The Emperor Penguins’ Fortress

The system had been tested. It had functioned, after a fashion, at a cost that the records documented and the planning did not fully acknowledge. The depot at 79° 28′ S stood in its cairn of snow, a fixed point in a white wilderness, but the men who had placed it were diminished. The ponies had come back gaunt. The dogs had come back exhausted. The motors lay frozen in their troughs, their petrol exhausted, their tracks drifted full. And now, in the absolute dark of the Antarctic winter, with the sun vanished below the horizon and the temperature falling past the point where instruments could be trusted, three men prepared to leave the hut at Cape Evans on a journey that had no precedent in the history of polar exploration.

They rose before the others. The hut was black. No dawn would come to relieve it. Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard moved by touch and by memory through a space they had learned to navigate in darkness. Their sleeping bags, frozen stiff from the night’s cold, had to be forced into their stuff sacks. The bags were tubes of reindeer fur and eiderdown, rated to withstand temperatures that the manufacturers had never actually tested. At −60 °F, the fur cracked. The down compressed into icy slabs. The men worked with fingers already numb, the leather of their mitts stiff as boards, their breath crystallizing in the air before their faces in a fine spray that settled on their hoods and eyelashes. Each movement took ten times the effort it would have cost in daylight, in warmth. Each minute of preparation consumed calories they could not afford to waste.

They had been invited to this. That was the first thing to understand about the Winter Journey to Cape Crozier.

In 1910 Scott invited Wilson to join his new Antarctic expedition in the Terra Nova as chief of the scientific staff. The invitation carried with it the full weight of Edwardian scientific ambition: the detailed exploration and researches in Victoria Land that would justify the expedition’s cost in money and in lives. Wilson had accepted, and with him had come a private purpose that he had nursed since his first Antarctic winter a decade earlier.

In the Zoology section of the Discovery Expedition’s Scientific Reports, he had suggested a line of inquiry that only a winter journey could complete. The emperor penguin, Aptenodytes forsteri, bred in the darkness of the Antarctic winter. Its eggs, incubated on the feet of the males through months of starvation and cold, offered a unique opportunity to study embryonic development at the earliest stages. The scientific value was speculative. The practical difficulty was absolute. No one had traveled in the Antarctic winter. No one had attempted to navigate in the darkness of the polar night.

The journey existed at the intersection of scientific duty and physical possibility, and Wilson had carried it with him through the loading of the Terra Nova, through the voyage south, through the establishment of winter quarters at Cape Evans, as a deferred promise to himself.

Now the promise came due. The three men stepped out of the hut into a darkness so complete that they could not see their own feet. They had six weeks’ provisions, two sledges tied in tandem, and 253 pounds of weight per man. The load included sleeping-bags, camping equipment, a venesta case of scientific gear for preserving specimens, axes, rope, canvas, and six cans of oil that Scott had questioned with an edge in his voice that Cherry-Garrard would remember. The question hung in the air between them. Oil meant heat. Heat meant survival. But oil also meant weight, and weight meant slower travel, and slower travel meant more exposure to the cold. The calculation had no certain answer. They took the oil.

They traveled by the light of a hurricane lamp, its flame a small yellow pool in an ocean of dark. The ice of McMurdo Sound was their highway, a surface they had learned to read in summer but that transformed in winter into something alien. Pressure ridges, hidden until the last moment, rose as black walls against the starlight. The sea ice groaned and cracked, adjusting to temperatures that turned its surface to a crystalline hardness. They pulled their double sledge in harness, three men yoked together, their boots finding purchase on a surface that offered no forgiveness for a misstep. The temperature was somewhere below −60 °F. The thermometers they carried were not calibrated for such cold. The mercury contracted to the bottom of the tube and stayed there, indicating only that it was colder than the instrument could measure.

They made their first camp in the lee of a pressure ridge, pitching their tent on ice that rang like metal under the tent pegs. The tent was a double structure of thin silk and gabardine, designed for summer use, pressed into service for a season it had never been meant to face.

They lit their primus stove, a Swedish device that burned paraffin, and the flame roared in the enclosed space, bringing a mockery of warmth to air that still burned their lungs. They ate pemmican, the staple ration of polar travel: dried beef, pulverized and mixed with fat, concentrated calories that could be eaten cold or warmed into a stew. Each man consumed a measured portion. The measurement had been calculated in London by nutritionists who had never experienced appetite in −60 °F, who had never watched their own bodies consume muscle to keep the core temperature stable. The pemmican disappeared. The hunger remained.

They traveled for five weeks. The rhythm of their days was dictated by the impossibility of their conditions. They could not travel in the coldest hours, when the temperature dropped toward −70 °F and exposed flesh froze in minutes. They waited in their sleeping bags, the three men pressed together for warmth, their breath freezing the fur hoods of their bags into rigid shells. When the temperature moderated—rose, that is, to something merely lethal—they emerged to harness themselves to the sledge and haul it forward. Their progress was measured in miles per day that would have been laughable in summer. In summer, a fit man could pull 100 pounds across good ice. In winter, in darkness, in cold that turned every movement into a battle against the physics of their own bodies, they measured advance in yards.

The navigation was Bowers’s responsibility. He carried a compass, but the compass was unreliable so close to the magnetic pole. He carried a theodolite, but the theodolite required stars, and the stars were visible only in the brief intervals when the sky cleared of drift.

Most days they traveled in a white darkness, the snow falling upward and downward simultaneously, the horizon dissolving into a uniform gray that offered no reference point. Bowers learned to read the ice, to feel the direction of the wind, to maintain a course by the pressure ridges that ran in predictable patterns. The craft had no name, learned by trial and error in conditions that punished error with frostbite or death.

He was twenty-seven years old. He had joined the expedition as a last-minute replacement, bringing skills he had acquired in the merchant navy and a temperament that seemed to thrive on difficulty. On this journey, the difficulty found its measure.

They reached Cape Crozier after nineteen days of travel. The journey should have taken half that time. The delay was written on their bodies: Wilson’s hands, cracked and bleeding from exposure; Cherry-Garrard’s teeth, shattering from the cold; Bowers’s feet, maintained by sheer force of will against the creeping damage of frostbite. They had covered approximately sixty miles. In summer, with dogs, the same distance could be traveled in two days. The comparison meant nothing. They were not in summer. They were not using dogs. They were three men who had chosen to enter an environment that human beings were not equipped to survive, and they had survived to reach their objective.

The emperor penguin colony was located on the sea ice at the base of the great ice cliffs that walled Cape Crozier. The birds stood in their thousands, huddled against the cold, each male incubating a single egg on its feet.

The scientific purpose of the expedition required eggs at the earliest stage of development, before the embryos had advanced beyond the point where they could reveal the evolutionary relationships of the species. Wilson had theorized that the emperor penguin represented a primitive form, a living connection to the ancestral birds that had preceded the separation of flightless and flying species. The theory was speculative. The evidence he sought required eggs collected at specific stages, preserved in formalin, and transported back to the comparative anatomists of England. The value of this evidence was a matter of scientific debate.

The cost of obtaining it was being inscribed on the bodies of the three men in real time.

They established a shelter on the ice. They had brought a large piece of green Willesden canvas and a bit of board, materials that Wilson had specified for the construction of a temporary observation post. The canvas was stretched over a framework of ski sticks and bamboo poles, lashed together with Alpine rope. The result was a low tent, barely high enough to sit upright in, open to the ice on one side. They called it the igloo, though it bore no resemblance to the snow houses of the Arctic. The structure was a windbreak, nothing more, a slight reduction in the velocity of the air that stripped heat from their bodies.

They spent three weeks at Cape Crozier. The routine they established was dictated by the breeding cycle of the penguins and by the limitations of their own endurance. They could not work continuously in the cold. They worked in shifts, one man observing while the others huddled in the igloo, warming themselves over the primus stove, consuming their measured rations.

The penguins offered no cooperation. The birds they needed to reach were at the center of the colony, surrounded by thousands of others who defended their own eggs with beaks that could strip flesh from bone. The men developed techniques: distraction with a ski stick, rapid movement to seize an egg, retreat before the surrounding birds could react.

The eggs were warm, almost hot, carried from the interior of the penguin’s body. The men tucked them into their clothing, against their skin, to keep them from freezing before they could be transferred to the preserving jars. Each egg collected was a small victory. Each egg collected cost hours of exposure, calories consumed, tissue damaged.

They secured three eggs. The number was less than Wilson had hoped for, more than the circumstances had seemed to allow. The eggs were packed in the venesta case with layers of cotton wool and formalin solution. The case was lashed to the sledge. The return journey could begin.

It began in a storm. The Antarctic winter does not offer convenient weather windows. The wind that had been their constant companion at Cape Crozier rose to a velocity that made travel impossible. They waited in the igloo, the canvas walls snapping and straining, the temperature inside dropping to match the temperature outside as the primus stove consumed the last of their oil. They had planned for six weeks. They had been gone for five. The margin was thin. The storm was thicker.

The igloo failed. The wind found a weakness in their lashing, or the canvas tore, or the bamboo frame simply surrendered to forces it had never been designed to resist. The details would be disputed later, in the warm lit rooms where such disputes could matter. What was certain was that the structure collapsed, that the three men were exposed on the ice in a wind that drove snow horizontally at speeds that could scour skin, that their tent—their proper tent, the one they had carried from Cape Evans—was somewhere in the darkness, its location unknown, possibly buried, possibly blown away to sea.

They found it. The fact that they found it would become, in Cherry-Garrard’s later account, a matter of repeated wonder. The tent had been carried half a mile by the wind. It had lodged against rocks that offered some protection from the full force of the storm. They found it by chance, by persistence, by the kind of luck that expedition narratives invoke when the alternative is death. They crawled inside. The tent was damaged, its poles bent, its fabric torn. They repaired it as best they could with frozen fingers and materials that had lost all flexibility. They lay in their sleeping bags, the three of them, and waited for the storm to end.

It lasted a day and a half. They knew this because they counted. There was no other way to measure time in the darkness.

They could not light the primus: the oil was gone, or the stove was damaged, or the wind made any flame impossible. They lay in their bags, pressed together, and sang.

Bowers sang, primarily—hymns, music-hall songs, anything with a rhythm that could mark the passage of time. The others joined when they could hear him over the wind. They kicked each other through the bags, a signal that they were still conscious, still alive.

The snow drifted over them, filtering through the damaged tent, accumulating on the bags until they were buried in a shallow grave of their own making. The cold penetrated gradually, inexorably, finding every gap in their protection. Frostbite advanced on fingers and toes. The body’s central mechanisms conserved heat for the core, abandoning the extremities to damage that might be irreversible.

The wind stopped. They emerged from their burrow, dug out their sledge, located their damaged igloo and the scientific case that contained the eggs. The case had survived. The eggs had survived. They loaded the sledge and began the return journey to Cape Evans.

They traveled for eight days. The distance was the same sixty miles they had covered on the outbound journey, but their condition was transformed. Wilson’s hands were too damaged to grip the sledge harness properly. Cherry-Garrard’s vision was affected by the cold, the vague blobs he had seen in Victoria Street now reduced to a general impression of light and dark. Bowers maintained navigation by force of will and by the physical memory of the route, but his feet were growing numb in a way that he recognized and feared. They reduced their daily marches to the minimum that would keep them moving. They consumed their remaining rations without restraint: the discipline of measured portions had dissolved in the presence of death. They were burning their own bodies now, muscle and fat consumed to maintain the core temperature, the biological equivalent of burning the furniture to heat the house.

They reached Cape Evans on 1 August 1911, five weeks after their departure. The hut was warm, lit, populated by men who had spent the winter in relative comfort, engaged in scientific work and the maintenance of equipment. The contrast was unbearable. Cherry-Garrard would describe it, years later, as the moment when he understood that the worst journeys were not the ones that killed you, but the ones that returned you to a world that could not comprehend what you had endured.

The three eggs were handed over to the expedition’s biologist. They were transferred to England with the expedition’s scientific collections. They would be examined by specialists who found in them nothing that justified the cost of their collection. The embryonic development did not support Wilson’s evolutionary hypothesis. The species remained interesting, but not revolutionary. The scientific value of the Winter Journey to Cape Crozier was, by the standards of the laboratory, negligible.

At Cape Evans, the journey was understood differently. Scott, recording the event in his journal, called it a very wonderful performance and noted that the right men had gone to attempt it. The phrase carried weight. The judgment was on character, on the capacity for endurance, on the qualities that would be needed for the greater journey that lay ahead. The polar journey, the march to the South Pole itself, was scheduled to begin in November, when the sun returned and the temperatures moderated. The men who would undertake it were being selected, their qualities assessed, their capacity for sacrifice measured against the demands of the enterprise.

The Winter Journey provided data for this selection. Wilson had proven his fitness: at forty, the oldest of the three, he had emerged from five weeks of extreme exposure with his capacity intact. Bowers had proven his reliability: the navigation, the leadership in crisis, the maintenance of morale through the storm, all marked him as a man who could be trusted in difficulty. Cherry-Garrard had proven his willingness: the youngest member of the expedition, medically disqualified from the original selection, he had volunteered for a journey that no one had required him to make. Scott valued these qualities. They would determine the composition of the polar party.

But the journey provided other data as well, less visible in the immediate assessment but inscribed in the bodies and the records of the participants. Wilson’s hands never fully recovered their sensitivity. Bowers’s feet carried damage that would affect his gait, his endurance, his capacity to maintain the pace that polar travel required. Cherry-Garrard’s teeth, shattered by the cold, would require extensive dental work and would never function normally again. The weight loss was measurable: pounds of muscle and fat consumed in the effort to survive, tissue that would require months to rebuild, tissue that would not be fully restored before the southern journey began. The psychological cost was less quantifiable but no less real: the memory of the storm, of the collapsed igloo, of the hours buried in snow waiting for death or rescue, would linger in the minds of men who would soon face conditions equally extreme.

The normalization of this cost was the crucial legacy of the Winter Journey. The expedition had proven that men could survive in the Antarctic winter, could travel in darkness and cold that had been considered prohibitive, could return from the edge of death with their mission accomplished. This proof became a datum for planning. The polar journey would be undertaken in summer, in daylight, with conditions that were, by the standard of Cape Crozier, moderate. The men who had survived the winter would find the summer manageable. The margin of safety that had been consumed on the journey to Crozier would not be restored. It would be assumed, incorporated into the baseline of acceptable risk.

The mechanism was this: a diversion for science became a debt against the future. The Winter Journey was not a sidebar. It was a test of the expedition’s capacity for sacrificial endurance, and the test had been passed. The passing established a new standard. The men who had endured the worst journey in the world had demonstrated that worse was possible, that the human body could be pushed further than the planners had assumed, that the Antarctic environment could be survived even when it offered no concession to human presence. This demonstration would haunt the calculations of the polar march. The margin that had been consumed at Cape Crozier would be sought elsewhere, in lighter loads, in faster travel, in the assumption that the men could endure what the records suggested they could endure.

The quantified physical and psychological cost of the winter journey—pounds lost, injuries sustained—establishes a new, dangerously expanded baseline for acceptable suffering as the polar journey is planned.