Ice Coffee: the history of human activity in Antarctica

Pemmican and sledging biscuit have received several mentions in the series and it's high time I let you in on what I'm on about.

The Eastern Party make their dogged way back to Cape Evans while Atkinson led teams onto the barrier to look for evidence of the pole party.  The Terra Nova arrives and the BAE heads home.

Scott's 3IC, Lt. Victor Campbell, fares poorly on every front except the important one.  Little came of the BAE's Eastern Party's efforts in terms of geology, geography, biology, but everyone survived the challenging circumstances that British decorum and crook weather placed them in.  Oops.  Spoilers. Don't read this until you've listened to episode 040.

Dammit - it happened again. This story always ends the same way. All of the driving forces behind Scott's polar ambition push him to his death. Poor weather, broken tractors, crap ponies, leaky fuel cans, crevasse fields - lots of things contributed to the tragedy in the physical sense but the expectations placed on Captain Robert Falcon Scott by his nation, his mentors and his peers did their par...

Scott leads his team south while Amundsen and Mawson keep his clockwork wound up tight. Stormy seas, pack ice and a four way split in the transport preparations frustrate efforts to meld scientific, geographic and historical goals.

I'm sick of 2016.  A friend just died for stupid reasons and my extended family and many friends are facing life in the USA under president Donald Trump and his cabinet of elite racists. I really have not been in the mood to read about noble suffering under the Victorian model of manliness and my notes about Scott's death on his return from the pole came to a grinding halt about two weeks ago.  He...

A dark clockwork comprising duty, ambition and hurt pride winds up Captain Scott and sets him on his path back to Antarctica.

At the start of the twentieth century whaling in the Southern Ocean was on the uptick.  The players and mechanisms in play held considerable sway in geographic outcomes, with claims and counter claims taking on a new urgency once the parties operating in the south had some oil in the game.

With just seven minutes up my data storage sleeve and some expeditions featuring weird relationships between officers and men in the offing, this seems an opportune time to map the boundary between the commissioned and the other ranks in the Victorian era and its immediate aftermath.

Charcot leads his second Antarctic expedition aboard a new ship with a new engine.  What could possibly go wrong? More groundings, more whimsy and more coastline explored. Well done those Frenchmen.

Ernest Shackleton heads south in a dodgy ship, short on funds and with a flea in his ear from Scott, but manages to get a lot done and get everyone home safely.  Lots of firsts but the south pole remains unclaimed and, with two teams alleging they made it to the north pole, becomes even more alluring. Douglas Mawson, Aenaes Mackintosh and John King Davis make their Antarctic entrances while Frank...

Photography, sledging, hypothermia, frostbite and snow blindness have been getting a lot of mentions in episodes addressing the heroic age and I thought it high time these things be given some attention, as they're not leaving the narrative anytime soon and I don't want anyone left in the dark regarding photo-keratitis. Dr Jacinda Amey is one of New Zealand's hardest case people and I was privileg...

Jean Baptiste Charcot heads south, in yet another ship named after a place, looking for adventure, science and Swedes. Good food, good wine and inadequate heating and propulsion characterised life aboard the Francais but the French got a lot done, showed their mettle in a miserable display of hard as nailsness, and came home with all hands. Professor Craig Franklin first came on my radar in an int...

Robert Falcon Scott makes his first but far from his last appearance in the series and a two year voyage to McMurdo Sound.  Much sledging.  Very scurvy. Sir Clements Markham continues to kick downhill to have his way but the back of his bullying breaks when someone take his prophecies of doom at face value. Wilson, Shackleton, Crean, Frank Wild, Taffy Evans, Lashly and Joyce make their Ice Coffee...

William Spiers Bruce showed the world what a team could achieve if they ignored the south pole and got on with some science.  Under his guidance the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition established the longest continually occupied meteorological station and discovered large numbers of Antarctic marine species but what I like most about the Scot is how much he got on Sir Clements Markhams' nerves...

Never heard of Nordenskjold? You have now, and he's pretty darn spiffy. Likely the reason Nordenskjold isn't better known is that Shackleton and Mawson's later tales of survival against stacked odds drew attention away from the challenges faced and bettered by the Swedes who sailed to the Antarctic aboard the Antarctic.  Carl Anton Larsen makes a repeat appearance, reprising his role as competent...

Germans winter in fast pack ice, make some geographic discoveries, fly, sledge, and science as much as they can, but it's the diving that sets the voyage of the Gauss apart, in my eyes.  Willy Heinrich - die Achtung!

Carsten Borchgrevink adds to his track record as a git and gets on everyone's nerves in the first winter spent ashore in Antarctica.

British pride is a'stirring and Germany hankers for some long, hard sciencing but it's the Belgians out in front, showing everyone how it's done if getting trapped in the pack and going mad is the goal. Some notes about navigation notes presage some future episodes about spurious claims on fruitless firsts but the real appeal of episode 023 is the interview with Peter Cleary, who discusses leopard...

More Norwegians head south seeking whales.  A kerfuffle over who's on first marks the start of the Heroic Age. In 2005 I recorded an interview with Rob Robbins, head of the USAP diving programme.  This was slated for a New Zealand radio programme that never came about, itself a rip off of RRR's "Radio Marinara" in Australia, and was captured using a badly battered Mini-Disc unit.  It's not the bes...

Little Antarctic exploration occurred in the decades immediately after the French, American and British race south that rounded out the 1830s.  American, German, British, Scottish and Norwegian visitors did turn up looking for whales and in the course of the invention of oceanography.  This episode takes the series up to the 1890s and sets the scene for the voyage that would kick off the Heroic Ag...

With many Arctic winters and more Arctic summers under their belts, Ross and Crozier got a lot done and brought their crews home safely.  Gongs all round.

It's just a word sometimes employed by people pretending to be pirates to most modern ears but until recently scurvy stood as a perplexing and deadly problem for mariners and polar explorers.  In this episode I discuss how sailors and scientists solved the scurvy riddle, screw up an attempt to say "very low levels," and make myself sad. 

For my money, Charles Wilkes is the first of the Antarctic matinets.  Drawn south by the opportunity to lead a large expedition and little else, his attempts to coordinate six poorly fitted out and ill matched ships crewed by people who largely thought little of him went every bit as well as that sentence presages.

First out of the blocks in the three way race south, Dumont d'Urville does a fair job with the resources France can throw at the project after much war and revolution and war and blockades and war.  Often described as a nineteenth century analogue to the Space Race, I think of this period in Antarctic history as the nineteenth century race southward, of which the Space Race was a twentieth century...