetti sauce) made it entertaining. It was a pleasant couple of hours, one of the unsung attractions of mountain expeditions: getting off one’s tired feet, getting warmed up, getting food in the stomach, food which because of the extreme states of hunger involved often tasted wildly delicious even if it was very plain fare; and all the while lounging around on soft sleeping bags in colorful silky clothes like Oriental pashas, and talking a mile a minute. In these conditions cooking for others was a solicitous, avuncular activity; taking care of people; which meant that the cooks got a little taste of how the guide felt all the time. Even Jack was not as much of a jerk on the nights when he and Jim cooked.

  On this night, however, he was not cooking, and so free to look, and to talk. And the day’s exertions had made all of them talkative, to tell the truth.

  “That was so hard!”

  “I can’t believe they got fifty-two dogs up that!”

  “Three thousand vertical feet, and a lot of it gnarly indeed.”

  “And then to find out it was all wasted effort!”

  “And with the big icefalls still to come!”

  But the Norwegians hadn’t known that, Val thought. Perhaps not knowing what lay ahead had made them less apprehensive rather than more. Ignorance was bliss. At least sometimes. “It’s a good thing we came this way,” she said. “It’s nice to see what they saw.”

  Jack nodded complacently. “That’s what it’s all about.”

  After more food intake Jorge said, “You know, it gives you an interesting new angle on the myth of Scott as total bungler and Amundsen as hyperefficient genius. I mean unless you’ve done today you don’t realize what huge risks Amundsen took. There were sections today that were worse than when we went up the Khumbu Icefall.”

  To the same kind of goal, Val thought—Everest, the South Pole—the tallest, the bottommost; something only had to be the mostest and suddenly it was the holy grail, worth taking fatal risks for. For a certain type of person.

  “But the Norwegians were good on ice,” Jack told Jorge. “They were experienced polar travelers.”

  “Yes,” Jorge said, “but that wouldn’t have helped if a snowbridge had collapsed at the wrong time, or if a serac had fallen on them. That easily could have happened.”

  “You can imagine them disappearing without a trace,” Elspeth added. “Then Scott’s group would have gotten there first, and had the extra psychological push to make it back home, and the whole story would have been reversed.”

  “The rash presumptuous Norwegians,” Jorge declaimed, “and the amateur but tough steady Brits. It’s the story everyone wants, really.”

  “Not me,” Jack said. “Scott was an idiot. If it had turned out that way it would be the genius punished and the idiot rewarded.”

  “Very realistic,” Val murmured, but no one heard her, as Elspeth was crying “Oh come on!” and waving a finger at Jack. “Scott was not an idiot!”

  “But he was!” Jim said. “He did everything wrong!”

  “Everything,” Jack said, with a knowing smile at Val.

  And then he and Jim were off and running, playing riffs they had obviously played many times before, variations on the theme “Scott and His Stupidities.” He had become a torpedo lieutenant in the late Victorian Royal Navy, a ridiculously dead-end post in a ridiculously moribund service. He had gotten the polar assignment through personal connections even though he had no knowledge of polar regions. He had not bothered to learn a thing from previous polar explorers, nor had he bothered to study the Arctic indigenous peoples—perish the thought. In fact he took exactly the wrong lessons from those who had gone before, disdaining Eskimo furs in favor of naval canvas clothing, disdaining dogsled travel in favor of manhauling. Actually he tried to use dogs, as well as ponies, motor tractors, and skis; but as he and his men could not manage to master any of these modes of transport over snow, they had had to fall back on walking as a last resort. Only at that point had Scott proclaimed to the world that manhauling was really the only honest and noble way to go.

  “It wasn’t a matter of style,” Jim said, “or consideration for animals. They killed their ponies and dogs too, only without ever admitting they were going to have to do it, so that sometimes they didn’t have pistols there for the job. Wilson had to knife some of them to death, while Scott sat in the tent wringing his hands about how bad he felt. It was sheer incompetence.”

  He had also been a bad judge of character, Jack added. He had been the sycophantic disciple of bad men; he had chosen bad men to work for him; he had led them badly. He had had bad friends.

  “Oh come on,” Elspeth objected. “Wilson cannot be called a bad friend. He was a wonderful man.”

  “He was too good to be good,” Jack said, which cracked Jim up. “A passive Christlike martyr in the making. And the rest of them were buffoons.”

  Except for the ones who had ripped Scott privately in their diaries, of course, who all turned out to have been wise men. But the rest—buffoons.

  “He also seems to have gotten in trouble with a girl in America,” Jack said, with another suggestive glance at Val. “And his marriage …”

  He had married a woman too beautiful for him, it seemed, too ambitious and smart. An Edwardian Lady Macbeth, who had pushed him south “and then had an affair with Nansen at the very same time Scott was dying on the ice,” Jack said, shaking his head woefully.

  He had been a scientific dilettante as well, Jim went on, only using the sciences as a cover for his desire to get to the Pole. He had had sulks and depressions lasting up to a month. He had sent Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard into needless danger and exhaustion on the Winter Journey, while the rest of his men sat around the hut writing a newspaper and putting on skits, rather than learning to ski or control their dogs. As for ponies, he had obtained glue-factory nags from Siberia in the first place, then killed half of them during pointless excursions during the winter, little trips which read like rehearsals for a Keystone Kops Ice Capades.

  Then during the trek south he had overworked his men, demanding that they keep up with his unhealthily strong strength. He had gotten into a race mentality with the second sledge team, thus breaking Lieutenant Evans. He had seriously underestimated the provisions needed to feed four people to the Pole and back; then at the last depot he had decided to take five people instead of four, sealing their fate.

  “Now that was a mistake,” Val admitted in her murmur at the stove. She had hear
d all this before, of course. It was a frequent topic of conversation on these expeditions, naturally. Everyone who joined a Footsteps expedition was an expert; it only took a half-dozen books to fill you in on the entire history of Antarctica, and after that everyone had an opinion. Including her. But she had learned to stay out of the discussions, having become tired of the faintly condescending responses she got if she joined, responses all the more irritating because even though these were outdoor people, they still seemed to share the desk-jockey notion that anyone doing physical work for a living must have had all thoughts fly forever out of their head. She knew this was only the defensiveness of the couch potato, but it still bugged her. And it was always the same discussion anyway.

  Jim and Jack were by no means finished with the litany of Scott’s mistakes. Jim focused on technical errors of competence, Val noted, Jack on moral turpitude. Jim pointed out that Scott had failed to notice that the cannisters they were using allowed their stove fuel to evaporate out of the cap screws. He had also ignored all signs of scurvy. He had hiked facing into the sun on the return from the Pole, when they could just as well have reversed their schedule and hiked with the sun to their backs, as Amundsen had done. Jack took over and insinuated that Scott had probably pressured Oates into committing suicide, and then probably invented Oates’s famous last words, “I am just stepping outside and may be some time.” It was certain that he had altered other diary entries when publishing them in his books. (“Oh heaven forbid,” Elspeth interjected.) In general he had been too good a writer; and in the end he had written his way out of responsibility for the fiasco—out of responsibility and into legend. In fact, Jack said, he had probably preferred to die heroically, rather than return to England as the second man to the Pole. And so he had no doubt coerced Bowers and Wilson into staying in their final campsite, rather than brave a storm to try to reach their next supply cache only ten miles away, a storm that Amundsen would have waltzed through with barely a note for it in his journal, except perhaps “some wind today.”

  No. Scott was an idiot. He had read Tennyson; he had believed Tennyson; he had been the disastrous end product of a decaying empire, whose subjects had told themselves any number of comforting delusional stories about amateurs muddling through to glory, as at Waterloo or in the Crimea. This was the crux, even Jim maintained it: Scott had believed in bad stories. J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, had been one of his best friends. And so he and his men had never grown up. They had been Peter Pans, they had been Slaves to Duty like Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance; they had not had the sense to notice that The Pirates of Penzance was a satire. No, it was Browning and Tennyson and G. A. Henty and the Boy’s Own Weekly for them, all the stupidities of the Victorian age turned into cast-iron virtues by the stories the boys were told. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred; onto the plateau of death manhauled the five.

  “P. G. Wodehouse made fun of that stuff all the time,” Jim mentioned as they started dessert, which consisted of immense chocolate bars and brandy. “That’s why he was so funny.”

  “They were Woosters!” Jack exclaimed. “They were a bunch of Bertie Woosters on ice, without their Jeeves along to help them out.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Jim said. “The Jeeveses were right there at hand being ignored—men like Bowers, or Crean, or Lashly—the able seamen from the working classes. Those guys were very very tough, and they almost managed to haul the toffs out of there despite everything. In fact that’s what Crean and Lashly did with Lieutenant Evans, on their retreat from the last depot.”

  After Scott had taken five men to the Pole, as Jim now reminded them, there had only been three to return from the last depot, and for these three it had been a very close thing indeed. Lieutenant Evans had collapsed, a victim of scurvy, and seamen Crean and Lashly had had to haul him on their sledge five hundred miles back to Cape Evans, an ordeal that included emotional moments such as sticking the lieutenant’s frozen feet onto their exposed stomachs, right through clothing and the membrane of class itself, to save him from a fatal frostbite. Finally Crean, at the end of four months of a manhauling regime so intense that it killed everyone else who tried it except Lashly, hurried ahead for help, covering forty miles of the ice shelf and getting down its edge to Hut Point, in a push of thirty-four straight hours of walking.

  “And in the end Bowers almost managed to do the same for Wilson and Scott,” Jim added, “like he did for Wilson and Cherry-Garrard on the Winter Journey.”

  Little Birdie Bowers, Val thought, remembering the spring trip to Cape Crozier. Henry Robert Bowers—never cold, never tired, never discouraged. But even he hadn’t been able to Jeeves his way out of that last trip. Worked into the ground like the poor knackered ponies, until he had died in his traces.

  “No,” Jim insisted. “Bertie Woosters. And Scott the worst of them—the one who killed them. He’s the one who had the authority. He could have studied the problem, and figured out solutions. It’s not like the solutions weren’t there, because they were. But he couldn’t be bothered. And so he tipped the balance, from life to death.”

  All through this conversation, this dissing duet, everyone had been eating, powering their spaghetti down and enjoying the rant for the tent entertainment it was, laughing even when they were waving chunks of garlic bread or shaking heads to mark their objections. And when Jack and Jim were done, and into their second mugs of brandy, Elspeth wiped their whole case away with a single sweep of a chocolate bar. “This is all just Huntford,” she said firmly. “You can’t take him seriously.”

  Ta Shu looked interested in this; he had been following the whole conversation as if watching a sport he didn’t know, head swiveling this way and that, entertained but mystified. “What do you mean?” he asked Elspeth.

  “All this anti-Scott stuff they’ve been giving us. It all comes from the Roland Huntford biography of Scott and Amundsen. It’s a good book in some ways, but it should really have been called Scott Was an Idiot. It’s a five-hundred-page list of stupidities. But a lot of them are crazy.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack challenged.

  “I mean Huntford went overboard,” Elspeth said, with a steady look at Jack. Val saw that she didn’t like him either. “Sometimes he was right, but other times he was just making a case. He was the first writer to debunk the Scott myth, and he got so into it he turned into a prosecutor rather than a judge. Complaining that Scott had ambitions to be more than a torpedo lieutenant! I mean really. Or pretending it was Scott’s fault that he was given a bad ship. Or pretending that his men weren’t loyal to him. Or that England was so bad, and Norway such a virtuous little country, when at that time the Norwegians were out slaughtering the world’s whales to make their fortune and build their pretty towns.” She shook her head. “Huntford made everything black and white, and that’s not the way it was.”

  Jim gulped a mouthful of brandy and choked a little, waving a hand at her. “Even if you discount Huntford—and I take your point about his book being extreme—you still have to admit that Scott was pretty comprehensively incompetent. That part is simply true.”

  “Nothing is simply true,” Elspeth said. She liked Jim better than Jack, Val saw. “Cherry-Garrard didn’t think Scott was incompetent, and Cherry-Garrard was there.”

  “He was biased.”

  “So was Huntford.”

  “But Cherry-Garrard was an apologist. He tied himself in knots to try to tell the truth and still protect Scott’s memory.”

  Elspeth nodded. “His is a complicated book that way. It has some of the grays in it, you see. That’s what makes it a great book. He tried to be honest. And all his best friends died in it, remember. And he was in the group that found their bodies the following spring. They were only eleven miles from the next depot, and it was Cherry-Garrard who had laid that depot the previous fall. He had had orders from Atkinson to lay it in that spot and turn back, and he was wrecked himself by then, so he obeyed the orders. But if he had gone on
a little farther, and set the depot another fifteen miles farther out, the return party might have found it and gotten home okay. It was a possibility that haunted him all the rest of his life. He was a haunted man. The night they found the bodies he wrote in his journal, ‘I am afraid to go to sleep.’ And when he got back to England he was sent right into the trenches of World War I. He drove an ambulance and he saw it all. And then he got colitis and was sent home. And after that he wrote his book, and it took him years and years. It was the book of his life. And struggling with mental illness a lot of the time.”

  Val, remembering the Ponting photo encased in the new display at Cape Crozier, said, “You can see that in the picture of the three of them after the Winter Journey.”

  “Yes you can, can’t you? He looks quite mad. And in his later years, when he looked back on his time in the Antarctic, it was like looking back into another age. Into the time before the fall.”

  Back when your friends were alive, Val thought. Back when your big brothers were alive. Bowers had been 28, Wilson 45; Cherry had been 22.

  “But even he says Scott was moody,” Jim pointed out, “and a bad judge of character. Even when he was idealizing the whole experience, he had to say that.”

  “That’s right. And I believe him when he says it, because he was there. But he was still intensely loyal to Scott, he still admired him despite the mistakes. And even more did he admire Wilson and Bowers, and they were Scott loyalists as well. You can’t take that away from Scott, no matter what Huntford said.”

  Ta Shu turned from the stove, where he had started washing the dishes in a basin of steaming water. “Like Huxley,” he said.