Bainbridge has five separate narrators tell their stories of what happened-the captain; “Uncle Bill,” the ship’s doctor and scientist; two officers, and a petty officer. This is not “Rashomon”; every anecdote is told just once, even when two or more of the narrators are present in a scene. It quickly becomes clear that the officers and crew were ill prepared for the brutality of Antarctica. But they describe without complaint the cruelty of the wind, the ice and bitter cold. in the great British tradition, they press on, inspired by memories of life back home, of their mothers and wives. The captain has an uxorious marriage to barefoot, bohemian Kathleen. “I start to think of her a dozen times a day, and then I stop myself, for that way madness lies,” he says. The men also share thoughts of birthdays, past and current. Often it reminds you of how young these men are: “Do you know what, Uncle Bill? … Don’t let on to the other chaps, but I’ve just remembered it’s my birthday,” a junior officer confides. The subject of birthdays seems to reassure them, even as the antithetical day approaches.
Bainbridge is a writer with vivid descriptive powers. In one memorable incident, she describes how the crew’s emaciated ponies, crazed with hunger, break loose. Trapped on ice floes, some fall into the icy brine. Lying in wait like so many piranhas are killer whales. “The sea was like a cauldron,” said one of the men. ‘And them killer whales were all about us, rearing their ugly snouts." In another incident the dogs fell into a crevasse and hung entangled in their traces; frightened, they bite and snap at each other. The scene disgusted Captain Scott: “Such uncivilized behaviour went some way towards dulling compassion for their plight.”
Some of the men made their deaths harder than they had to be, as though they were unworthy to die otherwise. One officer keeps his rotting, frostbitten foot covered from sight; a crewman hides a gangrenous hand. “Taff’s hand was vast and purple and most of his nails had gone. There was a great gash across his knuckles which gaped so wide that the bone showed through. It wasn’t so much a hand as some grotesquely swollen fruit. . . "
Few things are more moving than the spectacle of young men being led to cruel deaths in the name of someone else’s cause-in this case Scott’s reaching the Pole before the Norwegians. Scott lost the race, and he had a lot more to lose in the lives of his crew. In 1912, he froze to death himself. He was a victim of his own ambition and a climate he never understood.
