While it will, of course, be tremendously emotionally satisfying to walk in the footsteps of my heroes, my real practical reason for going to Antarctica in my own corporeal form – and this specific part of Antarctica, rather than the more accessible Peninsula or somewhere much closer to home that is equally covered in ice – is to get an authentic sense of place. In order to really understand what it’s like to move around in the locations the Terra Nova Expedition called home for two years, one needs to be in that space oneself, and getting a sense of the atmosphere and conditions will contribute hugely both to understanding the history and depicting it truthfully on the page.

In order that you, dear reader, should understand what I’m talking about and where I’m going, I have put together a quick guide to the Ross Sea region.

First, an overview of the Antarctic continent. It’s really big. To get a sense of the size, it is larger than Australia; it could fit the U.S. and Mexico together; if you drew a circle around the whole of Europe, that’s roughly the size and shape of the Antarctic continent. Our action revolves around the Ross Sea area, south of New Zealand, roughly centred on the 180° meridian. The main features here are the Ross Sea, a large indent in the continent, and the Ross Ice Shelf, a floating plain of ice several hundred feet thick, which covers the southern half of the Ross Sea. This ice shelf is about the size of France, or of Texas, whichever resonates most with your personal frame of reference.

[map taken from the British Antarctic Survey website]

The detail area delineated above is the broader theatre of the Terra Nova Expedition. I will not be visiting most of these places, but it is useful for you to know them, to understand some of the events of the story.

My placenames and terminology can sometimes be 100 years out of date – I think King Edward VII Land is called something else now, and no one calls the ice shelf ‘The Barrier’ anymore – but it’s simpler for me to use the same names as appear in the records I’m studying.

The area marked ‘Bay of Whales’ used to be a definite inlet in the northern face of the ice shelf. The ice shelf is made primarily of ice flowing off the continent into the sea, and its forward face is constantly breaking away as more ice pushes in from behind, so it’s impossible to pin down permanently on a map. However, a bay was consistently found in this area, so it got a name. Many years later, Roosevelt Island was discovered, which explained the permanence of the bay – its contours might change, but as it was a result of the ice flowing around the island, the fact of the indentation there remained. Now it appears that the ice sheet has retreated nearly to the island itself, so the ‘bay’ no longer has its defining walls.

The Beardmore Glacier, which provides a broad and relatively shallow ramp up from the ice shelf, through the Transantarctic Mountains, to the polar plateau, was discovered on Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition of 1907-9. It was the obvious route to take when planning the Terra Nova Expedition’s journey to the South Pole.

One of the camps on Scott’s ascent of the Beardmore Glacier.

The main body of the Terra Nova Expedition was always going to be based on Ross Island, but a side branch was supposed to have been landed on King Edward VII Land, to the east, as this was largely unexplored. They couldn’t find a suitable landing place, and on the way back, they discovered that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition had set up their base at the Bay of Whales. It would have been awkward to have two competing expeditions working in more or less the same area, so what had formerly been the Eastern Party decamped to Cape Adare, on the west side of the Ross Sea.

But, as the story I’m telling takes place mostly in the Ross Island area, and that’s where I’ll be, let’s turn our perspective around 180° and take a closer look at that.

[base image taken from Google Maps satellite view]

Ross Island (as well as the Ross Sea and Ross Ice Shelf) were discovered in 1840 by the expedition led by James Clark Ross. Their ships, HMS Erebus and Terror, gave their names to the two volcanoes which dominate the island, and the second-in-command, Francis Crozier, had the easternmost cape of the island named after him.

In 1902, the area was revisited by the Discovery Expedition, Scott’s first. They explored the western side of the island, naming Cape Royds and Cape Armitage after senior officers on the Discovery. They spent two winters anchored in the bay between Hut Point and Cape Armitage, living in the ship, but also built a hut at Hut Point. The American base at McMurdo Station is walking distance from Scott’s Discovery hut, and if you cross Cape Armitage to a feature formerly known as Pram Point, you will find New Zealand’s Scott Base.

The RRS Discovery, icebound, with Observation Hill in the background. McMurdo Station now occupies the slope behind the ship, which Scott and his men used for ski practice.

Ernest Shackleton had been one of Scott’s officers on the Discovery; he took his own expedition back to Antarctica in 1907 on the ship Nimrod. They established their base at Cape Royds, a little more than a day’s journey north of Hut Point.

Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds, in the midst of an Adelie penguin colony.

When Scott returned with the Terra Nova in 1911, they established a new base at Cape Evans, a landmark freshly named after this expedition’s second-in-command. This location afforded them good access for the ship, interesting features for the geologists, and a central location for their actions, but had the disadvantage of being cut off from the permanent ice shelf for a few months every year when the sea ice broke up between Cape Evans and Hut Point. The old Discovery hut at Hut Point, then, was used as a secondary base for parties travelling south.

Cape Evans, as photographed by Herbert Ponting, looking north from Wind Vane Hill

Between Ross Island and the Beardmore Glacier was established a safe and direct route, along which depots were laid at readily identifiable places. This became known as the Southern Road. It travelled southeast from Hut Point until it was clear of the protrusions on the western shore of the Ross Sea, then shot straight south until it reached the base of the glacier. The site of this bend was known as Corner Camp. Scott wanted to lay depots along the route as soon as they arrived, so that the following summer’s journey to the Pole wouldn’t need to drag absolutely everything all the way from base. The final depot in this chain was supposed to be placed at 80°S, but due to circumstances on the depot-laying journey, they had to stop just short, and it was placed at around 79°30’S 170°E. Due to the quantity of stores left here, this became known as One Ton Depot. It might be the most important landmark in the story which today has nothing to denote it; the flow of the ice shelf and the accumulation of snow since 1912 have erased it from the geography, except as coordinates.

Sarah Airriess – Blog