1912 by Chris Turney Page B

to head north before the end of February if it was to reach warmer climes safely. One week later the expedition reached Ross Island. Landing at Cape Royds, some forty kilometres north of the old Discovery base, and working at a frenzied pace, the expedition members unloaded the supplies from the Nimrod , assembled the wooden hut that was to be their home for the next year and waved farewell to the ship before it departed north, three weeks later. The men left behind set about getting ready to hunker down for the two-month winter darkness and prepare for the assault on the poles the following summer.
    Never had men been left so far south alone. To the young members of Shackleton’s expedition, Antarctica must have seemed otherworldly. The vastness of the landscape, coupled with the extreme swings in light, temperature and sound, could unsettle the strongest of characters. Now they also had to deal with physical isolation from the outside world—and proximity to one another. Antarctic explorers were like the seafarers of the past, forced to rely upon their comrades for company.
    The sentiment was captured by Darwin’s colleague and friend Thomas Huxley, who wrote: ‘how utterly disgusted you get with one another! Little peculiarities which would give acertain charm and variety to social intercourse under any other circumstances, become sources of absolute pain, and almost uncontrollable irritation, when you are shut up with them day and night. One good friend, a messmate of mine, has a peculiar laugh, whose iteration on our last cruise nearly drove me insane.’
    The situation would only be exacerbated by continuous darkness. Now known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, the absence of natural sunlight is understood to have a debilitating effect on people. The experiences of de Gerlache and Borchgrevink had shown that, with individuals left to their own devices during the long winter night, depression and listlessness could easily set in. It was critical that everyone be kept busy and a strict routine followed.
    To see off any problems, fieldwork was carried out in earnest, the men exploring their immediate surroundings and collecting samples in anticipation of the winter darkness. Shackleton sent David and a small team to make the first successful ascent of nearby Mount Erebus, helping to maintain morale while also allowing him to test the mettle of future sledging-party members. On their return David and Priestley were out all hours during the remaining sunlight, gathering geological samples scattered around the base. Murray collected biological specimens from nearby lakes, while Mawson investigated the structure of the local ice. During the day ‘a miscellaneous assortment of cameras, spectroscopes, thermometers, electrometers and the like lay in profusion on the blankets,’ Shackleton later wrote; the Prof ‘made a pile of glittering tins and coloured wrappers at one end of his bunk, and the heap looked like the nest of the Australian bower bird’. This cornucopia of scientific equipment in and surrounding David’s and Mawson’s bunks earned that part of the hut the label Pawn Shop.
    During winter the team kept weather observations, wrote up the geological samples they had collected, took magneticmeasurements, analysed the plant and animal life they had found, and made observations on the ‘mysterious Aurora Australis’—the southern equivalent to the Aurora Borealis in the north—that lit up the night sky. It was enough to keep the demons at bay and, during spare time, the men’s discussions inevitably wandered to how the news of their base’s location was being taken in London. Scott, they decided, was just going to have to live with it.

    To prepare for the expedition Shackleton had travelled across Europe and spoken to anyone who would give him the time of day, building on his experiences in the south. Inevitably, much of this advice came from those who had