Now that you’re up on the history of the Discovery Hut, let’s take a stroll around it.
The entrance is on the southerly side, facing McMurdo Station. For its protection, the Antarctic Heritage Trust have fitted the door with a hefty padlock, but this is OK because you are with a Hut Guide who has the key, and will keep an eye on you during your visit to make sure you don’t pocket any artefacts.
The door is on the southwest corner of the hut, at one end of the three-sided verandah. In the Australian Outback, which this hut was intended for, it would provide a margin of shade and keep the walls of the structure cool. Here, it drifts up with snow, but if the building’s margin is kept clear, can provide some semi-sheltered outdoor storage space. This space was used to house the ponies and dogs when parties stopped here to or from more southerly destinations.
While your Hut Guide grapples with the lock, you notice that what looked like a pile of leather is a mummified half-butchered seal, which gives you an inkling of the realities of life in this environment, in the days before giant cargo ships brought tons of frozen food every year for your breakfast bacon and grapefruit juice.
The Guide has opened the door, and brought out the boot brush. You must thoroughly brush all the snow and volcanic gravel off your shoes before you enter. The hut is enough work to take care of without everyone tracking in moisture and grit. If you are very clever, you will remember to put your clean foot on the step while you brush the other one, and not back into the dirt.
You step into the darkness of the hut, and immediately notice that it smells like a barn. When your eyes adjust, you realise you are smelling the wind-eroded hay bales that have been stacked in the vestibule.
I don’t know for sure if this was the famous ‘compressed fodder’ but it’s all in very small bits, not long stalks of straw, and certainly looks compressed – more like chipboard than hay – so I’m going to guess it is.
You follow your guide into the main interior space of the hut, and briefly marvel at seeing it for the first time, before you are called over to the guest book to sign in. Your guide provides you with a pencil of her choosing, because she finds the ones supplied by the AHT to be too hard. To your amusement, you observe that the offending pencil is the same brand as the ones provided to fill out document request forms at the archives at SPRI.
Now that you have filled in your name, date, and time of entry, you can begin to explore the place properly. You are standing in the largest ‘room’ of the building, the wider arm of an L-shaped space which wraps around the improvised inner compartment. This was where the Terra Nova men slept on their way back from the Depot Journey, where their sleeping bags were turned into a ‘snipe marsh’ by the meltwater from the ceiling. For reasons lost to history, it was known as ‘Virtue Villa.’
There is a lot to see here, but your attention is first drawn upwards, because there is the famous ceiling cavity that was filled with ice! You have always had trouble picturing it, and it turns out to look nothing like you would have imagined.
It’s hard to tell in this photo, but the ceiling actually slopes upwards to the centre, just like the roof except a shallower pitch.
The fact that you can see into it at all is due to a remarkable but little-known event on the Terra Nova Expedition. When the main party were off making the big journey to the South Pole, four of the men left at base manhauled a load of extra food and fuel out to One Ton Depot, to restock it for returning parties. Their first night after leaving Cape Evans was, as usual, spent at Hut Point, but one of the men ‘had some feeling against sleeping in the Hut’ and persuaded the party to leave the supplies inside but sleep in a tent outside. During the night, a portion of the ceiling, still burdened by the unmelted ice above it, fell down – it would have killed the men, had they been sleeping there.
At the bottom of one of the roof support beams, you see a curious metal contrivance, and realise it must be a blubber lamp, mounted at just the right height for reading or journal writing in one’s sleeping bag on the floor. When burning, it would have added its lick of smoke to the general miasma which has stained the ceiling and curtain black.
Next to the blubber lamp is a crate with what look like ration bags – a grimier version of the ones you’ve seen in museums, anyway – and possibly a measuring bowl.
To your right, on what had been the far wall, is a case containing some food tins of a rather startling hue.
The orange spots are rust from the tin beneath. These contain barley, according to the label.
Now you can see down to the previously hidden corner. At the end is another window and, next to it, some curved wooden staves. They look like sledge runners, but the curve is the wrong shape. Your guide tells you they are tent poles, and you realise this must be one of the dome or bell tents that were mentioned in diaries but never photographed. It would have been far heftier than the dome tents you remember from camping as a kid, with the bendy metal poles that threaded through the fabric.
Now you are in more familiar territory, for in front of you (or behind you, if you are still looking at the tent poles) is the kitchen area, walled off from the rest of the hut by that heavy curtain, which had once been the winter awning of the Discovery. You remember this space from that photo of Dmitri and Meares which I shared last week, only now you are looking at it from the opposite angle, and it’s in colour and 3D.
Also, Meares and Dmitri are no longer here. Obviously.
Beyond the blubber stove is a platform raised on yet more biscuit cases, which would afford at least two men the luxury of sleeping off the cold floor. Above it – presumably to take advantage of the greater warmth of the kitchen – is strung a washing line, with a pair of thick woollen thermal underwear bottoms and a very rough-looking canvas trousers, probably one of the Ross Sea Party’s.
On the stove is a wide pan with a layer of some unidentifiable chips in it. It’s probably another relic of the Ross Sea Party, but it puts you in mind of one of Cherry’s stories from that jolly camping holiday in the hut while waiting for the sea ice to freeze.
"Who's going to cook?" was one of the last queries each night, and two men would volunteer. It is not great fun lighting an ordinary coal fire on a cold winter's morning, but lighting the blubber fire at Hut Point when the metal frosted your fingers and the frozen blubber had to be induced to drip was a far more arduous task. The water was converted from its icy state and, by that time, the stove was getting hot, in inverse proportion to your temper. Seal liver fry and cocoa with unlimited Discovery Cabin biscuits were the standard dish for breakfast, and when it was ready a sustained cry of 'hoosh' brought the sleepers from their bags, wiping reindeer hairs from their eyes. I think I was responsible for the greatest breakfast failure when I fried some biscuits and sardines (we only had one tin). Leaving the biscuits in the frying pan, the lid of a cooker, after taking it from the fire, they went on cooking and became as charcoal. This meal was known as 'the burnt-offering.'
Lighting the kitchen is a window with a frayed end of wire hanging in it. Was this what remained of the telephone wire which was laid over the sea ice between here and Cape Evans, providing communication between the two huts? This side of the hut does face Cape Evans, so it’s possible, but as far as you can tell, no trace of the telephone remains.
Reverse angle of the kitchen, as in the historic photo. The lighting is entirely natural, but you couldn’t ask for anything more atmospheric, or theatrical.
Past the laundry, you walk into another partitioned section of the hut. This area has a lower ceiling, and would have been under one of the outside awnings except that the wall has been pushed out to the edge of the roof, enclosing it. It is something like a pantry, with a large shelving unit between it and the kitchen, on which are arranged some choice artefacts. As you walk through, back to the first room, you pass a curious square column of bricks rising out of a hole in the floor. The Guide tells you this was the pedestal for a gravity-measuring pendulum, which needed to be in direct contact with the Earth.
Now we are back where we started, more or less, standing at the guest book. Before you sign out, your Guide implores you to go back into the vestibule and look into the other compartment. So you do; walking down towards the hay, you poke your head around the end of the partition and see what looks like a miniature abattoir.
The carcasses hanging on the wall have ungulate legs (out of shot in this photograph) which means they must be sheep, not seals. New Zealand was very keen to shower frozen mutton on departing expeditions, and this familiar taste of home was regarded as a treat by the travelling men who otherwise ate the local wildlife, much of which tasted of fish. In the corner is what looks like a headless, hollowed-out skin of an Emperor penguin. Two Adelie ribcages sit on the crate next to it. It would have made sense to store meat in this room as it certainly would have been very cold. Your Guide tells you that the door to your right was originally the main entrance; the door we have come in was regarded as the ‘back door’. The original front door is permanently shut, now, so the back door is the only way to come or go.
That’s it; you’ve now seen all the dark and secret corners of the Discovery Hut. You enter your departure time in the guestbook and clump back out the door. While the Guide sweeps the entryway and brings in the boot brush, you stand outside the door looking out over the Sound, trying to imagine what it would have been like to live here for months without any other sign of human habitation as far as you could see.
View to the south: L-R Observation Hill, White Island, Minna Bluff, and Black Island.
View to the west: L-R Mt Discovery (capped with cloud), Brown Peninsula, and in the middle ground, the Hut Point headland with Vince’s Cross on top of it.
From Vince’s Cross, you can look down on the descendants of the Weddell seals that sustained the early explorers, slumbering peacefully under the protection of the Antarctic Conservation Act.
Before long, you and your Guide are fighting the famous Hut Point wind to get back to base, where you will have apples, oranges, and fresh greens brought down by the cargo jet you rode in on. The seals around Hut Point are safe from the needs of the Galley and protected by international law; if you get peckish or miss dinner, there is hot pizza available all through the night. The Discovery Hut, and the Hut Point wind, haven’t changed much since the first explorers were here, but some things have, probably for the better.
