Archive for category: Antarctic Blog

By Stefanie White

Looking through the magnification lens, I take a breath through my respirator and reach for the micro spatula. The belt is encrusted with layers of dried penguin guano and dirt. It stinks. With the spatula, I lift thin sheets of the encrustations to reveal a stained leather surface. Tweezers hold penguin feathers fast and I remove them from within the encrustation with some force. And then finally I role cotton swabs dampened in deionised water across the leather surface and begin to reveal the original surface. The process is slow, deliberate, meditative and satisfying in that oddly pleasurable way.

As time passes, I notice the wear marks in the belt and notice which punch hole was used most often. I think about the size of the owner’s waist. I see handmade punch holes and contemplate the dramatic weight loss the owner must have experienced while based at Cape Adare. I think about why the owner left his belt behind … perhaps he forgot it, perhaps he suffered from T3.  The buckle is interesting. It’s square, elegant and made out of nickel.

As I swab, I tune into the New Zealand radio playing in the background and into conversations happening in the lab. I continue to swab and swab and swab the leather belt. And then from beneath the residue of the penguin guano, I see something. I see a gold printed letter. I turn and shout to my colleagues ‘The owners name is on the belt’ and together we decipher the printed letters.

George Murray Levick was a naval surgeon and zoologist on Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition of 1910-13. Being a part of the Northern Party, he spent the summer of 1911-1912 at Cape Adare.  Levick and possibly all members of the Terra Nova expedition were gifted a leather belt by the leather manufacturing company Leckie and Co. based in Walsall, England. They received this gift especially for this British Antarctic Expedition. The discovery of the gold printed letters was a highlight this week in the lab. The discovery is one-of-a-kind as no other belt survives. Information previously unknown was uncovered and it’s always exciting for a conservator to be able to attribute an owner’s name to an artefact.

By Sue Bassett

During the decade of work by the Trust’s on-ice conservation teams, many personal insights have been gained into the lives of the early expeditioners. Some of the paper items from Captain RF Scott’s hut at Cape Evans provide good examples.

In addition to a range of adventure stories and military novels, there are a surprisingly large number of paperback romances … and, judging by the degree of wear and sooty fingerprints, they were rather well read!

The stories seem to reflect the sensibilities of the era and are of variable quality – although almost all seem to feature prolonged bouts of blushing between the chief protagonists. One of the best (or worst) involves a hero called Dr Love who finds he has feelings for an impoverished actress and resolves to free her from the profession. The end pages are unfortunately missing, so we can only hope that it ends as a proper romance should.

Many of the magazines, too, combine stories of popular interest with the frivolous and banal (not to mention articles on fashion for the ladies). To Scott’s men, who often had to survive gruelling conditions, such throwaway reading matter was likely valued as a diversion. Along the same lines are two scrapbook-style montages tacked to the wall in the officers’ sleeping area. One comprises a wonderful selection of images—all cut from magazines—mainly of women with big hats, parasols and big hair, all surrounding a large central image of a very well-fed cat. The other, a firm favourite of ours, is a collection of cut-out pictures of dogs pasted to the back of a plywood crate lid … presumably by someone very fond of man’s best friend and perhaps also missing his pooch back home.

The midwinter tradition should probably be credited to Robert Falcon Scott, who on his first expedition just four years later describes the festivities of midwinter 1902 in some detail. There were decorations ‘with designs in coloured papers and festooned with chains and ropes’ and ‘the tables were loaded with plum puddings, mince pies, and cakes’. There were speeches, presents, sing-songs, champagne, and great revelry, with which, Scott records, ‘we agreed that life in the Antarctic regions was worth living’.

As we at Scott Base hung the decorations, opened gifts and tucked into our 9-course midwinter dinner, shared with some good friends from neighbouring McMurdo Station, we couldn’t have agreed more. Salute!

By Stefanie White

My grandmother, my mother and even my best friend have been heard announcing the old view that ‘you can tell a man by his shoes’ implying that shoes can portray a man’s moral character. Today that view may be mostly obsolete, especially in the Antarctic.

In the Antarctic, where there is little room for fashionable and aesthetic footwear, our shoes and boots are practical. Designed for Extreme Cold Weather, they are big, sometimes knee high, and insulated with high soles and thick layers of fleece. With wear and tear, we repair them and with decreasing temperature and new demands, we alter them.

This was also the case for Scott and his men. They patched, re-stitched and altered their boots often adding hobnails to increase grip for walking on ice and stuffing insulating sennegrass inside to help overcome freezing temperatures.

One may interpret that these men stayed true to their old boots, maintaining and caring for them. These men were professional and practical yet display chaotic domestic habits in the scruff and buildup of dirt on the boot soles. Perhaps, pronate distortions in the boots tell that they were sometimes stressed and exhausted with sore and cold feet.

It was sometimes the case that the historic explorers wore less practical and fancier shoes. Uncovered from under Wilson’s bed, in Scott’s Terra Nova Hut at Cape Evans, a black patent leather pomp, with a decorative grosgrain bow, was found. This rather fancy shoe is completely unsuitable for the harsh Antarctic conditions and may perhaps lend a tale about a man’s more sensitive character. The owner of this shoe was a man with grounded feet; a man with a sense of vanity, style and perhaps even artistic humour.

Overall, we can be sure of one thing: Practical and durable boots are a necessity for surviving the harsh Antarctic conditions and equally as important is  the superficial and impractical accessory that can sometimes lift a man’s moral and make him feel at home.

 

By Sue Bassett

When Ernest Shackleton led the British Antarctic ‘Nimrod’ Expedition 1907–09 he hoped to reach the geographic South Pole. To achieve this, he took with him dogs, ponies, and a motor car donated by a major sponsor, William Beardmore, who had recently taken over the car company.

The car was a purpose-built 12/15hp New Arrol-Johnston, an open two-seater with a utility tray-back. It had a specially designed air-cooled, four-cylinder engine, used non-freezing oil, had a silencer that doubled as a foot-warmer, produced hot water by passing the exhaust pipe through a hopper that could be filled with snow, and could be fitted with a pair of ski runners on the front wheels.

However, it was also heavy with little traction, sinking to its axles in the snow, and its petrol engine performed poorly from the outset. It was garaged at Shackleton’s expedition hut at Cape Royds and was useful only on the sea ice for transporting light loads, and once fell into a crevasse.

While a couple of parts remain at Cape Royds today, the car left Antarctica with Shackleton and the skis are now held by the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, where they have undergone conservation treatment by our conservators.