Chapter V: Through the Ross Sea

Midnight on the 29th marked our breaking through the pack, and thence we sailed southward and slightly westward, without further trouble from the ice. In fact, it was a help, for we encountered half a gale from the south on the 31st and hove to under the shelter of a drifting belt of pack. This was necessary for the sake of the weakened ponies. Advantage was taken of the halt to put down soundings. Bottom was reached at 187 fathoms, whereas the day before it had been 1111 fathoms or 5500 feet deeper! We hauled up some small pebbles of eruptive rock coated with polyzoa—a low form of life which was absent on the rocks from the deep water.

Late in the evening of the last day of the year the officer of the watch reported “Land in sight.” On the starboard bow was a clouded horizon, and there, apparently far above the sea line, in a belt of thinner clouds extended a range of mountains in a vast panorama. There were two widely separated peaks rising in solitary splendour, and akin in form to the Matterhorn; but even grander owing to the clothing of snow from top to bottom. These were Mounts Sabine and Monteagle, each about 10,000 feet high, with their slopes washed by the waters of Ross Sea. They lie well to the south of Cape Adare, where Borchgrevinck spent the first winter in the Antarctic.

An hour or two later we kept up the good old ceremony of ushering in the New Year. At the proper time Lieut. Evans performed on the steam siren, and others of us, with handbells and other weapons of offence, awakened the sleeping afterguard. As a grand finale, a march was played on the pianola, after which we turned in with a pleasing consciousness of duties nobly done.

New Year’s Day was most beautiful weather. Some portion of it was occupied in swinging ship to correct the compasses. In a chart plotted to show the magnetic variation this region is of great interest. For the last few days every degree of southing has approximately led to a change of one degree in the magnetic variation. Thus on entering the pack the variation from north was 40° E.; on leaving it was 60°, while at Ross Island it has increased to 150°. The magnetic pole—to which the S. end of the compass needle points—lies inland some 200 miles from Mount Sabine. On the line joining the magnetic to the south pole the compass readings are completely reversed. Captain Scott, on his western journey, crossed this line, and when he sent back a party of men, told them to find their course _due east_ by following exactly the path indicated by _west_ on the compass.

During these few days every one is much occupied with letters home. Special stamps—surcharged VICTORIA LAND—have been issued to us, but as their number is limited, I fancy few of them will be exposed to the tender mercies of the post offices of the world. On the last expedition many of the letters bearing Antarctic stamps went astray, so that on this occasion two envelopes are being used by those who desire to send home officially obliterated stamps. The talents of the afterguard as regards letter-writing vary considerably. One member is sending off nearly a hundred postcards and letters. Another collected a few important dates from other people’s diaries—to lend an air of exactitude to his epistle, he explained—and then proceeded to send off one letter of no great length.

If it were possible, Captain Scott proposed to make Cape Crozier his headquarters. In some respects this was superior to other positions. It was new ground, except for a hasty survey; it was near the Emperor Penguin settlement. More important, it was permanently connected with the Great Barrier, whereas Cape Royds is isolated from the south by impassable cliffs and glaciers in summer.

A _sine qua non_, however, was a firm ice-foot, or sea-ice platform, on which to disembark the heavy motor sledges and the ponies. The 3rd of January was a day replete with interest. At noon we had approached near enough to Mount Terror to see the details of its surface. Erebus lay twenty miles to the west, and was shrouded in clouds and somewhat behind Terror. As we steamed in toward Cape Crozier we could see the great Ice Barrier extending indefinitely to the east. Owing to the numerous fragments of the Barrier we had met to northward, and to the pictures we had studied, this giant wall seemed like a familiar old friend. As one of the men remarked, we seemed to have been seeing it all our lives! At this point it was about sixty feet high, and gave rise to a curious meteorological effect.

In the far east, where the lessening ribbon of the ice front reached the horizon, there was a distinct difference in the sky to north and south respectively. To the north it was a dark grey, with heavy cumulus, but in a definite arc over the Barrier this was changed to pearly grey, and the clouds were almost white. This was, of course, a gigantic form of ice-blink, but I saw nothing approaching it in size or intensity in our passage through the pack.

Coasting Ross Island, January, 1911.
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Near at hand were bands of brash ice, forming a sort of miniature pack just under the Great Barrier. On this bobbing and rotating surface sported flocks of penguins, performing marvellous feats of equilibrium, and nowise disturbed by the huge bulk of the ship towering above them. The Barrier front is deeply undercut by the waves at the water-level, and small berglets were constantly dropping off above this line of weakness. Probably they give rise to the broken masses cemented to floes which we met in the pack; while the large bergs are pieces broken off from the _whole_ face of the Barrier. From top to bottom the Barrier would here be about 250 feet deep, I expect.

By this time we had approached as near to Cape Crozier as the swell would allow. In the angle between the Barrier and the rocky cliffs buttressing Mount Terror were piled up masses of pressure ice for some distance back from the sea. The cliffs of dark lava were 250 feet above the water, and were actually overhanging in places. Further west, again, the shore line consisted of some low bluffs separating beaches of considerable extent. Behind these beaches, the rock, instead of being black, was a light brown or buff colour for a distance of a mile along the water’s edge, and perhaps a quarter of a mile inland. It was difficult to realize that this brown area was a guano deposit, resulting from the presence of a vast colony of penguins. Through the glasses we could see vast regiments of them, extending far up the hill slopes and making their way across patches of snow from one rocky surface to another. Quite separate from the main rookery were two little exclusive colonies, though why they should move away from their fellows, and so far from the sea, is difficult to explain. In the background towered Mount Terror, 10,000 feet high, his summit occasionally appearing through a break in the clouds.

Captain Scott decided to prospect for a landing-place in a whaleboat, so a party set off to cover the intervening half-mile. Bits of floe, that seemed insignificant in the _Terra Nova_, gave the whaleboat a nasty jar, and the swell quite prohibited our making a landing at any point. We made for the lowest place in the pressure ice. Here a floe had been forced up to form a deep sea cave, and along one side was a pathway used by the Emperor penguins. Hanging head downwards from the roof of the cave were two dead penguins, which had been caught in the pressure. Awaiting us were two Emperors, one full grown, and the other a lusty chick the size of a duck, and covered with grey down. It marched off in a stately fashion without the ludicrous wobbles of the Adelies; and so escaped the clutches of Dr. Wilson, who was eager for its scalp as soon as he saw its plumage. We then rowed west for half a mile under the lava cliffs. Some lenticular patches of white material among the dark basalt reminded me of the alternating layers of snow and lava seen in a volcanic island in the South Pacific. But this white material was not snow, but a basic ash from which all the iron (the colouring material in Vulcan’s workshop) had been bleached out. We felt rain falling, and looked up to see that we were right under the water from the melting snows of Terror, which dropped 250 feet from the crumbling lavas. Lest the latter should also fall on us, we moved seaward. A magnificent series of basalt columns appeared before us. They were long, narrow, hexagonal rods rather than columns, curved and interlocked, and about a hundred feet long. For a hundred yards or more, the appearance of this cliff face reminded me of the fracture of a coarsely crystalline piece of cast iron. I have not heard of a parallel case of columnar basalt. There was no hope of landing under these cliffs, so we made for the ship, and soon put off to the penguin rookeries, where some sea-ice might be expected to remain. After passing some stranded bergs, we came abreast of the penguin colonies, and the sea was perfectly full of the birds cruising about in search of their shrimp-like food. I have never seen seas so teeming with life. The explanation is that these polar waters are free from the bacteria which break up protoplasm and so render it to some extent useless for food. The cold waters act as a kind of cold storage, and supply unlimited food material for higher organisms in the form of algæ and protozoa, which quickly vanish after death in warmer regions. At the other end of the scale of life in the Antarctic are the warm-blooded killer-whales (_orca_), of which we saw a party of three busy gobbling up penguins. The cycle involved has been described by one of the scientists on board in a rhyme, which is descriptive, if not poetical:—

(As will be seen later, the human element in the cycle was nearly supplied!)

One never sees the penguins swimming on the surface. Occasionally a snake-like head pops up and looks around for a few seconds, but usually they are swimming rapidly with their flippers a foot or two below the surface, or imitating the dolphins in curving leaps through the air. On the shore near the rookeries the snow was worn into long gutters where the penguins promenaded to and fro. The winds are too strong for any economic deposit of guano to arise. We saw brown patches driven by the wind on to a snow bluff five hundred feet above the rookery.

About 6 p.m. on the 3rd Erebus came into sight. We approached it from the north-east—an unusual direction—and so, perhaps, obtained a more comprehensive view of the outer crater than previous observers. It is a wonderful “Somma” ring, like that of Vesuvius, and being composed of dark steep rock, it stands out in strong contrast to the inner white cone and the outer snow-covered slopes. Ponting got a fine photograph of it, which will be of interest to vulcanologists. Having given up all idea of wintering on the north-east quarter of Ross Island, we immediately steamed west to McMurdo Sound.

We were engaged on a survey of the north coast of Ross Island. Bowers with sextant, Pennell at the compass, Campbell at the range-finder, each with an assistant, formed a busy group on the ice-house.

All that night we steamed steadily west to Cape Bird, passing Beaufort Island on the starboard, and then turned south again to Cape Royds. Beaufort Isle was the scene of an exploit of one of our seamen (Paton), who was shut in by pack some five miles away from the island in the whaler _Morning_. He and a mate broke leave to try and reach the isle across the floes, but had to return without accomplishing their wish. On his return to civilization Paton found he had become a proud father. The child was christened Beaufort Paton on the suggestion of Lieut. Evans.

About 5 a.m. we came into sight of the western face of Erebus. McMurdo Sound was closed in here by loose pack, but the ship threaded her way through fairly readily. We were keenly interested to see the condition of the ice at Cape Royds, and two of our afterguard (Priestley and Day) have a personal interest in the headquarters of Shackleton’s expedition. Soon after the queer volcanic knob on the end of Cape Barne hove in view we sighted the meteorological screen, and immediately afterwards the hut of the 1907 expedition. But the bay, instead of its old-time surface of sea-ice, was a sheet of open water, with two stranded bergs in one corner. Obviously it was no better as a landing-place than Cape Crozier had been. The hut looked in good order, though the door had apparently been broken in, but we could not see many details, for it was essential to push south and see how much ice had broken away. An hour later we reached Inaccessible Island, and here a solid wall of sea-ice prevented all further progress. Forty-eight hours of coast observation caused one watcher to retire to his bunk. On returning to the deck I found that the _Terra Nova_ had come to a standstill against the sea-ice, about a mile south-east of Inaccessible Island, and the same distance from the shore. Here on a large area of dark eruptive rock—freed from snow at this season—we are building our hut. In the future the locality will be known as Cape Evans.

MAP OF THE COAST FROM CAPE ROYDS TO HUT POINT.
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