Hut Purgatory

[tealin]

It's been a while since I've given an update on Our Heroes and their adventures a century ago; this is because they've spent the last while cooped up in a hut waiting for the bay between them and Cape Evans to freeze so they could get back to the main base.

No single event of great import happened that would warrant a commemorative post, but everyone has anecdotes about how they passed their time, and it's fun to read different people's journals discuss the same thing. So, with occasional context from yours truly ...



The hut had been built on Scott's prior expedition in 1902 and had never been intended as a habitation. Shackleton had used it on the Nimrod expedition of 1907-09 but had left a window open, so when Scott's party got back to it in 1911 they discovered it had filled with snow, which had turned to ice. While the main party was off laying depots, Tom Crean and Dr Atkinson (who had a terrible blister on his heel and couldn't continue) stayed behind and cleared out the ice, finding a useful cache of supplies and even some old reading material, but they couldn't get to the ice in the space between the ceiling and roof. A few days after the depot party got back, they rigged up a stove from stuff found in a scrap pile, and after a period of tinkering got it to burn blubber and not fill the hut with smoke (after they all got black as sweeps, of course).

The hut has a pungent odour of blubber and blubber smoke. We have grown accustomed to it, but imagine that ourselves and our clothes will be given a wide berth when we return to Cape Evans.

~ Capt Scott

As we are getting the hut warmed the ice in the roof melts out and gives us a sort of snipe marsh to lie in at night.

~ Bill Wilson

One of the jobs undertaken was to go fetch the supplies left behind where the Pony Disaster had happened, which Birdie took charge of.

It took us all the morning to reach Saddle Camp with the loads in two journeys. I found a steady plod up a steep hill without spells is better and less exhausting than a rush and a number of rests. This theory I put into practice with great success. I don't know whether everybody saw eye to eye with me over the idea of getting to the top without a spell. After the second sledge was up Atkinson said: 'I don't mind you as a rule, but there are times when I positively hate you.'

~ Birdie Bowers

From odd corners we unearthed some Contemporary Reviews, the Girls' Own Paper and the Family Herald, all of ten years ago! We also found encased in ice an incomplete copy of Stanley Weyman's My Lady Rotha; it was carefully thawed out and read by everybody, and the excitement was increased by the fact that the end of the book was missing.

~ Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Griff was the only one who had read the book prior to coming to Antarctica.

I couldn't remember quite how it ended, for the plot is very concentrated to the end; the elderly hero not having found a son or a second wife; and the lady debating between the ancient count and the lunatic lover. I am afraid I finished it off in several ways to various applicants, none of which would have pleased the author!

~ Griff Taylor

Somebody found some carbide and Oates immediately schemed to light the hut with acetylene. [...] Wilson took the situation into his tactful hands. For several days Oates and Wilson were deep in the acetylene plant scheme and then, apparently without reason, it was found that it could not be done. It was a successful piece of strategy which no woman could have bettered.

~ Apsley Cherry-Garrard

So how did you do it, Bill?

I knew it was a dangerous game and insisted on collecting a sample of the gas in a galley jar first. This exploded so promisingly when we lit it that no one suggested putting a light to the main plant, and it was passed bodily out into the blizzard!

Several others tried the same thing on a small scale, happily with no success, or I am certain we should sooner or later have had a bad explosion. Gran, as it was, trying to make it in a tea tin, blew the thing up to the roof and across the hut, bursting the tin but happily hurting nobody.

~ Bill Wilson

The activities of the geologists incited all the other officers to emulation. Bowers was the most indefatigable of these "pseudo-scientists," and was always bringing some huge specimen along to Debenham or myself. "Here you are," Birdie would say of a particularly uninteresting block, "here's a gabbroid nodule impaled in basalt with felspar and olivine rampant."

~ Griff Taylor

Plenty of fun over a fry I made in my new penguin lard. It was quite a success — tasted like very bad sardine oil.

~ Bill Wilson

Yesterday Wilson prepared a fry of seal meat with penguin blubber. It had a flavour like cod-liver oil and was not much appreciated ... Three heroes got through their pannikins, but the rest of us decided to be contented with cocoa and biscuit after tasting the first mouthful.'

~ Capt Scott

Together with others of the party Oates pretended to have a grudge against the 'medical faculty' in that certain medical comforts, namely brandy, taken for emergencies on sledge journeys, were never opened. Over the blubber stove one day at Hut Point Oates complained somewhat as follows:

Saw them again this morning in the medical stores. All full. What do they
give brandy for, anyway?" Various answers elicited the fact that epileptic fits required brandy, whereupon Oates went and cross-examined Atkinson on the phenomenon of fits. Later in the day Oates went out to where Wilson and others were shovelling snow and threw a very realistic fit at Wilson's feet. An accomplice said to Wilson: "It looks as if Oates had got a fit." "Yes," said Wilson, "he's got a fit all right; rub some snow down his neck, and he'll soon get over it."

~ Frank Debenham

As the autumn progressed, the impatience to get back to Cape Evans increased, but whenever the sea froze over, the next storm would blow the ice out to sea again. On one of the last of these occasions, when the ice stretched as far as they could see and was several inches thick, Silas said The Most Canadian Thing:

7 Apr 1911 - A bunch of Canucks would have packed over beyond Castle Rock three or four days ago, getting onto the firmer ice as close to Turtle [Rock] as possible.

~ Silas Wright

9 Apr 1911 - Ice cleared out to the north directly wind commenced — it didn’t wait a single instant, showing that our journey over it earlier in the day was a very risky proceeding — the uncertainty of these conditions is beyond words, but there shall be no more of this foolish venturing on young ice.

~ Capt Scott

Finally, ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY, Scott decided to risk it and a party of men set off with their sledges across the bay.


HUGE thanks to Vandee for ferreting out some of these quotes for me!