Four days later the work on shore was sufficiently in hand for Scott to think of their first sledging reconnaissance towards the nearby islands on the Barrier, and on 17 February Shackleton won a toss of a coin with Barne for the pleasure of leading it. The ice around the end of their peninsula was showing signs of breaking up, and the next day Scott told off three seamen to haul a sledge over the ‘Gap’ in readiness for Shackleton, Wilson and the young geologist Ferrar to start the next morning.
It was a historic occasion, because it was not only the first test of the men, but the first test too of the equipment over which Scott had struggled so long before Discovery sailed. The tents they had brought were bell-shaped and made of either a green Willesden canvas or thin gaberdine, stretched out over five bamboo poles that met at the top to give a height of five foot six and a diameter of about six feet. There was an entrance hole two and a half feet in diameter with a funnel-shaped door, another hole at the top for ventilation, and a valence or ‘skirting edge’ that could be weighed down with blocks of snow and ice to keep out drift. With a waterproof canvas floorcloth that could double up as a sail, the whole weighed about thirty pounds – the minimum, Scott reckoned, to withstand Arctic conditions.
The Discovery expedition had the advantage of recent polar experience to call on when it came to their tents – among Markham’s papers survives a note on tent design from Belgica’s Frederick Cook – but their sleeping bags show how much a matter of trial and error their equipment necessarily was. On this first journey they were experimenting with a kind of ‘night suit’ made out of reindeer or wolf furs that had been bought in Norway, but experience would soon prove these virtually impossible to get in and out of, and Scott had them converted into bags – either single or, more typically, ‘three-man bags’ weighing forty pounds (twice that by the end of a long journey with the accumulation of ice) – made with the fur inside, an overlap at the head and the sides, and a large flap that could be drawn over when everyone was inside and toggled down. ‘The warmest position,’ Scott wrote – almost anticipating, it would seem, one of the posthumous criticisms that he always took the centre berth – ‘was the middle, but it was not always preferred. As an offset for his increased comfort it was the duty of the centre occupant to toggle up the bag – a task which, with bare cold fingers was by no means pleasant, and generally occupied a considerable time.’
The sleeping bag was an even more vital piece of equipment than the tent, Scott reckoned, and not far behind it was their cooker. He was prepared to concede that the nutritional value of the food would in theory be the same hot or cold, but ‘as regards the heating of food’, he later remarked with measured understatement, ‘I can only say that I should prefer to be absent from a party who had decided to forgo it’.
The cooker they used was of Nansen’s design – his greatest contribution to sledging requirements, a grateful Scott believed – an adaptation of a modern form of heating lamp that consumed paraffin in a vaporised state. The most vital requirement of any cooker in Antarctic conditions was heat efficiency, and Nansen’s design of concentric lightweight aluminium containers, with the heated gases circulating around the central pot, usefully expended 90 per cent of the heat coming from the lamp beneath.
It was not just for the cooker that they had to thank Nansen, because their sledges, made in Christiania, similarly showed the benefit of his experience. The typical soul-breaking, iron-shod tenfooter of the McClintock era had taken seven men to pull, but Scott’s ash sledges were lighter, narrower and more flexible, with most of the joints made of lashings to allow for an almost snakelike movement, slightly wider runners, rounded beneath, an overall width of one foot five inches, and a length that varied from seven feet (too stiff) to the ideal, forty-odd pound eleven-footer, and a twelve-footer that was ‘just beyond the limits of handiness’.
As important as their sledges was their sledging costume, and give or take individual touches of whimsy, this was the same for officers and men. A warm thick suit of underclothing formed the innermost layer, followed by a flannel shirt or two, a sweater, pilot-cloth breeches and loosely cut jacket, lots of pockets for knives, matches, goggles and whistles, and an outer suit of thin gaberdine from Messrs Burberry to keep out the biting wind.
For the hands there were fur or felt mitts – Scott swore by his wolfskin – over long, woollen half mitts – but when it came to headgear, there was more individualism. In the glare of summer a broad-rimmed felt hat would usually be worn over a balaclava, and in the colder weather a camel-wool helmet with gaberdine cover, or simply two woollen balaclavas under the gaberdine cover – Scott used just one, augmented by an extra thickness of material to protect the ears – and a pair of goggles made out of smoked glass, slitted leather or, in Scott’s case, a sliver of wood, blackened on the inside and pierced with a cross-shaped aperture.
Most vital of all on the march was the protection of their feet, and for this there was nothing to touch the reindeer-fur boot or finneskoe made in Norway. The pressure of time had meant that their supply was of a variable quality, but a properly made pair, bulked out with a couple of pairs of socks, or in Lapp fashion, an insulating nest of sennegrass, would stand weeks of hard travelling on the ice.
There was one further, more controversial piece of equipment that stemmed from Scott’s journey to Norway, and that was their skis. Since Nansen completed the first crossing of Greenland on ski their possibilities for polar travel had been obvious, but between a man who had had his first pair of skis at two and a party of British seamen using them for the first time lay a gulf that no cursory practice on an ice floe in the pack or on the slopes above the Discovery hut was going to close. There was a profound disagreement on the subject from the start – Armitage loudest in the antiskiing faction, Skelton noisiest in their defence – but Scott himself would always remain oddly ambiguous about their use. Alongside the ultra-competitive Skelton he was probably the best skier in the party, but after an early conversion to the pro-ski faction he relapsed into a scepticism that nothing in his expedition experience could shift. ‘It was found that in spite of all appearances to the contrary,’ he would later write – and not from any doctrinaire opposition, but with the experience of months on the ice behind him, ‘a party on foot invariably beat a party on ski, even if the former were sinking ankle-deep at each step; while to add to this, when the surface was hard, ski could not be used, and had to be carried as an extra weight and a great encumbrance on the sledges … It will be seen, therefore, that our experience has led me to believe that for sledge work in the Antarctic Regions there is nothing to equal the honest and customary use of one’s own legs.’
That Scott was wrong would be only too bitterly demonstrated, but whether he was wrong at the time, with the men and equipment that he had at his disposal, is another matter. If he was guilty of anything it is probably that he was enough of a believer to make his men more competent, but against that it has to be recognised in his and their defence that, hauling on foot, Scott’s men would comfortably match in terms of miles anything that Nansen achieved with skis on the Greenland icecap.
All these matters, however – and the all-important issue of sledging rations that the long journeys of their first full season would expose – still lay in the future as Shackleton and his party finally set off.* The weather was fine, but with a bitter southerly wind soon getting up, and White Island seeming to recede with every step they took towards it, it was not long before any illusions of knight errantry were brought to a brutal end. ‘At 11.30 the