Snow Widows

Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition Through the Eyes of the Women They Left Behind

Katherine MacInnes

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780008394691
• eBook ISBN:
  9780008394677
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

'An elegant, densely textured work, like a tapestry … A welcome contribution to polar studies.' Sara Wheeler, Spectator

'[MacInness] handles the whole thing with masterly skill…takes us to the heart of the hope, love, anguish and grief' The Times

The men of Captain Scott's Polar Party were heroes of their age, enduring tremendous hardships to further the reputation of the Empire they served by reaching the South Pole. But they were also husbands, fathers, sons and brothers.

For the first time, the story of the race for the South Pole is told from the perspective of the women whose lives would be forever changed by it, five women who offer a window into a lost age and a revealing insight into the thoughts and feelings of the five heroes.

Kathleen Scott, the fierce young wife of the expedition leader, campaigned relentlessly for Scott's reputation, but did her ambition for glory drive her husband to take unnecessary risks? Oriana Wilson, a true help-mate and partner to the expedition's doctor, was a scientific mind in her own right and understood more than most what the men faced in Antarctica. Emily Bowers was a fervent proponent of Empire, having spent much of her life as a missionary teacher in the colonies. The indomitable Caroline Oates was the very picture of decorum and everything an Edwardian woman aspired to be, but she refused all invitations to celebrate her son Laurie's noble sacrifice. Lois Evans led a harder life than the other women, constantly on the edge of poverty and forced to endure the media's classist assertions that her husband Taff, the sole 'Jack Tar' in a band of officers, must have been responsible for the party's downfall. Her story, brought to light through new archival research, is shared here for the first time.

In a gripping and remarkable feat of historical reconstruction, Katherine MacInnes vividly depicts the lives, loves and losses of five women shaped by the unrelenting culture of Empire and forced into the public eye by tragedy. It also reveals the five heroes, not as the caricatures of legend, but as the real people they were.

PART ONE

Allegro

10 NOVEMBER 1910

QUEEN’S HALL, LONDON

As the orchestral introduction draws to a close, the violinist Fritz Kreisler, slightly less pale now, feels more prepared for what is to come. He has heard the five themes that Elgar has woven into the warp and weft of the score. The mystery of ‘. . . . .’ is still being discussed in whispers, but now there is a hush.

Kreisler knows that although the audience have glimpsed the future, he has to take them back to the beginning and carry them forward with him to the finish in approximately fifty-five minutes’ time. At least with a narrative composer like Elgar, the structure takes charge. He focuses on the five themes. He must keep faith with the ‘Hart’, the voice with which to tell the story.

Kreisler raises his violin and places it between his left collarbone and chin. He lifts his bow and holds it hovering just above the strings. Ahead of him there is constant double-stopping, chords, virtuosic passage work, athletic leaps and sustained lyrical passages. The stamina needed is phenomenal. It’s like an Olympic hurdle race and the starter has raised his flag.

Kreisler braces himself for the first movement, the Allegro. He waits as the orchestra funnels the vast heroic soundscape down towards a single musical note. Setting his bow across the strings, Kreisler catches that note and flings it out into the audience.

1

‘I Hate Those Awful Goodbyes’

1 JUNE 1910

WEST INDIA DOCKS, LONDON

High on the main mast, a flag flutters out – a white firework bursting against a brilliant blue sky. A cheer erupts, making the air tremble. The Ensign is broken. The white rectangle with its red crosses lifts in the roof-skimming breeze. It is the most prestigious flag in the Royal Navy, the red cross of St George with a miniature version in the upper canton. At this moment, it is the starter gun to the Pole. At the bottom of the mast is Lady Bridgeman, the admiral’s wife, who now hands the flag halyard back to her husband.

Among the crowd jostling and cheering on West India Docks, there are five women. At this moment in the summer of 1910, the five have no idea that they share a common future. And yet, as the flag breaks, they move in unison, faces lifting to the sky, their wide hat brims crosshatching the heat-shimmered surface. But there is another woman who has her back turned to the flag. She is looking in the opposite direction.

This woman has no hat, no gloves. She wears an impassive expression, cool and calm. In her old-fashioned decollete dress, she resembles a chaste Botticellian Venus. The woman’s head is tipped back towards the bow of the wooden barque. Her long throat is exposed, her loosely streaming hair decorated with roses. It is nothing to her whether she cleaves the clean, cold waters of Newfoundland or flotsam and bloated rats.

She is the Terra Nova’s figurehead, the protectress but also the muse, the witch, the siren call of adventure, the song leading them on. Whatever the secret hopes and fears fluttering through full hearts on the crowded dock today, this wooden beauty is the only woman going all the way to the Antarctic.

The men from the Royal Geographical Society who have come down to the docks for the Terra Nova’s christening admire the elegant figurehead with her serene expression. She will take the expedition men, all of whom apart from Bill Wilson are here, basking in the adulation of the crowd, down to the Antarctic coast. But she will not stay. The men of the RGS stand apart from the ‘unwashed’ cheering crowd. They are nearly all agreed that no flesh and blood woman would, could or should ever explore, particularly the far south. Lord Curzon, the president-elect, is most decided. The RGS should not admit females.

We contest in toto, the general capability of women to contribute to scientific geographic knowledge. Their sex and training render them equally unfitted for exploration; and the genus of professional female globe-trotters with which America has lately familiarised us[fn1] is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century.[38]

Douglas Freshfield, Curzon’s vice president, disagrees. He is all for women. Might he refer Lord Curzon to Mrs Freshfield’s publications Alpine Byways and A Tour of the Grisons? There’s little point. Women, Curzon assures Freshfield, will contribute nothing but their guineas to geography.[39]

Sir Clements Markham, the father of Antarctic exploration, is standing beside his wife on the deck of the Terra Nova, where she has just raised the ship’s burgee. Sir Clements hopes that this expedition will restore credibility to a Society ‘lost by the mismanagement of the female trouble’.[40] The Sixth International Geographical Congress agrees that exploration of the Antarctic region is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken. Scott’s Terra Nova expedition must erase, not just the taint of ignorance from the map at the bottom of the world, but ignominy and dissent in the dispute over women. The British Antarctic Expedition must realign the RGS behind an ideal Britannia. Amid the noise and summer heat, the Terra Nova’s figurehead remains unflinching in the face of that vast responsibility.

ORIANA – LONDON

Oriana Wilson stands on the Terra Nova’s deck, looking out at the crowd. She has spent four years on Lord Lovat’s remote Scottish moor in Fort Augustus with only her husband and black grouse for company, and now this. At least there is a breeze somewhere. It is cooler here than down below in her husband’s cabin, where she has just finished stowing his gear. The London smog is almost fresh in comparison to the heavy reek of whale oil and shag smoke down there.

The ship pitches and yaws lightly on the rising tide. Fortunately, Ory is a good sailor. She boasts a stomach of solid iron (reinforced appropriately in the present context by a whalebone corset). A long skirt and a corset are not ideal working clothes aboard, but she has standards. Even dressed as a lady, she would not normally presume to work alongside the sailors unless it was necessary, but it is. As head of the scientific staff, Bill, her husband, must arrive in the Antarctic with the correct equipment. (He is, at this moment, in the Orkneys, learning how to catch whales in order to restock the larder in the Antarctic.) As her husband’s unofficial scientific assistant, she knows what the correct equipment is.

While Bill has been embracing the character-building discomfort and drenching seas, Oriana, who his family have nicknamed his ‘U.H.’ (Useful Help), has provisioned his cabin to cover everything from art to ornithology via medicine. She has stowed Bill’s watercolour paintbrushes with the scalpels, arsenic preserving fluid with antiseptic (both clearly labelled) and a stack of his favourite cartridge paper with gelatine sizing. In pride of place she has placed the page proofs of their precious grouse enquiry report, the culmination of four years’ harmonious fieldwork together.

If Ory tries to pinpoint the exact moment her husband had agreed to return to the Antarctic, she would cite the invitation that arrived in Fort Augustus. It was sent by an exultant Scott immediately after he heard that Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition had failed to reach the Pole. ‘If I should go South again,’ wrote Scott to Bill, ‘you know there is no one in the world I would sooner have with me than you, though I should perfectly understand the ties which might make it impossible.’[41] Ory does not want to be that tie. But when she expressed her concerns for her husband’s safety (and perhaps her ability to endure another long separation with an uncertain outcome), Bill responded emphatically, ‘I cannot bring myself to think that you would fail.’ It would be failure if he had to ‘be afraid on her account’ and it would be failure if he had to ‘desert Scott if he goes’.[42]

Shackleton, now Sir Ernest Shackleton, apparently told his wife that he turned back within a hundred miles of the South Pole because he thought she would prefer ‘a live donkey to a dead lion’.[fn2] Ory still wonders, which would Bill choose? Donkey or lion? Life or death? Bill’s deep Christian faith means a tendency to prefix ‘life’ with ‘this’, ‘this life’: ‘This is not our rest, and the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep.’[43] Bill compares Christian life to a building – Ory and he must be vigilant for cracks or ‘signs of settling’. Now on the West India Docks as Ory watches Lady Markham hand back the burgee halyards to her husband, she can at least confirm that there are no signs of settling down yet. She has not failed.

A brass band strikes up on the dockside. After breaking the flag there was a lull but now there is a renewed surge of energy, crowds jostling for a view, children on shoulders swinging rattles and streamers, in the harbour hooters, cheers, claxons, and the slap and splash of the heavy hemp ropes as they fall from the stanchions into the water below. The diminutive three-masted whaler, dwarfed by great liners and cargo-carrying ships, eases away from the dockside, out into the flood tide. The noise of the crowds behind is gradually replaced by the even rhythm of the steam engine, the slap of silty waves against the bow where the figurehead leans out, her right arm extended towards the unknown, towards terra nova.

When the flurry of departure settles and the ship’s routine resumes, the logbook is brought for Ory’s examination. She finds, to her surprise, that her name is entered on the first pristine page as the ‘Officer of the Watch’. It is touching to find that her hard work below deck has not gone unnoticed. As Officer of the Watch, she wonders what her duties entail. There has never been a reason to write ‘her’ in the Royal Navy rule book, but ‘his duty [is] to keep watch on the Bridge … as the representative of the ship’s master, to accept total responsibility for safe and smooth navigation’. Ory watches the sailors’ practised movements as they work the ship smoothly and safely. The tidal flats slip away on either side: Surrey Quays, Greenwich and Woolwich. At 8 p.m. the ship docks at Greenhithe for the night and Ory disembarks. Tomorrow it will carry on to Portsmouth en route to Cardiff. It has been a thrilling time – alive with possibility. It seems entirely in keeping when, the next day, Charles Rolls completes the first continuous cross-Channel return flight in his Wright Flyer from Dover to Sangatte in ninety minutes.

3 JUNE 1910

BILL WILSON – ORKNEY ISLANDS, SCOTLAND

In the fishing grounds of Orkney, unaware of ‘Mrs Wilson O.O.W. (RN)’ or Rolls’s feat of aviation, Ory’s husband Bill stands on the firing platform of a whaler, the heavy gun loaded. His whaling instructor is Henriksen, a young Viking of thirty-three years. ‘Often I tink,’ Henriksen assures Bill, ‘I know vat dat vhal tink in my het.’[44] In his letter to his wife, Bill narrates Henriksen’s pigeon-English for her entertainment: ‘I tink I know vhat dat val will tink – dat chap – he tink, ven I go down, I go dis way – ja – den I tink, ja, dis way; den I tink again, dat vhal he go dis vay, but den he go dis vay, ’gain I tink – so I go not dis vay, but dat vay – so – dat feller he come and blow an’ I shoot – ja!’

As the Orkney whale feints this way and that, trying to shake his nemesis, on Friday 3 June another Norwegian, the explorer Roald Amundsen, slips quietly out of Christiania (present-day Oslo). He has borrowed his friend and mentor polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s ice ship, the Fram. He has made sure that the general assumption is that he is heading north, embarking on an Arctic drift. Unlike the continental Antarctic, the Arctic is a frozen sea, so Amundsen and the team aboard the Fram will drift across the Arctic, moving with the ocean current.

Days after Amundsen’s unobtrusive departure, Bill returns to the Terra Nova for the journey to Cardiff. He notices his wife’s name in the ship’s log. A private joke is one thing, but the log will be inspected in every port so he feels he has to insure against misinterpretation – she is not a ‘globe-trotter’ and he does not want her to be mistaken for one. ‘Ory was on board but not I,’ he writes at the beginning of his expedition journal. ‘Ory’s initials may be seen in the Terra Nova log as one of the Officers on Watch … I did not put them there or suggest it, but they are there.’[45]

Bill has tried to impress upon the men of the Terra Nova that anything they write down could be used by a journalist looking for a story. His experience on Scott’s previous Discovery expedition has made him wary – the unscrupulous press stop at nothing for sensational headlines and it disgusts him. In the Antarctic, when they can only send and receive letters once a year when the supply ship gets through the sea ice, a misunderstanding might take a year to correct. Scott has produced an official ‘confidentiality notice’ to be included in every letter home as a precaution.

If Bill was really worried that ‘Watch Officer Ory’ might be mistaken for a ‘New Woman’ or worse, a hunger-marching suffragette, he might have referred to her as ‘Oriana’, or even ‘Mrs Wilson’. But the ‘joke’ was being written into the Terra Nova log about the same time that he was pidgining the telepathic Norwegian whale captain to Ory in his letters. Part of him realises that the sailors meant it as a piece of harmless fun, as flattery even, and besides, she deserves appropriate recognition:

These were days of very hard work for Ory, as she has had all the London packing to do while I was really making holiday … She has had no holiday, and the weather has been very hot … [She] got all my clothes ready for the whole voyage and had them packed for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Author’s Preface – ‘The Lady Question’
• Prologue – The Five Dots
• Introduction – Cherchez la Femme
• Part One   Allegro
• Part Two   Andante
• Part Three   Allegro molto
• Epilogue
• Picture Section
• Footnotes
• Endnotes
• References
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Book
• About the Author
• About the Publisher