Thaw

By Dennis Glover

Some secrets won't stay buried.

Scott's lost expedition was still here, she thought -- frozen, preserved, waiting to be rescued from the thaw. The truth lay beneath the surface, and she was going to bring it up.

In 1912, five British explorers struggle across the Antarctic landscape, through howling winds and plummeting temperatures, seeking the safety of their camp.

Today, as the world's ice sheets begin to melt and surrender their secrets, renowned glacial archaeologist Missy Simpson works to discover the true cause of the explorers' deaths -- a subject that has intrigued researchers for more than a century.

Her colleague, Cambridge professor Jim Hunter, is working on his own scientific mysteries -- and is willing to risk everything to solve them.

In hallowed halls of learning and on the icy polar plateau, these risk-takers must grapple with the unfathomable power of the natural world and the dramatically changing weather -- while navigating their own complicated relationships.

Drawn from the pages of history and cutting-edge science, Thaw is a gripping read that will forever change how you see the frozen continent -- and those who seek to conquer it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781743823255

Dennis Glover

Dennis Glover grew up in Doveton, Australia, before studying at Monash University and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in history. He has worked for two decades as an academic, newspaper columnist, political adviser and speechwriter. The Last Man in Europe is his first novel.

Book preview

PART ONE

THE BRITISH ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION, 1910–13

1

12 November 1912

Blinding light. The cloud and wind had taken a holiday to celebrate the return of sledging season. The Great Ice Barrier stretched to the far horizons, a perfect, unblemished sheet, and human vision seemed limitless. The search party was making good progress.

Charles ‘Silas’ Wright, the expedition’s Canadian physicist, panted heavily, pushing one ski after the other, tracking south to the Beardmore Glacier. For two weeks, staying on course had been easy. Several times a day they would find remnants of the disaster: tractors, petrol cans, walls of ice that had sheltered the resting ponies from the freezing winds, food dumps and snow cairns, drifted up by the winter storms but still visible. It was as if the traffic of men and animals that had passed that way the previous summer had left a well-marked highway. Now, having passed the largest depot, the debris trail had thinned out and the job required both skill and luck; there was no easier place on Earth to become disoriented and lost.

Something caught his eye, ahead and to the right. It could have been anything – an old pony dropping most likely, or maybe a tin of coffee that had fallen off a poorly packed sledge. He kept it in his peripheral vision as he proceeded. After what must have been ten minutes he pulled abreast of the object, which was, he reckoned, still half a mile off. He took out his binoculars, careful to keep the freezing lenses from touching and sticking to his eyeballs. The object was regular in shape, but what could it be? Was it worth the mile-long round trip and the resulting hold-up? If a blizzard blew in – they could arrive out of a clear sky within minutes – he’d be on his own, without a tent or sleeping bag. He felt weary, and there was still a long way to go. But whatever it was might be an important clue in their search. He signalled to the pony train following him to continue while he skied over alone to investigate. He turned right and picked up speed.

The deviation seemed to take forever. The object refused to get any larger. He took to looking down at his feet, peering up only after 10, then 20, then 50 yards had passed. Still he couldn’t make out what it was. On the white plain of the ice shelf, which offered no perspective, distances were deceptive; it could have been a huge object five miles distant, or a small one, just 50 yards away. After covering what he guessed was another hundred yards, he looked up, then glided to a stop.

‘Christ!’

The object, now just 10 yards ahead, was finally clear. It was the top six inches of a deeply drifted-up tent. He suddenly felt like he was in a cathedral, staring at the altar. He removed his woollen cap and stood, panting, his breath freezing in front of his face.

It seemed somehow sacrilegious to make a noise, so, turning back to his colleagues, he waved until they realised he wanted them to come over and join him. Sensing his urgency, they began running, urging the mules on.

The mule team arrived, panting, but Wright halted them, waiting for their leader, Atkinson, who was bringing up the rear with Cherry-Garrard, Dimitri and the dogs. Atkinson looked at the exposed canvas and then back at Wright, who was shivering.

‘It’s them, Atch,’ Wright said. ‘Has to be.’

The tall, bespectacled Cherry-Garrard took off his hat. ‘My God, they got this close,’ he said.

Atkinson also took off his hat and the two walked, silently, to the drifted-up tent. They could tell from the position of the ventilation port at the top that the entrance was on the other side – pointing south.

‘So the wind was in their faces on their final stretch,’ Wright said. ‘On the Barrier. In March.’

Atkinson cringed at the thought of it. The pain. The cold.

The three of them walked around to the entrance side, knelt and started digging away the snow with their mitts. Gradually the opening was exposed. Atkinson looked at Wright and Cherry-Garrard with dread.

‘I’ll go first,’ said Atkinson. He hesitated, then opened the tunnel-like entrance and peered inside. ‘Three,’ he said quietly. ‘There are only three.’

‘Three?’

Atkinson withdrew to allow the others to see.

The inside was rime encrusted and a powdering of snow lay over everything, but they could make out their old friends clearly. Wilson lay on the right and Bowers to the left. Both were in their reindeer bags, arms crossed, peaceful, as if having fallen gently to sleep. Between them was Scott, whose end must have involved one last struggle; his bag flaps had been thrown aside, his coat ripped open and his left arm was reaching over his old friend Wilson’s body as if to protect him. Their pinched faces and exposed skin were translucent, frozen solid, the colour of alabaster except for the painful-looking frostbite that covered them.

‘Where are Oates and Evans?’

The others padded up slowly. ‘Let them all see,’ Atkinson said.

In the sombre silence, broken only by the bark of tethered dogs and the crunch of soft-soled finnesko on thinly snowed ice, the men took turns seeing their dead friends while the officers set up the camp. Bill Lashly, Scott’s loyal man, was sobbing.

Atkinson called Wright and Cherry-Garrard over again. ‘Cherry, you, Silas and I will collect their possessions. Be thorough, gentlemen. I’ll collect Scott’s things; Silas, you get Birdie’s, and you, Cherry, can deal with Bill’s. I’ll go first.’

With the other two watching, Atkinson knelt carefully beside Scott and reached for the small leather pouch in which Scott kept his journals. It was lying under his left shoulder, wedged tight against the ground sheet. He looked back at the other two, then, as gently as he could, lifted Scott’s outstretched arm to free the object from its owner’s final possession. There was a crack, which, in the desolate quietness of the camp, sounded like a gunshot. Cherry-Garrard flinched, a look of total horror on his face.

‘It’s alright, Cherry,’ Atkinson said. ‘The Captain’s arm has broken, that’s all.’

Atkinson’s job finished, Cherry’s began. Careful not to touch Scott’s broken arm, he untied Wilson’s bag, finding letters and a journal. He hesitated.

‘Everything,’ Atkinson said. ‘We must get everything.’

His hands shaking, Cherry undid Wilson’s jacket and slid a folded silk pennant from his shirt pocket. In the other pocket was Wilson’s small prayerbook, which he always kept close to his body. As he was retrieving it, Cherry felt the dread chill of the dead man’s torso – a shock he immediately knew he would never be able to forget. His whole body began to tremble.

The dead men’s possessions finally collected, Wright followed Atkinson to his tent. He was carrying a chronometer and small packet of letters but was disturbed. Something was missing, something vital.

‘Atch, the meteorological register. Do you have it?’

‘No, just the Owner’s letters, and these.’ He held up two small cans of photographic film. ‘I think they’re exposed.’

Outside, the sound of digging ceased. The men had finished digging out the dead men’s sledge. Wright went straight to it, opening box after box, searching. Don’t tell me the records are lost? He became increasingly frantic. I must have missed them. Surely they can’t be lost. Birdie would never have left them behind. Never. He opened another box to find nothing but worn-out clothes and empty food bags. In yet another box he found only rocks. There must have been at least 30 pounds of them. He could see on several the clear outlines of fossilised plants. They dragged 30 pounds of rocks all this way? Why?

Wright sank to his knees, despairing. His friends had died, but for what? To be first to some arbitrarily chosen dot on the map? To the world, the expedition was just a race – a glorious, pointless, heroic gesture for the honour of the Empire. But if it brought knowledge of the climate at the Pole, if it advanced science, maybe their sacrifices wouldn’t have been in vain. He resumed his search, opening one last box. And there they were: a broken thermometer and the meteorological register.

The weather records had been saved.

2

26 January 1913, Simla, India

George Clarke ‘Sunny Jim’ Simpson poked distractedly at the hill of unread telegrams reproaching him from the back of his desk. Partly obscured beneath them were several heavy objects he liked to use as paperweights: a chronometer by S. Smith and Son of the Strand, an aneroid barometer by Cary of Pall Mall and a wet-bulb thermometer, also by Cary, which was little more than a tube of mercury stapled to a slab of wood. Sitting on the filing cabinet and visible in the corner of his eye were the four semi-hemisphere cups of his portable anemometer. The instruments gave away his profession, but a visitor unfamiliar with the equipment may have made a good guess based on the pencil tucked behind his ear and his habit of continually entering data in the soft, vellum-covered logbooks that were always stuffed into the large pockets of his brown corduroy trousers. In the same way that you could recognise physicists by their unkempt appearance and the theoretical aggression of their arguments, you could deduce from George Simpson’s neatness, unflamboyant nature and empirical disposition that he was a meteorologist.

Telegrams … At times he contemplated slipping out of town after dark with an axe and chopping the telegraph poles to the ground. In the fourteen months he had spent at the hut as chief meteorologist of the British Antarctic Expedition, telegrams and letters had arrived just once per year – assuming the ship got through the pack ice – leaving him to run his weather station without their constant distraction and time wasting. If his boss at the India Meteorological Office, Gilbert Thomas Walker, hadn’t become ill and called him back to Simla, he would still be there.

He sighed and picked up one of the telegrams. CONF MED PRESH D NOV STOP. Some dull bureaucrat trying to plan for the rice harvest wanted him to confirm the median air pressures for Delhi for the previous November. He threw it down and picked up another. MEAN TEMP LH JUNE LAST STOP. It was from those pests in Lahore again. This was the problem with meteorology: everyone wanted to forecast what tomorrow’s temperatures and rainfall might be, but no one ever wanted to understand how the weather actually worked.

He pushed his chair back and looked for his Antarctic journal. He had handed the original to Teddy Evans on the sea voyage home, as agreed in his contract of engagement, keeping the carbon copy for himself. Where was it? He went over to a travelling chest that sat in the corner and opened it. He was immediately hit by the smells of the hut, including fried seal and the dampness that pervaded everything. There was a pair of the soft fur sledging boots they called finnesko, three rolled-up pairs of thick woollen socks, a set of leather-strapped metal crampons, a reel of the silk thread he had used for balloon ascents and a stale, crumbling sledging biscuit the size of a hymn book. He pulled out several photos. They were of the same scene, which Ponting had taken, of him setting out across the sea ice with Birdie, Captain Scott and P.O. Evans on their ‘pleasant spring journey’ to the Western Mountains that September. He looked clumsy and overdressed, but Birdie and the others seemed strong and invincible as always. At the very bottom, underneath his windproof jacket, was the journal itself. He hadn’t re-read it since writing the final word twelve months before. He flicked though the pages, glancing at several passages he recalled scribbling down, but was reminded at once what a clumsy writer he was. He placed it back in the chest and returned to his desk.

He developed a sudden, violent loathing for the telegrams that once again stared at him. With a swipe of his forearm, he sent them to the floor, the flimsy papers wafting in the mini air currents coming from the fireplace. Looking up at him, now uncovered, were deeply stacked layers of chart paper, the sort found on a ship’s navigational table. There were thousands of entries on each sheet: temperatures, pressures, wind readings and small, roughly drawn maps covered in arrows indicating wind direction and sastrugi drifts. He estimated he had brought half a million separate data points of weather measurement back with him from Antarctica. Wright, whom he had left in charge of his weather station for the expedition’s second year, would be bringing him back a half million more, including the readings he was most eager to see – those Birdie Bowers had recorded on the final journey to and from the South Pole. He had personally briefed Captain Scott on the temperatures and winds expected on the journey and was itching to see if his predictions had proved accurate.

Suddenly, after a full year of patience, he could no longer wait. He had to get his hands on that data.

He looked up at the calendar. According to the original timetable, Captain Scott should almost be back in New Zealand in the Terra Nova, from where he would catch a steamer back to England and glory. He would almost certainly have the expedition’s meteorological records with him. A letter might just reach him in Christchurch or Melbourne. It occurred to him that he could meet the captain halfway, get his hands on the records and get to work. There was no time to lose. He opened a drawer, grabbed a sheet of letterheaded paper, unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen and began writing.

Dear Captain Scott

Welcome back again to civilisation in, I trust, perfect health and with all success. I am writing now to see if it is not possible for me to meet you on your way to England. I suppose you will return by the mail boat via Colombo; if so, I will do all I can to meet you there …

As soon as he finished, he placed the letter in an envelope, addressed it and rang a bell. When the housemaid arrived, he handed her the letter.

‘The post office, please, Veda. At once.’

15 February 1913

It was mid-morning and he and Dorothy were still in bed. It had been like this since they were married six months before. Dorothy had changed him. He seemed lighter and freer – something those who had known him ‘before Dorothy’ commented upon endlessly. Both had waited until their thirties to have a lover, and their bedroom had become the focus of their lives. His weather work was always instantly forgotten the moment she called him away from his desk.

There was a knock. They froze.

‘Damn,’ Dorothy said, dragging the sheet up over their naked bodies. Veda, who had learned from experience, slid the newspaper under the door. With news of the expedition expected any day, he had insisted on getting the newspapers the minute they arrived. The Times of India took sometimes a day or two to arrive in Simla by train, but he found that if you ignored the time lag, it seemed like fresh news arriving every morning.

Dorothy climbed back on top of him, but his eyes were on the Times on the floor.

‘Just the headlines!’ he said apologetically.

She rolled her eyes, sprung up and walked on her toes to the door. He watched her, as he did every morning, her naked back to him, balancing on one leg like a chorus girl while the toes of her other foot rubbed her calf, her legs open, as she ritually scanned the first page. For how many weeks had they done this, waiting for the long-delayed news to come? ‘Nothing yet,’ she would say, before rushing back to him. He reasoned that the Terra Nova must have become stuck fast somewhere. The rumours he had heard about Scott reaching New Zealand must have been wrong. Maybe the strange, extreme weather of the previous year had continued into yet another season, icing them in. The news would come tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. But it wasn’t inconceivable that it could take another whole year, and then only if a relief ship got through.

He sat up. Something had changed in Dorothy’s posture. ‘Well?’

She turned to him, her mouth open, a frozen, stunned look on her face. Walking back, flat-footed, she handed him the newspaper.

‘Darling, I’m so sorry.’

SCOTT’S ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION

Whole Party Reported Dead

London 10 February

The Central News Agency announces that Captain Scott and his party perished in a blizzard after reaching the South Pole on 18 January 1912.

He felt his throat closing over. They had been dead for over a year.

18 February 1913

The small, narrow-gauge train came to a panting halt at the hilltop station, blowing out a final burst of steam. He guessed correctly where the freight carriage door would line up and staked his place on the platform, out-thinking the news-hungry crowd that had formed every day since the disaster was announced three days earlier. It had caused the sort of sensation not seen across the whole Empire since the sinking of the Titanic. He had barely eaten or slept since receiving the terrible news and was feeling faint. As soon as the mail wagon bounced off the buffers of the bright red passenger carriage to its front, its door was flung open and a squad of labourers leapt on, throwing bundles of newspapers tied with twine to the news vendors waiting below. The crowd quickly circled one of the news sellers who, being jostled, took a knife, opened his packet and yelled in surprisingly refined English: ‘Latest news of the Scott disaster!’

People began taking copies from the pile, throwing coins into the vendor’s hat. Simpson grabbed one of each of the newspapers and returned to his awaiting driver. It was the fourth day in a row he had done this, so far finding the news pages full of nothing more than repetitious surmise and potted biographies of the dead. He knew the basic outline of events already: the gale that halted them at the Gateway then slowed their ascent of the Beardmore Glacier; their arrival on the Polar Plateau in fine condition and with high hopes; the shock of discovering Amundsen had beaten them to the Pole by just thirty-three days; that P.O. Evans had died first, then Oates, then the rest together in the tent, just short of One Ton Depot. Now, in the back of the motor car, he quickly rifled through the pages. Today, at last, there seemed to be something new: CAPTAIN SCOTT’S LAST MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC: Reprinted here in full.

The following message, it read, was found in Captain Scott’s diary in the tent.

He quickly read the first few paragraphs. The information seemed familiar from the preceding days’ reports. Then he saw something new. His eyes opened wider. But all the facts above enumerated were as nothing to the surprise which awaited us on the Barrier.

Surprise? thought Simpson. What surprise?

I maintain that our arrangements for returning were quite adequate, and that no one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we encountered at this time of the year. Temperatures? Surfaces? He read on, alarmed. On the summit in latitude 85° and 86° we had –20° –30°. On the Barrier in latitude 82°, 10,000 feet lower, we had –30° in the day, –47° at night pretty regularly with continuous headwind during our day marches.

Minus 47 in February and early March? Continuous headwinds? Northerlies? It wasn’t possible. It is clear that these circumstances came on very suddenly, and our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause. I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through …

He read it again, incredulous. No one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces we encountered at this time of the year. He realised what it meant. It must have been addressed to him. He had got the forecast wrong and five men who depended on the accuracy of his work had died. His head felt heavy and dizzy. He fell forward in the seat and collapsed.

The driver had the good sense to take him home rather than back to his office. Some household staff carried him to his bed while others were sent out to find Dorothy. Two hours later, a doctor neither of them knew met her at the door to their bedroom.

‘Your husband fainted,’ he said. ‘I should warn you that he seems to be in some sort of shock. Nervous exhaustion, I think. And he appears not to have eaten for several days. Has there been a bereavement?’

‘You could say that.’

‘This is a common reaction. He will be fine with time. Someone close?’

‘My husband was with Captain Scott.’

That Simpson. ‘Oh, yes, I understand.’ He looked at her sympathetically. ‘Time heals.’

She thanked the doctor and entered the room, finding him bolt upright in bed, kicking out his feet, his eyes open but unseeing. He was calling out something; she couldn’t at first make out what. Then she deciphered the manic cries: ‘Birdie! Birdie!’

She took his hand, awakening him from the nightmare. He looked at her, then across the room, appearing not to recognise either. He had a horrified, traumatised look on his face, as if waking to find himself in some awful place, surrounded by danger.

‘Darling, everything is all right. You’re here, with me.’

He pulled his hand away, then seemed to grasp where he was. Panting heavily, he sank back into the pillows, put his hands over his eyes and started crying.

‘Forgive me,’ he was saying, over and again. ‘Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.’

After several seconds he looked in her direction, though it was as if he looked straight through and past