nerves already drawn taut by the exhausting demands of Misery Trail. We were ready to find anything under the bed. In this mood we jumped one day to the grim conclusion that Little America was on the verge of breaking loose from the Antarctic Continent and drifting into the Ross Sea as a calving iceberg.
Little America is actually a city on a raft. The 300-foot thickness of ice on which it rests is pocketed in the coastal reach of the Ross Ice Barrier, whose sheer cliffs in places rise to 150 feet above sea level. Partly floating free, partly resting on deep submarine reefs and shoals, and elsewhere riding over the land, this gigantic Barrier fronts the ocean for 400 miles and also extends inland clear to the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains. It is not fixed in the sense that land is fixed. It is, in effect, an enormous glacier, wide enough to blanket the Atlantic seaboard States, and, like a glacier, it is forever creeping toward the sea. Propelled from behind by the massive rivers of ice pouring down through the mountain passes from the polar plateau, the coastal edges tend to bulge out over the sea, until the sheer weight of the projecting shelf or the violent pressures of tide and storm cause great strips to break off.
In this way the vast fleets of icebergs which patrol the ocean approaches to Antarctica are created. We had seen these products of continental disintegration. In the course of the voyage through the Devil's Graveyard, far to the north and east of Little America, we had counted no less than 8,000 bergs in a single day, some of them twenty miles long. I don't think that any of us will ever forget what it was like in the Devil's Graveyard: the sunless corridors of waste waters; the fog that sometimes thinned but never lifted; the crash of the gales, and occasionally over that uproar the heavier sound of bergs capsizing in the storm; and everywhere those stricken fleets of ice, bigger by far than all the navies in the world, wandering hopelessly through a smoking gloom. Through this ambush the ship groped and side-stepped, like a lost creature, harried by enemies her lookouts rarely saw full view, but only as dark and monstrous shadows sliding through the fog. The engine-room telegraph bells never stopped ringing, and months after some of us would start out of a sound sleep, braced for the impact which we could not forever expect to avoid. With the spell of that region upon us, the realization that Little America might itself be destined to join the ghost fleets to the north was enough to shake us out of our weariness; for Little America was barely three-quarters of a mile from the water's edge.
Ever since our arrival in January, the new, or bay, ice in the Bay of Whales had been breaking up with unprecedented speed. Toward the end of February, when from experience we had reason to expect a freeze, the pace of the break-up quickened instead. The pressure ice started to go; and with it went the ice cementing which held that stretch of Barrier in position. Huge cracks opened up all around Little America. Each day they gaped a little wider. At night, when everything was quiet, one could sometimes feel the floor of one's shack heave gently from the swell pulsing against the ice basement hundreds of feet underneath. Fierce storms in the ocean to the north were apparently responsible. The waves continually smashing against the coast were breaking up the old ice and the new ice as fast as it formed. With Dr. Poulter, Senior Scientist, I took a long trip in a tractor along the Barrier crest to the north and east. The sound of the seas sixty feet below us was like thunder; and at least once, when the car was stopped, we heard far off the tremendous whoosh of a huge stretch of Barrier giving way.
We were worried, make no mistake about that. We were worried because we honestly didn't know what was coming, and couldn't stop it if it did come. So I did an extraordinary thing. I summoned the entire winter party into the mess hall, where I laid before them the facts, inviting every man to have his say on the steps, if any, which we should take. The outcome was a decision to continue as we were on the assumption that Little America would last; but at the same time to move approximately one-third of our stores to high Barrier, a mile or so to the southeast. If Little America did go out, we should then have a handy place to scramble to, with enough supplies cached to carry us through a winter. And if it didn't go out, there wouldn't be too much stuff to haul back. So for a couple of days we forgot everything else to haul gasoline, coal, food, clothing, and other gear to Retreat Camp. To hurry it up, I had Demas' tractors hauled out of the repair shop and pressed into service.
All this had a bearing upon the fate of Advance Base. Time was lost that could not be redeemed, and the energies of the men were depleted by that much more. The pity is that it seemed like so much labor lost. No sooner were we done than the seas abated, the outrush of the ice ceased, and the freeze-up set in almost at once.
Wearily the tractor men returned to their preparations. At midnight on February 15th, by the light of gasoline flares, the Advance Base shack was dismantled; and the sections were piled on two tractor sledges. Next afternoon, the four tractors moved out of Little America in echelon; trundling behind each was a string of sledges loaded down with food and fuel and meteorological gear and books and clothes and tools and all the other countless things required to defend existence in a place which offers nothing to man but air to breathe. Ahead of them ran a 178-mile life line through the heart of the Barrier, which had been flagged and scouted by Innes-Taylor's Southern Party, then making ready for the turn-around and homeward journey.
Nine men made up the party, including Siple and Tinglof, the carpenter who had built the hut in Boston. June and Demas were in joint command. Both were optimistic — I was not. Watching the column creep up the long white slope to the south, I was conscious only of misgivings. Although the sledges were loaded to the gunwales, a careful inventory of the supplied that were leaving showed that they were insufficient for three men and that, unless a second round trip could be made before the winter night, our plans for manning the Base would have to be drastically changed. But before committing myself to any decision I would wait and see.
Chapter Two — March: The Decision
Thereafter from the tractor fleet came an almost continuous stream of radio reports, mostly discouraging. Vexed by cold and drift and blizzards, and reduced to low gear on loose, newly fallen snow, the machines made slow going of it. About twenty-four miles south of Little America two cars narrowly escaped disaster in an unsuspected crevassed region; and about fifty miles out in a bowl-like depression named the Valley of Crevasses the party was compelled to take a long detour eastward to avoid blind crevasses whose roofs had been strong enough to pass Innes-Taylor's dog teams, but not the heavily loaded machines. On this jog, sixty-seven miles out of Little America, the Cletrac gave out entirely: a crankshaft pin, made brittle by the cold, sheared off; and, the necessary repairs being beyond the party's resources, the machine was abandoned. With it was lost 50 percent of the party's carrying capacity. Redistributing the loads as best they could, June and Demas pushed south in the other three tractors. Any chance of an extended southing was gone. The three surviving Citroens, June advised, had all developed mechanical trouble of one sort or another. The generators — even the spares — were worn out, the radiators were leaking, the anti-freeze solution had been lost, the drivers were cramming snow down the radiators to keep going, and one car was without headlights.
More vividly than the terse radio bulletins described, I knew what the men were up against. The sledgers, at Little America, hating the break with tradition, sneered at tractor travel as «limousine exploring.» But, so far as discomforts went, there was little to choose between the two ways of travel. You could go faster and haul more in a tractor, and certainly you could do your exploring sitting down. But tractoring had its own punishing hardships, not the least of which was waiting exasperating hours for the blowtorches to thaw out the lubricants in the crankcase, rear end and the transmission, which the cold congealed to a rubbery toughness after the engine stopped. And sucking frozen condensation from the gas lines. And melting snow in the food cookers to make water for radiators that leaked like sieves. And leaving the flesh of your fingers on metal parts too delicate to be handled with clumsy mittens. And sitting as if trapped in a moving cab, waiting for the awful lurch, and the whroom of slithering tons of snow to warn you that a crevasse roof was letting go under the treads.
Even a demanding leadership can ask only so much of flesh and blood. The evening of March 21st, the tractor party reported that it was at a depot put down by Innes-Taylor's Southern Party 123 miles by trail from Little America. Almost at the same time Innes-Taylor wheeled in from the south, with just one day's dog rations on the sledges and a story of bitter cold and blizzards. That, I decided, was far enough. Let Advance Base be planted alongside this depot at Latitude 80 degrees 08' South, Longitude 163 degrees 57' West, just a hairbreadth off the Little America meridian. The distance was sufficient, the meteorologists decided, to permit satisfactory correlations. June was instructed to retrace his tracks and pick up the remnants of the Cletrac's load in the morning. The temperature where he was dropped meanwhile to 52 degrees below zero.
That night, between the hours June arrived at, and went from, Latitude 80 degrees 08' South, I made my decision. Advance Base would be occupied and, inevitably, by one man. With the tractors crippled and the sun due to quit us in less than a month, neither the means nor the time remained to stock it for three men as planned. The
