Edward Larson

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Ramona Koval: Edward Larson is in the studio with me. Welcome to The Book Show Edward.

Edward Larson: Thank you for having me here.

Ramona Koval: Let's look at the heroic age of Antarctic science, as it was called. We've got to get all the expeditions in our head properly. Let's talk about Captain Scott first. This famous last expedition wasn't his first expedition.

Edward Larson: No, he had launched this age, along with the Germans who had an expedition the same year, with his Discovery expedition in 1901.

Ramona Koval: And Discovery was the name of the ship that he took.

Edward Larson: Correct, Discovery was the name of his ship, it was purpose-built, it was built solely for the expedition, and it was special, it was a wooden ship in an age when they were now building metal ships, but it was wooden because the primary goal of that expedition was not to reach the South Pole, even though Scott wanted to get there, had it in mind as a sort of plum to pull out of the pudding, as it were, but the main purpose was, of all things, terrestrial magnetism.

Because of you, because of Australia, and South Africa, these are burgeoning British colonies down here, there was an amazing amount of transport by ships, commercial ships, that were now taking the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, trying to get to the goldfields here in Australia and New Zealand or to get to South Africa and then sailing on up to England, and for that they needed better navigation. They were virtually clueless about where the magnetic South Pole was and how the lines of declination and inclination worked, and if you didn't know that, you didn't know where you were.

And so the main purpose of the expedition was to take very precise magnetic readings to try to track those lines, the way the curved lines that point into the South Pole that would make your magnet, your compass different. And so the Germans sent an expedition, they went to one part of Antarctica, the Swedes sent another, and the British sent the biggest, and that was the Discovery, wooden ships so it wouldn't affect their compasses, it leaked terribly, it wasn't a very well built ship. But they were trying to find the magnetic South Pole and the curvature lines. And then in addition they took along biologists and geologists to try to do all those other sorts of scientific research in expedition. It was designed to winter in the Ross Sea area of Antarctica, that was the chunk given to Britain when they split up the quadrants for research.

And so he went down there. Along with him, as the third officer, was Ernest Shackleton who was really one of the few non-navy, he was merchant marine, but he got on the expedition, he always got what he wanted, so he got on the expedition. And Edward Wilson, some of the other great people who became famous, Wilson died with Scott later. And so that was the Discovery expedition.

And then in addition to that, after Shackleton gets sent back because he doesn't get along well with Scott, he gets sent back after just one year on the relief ship, the expedition stayed two years, two winters. He mounts his own expedition, he raises his own funds, he was incredibly charismatic, and he raised his own funds, got his own team of scientists, and his was a better team than Scott's, he wanted to beat Scott in everything, he wanted to beat Scott to the Pole and he wanted to beat Scott with scientific research. But most of his greatest scientists came from Australia, he picked them up in Australia. That would be Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson who became an Australian hero, several others went down.

And then when he narrowly fails to reach the South Pole, Scott launches a third expedition, the one in which he died that you referred to, the so-called Terra Nova because it was on the ship Terra Nova, and he came down and again brought a new team of scientists down and now he included several Australians such as Griffith Taylor and Frank Debenham went with that expedition. So there are Aussies on ice throughout all three expeditions.

Ramona Koval: Well, this Aussie went to see the Discovery in Dundee a few years ago and it was such a fantastic exhibition, you can actually get on the Discovery, and I was knocked out by how they were maintaining the class system, even on the ship. There were the officers' mess and officers' bunks, and then there were the bunks for the men, they were hammocks, and they had somewhere separate to eat. You'd think that in such conditions that they might drop all that, but no.

Edward Larson: That was Scott, and that's why...versus Shackleton...Shackleton was beloved by his men, Scott at the best was respected, he was really beloved by his men. He was respected by many of them, not by all, but part of the reason was he maintained this...even though it wasn't officially a naval expedition, he imposed British Royal Naval procedures, which meant officers eating separate on the ship, and of course they lived on the ship so it continued in Antarctica while they were frozen in ice the two years down there, they kept that split between an officers' mess, they had officers' clubs, they had officers' quarters. The officers had certain privileged liquors and alcohol, they had cigars while the others had cigarettes, and there was this class distinction that ran through the entire expedition.

They also amazingly, since Scott was a figure of...he viewed himself as a crusader for science and he was very much an agnostic. This was an age of course of TH Huxley. Darwin's people were behind the expedition, and Hooker, and so it was not a religious expedition. But he maintained having formal (just as in the Royal Navy) masses, Anglican masses, and he would lead the singing. And a few religious people on the ship were always sort of baffled, they didn't feel comfortable going because he was so clearly an agnostic and so visible on that and yet it was the Royal Navy, religious masses on Sunday and religious services daily.

Ramona Koval: He was doing the shtick. The other person that we need to bring into this conversation while we get all the expeditions sorted is Amundsen, Norwegian polar explorer. He was a real man of derring-do, he was going north, he was going south. Tell us about him.

Edward Larson: Amundsen was a remarkable figure, and nothing that Scott did or nothing that my book says should take away from his magnificent accomplishment, but he wasn't doing science, and my book is primarily about the incredible scientific research and the derring-do of these scientists who were off doing these amazing efforts in the middle of winter in different times. Amundsen was very purposeful, he set goals, his hero was Fridtjof Nansen, a great Norwegian explorer...

Ramona Koval: Who had to invent a whole lot of stuff. He crossed Greenland, didn't he, and he almost got to the North Pole, but he had to invent a whole lot of equipment that didn't exist.

Edward Larson: Nansen was the mind behind all of this in the sense that Scott...everyone looked up to him because he had pioneered the whole effort, first with his skiing, which they thought was impossible, no one thought he would survive, cross-country skiing across Greenland, and then tried to drift where he froze his ship into the ice because he thought that there was of course no land in the Arctic and that his ship would be carried by the currents once it was frozen, and he hoped to go by the North Pole. It didn't go far enough North, he tried to get out and ski across, it didn't work, he came back.

But he was the person who inspired Amundsen. Amundsen heard about these tales as a child, and Nansen, when Norway became independent from Sweden, became a national hero. And so Amundsen wanted to be a second Nansen. He was never the scientist that Nansen was, Nansen was also a very good scientist. Amundsen had the same seriousness of purpose and focus, and the first thing he did that gave ire to the British is he bested them by being the first to take a ship or boat...the British used to like to diminish it as just a little skiff...through the Northwest passage, the first person ever. Now of course with global warming it's going to become...

Ramona Koval: Everyone is going to do it!

Edward Larson: It's going to be a commercial passage. But the British had been trying for 100 years. Famously Franklin was lost out there and there were all these searches for Franklin, but they had been trying ever since the days of Baffin to get across there, and they would always fail. The British never made it, and that's important to remember that in the story, that the British had failed.

Then Amundsen took a little skiff, and it took him two winters and three seasons because he kept getting frozen in, but he worked his way and got through the small passages and made it all the way around from the Greenland end through the Alaska end and back down. He left his ship that did that, the Gjoa, in San Francisco and then came back. But he beat the British at that, the first through the Northwest Passage.

Then he set his goals at being the first to the North Pole. But just as he was going to leave, word came back that American Robert Peary had claimed to make it there, probably never did, but the claim was the assurance was there. So, suddenly the plan of Amundsen wasn't...he wasn't going to be able to be the first to the North Pole, and Amundsen wasn't interested in being the second anywhere. So he said, 'I'm going on with my expedition to the North Pole despite this.' His plan was to take Nansen's old ship and go around, freeze it in the ice at a different place over near Alaska and then sail through, and then when he got the nearest to the North Pole do what Nansen did, get out and then ski all the rest of the way.

But what he did, now that Peary had claimed the North Pole, is he left Norway, still saying he was going to the North Pole, but instead he had totally decided already and he loaded the ship to go to the South Pole, with a prefabricated house which he wouldn't have needed for the North Pole, and all these dogs that he wouldn't have needed for the North Pole. And instead he went to the South Pole, and on his last landfall on an island in the Atlantic he sent off a message, after he could not be turned back, a message to the King of Norway and to Nansen whose ship he was taking and then to Scott saying that he was instead going to the South Pole. And he sailed then instead south and he made a base in the Ross Sea about 400 miles from Scott's base, but he was on the ice but closer to the Pole. And so you had Amundsen there as well as Scott in the same winter, and suddenly, totally unexpected to Scott, he wasn't planning a race, but well-known to Amundsen, we had a race to the South Pole.

Think of this, we're talking about 1911, this is when races were very popular. There were car races across Russia at this time, there were car races across the United States, there were air races going on, there were balloon races. This was before the Great War, and so this was a period where there was international races, and suddenly the press...and this was the height of yellow journalism, this was the press era...

Ramona Koval: And the press funded a lot of these races.

Edward Larson: And the press had money behind these, and also all of these explorers, Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen partly funded their expeditions by, in advance, selling the newspaper rights and magazine rights and book rights, those were three separate rights, and worldwide newspaper rights in each different country. They negotiated all those in advance and therefore when they got back they had to send their stories first to the world or first to the New York Tribune or different certain medias. And so the press was behind this, and the press had a vested interest in it. Murdoch would have loved this age.

And so here was another race, and so the press immediately started...they didn't know they were getting a race, and suddenly that raised the visibility because just getting to the South Pole is one thing, but now the press was in, and so there were worldwide headlines that Amundsen and Scott were in this race. But this was also the time before wireless telegraph of that distance, so they were totally out of radio communication with each other or the world.

Ramona Koval: So it was a surprise to them.

Edward Larson: It was a surprise to them, and Scott was never quite sure what Shackleton...the telegraph message from Amundsen was so cryptic that he didn't know for sure what it meant when he had gotten it, and he received that telegram here in Melbourne, right here in Australia. But he wasn't quite sure. But then his ship, while it is doing scientific research, runs into Amundsen's team and then brings word back to Scott at his base on Ross Island, and so then he knows that he is in a race. But it's a race that...Amundsen has expected a race...

Ramona Koval: And he's equipped for it.

Edward Larson: And he has dogs, and he knows how to go across these vast tracts of ice, where Scott is not an expert at that and he didn't think there was going to be a race at all, that there wasn't going to be any competitor, so he had a very slow scheme of how to get there. He was using horses and dogs and motorised tractors, and it was a very slow, cumbersome...he thought was going to work but it was a slow, cumbersome approach, while Amundsen's was designed, no science, just a dash to the Pole.

Ramona Koval: So we know who the people were that were involved. These guys just went on for years, didn't they, these weren't just short trips. I think you have to remind us how many years worth of stuff you had to take, what planning had to go into it.

Edward Larson: First you didn't even know how long they last because there was a whole history, both with the British Arctic expeditions and Antarctic, of being frozen in for extra winters, so you had to bring along and often plan for multiple winters frozen in the ice. And with Scott's first expedition, Shackleton's first expedition, and then Scott's second, the three that are the main focus of this work, they weren't just a small band of people like Amundsen, he just had a small group because he was just dashing to the Pole. These had 20, 30, 40 people down there on the ice, which were going off on multiple expeditions because they were going out to do geology, going out to do biology, going out to...some of them were caught out over winter, some winter expeditions where they would go to get, say, penguin eggs because they were studying the life cycle of the penguins. So they had to bring along all this different equipment for all these multiple trips.

And what gets lost in books that focus on just getting to the Pole is they have no place to tell these other stories, and to me these are the stories are just as gripping, they're just as death-defying, and to me in a way they have more lasting significance because they were doing truly...I've been down to the Antarctic program to the Pole and I've been down with the Australians and New Zealanders to Antarctica, and the same type of science that is being done now, it was all pioneered by these expeditions, and that makes these stories...it makes them a logistical nightmare to prepare for.

Ramona Koval: Let's talk about a couple of them. This obsession with the emperor penguins that Scott displayed, and the collection of eggs and embryos and adults. Tell us about this, because if you don't really know what's behind it you think why are they doing this?

Edward Larson: So many of these trips when you just learn about them after the fact, they seem crazy, but there was a method to their madness and it was reflected in these expeditions. We all love emperor penguins, we love them today. All of our children growing up, myself as a kid, and still today, things like The March of the Penguins and things like that. And they had basically discovered emperor penguins. There had been a few known before, but Scott's first expedition was the first to find masses of emperor penguins and, more critically, the first time ever that they found their breeding grounds, the rookeries.

And they discovered an amazing thing which just amazed them. First, they discovered the emperors were the largest of the penguin types, and therefore they thought that they were...and it wasn't just the explorers, it was scientists, ornithologists worldwide thought that the emperor penguins were maybe the oldest birds still existing because they thought that the penguin type, since they swam and didn't fly, might be an older type of penguin, therefore closer to the original evolutionary division of reptiles from birds, because by this time they thought that birds had descended from dinosaurs and therefore related to the reptiles. And they thought the penguin might be the oldest type of bird, and because it was the largest, and ancient penguin fossils are very large, they thought it might be the oldest type.

And they found out that it bred in the middle of winter. No other bird breeds in the middle of winter. And they hatch their young and they keep their young, and of course it's still a fascinating story, how they nurtured these young in these 40, 50 below zero temperatures, huddled under while the other mate goes off to get food, and it's a tremendous story...

Ramona Koval: We've all seen the film.

Edward Larson: We've seen the film, and they discovered it. But Edward Wilson on the first expedition had discovered all of this and written a monograph that was read worldwide, people were fascinated by it. So when he came back down on the second expedition he wanted to go out in midwinter, which means total darkness because the sun doesn't come up at all, and temperatures down to 75-below, the coldest temperatures that had ever been recorded in human history up to that time. He wanted to go out there in the middle of winter from their base, a 70-mile trek, through this darkness, through pressure folds and ice hummocks...

Ramona Koval: And wearing what?

Edward Larson: Well, wearing just all they had which was gabardine and Burberry outfits, pulling (because they didn't use dogs because the British didn't believe in it stressing dogs that way, dogs were pets of course to the British, not beasts of burden)...pulling, three of them...

Ramona Koval: Man-hauling.

Edward Larson: Man-hauling three-quarters of a tonne of supplies on two sledges that they had to pull because they had to take all their research equipment because their idea was to go there and get penguin embryos while they were still fresh so they could dissect them and to see if they displayed reptilian traits, because the idea is you could see the evolutionary development in the embryos. So they had to bring equipment to build a lab, so when they got there they had to build a stone hut that they could heat. This was called the winter journey or, by one of its participants, the worst journey in the world, he famously wrote about it.

And they went out and went back and it was just a hellish experience because on top of all this they decided to use this experience to test the diet appropriate for the trek to the Pole the next summer because the next summer...two of the three on the expedition were going with Scott the next summer, as soon as they got back. So they decided to divide up the food they ate, and one of the three ate nothing but biscuits and another one ate nothing but butter. So they would divide up the types of food to see what would be the optimal food content to eat, so they were eating strange foods. If you can imagine just eating butter for the trip, and going out and coming back...of course it would get to 75 below zero. One of them, their teeth chattered so much, chattered the whole trip, that they shattered all of their teeth, he lost all of his teeth.

Ramona Koval: That's amazing, isn't it.

Edward Larson: He never mentally recovered from this expedition. Of course when they got there it was a disaster because a blizzard hit them and it destroyed the building they had made, the hut, because it had a canvas roof and it blew off, and they lost their equipment. They came back, the net effect was three emperor penguin eggs that they managed to make it back with, but it was an amazing ordeal, all done in the name of science.

Ramona Koval: But if you're thinking you're in a real race, what are you doing going off doing side journeys like this?

Edward Larson: It's not the way to win the race, because two of the people on the expedition I just described ended up turning around and going with Scott. So they were already exhausted and taxed from doing this all winter. Amundsen meanwhile spent the whole winter in camp and all their men focused solely on getting to the Pole. So it was not the way to win a race to the Pole, what it was was if you don't think you're in a race and what you want to do is significant science and then bag the Pole as sort of an extra...which captures the British mind. Back then, a proper expedition would have been that you do science, that gives it the true meaning, sort of the Oxbridge way, and getting to the Pole is like winning the race on the side.

In addition to that of course, to really get to the Pole the British thought you had to man-haul, you had to walk there or ski there, you had to go there on your own, because if dogs were pulling you it's not really fair. I mean, why not just fly to the Pole or take a balloon to the Pole? If the dogs are pulling it then the dogs have won the race! And so they thought in addition to this, if it's a race of course you're going to try to go as fast as you can, which means dogs.

So in so many ways the British were doing it their way, and indeed when they got there and saw that they were last, when Wilson and Birdie Bowers who was also on this winter journey, when they got to the Pole their consolation, if you read their diaries, is Birdie Bowers said, well, at least we did it by proper British man-hauling instead of using dogs. And Wilson said, well, at least we did science, at least this is a meaningful trip.

Ramona Koval: In our last few minutes I just wanted to get to the point of the death of Scott and four of his men and when their bodies are found they have got all their precious notebooks, so they really wanted to keep those to the last, and they've got 35 pounds of fossils and rock samples. Tell us about this passion for getting the fossils, what were they looking for?

Edward Larson: From the very beginning, from the first expedition which one of the organisers was Joseph Walker who was a great British biologist and a close friend of Darwin, one of the goals was to look for a particular type of broad-leafed fossil flora which Darwin had proposed had originally started in the Antarctic and then spread. And it's found here in Australia and it's found...it had been found in Darwin's day in Australia, in South America, in Africa. And the creationists had argued against Darwin saying why should it be in all these places, God must have created where it belonged. And Darwin said no, it must have evolved originally in a southern continent.

And so behind the first expedition had been looking for this particular flora. The first expedition had found that there were early plants in Antarctica, the second expedition had then found fish and more plants, but nobody had found this. And on the way back from the Pole, after they were exhausted, after they were running short on food and fuel, Wilson spotted this in an exposed area of rock coming down the Beardmore Glacier, and they had stopped for two days and collected it, these precious fossils that they had been looking for for over ten years.

And even when they abandoned everything else, Wilson insisted that they keep these fossil records of these particular fossils, and these were what the 35 pounds of rock were. That underscores their passion for science, and Wilson insisted they were carried to the end, and it was found a year later after the winter, they came out and found the tents, they found their scientific notes, but they also had found they carried all that way these 35 pounds of rock specimens.

Ramona Koval: And it turned out that they were right.

Edward Larson: They were right, those were the fossils, these broad-leafed flora fern plant that had started in Antarctica, it was an early form of it. And so what they had done is they had proved one of Darwin's hypotheses.

Ramona Koval: You know, the respect for science seems to be lower these days than it was then.

Edward Larson: Science was a high level of...people were discovering new things and it was a search for truth, it was a search for meaning, and in that sense there was widespread interest in the scientific research. Of course Australia, the United States, New Zealand, other countries, still send teams of scientists down to the Antarctic, primarily to do science, and that is what...this book tells the story of the beginning of that enterprise that we continue to do to this day.

Ramona Koval: So glaciology, meteorology, other observations that they had.

Edward Larson: Oceanography, biology, terrestrial magnetism, they were working in all the same areas, early physics expeditions and observations that you can only do from the south polar regions, they were doing those, and they were doing it of course without the sort of equipment we have, and the stories of those various field trips to me are just as gripping and in some ways even more heroic than the race to the Pole.

Ramona Koval: Do you have a favourite hero? Who is your one?

Edward Larson: My favourite, if I had to pick anyone, it would be an Australian, Edgeworth David, who was the one who actually made it first with his assistant Douglas Mawson, made it to...in an incredible expedition, he was 50 years old, and he made it to the South Magnetic Pole on Shackleton's first expedition. And he, along with Edward Wilson, the person after the penguin eggs, these were the two that were universally beloved and respected.

Ramona Koval: Edward Larson, thank you so much for being with us on The Book Show today, telling us this fantastic story.

Edward Larson: Thank you for having me.

Ramona Koval: And Edward's book is called An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science, and it's published by Yale University Press.

Publications

Title: An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science

Author: Edward J Larson

Publisher: Yale University Press