But the snow of the ice shelf was soft, and pulling a sledge through it proved difficult, like pulling it through sand; very slow, and very strenuous. Shackleton had a heart defect that he hid from others all his life, and in the rigor of this forced march south, making five miles a day only after fourteen hours of badly designed manhauling, he succumbed to scurvy faster than the other two.
Within days of starting they could see by the slowness of their progress that they were not going to make it to the Pole, so the push south continued to no very great purpose, even though they were killing themselves to do it. This made them irritable. They never even got off the ice shelf, but only managed to make it to the tidal cracks separating the ice from the shore. They confirmed that the Western Mountains extended far enough south that they stood across any very direct route from Ross Island to the Pole; a rather ominous and discouraging discovery, and yet the only one they had made when they had to turn back.
And even so Scott had almost left it too late. The moment of return was his call to make, and despite warnings from Wilson in early December that Shackleton was developing scurvy, and the other two were not far behind, Scott pushed on until the day after New Year’s. At that point they had a desperate struggle to get back to Ross Island alive. On the return Shackleton collapsed from the scurvy, and could no longer help haul the sledge; at the most he could ski along freely next to the other two, at what cost to the will we cannot well imagine, as sick as he was—so sick that on some days he was forced to lie on the sledge and let the other two haul him.
And Scott, not knowing about the heart defect, had no sympathy for Shackleton. Here was a younger man, who had been so much more dynamic back on Ross Island; his breakdown Scott regarded as a moral defect, and as it endangered all three of their lives, and therefore Scott’s own reputation for competence, he grew angry at Shackleton. He made contemptuous comments about “the baggage” within Shackleton’s hearing, often enough that Wilson had to pull him aside and tell him to stop.
And in the end Scott and Shackleton fought. Shackleton and Wilson were packing the sledges when Scott shouted at them, “Come here, you bloody fool!” Wilson said, “Were you speaking to me?” And Scott said “No.” Shackleton then said, “Then it must have been me. But you’re the worst bloody fool of the lot, and every time you dare to speak to me like that, you’ll get it back.”
Shackleton was an officer junior to Scott, on a British Navy expedition. This statement was therefore very like mutiny. It took Wilson to patch things up and insist that the two men calm down and continue. The incident was so traumatic that not one of the three men wrote about it in the journals they were keeping on the trek; it was too dangerous to mention. How then do we know about it? Because Wilson, who was the father confessor figure for everyone on the expedition, finally felt the need to speak himself, and at some point afterward told the geologist Armitage what had happened. Later still Armitage wrote down what he had heard. How accurate Armitage’s account was, and Wilson’s too for that matter, we have no way to tell. But certainly by the time they staggered back across this ice to the Discovery Hut at McMurdo, Scott and Shackleton were enemies for life. They could not stand each other, Scott used his command to invalid Shackleton out of Antarctica, sending him home on the supply ship that visited after their first year there, while the rest of them stayed on for another year and made more sledge journeys, testing routes to the polar cap and looking around.
And so Ernest Shackleton became determined to come back.
Val and Wade were given a ride in a pickup truck down the two hundred yards from Hotel California to the helo pad, even though they were carrying only backpacks for their walk up the Barwick Valley to the S-375 camp. Val watched Wade as they stood around waiting for the loadmaster to wave them over; he was observing the scene with great interest, and listened impassively to the loadie’s unconvinced and unconvincing intro to the helo’s safety features, basically a cranial that was no more protection than a bike helmet, and was mainly there to get an intercom on one’s head. But no smirks or rolled eyes or blanched dismay from Wade; no doubt he had done a lot of helo travel before in his line of work. He stepped up into the pax seats and took the throne, the seat just behind and slightly above the two pilot seats. Val sat behind him, and after that she only had a view of the back of his head, his cranial actually; but as they took off she could see him looking down at McMurdo, then out at Erebus, then down at the sea ice as they crossed over the frozen surface of McMurdo Sound. He got on twice to ask questions, first about the trash ice, which Val explained was caused by windblown grit from Black Island landing on the ice and melting in, causing a ghastly dark gray pitted badlands, impassable on vehicle or foot; then another about the giant greenish tabular bergs sticking out of the sea ice, which Val explained were pieces of the Ross Ice Shelf that had broken off the previous summer, and were on their way out to sea. The sea ice was studded with these big chunks, even though the ice shelf between Hut Point and White Island was not breaking away at anything like the same speed it was along its broad exposed front east of Ross Island. Wade nodded to indicate that he had heard Val’s explanations over the roar of the engine, and that was it. No excited commentary, no further questions.
They flew over the piedmont glacier lining the coast, and then between the rocky mountain points of Mt. Newell and Mt. Doorly, the last two peaks of the Asgaard and Olympus Ranges, respectively. Then up the broad bare-walled valley between these ranges; this was Wright Valley, one of the biggest and most famous of the Dry Valleys. The copilot said, “They’ll be calling them the Wet Valleys soon, see how much snow there is on the ground these days? Later in the summer that’ll all melt and run down the Onyx River, that white line there, into Lake Vanda.” Vanda was several feet higher than it had been in years past, its blue cracked surface ringed with a broad band of whiter ice. The copilot fell into his tour guide mode for the still-silent Wade, naming the peaks they passed and the hanging glaciers spilling out of the gaps between the peaks of the Asgaard Range to their left. Wade’s head whipped from left to right to take it all in. Then the pilot cut in on the commentary to tell Val they were picking up a couple of scientists at Don Juan Pond before taking them on to their drop point. The helicopter veered to the left of the flat-topped island ridge called The Dais, up a side valley to land beside Don Juan Pond, which was small, shallow, brown, and liquid. The pond was liquid because its water was too salty to freeze, the copilot told Wade. The scientists to be picked up were nowhere in sight, so they killed the engine and got out and wandered around the narrow brown valley. The ground around the pond was crusted white with salt crystals. Wade walked right out into the middle of the pond, as it was nowhere more than a few inches deep. Val followed him out, partly to make sure he did not step in a pothole.
“Now why doesn’t it freeze, again?” He was looking at everything very curiously, as if in an art gallery to view an exhibit by an artist he didn’t quite trust.
“It’s too salty.”
“Really?” He reached down and scooped up a handful—the water was perfectly clear and transparent in his hand, as thin as ordinary water—then before Val could say anything he put the handful to his mouth and drank it.
Only to spit it out in an explosive spray. “Acck!” he choked, and began turning red-faced as he hacked away, spitting over and over.