Neither Amundsen Nor Scott: Who Was Really First to the South Pole?

Neither Amundsen Nor Scott

Who was really first to the South Pole?

Mick Harney

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Mick Harney 2016

Cover image: detail from an original graphic licensed on Wikimedia Commons. See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctica_relief_location_map.jpg.

From 90 Degrees South: The Story of the American South Pole Conquest by Paul Siple, copyright © 1959 by Paul Siple. © renewed 1987 by Ruth Siple. Used by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For further acknowledgements see references.

The moral right of Mick Harney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher or copyright holder.

Contents

Preface: Who Was First to the South Pole?

1. Stretch of Imagination

2. Penetrating the Interior

3. Amundsen and the Fram Expedition

4. Scott and the Terra Nova Expedition

5. Interregnum: 1912 to 1956

6. Dufek and Operation Deep Freeze

7. Bowers and the Construction Battalion

8. Siple and the IGY Station

Postscript: Transantarctic

References

Preface: Who Was First to the South Pole?

No quiz compiler would bother to include the question ‘Who was first to the South Pole?’ because it puzzles no one. Everyone knows that the answer is ‘Roald Amundsen’. If everyone was correct, this book would not exist.

Because it is so interwoven with Captain Robert Scott’s epic struggle and death, our perception of Amundsen’s success transcends simple fact to become an unimpeachable myth in our culture. Yet it is not true: Amundsen was not the first to stand at the South Pole. Nor was it anyone in his party. Nor was it Scott or one of his party.

Until three years ago, I too had no doubt that Amundsen was first. But towards the end of Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen, my curiosity was roused by a small and offhand piece of text on a chart of Amundsen’s final progress:

They probably passed within a few hundred yards of the mathematical point.¹

It took a while for it to dawn on me how significant those words were. Amundsen and his team did not reach the South Pole. The presumed rock solid truth of Amundsen’s primacy was unfounded. In that case, was the sensational truth that Scott was first after all? Huntford’s same chart also dismissed that conclusion.

But then, who on earth was first? I expected to find an immediate answer to such a large question. It wasn’t so. I had to go on a winding trail of my own through the cold wilderness before I could identify who it really was. This book describes the course of that trail and finally names the name.

Let me start where I started with an understanding of the fundamental context.

It may come as a surprise that there are several South Poles.

First, there is what is known as the South Pole of Inaccessibility, whose romantic name suggests its meaning: the spot in the Antarctic at the remotest distance from any coast.

Then, there is the Geomagnetic South Pole, which is the best calculated position for the magnetic line going through the centre of the Earth.

More physically manifest, and familiar to us, is the Magnetic South Pole. The latter is what the south arrow of a compass points to and is therefore particularly relevant for navigation. What can cause confusion is that the Magnetic South Pole moves great distances as the lines of Earth’s magnetic force flux and shift. It is notable that, during the classical period of Antarctic exploration – from the middle of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th century – the Magnetic South Pole was heading rapidly towards the edge of the continent. To give you an idea of the scale of the movement, by the 1970s it had moved off of the Antarctic landmass and even lay outside the Antarctic Circle.

For our purposes, it is worth bearing in mind that, during 1911-12, at the time of the Amundsen and Scott expeditions, the magnetic South Pole was located at latitude 71° south, 149° east², which is more northerly than either of their base camps on the inner edge of the Ross Ice Shelf (they were both at about 78° south). In consequence, it was paradoxical, but true, that from the Geographic South Pole, where by definition all directions are north, one could legitimately refer to heading south if this indicated a compass bearing. Indeed, Scott’s compass bearing from the Pole back to his 1911 12 base at Cape Evans was not very much west of south (this will figure later).

This leaves us with the Geographic South Pole, the most significant of them all and the focus of our attention.

The Geographic South Pole is the southern end of the axis around which the Earth actually spins. Its precise location is at 90° of latitude south. That is the definition of the South Pole. In other words, to genuinely claim you have reached it, you must stand on that exact spot. Anywhere else is not the South Pole.

It is also critical to an understanding of what follows that the definitive geographical pole has no dimensions. It is not wide or high or deep – it is infinitely small yet infinitely precise. In practice, this has meant that the task of identifying its true position on the ground has been no mean feat, as is highly relevant to our unfolding explorers’ tales.

You have to imagine a pure, mathematical, and invisible grid of latitudes geoscience paints onto the messy fractionalities of Earth’s physical surface. Imagine the difficulties involved in pinpointing their southern culmination. You are in a featureless landscape of ice, at temperatures many tens of degrees below zero, hundreds of miles from the nearest fixed shelter, at a mountainous altitude of nearly 3000 metres, perhaps in gale force winds, and therefore at considerable risk of your own life. It would be comforting if the barber pole of cartoon imagination already speared the spot, but it doesn’t (though it did come later and stands there now). You have to suffer all of that and get all of your navigational calculations absolutely right to be the first person to arrive at the South Pole. Or, more likely, not.

Is it any wonder that the achieving of the South Pole was so fraught and fundamentally ambiguous, that the heroes of the story have become mythic and their actions wrapped in misunderstanding?

In telling their various tales, I have relied on and used the explorers’ own words. Of course, a participant’s account of events can be clouded by faulty memory or a self serving agenda; where necessary, I have added context to ensure a balanced narrative. Yet my principle has been that the participants are entitled to tell their own story. They are vivid and revealing enough in their own right. Careful examination of the original texts has provided remarkable insights into each expedition and granted unique revelations about their unfolding events.

With regard to respecting the original texts, I need to add an aside here concerning units. Our explorers are creatures of their historic period, their home culture, their education, and their professions. That variety is reflected in the different units they use for the measurement of distance, temperature, and weight. For example, the many sailors among them prefer to use the nautical mile because that distance equates directly to one minute of latitude on a naval chart (it is close to 1.85 kilometres in length, hence some 15% longer than a statute mile). Naturally, the nautical mile is unfamiliar to those of us more used to kilometres or miles. As a consequence, some authorities insist on providing conversions for units in all cases, not only from the unfamiliar to the familiar but also between metric and non metric³.

I disagree with such a practice. I would not, of course, change a word or value in an original source. But inserting references at every turn muffles and distances the voice of the original writer and clots and strangles the narrative flow. Additionally, the context almost invariably provides the essential significance of a measurement. To choose one example, the rate of progress to the Pole is obvious even if the daily countdown is in nautical miles. I therefore only convert units if the issue at hand demands it.

Having set the scene, it is time now to move on to the action. In the remainder of the book, I scrutinise the successive claims of the candidates who present themselves as first to the South Pole. That includes a full account of the Amundsen and Scott cases, not just to establish and explain their failure to reach the Pole but also because there remains much that is untold about their quest.

First though we need to recount the story of the character that dominants everything: the Antarctic continent itself.

1. Stretch of Imagination

The Antarctic existed in imagination long before it was discovered. It is by no means clear that that primacy has ever altered.

Between 300 and 180 million years ago, the physical entity we identify as Antarctica was subsumed in a supercontinental landmass called Gondwana. Gondwana formed the southern mass of the Earth’s total crust with another supercontinent, Laurasia, forming the northern. Collectively the whole is known as Pangaea.

From 180 million years onwards, Gondwana began to separate from Pangaea under the influence of tectonic forces – massively powerful heat plumes circulating from and through the Earth’s magma – that also slowly split Gondwana into the separate continentals shapes of South America, Africa, and Antarctica that we see today.

Until 40 million years ago, Antarctica retained a tenuous link with modern day Tasmania. A final connection with its South American neighbour persisted until 23 million years ago but when that parted, with the opening of what we now call the Drake Passage, Antarctica existed alone. With no land barrier remaining, the freezing currents of the polar region were free to circulate around Antarctica without interruption, eventually isolating the continent in a permanent and profound cold.⁴

Antarctica is not idly defined as a continent: it is of a vast size. Knowing that its surface area is 12,093,000 square kilometres⁵ is impressive but it does not easily visualise its scale. Instead, consider that it is 22% larger than the whole of continental Europe (9,908,599 square kilometres⁶) and 27% greater than the whole of the USA (9,826,635 square kilometres⁷). Anthony Brandt makes the further, telling point that, ‘the pack can extend hundreds of miles from the edge of the continent in winter and may cover a total area of 20 million square kilometres.’⁸

The extent of the pack has two effects. Firstly the point at which the landmass proper begins is hidden and mysterious and secondly the very real dangers of ice deter would-be explorers as they approach. The ice creates a deep ambiguity: travellers stumble onto new lands in the deep south but are they yet just islands or actually the shores of a great main? It takes until the 1820s before there is tentative speculation that a vast, inscrutable continent exists beyond the frozen shrouds.

Where it had already existed for centuries was in the mind. Hundreds of years before Christ, Greek philosophers felt unable to countenance the land masses of the north without assuming there was a balancing land mass in the south. Around 150 AD, Ptolemy included this putative place on his map, a map that was rediscovered in 1407⁹. The Dutchman, Abraham Ortelius, confidently included the unfeasibly gargantuan land of terra australis nondum incognita in his world map of 1570¹⁰. As Brandt tellingly notes:

For it is one of the odd but interesting facts about Antarctica that it was put on the map thousands of years before it was discovered.¹¹

Such a curious fact suggests that Antarctica and its presence fulfils some deep, unrequited need in the human psyche, a need that manifests itself in various forms in the stories of the later explorers, as we shall see.

Serious expansion of European knowledge of the planet beyond the old world followed in the path of those explorers we know so well from the 15th and 16th centuries: Columbus and Vespucci west to the Americas; Magellan and Drake drawn further south. Drake ventures into the passage between South America and Antarctica in 1578 and so opens the door from the Atlantic into the Pacific, unknowingly rediscovering the separation of the two continents that had occurred those 23 million years before.

During the course of the 17th and into the 18th century, piecemeal discoveries widened the scope of understanding of those southern waters, including Anthony de la Roché reaching South Georgia at 54° 15’ south in 1675.¹²

I particularly note the reaching of South Georgia because it establishes my approach for the remainder of this chapter. I will focus exclusively on how the record for furthest south is pushed forward over time. History is rich with stories of human activity in the southern seas but the primary concern of this book is with the avowed efforts to seek out and explore the Antarctic interior. The ultimate goal is, of course, the Pole at 90° south.

Captain James Cook’s expedition of 1772-1775 resulted in a hugely significant advance, not least because one of his explicit intentions was to seek out evidence for a southern continent. On 17 January 1773, his Resolution was the first ship to cross the Antarctic Circle, reaching 66° 33’ south¹³. The Antarctic Circle marks the transition into an area of the earth that experiences at least one day a year when the sun does not rise (there are six months of darkness at the Pole).

Cook pressed on, zigzagging north and south in his search, and finally gave in to the hopelessness of progressing further against the ice. He reached 71° 10’ south on 30 January 1774, as he records in his journal:

I will not say it was impossible any where to get further to the South, but the attempting it would have been a dangerous and rash enterprise and what I believe no man in my situation would have thought of. It was indeed my opinion as well as the opinion of most on board, that this Ice extended quite to the Pole or perhaps joins some land, to which it had been fixed from the creation...¹⁴

In his travels, Cook had come as close as 75 miles to the continent of land rather than of ice, but he did not sight it.¹⁵

Cook’s observations of the difficulties of the region and its apparent lack of commercial interest served to dissuade further exploration for nearly fifty years. Not that did much to dull imaginations that flourished in lavish and lurid speculations. In 1818, the American writer, John Cleve Symmes, proposed a wild theory:

...arguing that the earth was an oblate spheroid composed of ‘several concentric spheres, with polar openings’ thousands of kilometres across....[through which] some animals...were said to migrate each winter to a supposedly temperate inner sphere that was bathed in almost perpetual sunlight.¹⁶

However, accidental visits by ships forced off course by storms eventually revealed the prolific populations of seals on the southern islands. That valuable bounty attracted many hunting vessels during 1820-1821¹⁷. ‘Their take’, Brandt concludes sombrely, ‘has been estimated at a quarter of a million sealskins, and that year remains one of the most egregious examples of human slaughter of another species ever recorded.’¹⁸

Although not as far south as Cook’s furthest, the US seal-hunting ship, the Cecilia, Captain John Davis, landed at Hughes Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula on 6 February 1821 and so became the first to step ashore on the continent itself. The Peninsula is a long, crooked finger of land that is the last vestige of the link with South America and, in anthropomorphic fashion, appears to be beckoning it nearer. Davis had an intuition about the significance of what he had done and where he was, writing in the Cecilia’s log, ‘I think this Southern Land to be a Continent’.¹⁹

From this point onwards in the 19th century, the discoveries about Antarctica were discoveries about the coast of what was undoubtedly a continent. Imagination and reality were at last joined in an intoxicating truth. Maps could be drafted and eyewitness accounts made of actual and astonishing places.

Two years after Davis’ landing, Cook’s furthest south was finally bested by James Weddell, an ex-Royal Navy officer who had become a sealing-ship captain. Searching for new sealing grounds, and aided by the unprecedentedly ice-free conditions that year, he steered the Jane to reach 74° 15’ south on 20 February 1823. The vast region of the southern ocean he had entered, bordered to the west by the Antarctic Peninsula, is now known as the Weddell Sea in his honour.²⁰

In a curious case of synchronicity, two significant events in the evolving tale of Antarctic exploration occurred within a week of each other in January 1840.

A French expeditionary leader glorying in the resounding name of Jules Sebastian Cesar Dumont d’Urville commanded the Astrolabe in a journey that climaxed with an Antarctic landfall on 21 January 1840. Although his position was nothing like as far south as Weddell or even Cook – the Astrolabe was barely south of the Antarctic Circle – d’Urville’s party had the distinction of being only the second ashore. They were also at a remote location: exactly opposite the spot on the continent where Davis had landed. There was thus scope to begin to appreciate Antarctica’s great diameter. D’Urville named that stretch of coast Adélie Land after his wife (it is still the basis for French claims to their area of Antarctica). ²¹

It is worth quoting from the account of the Astrolabe’s landing as it tellingly illustrates the fantastical images conjured up in men’s minds as they struggled to identify and comprehend the alien realities of the ice-scape they saw:

Never shall I forget the magnificent spectacle that then unfolded before our eyes...we were in fact, sailing amidst gigantic ruins, which assume the most bizarre forms: here temples, palaces with shattered colonnades and arcades, further on, the minaret of a mosque, the pointed steeples of a Roman basilica...over these majestic ruins there reigns a deathly silence, an eternal silence...²²

Perhaps to restore a measure of familiarity, they marked the moment by opening and drinking a bottle of Bordeaux.²³ Having thus successfully braved the ice, d’Urville’s ultimate fate exhibited a ghoulish symmetry. In May 1842, he, Adélie, and their son were in a train that crashed en route to Versailles. They were trapped and burnt to death in the subsequent fire.²⁴

Only a week after d’Urville’s Antarctic landing, another furthest south was achieved, this time again by the British. The already feted explorer, James Clark Ross (he had found the North Magnetic Pole), had at his disposal two tough and sturdy ships, Erebus and Terror, well-suited to the rigours of what was on this occasion a scientifically-motivated expedition.²⁵ He achieved his furthest south of 78° on 29 January 1840²⁶ but it was his discovery the day before that would shape the subsequent history of Antarctic exploration:

As we approached the land under all studding-sails, we perceived a low white line extending from its eastern extreme point as far as the eye could discern to the eastward. It presented an extraordinary appearance, gradually increasing in height, as we got closer to it, and proving at length to be a perpendicular cliff of ice, perfectly flat and level at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward side. What was beyond it we could not imagine...²⁷

Others would find a way onto its upper surface and would not need to imagine.

Ross’ description was of what became famous as the Ross Ice Barrier, which represented the leading edge of the permanent Ross Ice Shelf. Its surface would provide a route several hundred miles long leading to the beginning of the Polar Plateau and the heart of Antarctica. Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen would pitch their camps on or near it to make their respective attempts for the Pole. By the middle of the 20th century, the area around the Ross Ice Shelf would be home to permanent bases housing several hundred people.

Before any of those later developments could be conceived, one critical act was needed to complete the pioneering period and mark the beginning of the classical period of on-shore Antarctic exploration. So far, people had landed and immediately left. If any serious understanding was to be made of Antarctica, people had to land and stay; not just to stay, either, but to stay through the winter. Without that capability, explorers could never make sufficient progress. They had to be on site and established, ready to take advantage of the short Antarctic summer the moment it began.

The man to demonstrate that capability was one Carsten Borchgrevink, who had made his first trip to Antarctic waters as a crew member on a whaling ship in 1895, landing briefly at Cape Adare (some 500 miles west along the coast from the Ross Ice Shelf)²⁸. Knowing of the nationalities vying for pre-eminence in later history, it is notable that he was a Norwegian, though resident in Australia.²⁹ In 1898, the ‘pushy’ Borchgrevink persuaded the British newspaper magnate Sir George Newnes to invest £40,000 in an expedition under Borchgrevink’s leadership. The Southern Cross departed London in August 1898 and reached Antarctica in February 1899.³⁰

As Day recounts:

When the ship arrived at Cape Adare on 17 February 1899, the men erected what Borchgrevink described as ‘the pioneer camp’, two prefabricated huts made of Norwegian pine. They were the first man-made structures and the first human settlement to be established on the Antarctic continent. The huts were designed to house ten of the men during the coming winter, while the Southern Cross retreated to New Zealand.³¹

Compounding his achievement, Borchgrevink took the returned Southern Cross to the Ross Ice Barrier in February 1900, landed a sledge and dog team, and drove them to 78° 50’, marking a new furthest south.³² The new century so ably begun was to witness further successes following the same model of Antarctic habitation and travel as Borchgrevink had demonstrated.

Breaking through the coast marked the culmination of over 200 years of exploration. The way to the interior was now open, but that was a very different thing from it being easily traversed. The possibility of the Pole might light up imaginations but the reality of achieving it was to prove a daunting and at times dark experience.

2. Penetrating the Interior

During the first decade of the twentieth century,