Stepping into Terra Nova Hut, the smell hits me first. It’s pungent but not unpleasant. Earthy. Warm, somehow. Blubber and smoke and tobacco and the residue of men living together through the coldest of winters in absolute darkness.
A century has passed since anyone lit the stove, since anyone dried their boots by the fire, since anyone tossed a chunk of seal blubber into a pot to enrich the taste of bland biscuits. Yet the smell clings to the timber walls of Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Cape Evans as though the building itself is awaiting the men’s return.
Outside, Mount Erebus sends a curl of steam from its volcanic heart into a rare cloudless polar sky. It is nearly midnight and the sun still hangs above the Trans-Antarctic Mountains lining the southern horizon. On the beach, the brittle skeleton of a dog lies preserved in the dry polar air where it fell, more than a hundred years ago.
In the far corner, a scientist’s bench is cluttered with instruments, beakers and specimen jars awaiting the return of an absent researcher.
Inside, packing crates are stacked into a partition dividing officers from enlisted ranks, as firm a social boundary as any the men had known at home.
Shelves buckle under tins of cocoa, lunch tongue and mustard. Reindeer-skin sleeping bags lie askew on pitted mattresses. Holey woolen socks sag from lines strung above bunks.
In the far corner, a scientist’s bench is cluttered with instruments, beakers and specimen jars awaiting the return of an absent researcher.
Scott wrote from this hut on a March evening in 1911: “We gather around the fire with a hunk of bread and butter and a steaming pannikin of tea, and life is well worth living.”
Standing next to that same stove, I feel the truth of his words.
Traveling south through the ice
I’d arrived at Cape Evans two weeks after departing the southern tip of New Zealand aboard Heritage Adventurer. We’d island-hopped through the Subantarctic Islands, navigated the Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties of the Southern Ocean and crossed the Antarctic Circle as icebergs lined the horizon to reach McMurdo Sound.
In the Ross Sea, wind and ice set the agenda and our ship’s bow had shouldered aside pack ice and nudged through floes of pancake ice. Now, at 77 degrees South, the landscape I’d read countless books about had emerged as something very real: a solitary timber hut with newspapers unread, food uneaten and beds unmade.
At the bottom of the world, the wildlife is magnificent. But it is the huts and the brave men who occupied them that stays with me.
Onboard Historian John Rogers has visited this hut 10 times in 25 years and still speaks of it with the intensity of someone who reveres its presence. He knows every corner by the personal items it contains, and the person for whom they meant something.
“The area to the left as you walk in is called the tenements,” he says.
“It was where Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, Oates and Mears lived, and their personalities are more apparent there than anywhere else.”
Of Edward Wilson – scientist, artist, the most beloved of Scott’s men – Rogers speaks with particular reverence.
“On the table are his inks, his pastels, his drawing tools. You can imagine exactly where Wilson worked. And the work he did was beautiful.”
There is a small pencil cartoon sketched on the end of one of the bunks. No record exists to determine who drew it. Was the artist sharing a private joke? Passing time on a bored afternoon? Historians seem unable to explain its origins.
Uncovering the untold stories
Also aboard Heritage Adventurer is English author Katherine MacInnes, whose book Snow Widows tells the Terra Nova story through five women who have remained largely invisible for more than a century.
Among them is sculptor Kathleen Scott, who sent her husband south with a letter, urging him in the most extraordinary act of love, not to come back if coming back meant being safe at the cost of being brave.
“If there is a risk to take or lead, take it. If there is a danger for you or another man to face, it will be you who faces it. If there is anything you think worth doing at the cost of your life, do it,” she wrote.
The letter was found in Scott’s breast pocket when his body was discovered eight months after he failed to return from the South Pole.
Across the bay, Shackleton’s Hut at Cape Royds is more modest. Built for 15 men, its living quarters are arranged around an oversized iron stove that dominates the room.
Beds are made from crates with a thin mattress laid on top. A framed photograph of Queen Alexandra and King Edward hangs from the wall.
Standing in the doorway with the Trans-Antarctic Mountains filling the frame behind me, I try to imagine how it felt to overwinter here. The 24-hour darkness, the bone-numbing cold, the uncertainty of waiting for a ship these men had no way of knowing would come back for them.
Along the ice edge, orcas spy-hop through cavities, their heads rising and sinking like black-and-white ping pong balls.
Expedition leader Christian Engelke has spent 15 years working in these waters. He says he is drawn to wild places like the Ross Sea where humans are few and wildlife is abundant.
Fewer than a thousand people visit each year, compared to more than a hundred thousand on the Antarctica Peninsula. He is aware of the privilege that comes from being a custodian of this treasured place.
“I like closing down the hut myself,” he says. “I take the broom and clean it, always trying to keep it like we found it. And then I take my one minute. I just look around and breathe slowly, standing there in the hut. Until next time.”
Outside, a cacophonous colony of Adelie penguins chortle loudly, oblivious to our human presence. Back onboard Heritage Adventurer, we point our bow northwards toward the Southern Ocean once more.
On an ice floe, a Weddell seal stretches languorously, its blubbery body shuddering as it raises hind flippers as if to wave goodbye before flopping back onto the ice.
Along the ice edge, orcas spy-hop through cavities, their heads rising and sinking like black-and-white ping pong balls. Minke whales thread through krill clouds, slurping up sustenance. Humpbacks flash massive tail flukes before vanishing into an ocean so deep it is almost black.
At the bottom of the world, the wildlife is magnificent. But it is the huts that stay with me. They stand like silent shrines awaiting the return of men who never came back.
