Book Review: 1912 The Year The World Discovered Antarctica

Whether by accident or design, I bring my life’s experiences to reviews of books, as to most other things which I do.

In my case, I have been “fortunate” to have experienced the wildest of weather in the far south west of Tasmania. I have been marooned by metres of snow in its central highlands. I have suffered from altitude sickness and experienced a “white out”. Try as I might, however, and, despite representing the Australian Antarctic division in a number of matters, I have never succeeded in being selected for a trip to our great southern continent. That is one of my regrets in life.

The year 1912 is significant as this is when Scott arrived to see that Amundsen had just beaten him to the South Pole and when Scott and his party died on their return journey.

This book is spell binding and is the next best thing to being able to visit Antarctica ourselves. But it is far more than that. It reveals many of the largely untold stories of explorers whom history has long forgotten, together with those that we were taught about in our primary school days. As children we heard about Scott and his team who perished on the ice, of Douglas Mawson, of Amundsen’s success and Shackleton but I, at least, certainly did not hear anything of Filchner, Shirase or many of the others dealt with in 1912 The Year The World Discovered Antarctica.

Almost without exception, these explorers had shoe string budgets, to the extent that some of them returned from Antarctica with huge debts still owing. Equally, most spent most of the balance of their lives, in repaying those debts. Governments at the time seemed reluctant contributors to this type of exploration but were the first to seek advantage from any success. At one stage, a Japanese expedition, being forced to winter in Sydney, were permitted to erect their tents near the harbour as they were so financially destitute that they could not afford accommodation.

For many of us, the first reference to the name Erebus was in reference to the aircraft crash there which took the lives of the aerial tourists who had been enjoying an armchair’s view of Antarctica from above. But after whom what was it named?

We have all seen, I suspect, video of Mawson’s hut, erected 100 years ago and now, being preserved by a more modern and discerning world which recognises in the hut the achievements of these explorers, despite such adversity. Just transporting it to the site was difficult enough without then having to erect it.

I dislike the word “surreal” because it is frequently misused but, alas, I can’t think of a better word to describe the many stories told in this book of the various expeditions to Antarctica. We read of the Englishman’s distrust of foreigners, including Amundsen, the Japanese and the Germans, almost as if no one had the right to explore, but those of English stock. We read of how the cold, the primitive conditions, the lack of creature comforts, privations of food, the months of darkness, etc affected some expeditioners, to the extent that some probably became insane.

We now read that it seems likely that Scott’s party actually perished because their rations had been severely depleted, without Scott’s knowledge. Whilst their party was thought to be well equipped with food and resources, the work of the author in examining the actual diaries of Scott’s party, rather than edited versions, leads to what seems to me a very likely scenario that they found their food supply significantly short of what they had expected, such that, with the onset of bad weather, they had no hope of survival.

And the author points to the interesting observation that the unusually bad weather which Scott encountered was probably responsible for the icebergs in the Atlantic which caused the Titanic disaster to occur, a very short time (ie two weeks) after Scott died.

This is not simply another book about Scott. Very little time is spent on his journeys but no book on Antarctica would have been complete without weaving into the picture, the loss of Scott and his team.

This is a very gripping book. It is a book which is intended to be read, not studied. It does not have footnotes, but it has over 50 pages of appendices and references. I found the detail of the scientific research carried out by these explorers of immense interest. Inter alia, it reminded me, again, of the inter-action of weather systems across the planet.

If you have any, even the slightest, interest in exploration of Antarctica or if you are interested in reading of how some people thrive on adversity, while others allow it to destroy them, you will enjoy every word of this excellent book.