Archive for category: News Story

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.

By Sue Bassett

The artefacts conserved by the Trust that remain in Scott’s Cape Evans hut tell something of the harrowing ordeal endured by Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party in 1914-17.

Continuing their futile mission to lay depots to aid Shackleton’s planned crossing of Antarctica, the ill-equipped Ross Sea Party was forced to improvise clothing and equipment in order to survive.

Stranded at Cape Evans, they also used Captain Scott’s old Discovery Hut at Hut Point as a staging post for their depot-laying sledge trips. After one such trip, a group waited at Hut Point for over two months for the sea ice to harden so they could walk back to Cape Evans and join the rest of the team. During these months the men recovered from ill health, improvised games and made tools out of salvaged materials.

Lamps were made out of old food tins and fuelled with seal blubber, offering ‘a flickering glimmer of light in the dark interior’. Snowshoes were made out of old plywood supply boxes, such as this one that once held Spratt’s dog biscuits, and clothing such as this jacket was repaired with materials and fabrics scavenged from inside the hut – all testaments to remarkable resourcefulness and determination through extreme hardship.