The Terra Nova Expedition has made some names pretty famous, but there were plenty of people involved who fell out of the public eye or never got into it in the first place. One of these was the chief medical officer, a quiet and supportive man who ended up leading the expedition through the difficult second winter. As today is his birthday, I thought I would share a little about him.
Dr Atkinson – or "Atch", as he was nicknamed early on – was the medical officer for the Terra Nova Expedition, but also a parasitologist, so he'd be giving the men their regular evaluations one day, and be up to his elbows in seal intestines the next. What he was most remembered for, though, was his leadership of the reduced party at Cape Evans through the second year of the Expedition, after the Polar Party failed to return. He ended up, quite unexpectedly, senior officer at the age of 31, having never been in a position of command before, facing several extremely weighty decisions, and having to get a party of bereaved, knackered, anxious, and occasionally bored men through a dark and brutal Antarctic winter, which he did magnificently. As Silas wrote in his memoir:
To a large extent this [the happiness and harmony of the second winter] was due to Atch. . . . We all respected him, felt for him, pitch-forked into a difficult situation and more than that, I think I can say we loved him. (Silas, pp 275-6)
Though he bore it well, the weight of this role told on him, both psychologically and physically. His is one of the tragic arcs of the story, as he went from a fairly carefree team player – famous for his footballing skills and occasionally verging on irresponsible – to shouldering everyone's burdens and steering the Expedition on top of it all. You can see the change in him even in the photographs:
Atch was put in command of the First Returning Party, which turned back from assisting the effort to the Pole in December of 1911. He suffered terrible dysentery in the final stage of the return journey, but had recovered sufficiently to take up command of the dogs and was prepared to take them south to meet the Polar Party when news came in that the leader of the Second Returning Party, Teddy Evans, was gravely ill with scurvy. The dogs were immediately sidelined into ambulance service, and as doctor, Atch had to stay at base and try to save his patient, so he sent Cherry out in his place. As Cherry could not navigate, he was instructed to wait for the returning Polar Party at One Ton Depot (a major landmark along the route; more about this next week) rather than meet them wherever they might be, which had consequences.
When they discovered the Polar Party's last camp twelve miles south of the depot, and the documents amongst their friends' bodies, Atch, as commanding officer, was tasked with reading Scott's diary to ascertain what had happened and relate it to the rest. He took the little book away into a tent to read alone.
Hour after hour, so it seemed to me, Atkinson sat in our tent and read. The finder was to read the diary and then it was to be brought home—these were Scott's instructions written on the cover. But Atkinson said he was only going to read sufficient to know what had happened … When he had the outline we all gathered together and he read to us the Message to the Public, and the account of Oates' death, which Scott had expressly wished to be known.
(The Worst Journey in the World, p.483)
After building a cairn over the Polar Party's tent and reading the burial service, Atch then led the searchers another day south to look for Oates' body – they found his bag, slung over a snow wall (and now at SPRI), but no Oates, so they built a cairn and left a note memorialising "a very gallant gentleman." This is all the more poignant when you know Atch and Oates were inseparable on the journey down, and best of friends throughout, a fact which mystified Teddy as neither of them was given to conversation.
On returning to civilisation, Atch was quickly swept up in the First World War, investigating the infamous fly pest in Gallipoli and being blown up several times on the Western Front, before getting blown up good and proper on the HMS Glatton in Dover Harbour – an episode which cost him an eye and half his face, but despite which he saved five men's lives.
Ever the introvert, his wartime experiences – and the struggle with the boredom of peace, which was sometimes worse – didn't seem to rattle him too much, but when his wife died in 1928 he fell apart. After a steep spiral of depression and alcoholism he signed on as ship's doctor on a voyage to India, but died on the return journey, and was buried at sea somewhere off the coast of Egypt.
He and Cherry had remained good friends after the Expedition, and after Atch's death, Cherry added a special preface to a new edition of The Worst Journey in the World. It's just as well Atkinson has no headstone, because the whole thing should go on it, and it would never fit ... I will leave you with an extract, because nothing else so fully encapsulates his character:
There are people in this world who are rocks. They are never, in my experience, like stage heroes; they are nervy and highly strung. They do their best and seem to fail. And then comes some great emergency; and quite quietly they accept what the good God has sent them, and take a weight of responsibility which would crush hundreds of thousands of their fellow men. Not for an hour or a day or even weeks or months, but for an age which neither they nor anyone else know the limit, they carry on—cheering and comforting people to have about you when everything is going wrong—with a sense of duty which is beyond all praise. These men are rocks. I have never known a better rock than Atkinson was that last year down South.
His voice has been with me often since those days: that gruffish deep affectionate monosyllabic way he used to talk to you when he knew you were ill and perhaps feeling pretty rotten. Not but that he was abrupt at times. It was of the manner of the man to be so; it was his pose. The funny thing was that he could not prevent the tenderness poking through, despite himself.
(Preface to the 1937 edition of The Worst Journey in the World, pp. ix-x)
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