Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South. David Crane

from the cold. His cheek was constantly going dead white in one place, and Ferrar’s nose went too. My face wasn’t troubled, but the moment we halted and started to unpack … the cold and the snow drift and the wind were so bad that we all began frostbites …

      However we dug out our trench and shoved the poles into the flapping business and … got our footgear off. The ski boots were frozen to the socks, so that both came off in one and it took us all we knew next morning to tear the socks out. The sweat of one’s feet had lined the boots with ice. We got into our long fur boots and our feet began to get comfortable. Then we got our supper cooked, hot cocoa and pemmican and biscuit and jam and butter, and then we began to get our furs on, an awful job in a small tent, but it was too bad to go outside, as our furs would have been filled with drift in no time. The other two were bricks to me now. They dressed me first, as I was constantly getting cramp in the thighs whenever I moved, and having dressed me, they put me on the floor and sat on me while they dressed each other. At last we were all in our wolfskins … and settled off to sleep huddled together to keep warm …

      By 3.30 a.m. they had had as much as they could take, but exhausted again after four hours’ marching, they pitched camp still two miles short of White Island and slept until four that afternoon. After a meal they trudged on to the island, and with their tea frozen in the water bottles beneath their tunics, roped themselves together to begin the freezing climb to the 2,300-foot summit of the highest crater. ‘As far as the eye could see was a level ice plain,’ Wilson wrote of the view from the top, all the misery of the journey momentarily forgotten in the significance of what they were looking at: ‘the true Great Barrier surface, and no Antarctic Continent at all. On the west coast-line ran a series of promontories formed by splendid mountain ranges, and beyond them all was the setting sun just dipping below the horizon. Shackle took bearings and angles and I made a sketch, though we were nearly frozen doing it.’