From the outside the hut looked cheery and neat--all tidy and
ship-shape, with sharp corners and beautiful wood and little
blue-tinted windows. It looked like a place where you could be
perfectly comfortable and warm, huddled around a stove with a mug of
cocoa in your hands, listening to a story, watching the snow fall. But,
said my friend Tom Learned, as we stood at the door, this hut, the
Discovery Hut, had the saddest history of all the huts built in
Antarctica by early explorers. Tom, who works at McMurdo Station, has
made a hobby out of studying and photographing the huts, and offered on
this day to take me and Ruth Hill, a McMurdo electrician, on a tour of
Discovery Hut, built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men in 1902, when
they were on their first expedition to reach the South Pole.
Under the eaves outside the hut was a pile of frozen canvas and on top
of the canvas lay a mummified seal. Tom said the seal was hauled up
from the cold sea, only several hundred feet away. Probably it was
going to be cut up and boiled for blubber, but someone never got around
to it, and now, almost 100 years later, there it lay. I touched it and
it was hard and cold and black.
Tom knocked before he unlocked the door and slid the bolt back. "Knock,
Knock. Honey I'm home. Oh no, not blubber again!" he laughed. There
was a snowdrift in the doorway that we had to climb over and on the
wall in the entryway the snow had blown into delicate sculpted
patterns. "Smell the blubber in the air" Tom said. "What does it smell
like?" I asked. "Fishy," he said. Ruth and I put our noses to the air
and sniffed. I could
smell it, after all those years. There were frost crystals on the
ceiling. The walls were black from the smoke of burning blubber.
Scott's men anchored their boat Discovery in Winter Quarters Bay,
right next to hut, and used the ship to live in during the winter.
Scott and his men mostly used the hut itself to store things in and as
a place to put on plays. The hut was built with prefabricated materials
brought from Britain, in the design of an early Australian squatte's
hut. Scott also used the hut again for storage when he came back for
another try at the Pole in 1910. He never returned from that trip. He
died on his way back to his main base at Cape Evans, after reaching the
much sought after South Pole shortly after Norwegian explorer Roald
Amundsen.
The hut was actually lived in by members of the Ross Sea party of
Ernest Shackleton's expedition in 1914. Shackleton was going to start
his journey to the South Pole from the Weddell Sea, on the other side
of the continent, while the Ross Sea party was going to start at Cape
Evans and lay depots of supplies all the way to the Pole, so that
Shackleton would have supplies for the last leg of his Transantarctic
trek. Only, things went wrong, and part of the Ross Sea party got
marooned at the Discovery Hut, just 20 miles away from their companions
at Cape Evans. They ended up having to overwinter in the Discovery Hut
because the sea ice had melted and they could not walk the 20 miles to
join their friends. The overland route was full of crevasses. "Bleak"
is how Tom described their winter in the hut. "Bleak."
Under the best of circumstances the hut never got above freezing. It
was so cold that the men had to pile up crates and cover the crates
with blankets, trying to make walls in an attempt to create a smaller
space around the stove so that they could keep themselves warm. They
even started tearing down the hut itself for fuel to burn. They slept
in a big pile on a wooden palette on the floor--all five huddled up for
warmth. They got seals and carved them up and boiled them and used the
blubber for light and also for food. In the rusting frying pan atop the
rusting stove I saw petrified frozen pieces of blubber. In a pile near
the door lay hunks and slices of blubber and the backbones of seal,
piled up, waiting to be eaten or boiled. "Blubber was everything," Tom
said. "Everything."
Crates and tins of all sorts and sizes littered the hut. I walked
around in the dim, cold light, my feet soft on the lightly snow-covered
wooden floor, and saw blue and orange Huntley & Palmers Biscuits
tins, tins of Bird's Baking Powder, Fry's Cocoa, handmade lamps
from cut up tin cans in which they burned blubber with a piece of cloth
for a wick, Hunter's Famed Oatmeal, cans of corned mutton, rusted
tins of sardines, an old hardware catalogue, a can labeled Beach's
Golden Plum, a big box that had written on the side "Captain Scott's
Antarctic Expedition 1910--Homelight lamp oil", crates that had written
on their sides in black letters "Special Cabin Biscuits Supplied by
Spratts Patent Limited--Navy Army & Expedition Biscuit
Manufacturers London", a box of cubed sugar, a crate marked "Special
Dog Biscuits--Use on the Voyage." By the stove in a bucket along with a
hatchet was a pile of blubber. A burlap bag full of dried up onions lay
open on the floor. In a corner lay a box that once held Coleman's
Whole Meal marked for "The shore party." On a low table lay a pile of
wool mittens, leather mittens, and seal skin boots. In one corner I saw
broken chairs, shovels, and spare sled runners. Around the other side
of the door in the entryway hung three nearly 100-year-old, half-carved
frozen mutton carcasses and a penguin skin and skeleton.
On one shelf I noticed a slab of frozen petrified blubber hanging on a
nail. I thought it an unlikely place for a slab of blubber. "Why is
that there?" I asked Tom. "That was the last place they threw it," he
said. The whole hut was like this--it had an unexpected feeling of
urgency and abandonment about it, as if whoever was there couldn't wait to get away.
Analysis
What I tried to do in this piece of writing was focus on people in the
landscape, in this case, by writing about an artifact that people left
behind--the hut. I put in a lot of detail about what I saw in the hut,
including the colors of the tins, the smell inside, the color of the
walls, even that my feet sounded soft on the floor. I put in some
history about the hut. I tried to convey a feeling about the hut--that
it was "sad" as my friend Tom said. Another thing I did was I put in
some pieces of conversation between Tom and me. Just from what he says,
you can tell he is a man with a sense of humor.
Writing Exercise
Focus on an "artifact" in a place you have
been or know well. It doesn't have to be a house. It can be
anything--an old car, a bucket, an old piece of ivory. It could be a
big ruin--such as an abandoned mining town. Try to include details
about the object itself (details of the five senses--what do you see,
smell, hear, touch, taste) and some of the history of the object and
the place. Write about 250 words.
Copyright 11.24.97
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