#cape evans

[glacial-dreams]

Cape Evans Antarctica, December 2011

[worstjourney]

New Scott relics just dropped!  Mutton carcases from the food storage ice cave! A magnetic bench! Dog hospital! Pickaxe!  Lower-than-average snow coverage on Cape Evans has exposed a great deal more open ground than usual.

[photographyartgallery]

Cape Evans - Ross Sea, Antarctica, 2001 - Josef Hoflehner

[tealin]

Scene 3: Int. Cape Evans, Aft Cabins

As usual, this is best viewed on the original blog: http://twirlynoodle.com/blog – Barring that, wait a bit and the images will eventually turn up here. I wish I knew what was happening. Anyway, enjoy . . .

We continue our tour of the Cape Evans hut in the aft starboard corner. For the map of the hut and previous stops, please start with the Men’s Quarters and progress to the Tenements.

Coming out of the Tenements, we proceed down towards the end of the wardroom and find ourselves looking into a corner that is almost, but not quite, its own little room. This is where Captain Scott’s bunk was, as well as that of Teddy Evans, technically his second-in-command, and Dr Wilson, who everyone else considered to be his second-in-command. We will look at Scott’s cubicle first.

There is another historic photo here, of the man himself in his domain.

I have a high-res version of this and it shows the place as I need to draw it, so I deliberately didn’t take any similar shots when I was there, as its modern state is rather denuded. It has also been photographed extensively by every visiting photographer for the last twenty years, so if I really need to find reference for the modern space I can easily find it on Google, as can you. However, there were some small details that I hadn’t seen before and which gave a tangible connection to overlooked everyday life in the past.

The thing that really surprised me about Scott’s cubicle was how far the desk was from the bed, as the famous photo makes it look like a compressed space. Looking back at my photos against that one, I see now that he is not writing at the central desk that is there now, but instead at a smaller one that collapsed against the wall, and he’s sitting on his bed, not a chair. If you look closely at the first of my photos above, you can still see the triangular wooden support bracket still against the wall, though the table top is gone. So the large desk that is still there must be what was known as the chart table, and Scott’s collapsible desk was his writing desk. Learning new things all the time!

From Scott’s cubicle, you get a good view into one of the much less well=photographed parts of the hut, the nook that was shared by Lt. Evans and Dr. Wilson.

Having only ever seen one photo of this space, I guessed it was overlooked by photographers because it really wasn’t much to look at, but trying to photograph it myself I think it’s also because the light conditions are extremely awkward. The light from the window shines bright on the wall to the right and on the table in the foreground, but Teddy’s corner is in deep darkness. The human eye can compensate for this somewhat, but cameras want to use one exposure setting for the whole image, and it just doesn’t work! This was the best I got, with the nighttime setting on my phone and some help from Photoshop. It seems like a lot of work for a middling photo of an unimpressive space, but the whole reason I was there was to get into the corners that are mostly left out of the photographic record, and this was one of the most important ones.

The shelves around Wilson’s bunk are full of medicines and medical supplies – you can see piles of rolled-up gauze bandages in the upper right. Wilson wasn’t the chief medical officer on the expedition (that was Atkinson, whose bunk we saw in the Tenements) but he had qualified as a medical doctor and had been Junior Surgeon on the Discovery, so they are not misplaced.

On his bed is a rather comfy-looking sweater:

Oh all right, here’s a shot of Scott’s cubicle. See? Empty. But I hadn’t seen it from Wilson’s bunk before, and this gives you more of a sense of space.

To the right is Ponting’s darkroom, where the picture at the top of this post was developed, and beyond that another of the largely unphotographed corners of the hut. But that is an adventure for next time!

[womblegrinch]

Herbert George Ponting (1870-1935) - The ‘Terra Nova’ at the Ice Foot, Cape Evans

Carbon print mounted on board. Taken in 1911.

17.5 x 12 inches, 44.5 x 30.5 cm. Estimate: £3,000-4,000.

Sold Bonhams, London, 7 Feb 2018 for £6,000.

[magictransistor]

Frank Hurley. The SY Aurora in McMurdo Sound nearing Cape Evans (Hand coloured glass lantern slides), c. 1917.

[worstjourney]

There's a stunning aerial 360° shot of Cape Evans up on Anthony Powell's Facebook page. You don't need a Facebook account to check it out! They've had a shockingly dry/warm year; the reduced snowcover is why they've found so much new stuff, but it is really dire to see.

[tealin]

Scene 2: Int. Cape Evans, The Tenements

As usual, the version with all the pictures can be found at the original blog. I am not even going to try fixing the image tags here because that has never worked, but I think the images show up after a few hours, so um ... check back maybe? Or refresh? You're better off going to the source, though. Sorry.

As we walk deeper into the hut from the mens’ quarters, coming through the gap in the bulkhead, the view looks like this:

Today we’re going to look at the section to our left, or mapping the hut in nautical terms, starboard amidships. This is the area of the hut that was known as ‘The Tenements’ for how crowded and relatively sloppily built the bunks were. One very famous photo of The Tenements has all its residents in their places and shows this area at its most lived-in – it was October 1911, everyone had spent a winter in their little domains, and were about to set off on the journey for the Pole.

This is The Tenements as they appeared in November 2019:

The first thing that struck me about seeing the Tenements in person was how small they were. Scale in Ponting’s photograph is thrown off partly by the framing, but mostly by everyone lying down aside from the shortest of the Tenements’ tenants, Birdie Bowers. To my surprise, I could easily see over the top bunks, and I am only 5’6”.

We’re going to start at the forward end, with Cherry and Birdie’s bunks. Cherry is the main character in my graphic adaptation of his book, and I’ll be drawing a lot from his point of view, so getting a really solid idea of his bunk area was a must.

Although the Tenements photo has everyone with their heads at the public end of their bunks, they probably slept the other way around, for such privacy and quiet as one could find with 25 men in a 50’x25’ room. While the Cape Evans hut feels like it’s full of stuff now, comparing the modern hut with the Tenements photo above, you’ll see just how much more stuff there was back in 1911!

Cherry was a great fan of Kipling, and brought his whole collection with him – these likely lived on the small shelf you can see against the hut wall. The bed is now covered with stray bits of clothing, and one of the socks has Cherry’s name sewn into it, so I assume the others have been identified as his too.

The ladder leads up to Bowers’ bunk, so let’s take a look at that …

This is the foot end, which he also used as a desk, as you can see in the Ponting photo. The boards blocking it off from the main hut weren’t there in October 1911, so they may have been added the second winter, but Scott’s men weren’t the only ones to have used this hut – a couple of years after they left, Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party moved in, and one of them may have moved into Bowers’ bunk and sought some extra privacy.

But the real treasure of Bowers’ bunk is at the other end …

It’s his hat! The actual Green Hat of legend – less green than I was expecting, but definitely the same one as in all his photos. I was so pleased that, of all things, it should still be here – that he didn’t take it on the Southern Journey, that the Ross Sea Party had let it be, and that it hadn’t been pilfered in the years of uncontrolled hut visits before the AHT took charge.

The photo below the hat, I suspect, originally belonged to Cherry. He had found a photo of the actress Marie Lohr in a magazine and wanted it for a pinup, but one of Ponting’s photographs was on the other side of the page. and Ponting thought that was the object of his affection. He offered to mount it nicely for Cherry, which would have meant gluing the lovely Miss Lohr to the mounting board, and with some flustered embarrassment Cherry’s intentions came out. I had some photos of Marie Lohr; none of them are the photo in the hut, but she looks to me like the same person. How it got from Cherry’s bunk to Birdie’s I don’t know – the AHT have been very careful about giving items to the correct people, so it must have been found there. Perhaps the member of the Ross Sea Party who took Birdie’s bunk liked the photo and moved it up there.

My trip here was, in large part, to get photos that were necessary to my storytelling but unlikely to be found anywhere else. The Cape Evans hut is extremely well documented, but there are angles which are important to the reality of living there which do not necessarily make glamourous shots for publication. One of these was the view from the Tenements to the rest of the hut, rather than into the Tenements. It happens also to give you a good sense of how crammed they were.

Immediately to our left here is Titus Oates’ bunk. He was in charge of the horses, so it’s piled high with horse stuff.

The fringe in the middle is, in effect, pony sunglasses – it was originally dyed brown and would have hung down over their eyes like hair, blocking out a large portion of the harsh sunlight and snow glare. Ponies can get snowblindness too!

Behind us, from where we are standing looking at Titus’ bunk here, is Meares’ bunk, and below that, Atkinson’s. Atkinson, who alone shared the Tenements with Cherry through the miserable second winter, was in command of the expedition at that point; as doctor as well, he had a very heavy job in keeping the bereaved and stir-crazy men on the right side of health, both physical and mental. As leader, he could have moved into Scott’s much more comfortable and private space – that he didn’t, and that the thought of such a thing didn’t even turn up in anyone’s journals, says a lot about him and all of them. He stuck it out in his Spartan cubbyhole, within view of his best friend’s now deserted place, and was there for everyone.

It was here that I spotted the thing that, of all the amazing things in the hut, nearly brought a tear to my eye.

If you look at the Ponting photo at the start of this post, you will see that the string once held a spoon! I don’t know if it belonged to Meares or Atch – in the photo the string doesn’t look long enough to reach either of them. I think of it as ‘Atch’s spoon’ but that may be just because it’s hanging by his face; Meares seemed more the type to be possessive about silverware. Wilson’s cartoon in the South Polar Times suggests there was once an entire cutlery set hanging here, but that may have been a comedic exaggeration.

People visiting the hut often say it feels like the people are still there, or that they could walk in the door at any moment. I wanted to feel that, but I have to confess my experience was quite the opposite: they were gone, very gone, and had been for a very long time. Finding the string there without the spoon summed that up that better than anything.

Our next stop is the stern of the hut – Scott’s cubicle, Ponting’s darkroom, and the lab. Before we go, let’s take one look back at the Tenements.