At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the north and south poles still covered with ice were still undiscovered. Hell awaited those who decided to get them. Extremely low temperatures, disease and finally a test of character when it was necessary to consider eating a travel companion.
This is the coldest land on the planet; Here winter temperatures drop to -90 ° C inland. In summer, near the coast, thermometers sometimes show as high as + 15 ° C, but usually the temperature does not exceed + 10 ° C. It is also the windiest and driest continent, the interior of which is a desert with only 10 centimeters of snowfall a year.
The Antarctic ice cap covers almost 98% of its surface, with an average thickness of 1.6 kilometers, and almost 70% of the world's water resources. In winter, of course, it is completely dark, and in summer it is constantly bright, making sunburn a serious threat to researchers.
Such conditions in Antarctica, where the geographic South Pole was located, are described by Stephen R. Bown in his latest book " Amundsen. The Last Viking ", Telling the story of the man who first managed to reach this seemingly impregnable place.
Long-lasting darkness during the polar night made orientation in the field impossible. Only a compass was available for efficient navigation. On the other hand, high saturation of sunlight (and hence ultraviolet radiation), occurring during the polar day, in addition to the above-mentioned burns, also caused snow blindness in travelers. Pain in the eyes and head, photophobia and swollen eyelids were the daily life of the members of the expedition. At the turn of the 20th century, these symptoms could only be treated in one way:with opium drops. Staying in such conditions for a long time, however, could lead to irreversible damage to eyesight.
Long-term darkness during the polar night, alternating with high saturation of sunlight, could have led to almost irreversible blindness.
Sir John Franklin's eaten shoes
How, then, was it possible to protect against the dangers awaiting those who want to conquer the Pole? Preparation for the expedition was an individual matter for each expedition. It was drawn from travelers' journals and research, auxiliary literature and their own experiences. However, many problems could not be foreseen and the survival of all participants of the escapade depended only on the resourcefulness of the crew.
The main issue was to build up food supplies for at least a few years. The specter of starvation during the journey was not so much real as it was one of the main threats. Sir John Franklin found out about it, and in order to survive, he had to replace ordinary food with his own leather shoes. From his recent expedition on HMS Terror and HMS Erebus but no one came back alive. It did not even help that some of the sailors, fighting for survival, ate their companions ...
Before hunger hit the daredevils - monotonous feeding also took its toll. The consequence of the lack of a varied diet was, among others scurvy. It could be remedied by consuming fresh meat and the blood of hunted animals. At first, however, ordinary sailors were not convinced to eat raw material. It was only when the disease was at an advanced stage that they reluctantly but expanded their menu to include polar animals. The great threat that scurvy posed to travelers is described by Stephen R. Bown in the book " Amundsen. The Last Viking ":
Many mental disorders that plagued the members of the expedition during those gloomy months (depression, bleak immersion in black thoughts in a koi, lethargy and lack of interest to help even yourself) ) are the mental symptoms of scurvy. Its physical symptoms include: swollen, blackened and bleeding gums, moving teeth, halitosis, swollen joints, as well as old wounds opening and broken bones splitting as the connective tissue of the body breaks down . All of this is accompanied by a general inability to concentrate and think clearly.
British military and Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who at the same time as Roald Amundsen decided to conquer the South Pole, recalled that his crew members often dreamed of sumptuous dinners during long Antarctic expeditions. In the morning it was the main topic of conversation and sighs of sailors.
However, reality quickly caught up with them:next to them were dogs - companions, sharing the hardships of the journey with the crew. Because not only people in Antarctica were starving. If food ran out, the animals turned aggressive and turned from friends into deadly enemies. They ate their own excrement and leather gear from hunger. If the travelers did not manage to find food in time - they had to murder or eat the dead dogs .
The provisions posed another threat to the members of the expedition. The canned food may have become contaminated with lead while it is being packaged, by soldering the container incorrectly. Abdominal pain, memory impairment, susceptibility to infections and anemia - these are some of the main symptoms of poisoning with this heavy metal that affected the crew on the way to the pole.
Floating madhouse
Although the sailors had a lot of responsibilities related to the daily journey - after a few months they began to get monotone. If we add a constant sense of threat to a seemingly trivial problem, we get an explosive mixture. As we read in the book " Amundsen. The Last Viking ":
It's living for months in the cold and darkness on a small ship, repeating the same stories over and over again, remembering the same regrets and having the same arguments over and over again with the same people. Add to this unhealthy isolation the constant fear of never seeing the sun or going home; that the ship may remain frozen in solitary barren land until it dies of the cold and dwindling supplies; that if the ice shifted, the ship could be squeezed in a vice and would crumble - no wonder the morale (...) dropped noticeably as the months passed. (...) Two sailors went crazy, while others hovered on the brink of madness. Cook wrote that life on board (...) "mentally resembled a madhouse" .
The road to the pole was full of tangible threats. The travelers, apart from cold, hunger and disease, also faced mental problems. In the photo, part of Raold Amundsen's trail to the Antarctic Plateau.
If the crew had to wait for the ship to be freed from the chains of ice, it would have been a year or two in the snowy outback. There were no daily duties related to work on the ship then. People were losing their will to work and their only dream was to sleep in bed. An all-encompassing wilderness was breaking into their heads, paralyzing mind and body.
The captain's task was, among other things, to find his people's duties so that they could focus on something for a while and forget about the situation in which they found themselves. A break in the daily monotony, apart from contacts with Inuit (people of the North), was played with sled dogs, which for sailors were often full members of the crew.
Robert Edwin Peary was probably the first person to reach the North Pole (pictured left). Certainly, however, he managed to find a way to catch the dogs escaping from the crew (on the right - one of Amundsen's sailors).
In their journals, travelers to the Pole devoted a lot of space to the descriptions of the behavior of these animals and their individual personality traits. They provided daily entertainment, but could also become another source of problems. Their tough characters and innate cleverness made them run away frequently. The crew of Robert Edwin Peary - an American explorer who was arguably the first to reach the North Pole - found a way to catch them. First they were lured with dried meat, then one of the sailors jumped up and pressed the dog's head against the snow, while the other put a collar on it. As Peary recalled: With this method, it was possible to dodge without being bitten by a dog more than a few times.
The slightest mistake could cost your life
Even the best prepared expedition could end in failure or the death of the entire crew - the already mentioned Robert Scott, who lost the race with Amundsen, found out about it. A minor mistake, an ill-considered decision or just bad luck made the whole expedition fail.
The fire on board, which consumed some of the supplies, cracks in the ice, several or even several meters deep, invisible to the naked eye, and snow blindness - the discoverers of the route to the Pole had to deal with these and many other problems every day. Sometimes mistakes were made already at the preparation stage by choosing inappropriate clothing for the crew or by deciding that the sleigh would be pulled by people instead of dogs. Back then, failure and death were in fact inevitable.
Certainly, even with the right qualifications, these successful polar expeditions owed much to the indigenous peoples whose knowledge of how to survive in a harsh climate proved invaluable. It should be remembered that the fight took place not only between the conditions in this ice hell and the sailors, but above all in the mind of each of the participants of the expedition. Each of them had to fight with their own weaknesses, and sometimes with their own worldview.
Bibliography:
- Angell Pauline K., Victory over the Devil of the North , Our Bookshop, 1972.
- Augustyniak Tomasz M., Ice Trap , Podróże.Onet.pl, [online access:30/04/2018].
- Bown Stephen R., Amundsen The Last Viking, Poznań Publishing House, 2018.
- Scott Robert F., The Voyage of the “Discovery” , London, 1912.