He's come down to us as "Birdie Bowers" but he was christened Henry in Greenock, Scotland, in 1883, son of a merchant marine captain and a respectable Christian missionary from Cheltenham. When he was very young, his father died, and despite his mother's reluctance to let her son follow her husband to sea, when Henry was of age he was enrolled on the naval training ship HMS Worcester in pursuit of a career to support his beloved mother and two sisters. He was always very conscious of this responsibility, and though his naval tutors were impressed with him, when he graduated he opted for the better pay (if lower prestige) of the Royal Indian Marines.
Wherever Bowers went, he earned a reputation for level-headed competency and efficiency – his first command was an unwieldy riverboat on the hazardous Irrawaddy, which he mastered before anyone told him how hard it was supposed to be. Later he was stationed in the Persian Gulf and tasked with running down arms smugglers: on one memorable occasion his party took a dhow full of rifles, armed with only his service revolver and its holster (carried by someone else, to look like a gun in the dark). Through it all he was regularly passing exams in Hindi and Farsi, surveying the terrain, and in his own time collecting butterflies and bicycling up mountains, and grappling with the conflict between his religious convictions and his professional ambition.
We know all this because Bowers wrote compendious weekly letters home. He spend most of his adult life a very long way from his family, but remained very close with them and shared everything. Whenever he was given leave he rejoiced at being back with them in cold and rainy Scotland, and in 1908 spent eight glorious months hiking all over the Isle of Bute and swimming across Rothesay Bay every morning.
Caerlaverock [his family's house in Ardbeg] was always full of laughter when he was in it. His gaiety was infectious and its effect was tonic. Entertainments, parties, picnics – he was the life and soul of these, but to see Bowers at his best one had to be free of the hospitality of his home. His merriment was not of the riotous or boisterous kind, but the natural exuberance of a soul in love with life. His high spirits were irrepressible, and he had a rare gift for seeing the comic side of situations. No one ever saw him depressed; his incurable optimism was the expression of an inner joy. (Seaver, "Birdie" Bowers of the Antarctic, p.91)
Bowers had had an interest in polar regions since childhood, and wrote to his family of his regret at not being on Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition or free to pester Scott about getting onto the Terra Nova. But while he was getting burnt brick-red in the hottest part of the world, machinations were underway to take him to the coldest: his reputation had filtered through his commanding officers to Sir Clements Markham, who recommended him to Scott, and he was offered a position without an interview or even an application.
It was a risk to appoint someone on recommendation alone, but it paid off enormously: originally assigned to the ship's party, Bowers' "orderly mind" and perfect memory made him so invaluable a quartermaster that Scott gave him that role at Cape Evans. During the Depot Journey and its hazardous return, he proved his physical strength and hardihood, and his mental capacity in a crisis. During the first winter he became closely involved with Scott in figuring out the plans for the Polar Journey. Not only did this involve mountains of interrelated sums (weights, rate of travel vs food consumption, layers of contingency plans, etc.) but thorough research of the existing literature on polar travel, and understanding of its application. And in the middle of this, Bowers set off with Wilson and Cherry on the Winter Journey, a gruelling five-week trek in the middle of the Antarctic winter to fetch some eggs from the Emperor penguin colony at the other end of Ross Island. He came through the ordeal so much better than his companions that just over a month later he was off again to the Western Mountains. Scott had earlier called Bowers a "treasure"; after the Winter Journey he wrote:
I believe he is the hardest traveller that ever undertook a Polar journey, as well as one of the most undaunted; more by hint than direct statement I gather his value to the party, his untiring energy and the astonishing physique which enables him to continue to work under conditions which are absolutely paralysing to others. Never was such a sturdy, active, undefeatable little man. (R.F. Scott, journal for 2 August 1911)
On the Polar Journey he was given charge of the pony Victor ("I'll soon get used to him, to say nothing of his getting used to me," Cherry records him saying) and was incensed when Scott ordered Victor's slaughter for the dogs to eat, well before the end of his usefulness –it must have especially rankled that this was in part down to Meares being injudicious with the dog food, upsetting the careful calculations.
When the southern party switched to man-hauling, he worked largely in the team led by Teddy Evans, but when it came time for Scott's party to head to the pole and Evans' party to head home, Bowers was taken on with Scott. Much has been written on this choice, which I won't go into here, but for all the drawbacks there was a clear benefit in having a hardy traveller, expert navigator, and catalogue of depots all bound up in the person of Bowers, not to mention the psychological influence of his sunny disposition.
When things turned bad for the Polar Party, Bowers was predictably resilient. He was in best condition when they made their last camp, and was ready to make a 22-mile march with Wilson, to One Ton Depot and back, for the food and fuel they needed to survive, though in his letter home regarding this, he implies it's something of a suicide mission.
They never got there. The following November, when the search party found their tent, Bowers was peacefully tucked up in his bag, having apparently simply gone to sleep ...
My Dear Mrs Bowers,
I am afraid this will reach you after one of the heaviest blows of your life.
I write when we are very near the end of our journey, and I am finishing it in company with two gallant, noble gentlemen. One of these is your son. He had come to be one of my closest and soundest friends, and I appreciate his wonderful upright nature, his ability and energy. As the troubles have thickened his dauntless spirit ever shone brighter and he has remained cheerful, hopeful, and indomitable to the end.
The ways of providence are inscrutable, but there must be some reason why such a young, vigorous and promising life is taken.
My whole heart goes out in pity for you.
Yours,
R. Scott.
Some notes on the drawings
When I moved to the UK in 2014 I had some fairly debilitating tendinitis in my right arm, which would go away only to flare up on the next job. I tried to rest my hand as much as I could, which was frustrating, especially when I was feeling pressed to get down to the business of drawing the polar guys. For whatever reason, Bowers was the most insistent of them; I said, ‘If you want to get drawn, it’s going to have to be with my left hand,’ to which he replied ‘Is that a problem?’ My sketchbooks from the time are peppered with left-handed Birdie doodles, but my favourite is probably this one:
The orange shapes were painted with my right hand and the lines drawn overtop with my left ... that lower right image is probably my favourite drawing I've done of him. When I first got into this research, before I started keeping mental track of these things, I found a quote that I have not yet rediscovered – it went along the lines of, "if you ordered Birdie to march through a wall, he would just march right through that wall." I feel like he marched through the page of that sketchbook, and the tendinitis and left-handedness were nothing to him.
“... he may have seemed to some people a bit pushing or even bumptious on first acquaintance. That was because he went so precipitately at whatever came along ..." (Cherry-Garrard, foreword to the Seaver, xiv-xv)
It was funny to revisit all these drawings for the purposes of this post; Birdie's design got ironed out a lot in the course of drawing the Sea Ice Incident so most of these look wrong, now. I fully expect the same will happen to my other character designs once I've started drawing these guys into pages! But one has to start the ball rolling somewhere ...