Craig Harrison (3): Days of Starlight (1988)

Craig Harrison: Days of Starlight (1988)

Antarctica. A small scientific base. A huge, unexpected discovery made in the ice: something which will alter not just our sense of the history of our planet, but the future of all mankind. Sound familiar?

Of course it does. John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is, I suppose, the locus classicus for this particular plotline.

John Carpenter, dir.: The Thing (1982)

The special effects may look pretty hokey nowadays, but I can tell you that at the time they were quite horrifically compelling. Simply coming up with the idea of that severed head with legs scuttling around the base seemed like the kind of out-of-the-box thinking we simply hadn't encountered in horror films up to that point.

Of course there had to be a sequel - or rather a sequel / prequel - The Thing (2011), but it's interesting that they waited thirty years to make it.

Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., dir.: The Thing (2011)

And when it did come, it was immediately clear that many things had changed. The director is the star of the 1982 film. It's true that Kurt Russell got to run through his usual (slightly ironic) repertoire of heroics, but the film itself did not pander to the accepted conventions of how such things were supposed to run.

By 2011, the system had closed over and healed itself. There was a pretty girl starring - Mary Elizabeth Winstead - who got top billing, and whose oeuvre it tends to be linked to, rather than to that of its rather obscure journeyman director.

All in all, it's hard to see it as much more than a reversion to type. The first film version of the story, The Thing from Another World (1951), though set in the Arctic rather than the Antarctic, sets up its story by the playbook of the standard 1950s alien paranoia film.

Christian Nyby, dir.: The Thing from Another World (1951)

Of course it's no accident that essentially the same film should have to be remade every thirty years or so. The owners of the rights to a story know that the copyright on their property will expire unless it's renewed from time to time - hence the repeated Hollywood versions of franchises such as King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, The Mummy, The Wolfman, etc. etc.

John W. Campbell: Who Goes There (1938)

All three films are based - somewhat loosely, it must be admitted - on John W. Campbell's novella 'Who Goes There?', first published (under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart) in the August 1938 Astounding Science Fiction, of which he was then editor.

John W. Campbell: The Thing from Another World (1951)

An earlier, longer text of the story, entitled Frozen Hell, found among Campbell's papers at Harvard, has recently (2019) been republished on kindle. It was, however, the original version which was voted in 1973 one of the most influential SF stories ever written - just as Campbell himself is (for better or worse) still considered one of the most influential editors of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction.

H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness (1931)

Of course, the actual premise of the story - the isolated base in the polar regions (North or South), the frozen aliens in the snow who revive unexpectedly, the desperate struggle for life against them - are all very reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's classic novella At the Mountains of Madness, written in 1931, then submitted to his usual outlet, Weird Tales, later that year. Farnsworth Wright, the editor, rejected it for reasons of length, and so, instead, it was eventually serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories.

Admittedly the story was actually accepted by Campbell's predecessor in the editorial chair, F. Orlin Tremaine. Campbell did not take over till the end of the following year, 1937, but clearly he must have read it, and presumably it influenced his own story.

Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

Not that there's any great scandal in that. Lovecraft himself makes no secret of his indebtedness to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the closest thing to a novel Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, and, quite honestly, one of the weirdest and most extreme pieces of fiction ever composed.

Lovecraft ends his own story, in fact, with a direct invocation of Arthur Gordon Pym, quoting the strange cry 'Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li': 'a cry associated with mysterious white-coloured birds and uttered by the natives of the Antarctic land of Tsalal whenever they encounter white objects.'

Jules Verne: Le Sphinx des glaces (1897)

The enigmatic ending of Poe's story, with the hero and his companion drifting towards an immense chasm in the (warm) Southern ocean, just as an immense spectral white figure appears before them, is directly addressed in Jules Verne's sequel Le Sphinx des glaces [The Sphinx of the Ice] (1897), translated into English with the rather more prosaic title An Antarctic Mystery.

Dominic Sena, dir.: Whiteout (2009)

Once you start looking, It's actually quite difficult to avoid these rather dreamy associations between ice, enigmatic femininity, and dangerous secrets hidden in the preserving cold.

Take, for instance, the 2009 film Whiteout, where Kate Beckinsale - as a rather improbable US Marshall - acts as the involuntary Lorelei drawing large numbers of men to death in their search for the treasure concealed in an old frozen Russian transport plane (it turns out to be diamonds, rather than the fissionable nuclear material she fears it to be for most of the film).

Curiously enough, the French title for this US / Canada / France co-production, Enfer Blanc, translates as 'White Hell' - not too far from Frozen Hell, the original title for Campbell's novel. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French say - or, in Winnie-the-Pooh's paraphrase: "The more it snows, the more it goes on snowing."

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[SPOILER ALERT: reading this part of the post before you've finished Harrison's novel will definitely wreck your appreciation of its dénouement!]

So what contribution does the ostensible subject of this post, Craig Harrison, have to make to this set of various flavours of frozen hell?

Thomas Keneally: A Victim of the Aurora (1977)

Familiar, undoubtedly, with the John Carpenter film and its various antecedents - though possibly also influenced by some more literary excursions onto the ice, such as Thomas Keneally's 1977 heroic-age-of-antarctic-exploration detective novel A Victim of the Aurora - he takes a rather unexpected tangent.

When a team of research geologists at a remote American base in Antarctica discovers a two-metre-long silicon crystal, it becomes their most prized specimen. No one, however, anticipates the disruptive effect of the crystal - on the base's technical staff, nor on the silicon-chip technology sperating the base.
An attempt to investigate the powers of the crystal results in a startling discovery that appears to be of unparalleled significance.
But as the long winter darkness descends over the vast expanse of the earth's most alien continent, the research scientists at the base realise they must draw on all their resources to fight for their very survival.

DAYS OF STARLIGHT, set in the not-too-distant future, is a chillingly credible and timely tale, combining elements of the politico-psychological thriller and of speculative fiction.

There's no doubt that Harrison keeps up the claustrophobia and intensity associated with such narratives every bit as well as any of his predecessors. He keeps the sinister political overtones, too. The 'Delta Force' commandos sent by Washington to wipe out everyone with knowledge of this particular strange discovery in the ice are close cousins to the ruthless 'Blue Berets' in Broken October: sinister armed thugs whose idea of a good time is raping and murdering everyone they encounter.

Almost up to the last page, the story sounds like something which would make a heck of a good made-for-TV movie: clautrophobic (= fewer sets to build and maintain); cold (= bleached-out colours and backgrounds, easy to film); and with a very small cast (= great savings on extras, with more to spend on star power).

But then a basic weirdness, which has been growing throughout, only half-perceptibly, begins to manifest itself. What is the mysterious satellite to which the equally mysterious silicon crystal appears to be linked? It's a kind of transmitter, of course. In function, it's very like the moon monolith in Clarke & Kubrick's 2001, designed to send a message to some aliens a long way off just as soon as the inhabitants of this particular rock have reached a sufficient stage of development to warrant it.

I say 'warrant' rather than 'deserve' it because the whole book is about just what we deserve. And by 'we' I mean any and all beneficiaries of European hegemony. 'What if the aliens came and they were black?' is Harrison's basic question.

Roy Thomas: Avengers #102 (1972)

The crystal has been keeping an exact holographic of - everything, you see. The aliens will only need to look through it to see just what we've been up to, and it won't be a pretty sight. The book ends with Ben the protagonist's realisation that we have approximately 30 years to clean up our act - that's how long it will take them to get here, travelling at near light speed. 'What to do till the sentinels come,' to quote the title of a classic Marvel comic.

Is there a certain element of bathos in all this, after so much build-up, so much tension, so much spy-thriller intrigues? There certainly shouldn't be: it's a most ingenious solution to the narrative problem of how to find a new twist on the old Antarctic base story, but somehow there is. Turning it into yet another iteration of the conundrum black-white race relations seems just a little forced after Harrison's far more straightforward engagement with it in Broken October, and even the more effective, albeit fantastical and dreamlike extension of that in The Quiet Earth.

Fred Hoyle: The Black Cloud (1957)

But perhaps, in the end, that's the point. Days of Starlight may not work perfectly as a thriller (à la Whiteout or The Thing). Nor does it really succeed in emulating some of its more strictly Science Fictional influences: Fellow-Yorkshireman Fred Hoyle's classic The Black Cloud (1957), for instance, for the alien intelligence; or Stanisław Lem's His Master's Voice (1968) for the baffling artefact from another world (in Lem's case, a line of code in a book of random numbers which turns out to have been generated by the transmissions from a certain part of space).

Stanisław Lem: His Master's Voice (1968)

I suppose, in the end, that's what makes it - for me - an exemplary piece of New Zealand Speculative Fiction. Insofar as this can be seen as a genre at all, it tends to involve a certain rejection of cosmic solutions and speculations in favour of more nitty-gritty, number-eight wire, alternatives.

Sentient oceans and hyper-intelligent clouds are all very well, Harrison appears to be saying, but we've made a terrible mess of the place and the people who are actually here, all around us. Let's make a full acknowledgement of what it is we've done, as a first step in the process of repairing it. It falls almost naturally into the wording of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme.

We:

• Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves [Step 4]
• Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all [Step 8]
• Made direct amends to such people wherever possible [Step 9]

As such, I think Days of Starlight must be seen as a worthy culmination to the SF trilogy Harrison began with Broken October (1976) and continued in The Quiet Earth (1981).

Robert A. Heinlein: Starship Troopers (1959)

It falls in line more with the preoccupations of writer / critics such as Samuel R. Delany - who famously argued that the protagonist of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers must be black - and Ursula K. Le Guin, the hero of whose Earthsea books, Ged, was always intended to be dark-skinned, though he's seldom been portrayed in that way in cover illustrations - than with more familiar SF tropes and themes.

Ursula K. Le Guin: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

But, once you start looking for it, the subject of racial prejudice intrudes everywhere: in Isaac Asimov's "robot" saga; in many other manifestations of the Android theme (such as Stanisław Lem's Solaris (1961), filmed so memorably by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972); or - for that matter - Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the inspiration for the 1982 film Blade Runner).

Blade Runner (1982)

So what's the problem, then (if there is a problem)? I suppose, for me, it lies in the implications of Harrison's contention, throughout the novel, that black and white people's brains do indeed work differently, and are based on a different design. This manifests, for instance, in the greater amount of REM sleep required by the black, mostly service people on the base.

It turns out in context that this is a sign of superiority, not inferiority - and the racist assumptions to the contrary of the base's chief doctor, Kellner, are thoroughly satirised in context.

It's just that - even in the context of a quite far-fetched piece of speculative fiction, entertaining such ideas of a fundamental difference seems a dangerous one (Ben, the protagonist, turns out to be tuned in to the alien satellite's transmissions, communicated through dreams, thanks to the fact that his great-grandfather was in fact black - he therefore escapes the tone-deafness of the other honkies in the story).

It's not that Harrison is unaware of this peril. There's a passage early on where Ben and his love interest, Linda, talk about Dr. Kellner's research as follows:

'Well, if people like Kellner can prove that blacks have got inferior brains, then it means that they needn't worry too much about what the West has done in the last couple of hundred years. And goes on doing ...
'And this cerebrum makes us superior?'
'He reckons it's the centre of our rationality.'
'And the cerebellum's the opposite?'
'Yes: and much older. More primitive, he'd say. Controls all the magical, dreamtime, intuitive, visionary perceptions.'
'And the marvellous sense of rhythm.' [35]

Har-de-ha-ha. The trouble is, this isn't all that far from the actual underlying thesis of the novel. It's a little like the anthropologists who've postulated at various times independent lines of descent for Australian Aborigines and other native races from those which produced the Caucasian master race.

Carleton S. Coon (1904-1981)

The most notorious of these is undoubtedly the unfortunately named Carleton Coon, whose notorious book The Origin of Races (1962) argued:

that the human species divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens. Further, he suggested that the races evolved into Homo sapiens at different times.

Coon claimed that he had been prompted purely by a desire to follow the evidence where it led, but many of his contemporaries saw this idea as providing fuel for white segregationists and racists generally. Was Coon himself a racist? He, and most of his colleagues, have continued to deny the suggestion indignantly.

I did once see a documentary on the subject, though, where one of those colleagues summed up his feelings more or less as follows: he said that Coon had travelled to every corner of the globe, had met people of all races, worked and interacted with them, and lived among them. Many of them had become his close friends. And yet, he concluded, "I don't think for a moment that it ever occurred to Carleton S. Coon to regard any of them as his equals."

Craig Harrison - in his fiction and in his life - is a positive zealot for racial justice. This book of his is no exception. His fictional Dr. Kellner and the real-life Professor Coon would be seen by him as close intellectual cousins. But his book does have a tendency to encourage 'separate but equal' thinking about the various races of mankind.

It would be a real shame to dismiss his book unread on the strength of that, but I think that it does offer some explanation as to why so eminently filmable a story has remained untouched by directors ever since.

Pieter Bruegel: Hunters in the Snow (1656)
- a thematic reference in Tarkovsky's Solaris

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Two Versions of Mawson

David Day: Flaws in the Ice: In Search of Douglas Mawson (2013)

For years I've been encouraging my travel writing students to study two different versions of Douglas Mawson's classic survival yarn from his 1912 Antarctic expedition. On the one hand, there are two chapters from The Home of the Blizzard (1915), as reprinted for a popular account of his journey in 1930; on the other hand, there are his original diaries, edited for publication in 1988:

• Mawson, Douglas. Mawson’s Antarctic Diaries. Ed. Fred Jacka & Eleanor Jacka. 1988. North Sydney: Susan Haynes / Allen & Unwin, 1991. 127-29, 147-48, 150-51, 157-59, 170-72 & 174.
• Mawson, Douglas. The Home of the Blizzard: The Story of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914. 1915. Abridged Popular Edition, 1930. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1996. 158-203.

I was therefore interested recently to come across a new book about Mawson by David Day, author of the fascinating (and, indeed, truly groundbreaking) Antarctica: A Biography (2012). He'd expressed a few doubts about the veracity of Mawson's account in his earlier book, but given it was largely devoted to debunking the various masks behind which sheer naked greed for territorial acquisition were lurking on virtually all Antarctic expeditions old and new, I have to say that they didn't really seize my attention.

Now, however, he's committed himself to a full-scale hatchet job on Mawson, whom he clearly loathes with a passion, in the grand tradition of Roland Huntford's magisterial deconstruction of the "Scott of the Antarctic" legend in his Scott and Amundsen (1979).

In a sense, it's not a particularly difficult task. In his excellent and very balanced review of Day's book in Inside Story, "Debunking Mawson," Tom Griffiths acknowledges that:

All of Mawson’s well-known weaknesses are probed at length – his ambition, selfishness, coldness, competitiveness, meanness, lack of compassion and humour, propensity to dither, and other “flaws” in his icy character.

Yes, precisely. I doubt that anyone who has studied Mawson - or even just read his books and diary - was ever tempted to think of him as a nice guy. Scott certainly had charm, though he mostly chose to use it only on his superiors and those he was cajoling to do something for him. Shackleton, too, inspired a kind of love in most of those who encountered him (though he too had his bitter enemies). Mawson was a little more like the emotionally reserved Amundsen, it seems: though he wholly lacked the latter's immense expertise and attention to detail when it came to the mechanics of organizing an expedition.

Was the picture quite as black as Day has painted it, though? A recent book by Karyn Maguire Bradford called The Crevasse: A Critical Response to "Flaws In The Ice" (2015) argues otherwise. Tom Griffiths also points out a couple of respects in which Day's book seems to weight the balance unduly against Mawson:

As revealed in his general history of Antarctica, David Day continues to lack any interest in, or curiosity about, science. This political historian of empire, who casts a perceptive and tenacious eye on the politics of polar annexation, can only ever see science with cynicism. It is for “show”; it “acts as a cover”; it “buttresses scientific credentials”; it is always strategic, self-serving and “disguising” something else ... With such a view, Day is destined to be blind to Mawson’s core motivation, and he is unable to share the wonder and intellectual excitement that drew – and still draws – many expeditioners to Antarctica.

Quite so. "Science" is only ever mentioned with a sneer in Day's book, except where it assists him in pointing out how more "successful" both physically and scientifically the other expeditions Mawson sent out from his main base were than his own (scarcely surprising, since his became a desperate struggle for life, while theirs were merely intensely uncomfortable and difficult).

It also seems rather hypocritical of Day to spend so much time sniffing around the bedsheets to determine whether or not Mawson really slept with Scott's widow Kathleen. The same suspicions surround her relations with Fridtjof Nansen, but it's hard to see why it hasn't been allowed to blacken his reputation (though it undoubtedly calls his good judgment into question a little), while it should be so damning to Mawson's? Day is forced to resort to such phony rhetorical measures as balancing their trysts against the progress of the war itself:

That Sunday, as the relentless slaughter on the Somme continued, [Kathleen] went to Kensington Gardens with Peter [her son] to collect caterpillars, before spending a 'very delightful' time with Mawson in a row boat, and 'got home very late'. It wasn't warm enough for such activities, wrote Kathleen, but it was 'otherwise very delightful'. [272]

The implication is that they had sex in the row boat ("supine on the floor of a narrow canoe"), though it's hard to see how one can be sure at this distance in time. Day has earlier quoted the statement (echoed by so many contemporary writers: Proust and T. S. Eliot among them) by Kathleen's "biographer and granddaughter Louise Young [that] ... the 'war seemed to send everyone if not sex mad, then love mad, passionate friendship mad, waste-no-time mad'" [269] "Doubtless," he acknowledges somewhat reluctantly, "it was life-affirming amidst the death and despair of a war that was killing millions". Now, however, he lets his real feelings show:

Mawson may have dropped by to show off his ... officer's uniform ... He could hardly confess that he'd spent the war years relaxing on the beach and dancing the nights away at London clubs while a million men were being slaughtered on the Somme. [272]

This seems completely gratuitous. To hear Day trumpeting these John Bull-ish clichés ("What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?) a hundred years on is grotesque in the extreme. He tallies the various members of the Mawson expedition who managed to get themselves wounded or killed in the years that followed with almost the same smug satisfaction as some dyspeptic major in a Siegfried Sassoon poem.

WWI poster (1915)

James Joyce had a good answer for that question (or at any rate Tom Stoppard's play Travesties attributes one to him): "I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?"

The more serious charges against Mawson stem mainly from Day's analysis of his famous sledge-journey, after losing one of his two companions (together with the sledge he was guiding) in a crevasse.

You'll be unsurprised when I mention that Day seriously suggests that the accident was largely Mawson's fault because he hadn't told Ninnis that he might be in less danger riding the sledge than walking beside it, and speculates as follows about its cause:

Whether the bridge was already weakened by Mawson's sledge crossing it obliquely, or whether it was just the weight of Ninnis that made the critical difference, cannot be known. [151]

In this and other passages, it's clear that the question, for Day, has shifted from "Did Mawson play any significant role in causing Ninnis's accident?" to "Which of Mawson's actions were most crucial in causing Ninnis's accident?" His guilt and complicity in everything that went wrong is simply assumed (albeit with much logic-chopping and admission of gaps in the existing testimony which have not permitted him to prove conclusively this preset conclusion that Mawson was driven by self-interest and folly at this, as at every other moment of his life ...)

Why did Mawson choose to go back by the inland route rather than along the coast? Why did Mawson ration the food so severely on the first part of the journey? Why did his remaining companion, Mertz, die on the way while Mawson survived? All of these questions have now been answered by Day's magical powers of intuition (one of the oddities of his book is that he writes as if he is the first ever to consider the matter: as if his really were the virgin footprints in the snow he'd originally envisaged for his own travel narrative).

The coastal route would have had many advantages, but Mawson didn't choose it because it would have undermined his priority as an explorer (Madigan's party had already passed that way). The reasons Mawson himself gives: the possiblity of the sea-ice breaking, the prevalence of difficult crevasses, are so much flummery. Day knows that because ... well, for no reason really. As he admits in his preface, he'd hoped to land on Antarctica and do some travelling himself, but his ship couldn't land because of the pack-ice. He did get some nice photos of icebergs out in the bay, though. It certainly isn't his own personal experience of the conditions which enables him to refute Mawson so readily, then.

Why did Mawson cut back on the rations? Because there wasn't enough food on their one remaining sledge to get the two of the back alive without a great deal of luck. That's admitted by everyone. Where Day leads the pack is in suggesting that Mawson deliberately starved Mertz to death by giving him only lean meat while Mawson himself was scarfing down the heavy, fat-laden food they both needed for survival.

The trouble is that no-one knew about these dietary effects of lean meat at the time (a book documenting the fact by "the polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson" was published in 1913, though Day acknowledges that "Mawson and Mertz had no way of knowing this" [164]). So how precisely Mawson managed this cunning and systematic murder of his companion by using a dietary sleight-of-hand still controversial a hundred years later seems a little obscure. It does mean that Day isn't forced to major on the old accusation of cannibalism, though. He doesn't need to. However, it would go against the grain to let the old man off too easily:

His denial is not surprising. There is no heroism to be had in cannibalism. His vigorous denial has been acccepted by historians, who argue that it would have contravened Mawson's values and that, anyway, he had no need to do it, once Mertz was dead and all his intended rations were available for Mawson's consumption. [200]

I have a countercharge to make. I believe that David Day himself committed cannibalism (like Conrad's "Falk") during his repeated attempts to reach the shore of Antarctica and flesh out [pun intended] his absurd farrago of a book. If he denies it, that's hardly surprising. Cannibalism is not a good look for historians and science writers generally: it tends to alienate the buying public (though, on the plus side, it can make your appearances on TV talkshows more lively). It's true he didn't need to: there was food on the ship. But can we be sure that there was enough food? The verdict must remain unproven. If Day feels he can prove that he never did it, I'll be happy to look over his evidence. I remain unconvinced, though.

You see the point? This kind of "When did you stop beating your wife?" stuff quickly becomes infectious. If you only have one source of information, then at a certain point you do have to admit that relentless speculation about - not to mention shitting all over - that narrative will only get you a limited way. And yet, it seems that - besides a lot of nasty remarks by a strangely volatile and childish fellow called Cecil Madigan who also kept a diary of the expedition - innuendo is all Day really has: not a great deal to guarantee a book contract.

Is there no alternative to all this? Are we forced to accept either Mawson's own hero narrative or Day's relentless put-down? Well, strangely enough, there is. It's mentioned in Day's bibliography, but (curiously) not referred to in his text, which also fails to acknowledge much other earlier scholarship on the matter, as Tom Griffiths remarks in his review:

Although Day draws on the work of many historians who have studied Mawson and the AAE – in particular Philip Ayres, Peter FitzSimons, Brigid Hains, Elizabeth Leane, Beau Riffenburgh and Heather Rossiter – he does not name them in the text or engage explicitly with their scholarship. They are referred to as “other historians” or “other writers,” generally dismissively.

I refer, of course, to Tim Jarvis.

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Tim Jarvis: Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica (2008)]

In 2007 "Australian Adventurer" Tim Jarvis set out to retrace "Mawson's gruelling experience." As the blurb to his eventual video (it was also released as a book) remarks:

having been almost killed during his own solo trek to the South Pole in 1999, [Jarvis] confronts the deadly ice again - as Mawson did, with similar meagre rations and primitive clothing and equipment."

Whether or not one agrees that it's "a bold and unprecedented historical experiment that will provide clues to what happened to Mawson physically - and mentally - as a man hanging on the precipice of life and death," one must surely acknowledge that it's an interesting thing to attempt? And, one would have thought, an enterprise quite like Day's original plan:

to travel in the wake of Mawson's 1911 expedition to Antarctica, so I could visit the hut in which he and other members of the expedition had sheltered for nearly two years, and look out at the windswept vista of ice and snow that had beckoned them into the unknown. [1]

"However," Day confesses, "it was not to be."

Reading that passage a little more carefully, though, one realises that for all his talk about composing a book "part travelogue and part history," Day was actually just planning to "look out" of the hut. There's no mention of actually walking in Mawson's footsteps. Why should he bother, anyway? Tim Jarvis had already done the thing so comprehensively that any such efforts would be largely wasted.

The problem, of course, is that mentioning Jarvis at all might risk reminding readers that Day is really just one more desk-bound scholar treading the well-worn steps of so many other archive hounds of the past. Griffiths documents thoroughly Day's attempts to imply a kind of conspiracy of silence surrounding the documentation of Mawson's expedition: his claims to have "uncovered" this or that new source:

Much of the evidence of the expedition, claims Day, “has been hidden away for the last century” and “includes the diaries of Archibald McLean, Robert Bage, Frank Stillwell, John Hunter, Charles Harrisson, and several others.” But the diaries of these men have been available for decades in public libraries and archives and have been studied intensely by many people, including those “other historians.” How strange that a historical scholar should regard the carefully preserved and curated collections of public institutions, long available for research, as “hidden away.” What Day means is that many of those diaries have only recently, in these centenary years of the expedition, been edited for publication.

The other unfortunate fact about Jarvis is that this "adventurer" came to conclusions precisely opposite to those of Day himself on most of the significant questions surrounding Mawson's journey. What Griffiths refers to politely as Day's "confidently judgemental conclusions" on these matters can therefore be in no way helped by Jarvis's reenactment of the trip, and might actually be undermined by them. Best not to mention him, then. I'm an Academic myself: I know how that game works: the game of "accidental" omission.

That's not to say that there's anything flawless or forensic about Jarvis's investigation. It is, as he admits himself, a fairly rough and ready affair. Where he comes off way ahead of Day, though, is in his willingness to discuss his methods and debate the nature of his results up front.

I can't claim myself to have noted any particular pro-Mawson bias in his approach, though there may be a certain man-of-action solidarity there as against desk-wallahs in general. I couldn't say. If it's there it's pretty muted, unlike (say) the strident efforts to defend "the defamed dead" by Sir Ranulph Fiennes in his anti-Huntford Captain Scott biography (2003).

Where Day is particularly cock-sure is in his assertion that he has "solved" the mystery of Mertz's death. Rather than scurvy caused by vitamin C deficiencies in their diet, or the previously suggested vitamin A poisoning from the livers of the dogs they were eating, they were killed by the lack of fat in their diet:

Mawson couldn't have known it at the time, but it wasn't the lack of food that killed Mertz so quickly, rather it was the type of food they both were eating - particularly the scrawny dog meat with its almost total absence of fat, which caused them to suffer protein poisoning. [197]

Nice to have that cleared up. Lest we should remain in any doubt on the matter, the very first note in his book reminds us: "It is often claimed that Xavier Mertz died from an excess of Vitamin A, after eating too many dog livers. It was later suggested that starvation was the more likely cause of his death. Both claims are wrong." (281) The fact that the two articles which argue these alternatives were published, respectively, in the British Medical Journal and the Medical Journal of Australia, and were presumably peer-edited by the medical professionals overseeing both journals, is neither here nor there. Day has cracked the case!

Of course, being a doctor himself, he'll be in a good position to weigh up all these competing claims from the scanty documentation surrounding the trip: the hints in the diaries as to who ate more of what. But just a second - what is his medical expertise? None, that's what. He started off studying accountancy ("in which he performed poorly due [to] his political activity that included protesting against Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War"), according to his wikipedia page, then switched to History and Political Science, in which he did better.

Jarvis was still running with the Vitamin A deficiency hypothesis when he made his documentary, in 2007, but at least he doesn't claim to know. If Day could only admit the faintest shadow of a doubt about his confident assertions, one might find his book more persuasive. As it is, even if he's right about his "protein poisoning" theory, how on earth could it possibly be proved?

As for the famous incident near the end of his one-man journey where Mawson (according to him) hoisted himself out of a precipice, Jarvis's attempts to reenact it proved quite unavailing, despite the fact that he was in substantially better shape than Mawson was at that stage of his ordeal (Jarvis was prepared to starve himself, but not to poison himself, in the name of complete verisimilitude).

Here, I think, Day's reasoning is more cogent. He argues that rather than falling fourteen feet, Mawson may have fallen about seven, which makes his feat of strength far more feasible. Agreeing as it does with Jarvis's reenactment, this is one of the few occasions where Day's relentless scrutiny seems to have produced results. The same point is, however, made (at rather less length) in his far better - possibly because it was better edited - Antarctica: A Biography.

So, should we pull down the statues and throw away all our busts of Mawson: stop trumpeting him as the closest thing we have to an authentic Antipodean polar hero? Probably, yes. But then Mawson has always seemed a far more equivocal figure than his "heroic age" contemporaries. A flawed hero, then, but still a hero. His failure to emote all over the page in his stoic Antarctic diaries is one of the reasons they remain such compelling reading today. All Day's efforts to debunk and second-guess Mawson leave us more curious about him than his subject. What kind of a person would dedicate his life to such an avalanche of petty spite and hatred?

The comparison with Roland Huntford is, I think, quite unjustified. Huntford has never been afraid to give praise where it's due. His portraits of Amundsen, Shackleton and Nansen do full justice to the darker sides of their character, while still attempting to account for the charisma they continue to project, so many years later. True, Huntford sees few merits in Scott, but more of his blame is reserved for Sir Clements Markham and the other irresponsible bureaucrats who "pushed" him than for the hapless, demon-driven R. F. Scott himself.

Perhaps David Day's next work should be an autobiography. "What huge imago made / A psychopathic god?" as Auden once asked. Just why does he feel this need to denigrate poor Mawson, to scoff and sneer at and second-guess a man trapped in a coffin-shaped tent, his comrades dead, the snow falling, with a far less than fifty percent chance of survival? Could it be something as simple as jealousy?

Douglas Mawson (2013)

Homage to Roland Huntford

[Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1911)]

Basically it all comes down to Captain Scott. How do you see him? Hero or villain? Martyr or incompetent?

[Roland Huntford: Scott and Amundsen (1979)]

Like any historical (or human) dilemma, it's never going to be quite as simple as that; but ever since Roland Huntford published his dual biography Scott and Amundsen (1979), with its brutal, excoriating portrait of Scott as an incompetent amateur, it's been pretty difficult to get Humpty-Dumpty back on his perch again.

[Roland Huntford]

Did Huntford go too far? His intention - insofar as that can be ascertained after all these years - was simply to restore the balance in reputation between the two explorers. Amundsen had, after all, been damned with faint praise for decades as some kind of soulless technician, heartlessly scooping the South Pole out from under the dogged, noble Englishmen with their man-hauled sledges and heavy burden of noblesse oblige and public school spirit.

Much praise has been lavished on Scott and his companions for their devotion to science: the fact that their sledge was still loaded with geological specimens when it was found next to their dead bodies. Terribly bad luck with weather has also been advanced as an explanation for their failure to return to base ...

The implication all along is that if they'd chosen to make a race of it, like the devious Amundsen, then they could easily have "bagged" the pole ahead of him. As it was, their scientific preoccupations and general good-sportsmanship acted as a kind of brake. Scott, too, has been praised (by Ranulph Fiennes) for his ability to "write good English under the worst circumstances" - his admittedly eloquent diaries and final letters from the tent.

It would certainly be foolish for anyone to cast doubt on Scott's own personal courage, exceptional physical endurance, and fluent way with the pen (any deficiencies there were of course made up for at home by rigorous editing out of personalities and other gripes before his diaries were published - not to mention J. M. Barrie's famous "reconstruction" of what went on in the final hours in the tent. Scott leaning over to pull blankets over his comatose companions, soothing their fevered brows, etc. etc.)

What Huntford set out to do - with the advantage of fluent Norwegian and access to hitherto unconsulted Scandinavian source materials - was to point out the brilliance of Amundsen's achievement. I think the tone of his preface makes it abundantly clear that he had absolutely no idea of what was waiting for him in the Scott papers: the true, unvarnished version of all those carefully laundered accounts of "Scott's Last Expedition" ... Having found so many suppressed passages, so many sidelights in the notes and letters of the other protagonists, he had little alternative than to report on his findings.

Did his iconoclasm become just a little too zestful? Clearly the explorer's son - Sir Peter Scott - thought so, insisting that a proviso to that effect be inserted in Huntford's list of acknowledgments:

Sir Peter Scott, son of the late Captain Scott, has requested me to make clear to all readers that the thanks I have expressed to him in the list of acknowledgments for material which he made available to me must under no circumstances be interpreted as approval of anything in the book, from which he totally disassociates himself and which he did not moreover see before printing. His view is that in order to make a comparative study of Amundsen and Scott it was not necessary to denigrate Scott, let alone his wife. I do not accept that this is what I have done, but I greatly regret any distress that my treatment of the subject has caused to Sir Peter or others.

- Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen. 1979. A Weidenfeld Paperback (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993): p.xii.

I guess one might feel just a little more indignant at Huntford's failure to honour the old school tie if there had been any substantive attempts since then to discredit or refute the information he has supplied.

Did Kathleen Scott have a love affair with the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen while her husband was off on his expedition to the South Pole? Well, yes, it appears she did. One can certainly appreciate that a son would not wish this piece of information about his mother to become public, but it does certainly give Huntford some basis for his suggestion that the marriage was more one of expedience than passion.

The vast amounts of new (in 1979) information he provides certainly remain susceptible to more than one reading, but the fact that he was the first to dare to provide any real alternative to Scott hagiography is surely something to celebrate?

[Francis Spufford: I May Be Some Time (1996)]

Francis Spufford, in his his very entertaining and readable cultural history of the polar phenomenon I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1996), prefers (somewhat bizarrely) to attribute Huntford's actions to political bias:

Nor was the debunked version any less open to cultural colouring. Huntford denounced Scott form the New Right, as an example of the sclerotic official personality; the playwright Trevor Griffiths, adapting Huntford's book as a TV drama, attacked Scott from the Left as a representative of privilege and the Establishment bested by a rather democratic, workmanlike set of Scandinavians. [p.5]

Yes, but was Huntford right? Was Scott inefficient and capricious in the way he organised and led his expedition, or is that just a lot of extremist right-wing (and, it appears, left-wing) establishment bashing?

What Spufford does hot allow for throughout his very informative book is the fact that questions of emphasis must always be a matter of opinion. If one wishes to analyse those opinions in political terms, one is (of course) free to do so. The notable omission in his book is any account of his own set of cultural biases - the rather smarty-pants attitude of chronological snobbery which entitles him to devote page after page to generalisations about a distant race called the "Edwardians" (many of whom seem actually to have been Victorians, but to have undergone a weird sea-change as the clocks clicked over into the 1900s ...)

That's not to say that simple examination of the facts will ever answer the question about Huntford's own bona fides. Laying unfair stress on certain details at the expense of others can certainly be used to devastating effect (as the entire history of our legal system would seem to demonstrate: why else pay top dollar for particularly persuasive advocates as opposed to court-appointed hacks?).

That doesn't really mean that facts are irrelevant, or simply a matter of interpretation, or entirely susceptible to spin, however. It's noticeable that Scott's great rival Shackleton's posthumous reputation has not been attacked in the same way, by either right or left-wing revisionists. Could it be that he was simply a better leader? His personal life was certainly at least as murky as Scott's - his attitude towards finance and self-advancement every bit as unscrupulous ...

Amundsen too had a fluent way with him when it came to rubber cheques, and insisted on maintaining absolute control over his men at all times. Why hasn't he been decried as a gloomy, capricious dictator? Could it be that his achievements continue to speak for themselves when examined with any degree of objectivity?

So what were the problems with Scott as a leader (according to Huntford, at any rate)?

1. ignorance of Polar conditions, when first appointed to command the Discovery expedition in 1902.
   

   
   This can't really be disputed by either party to the debate. Scott was chosen to lead by Sir Clements Markham, a foolish old man who regarded the Franklin relief expeditions as the last word in arctic travel, had an unreasonable dislike of dogs, and a fervent belief in the ennobling effects of man-hauling. The death of the entire mid-nineteenth-century Franklin expedition was - to him and many others (including Charles Dickens) - proof of Sir John Franklin's transcendent merits as a leader.



2. refusal to repair that ignorance subsequently, despite abundant opportunities to do so.
   

   
   Scott's diaries during the 1911-1912 expedition reveal again and again how little research had been done on skis, dogs, or even the mechanical workings of the sledges he was relying on to pull him the the Pole. Admirers of Scott as a "scientist" (without a university education or any formal qualifications whatsoever, his observations cannot be said to have shed much light on any particular discipline) or as a "renaissance man" (he certainly spent a good deal of time in the company of his wife's artier friends, such as Max Beerbohm and J. M. Barrie, when he might have been passing the odd weekend in an Inuit village or in a ski-lodge), are forced to hail this as a virtue. The result was that there was one trained skier on Scott's expedition, one trained dog-sled driver, and the mechanic who'd had most to do with building the mechanised sledges was left at home.



3. unstable, capricious temperament
   

   
   Not denied by even his greatest admirers. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, whose classic The Worst Journey in the World (1922) is often seen as a paean of praise for Scott, gives a vivid account of the difficulties of sledging with "the owner": his time-wasting fussiness in the tent, his sudden decisions to go on for another couple of hours when the day's stage was over and his companions were dropping in their traces ... His depressions and fits of rage were also frequently commented on by his companions, even the otherwise faithful Wilson.



4. sudden, illogical decisions
   

   
   You don't need Huntford to document these. Even the central bastion of Scott worship, the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, includes a scene where he insists on his companions abandoning their skis in the middle of their way to the Pole. This is perhaps the single most controversial episode in the whole saga, in fact. Cherry-Garrard states quite clearly that Scott's last-minute decision to take five rather than the planned-for four people on the final stage was the major cause of their failure to survive, entailing (as it did) breaking up every block of food and fuel calculated for four people into a complicated fraction every morning and evening of their last days. Even worse, the fact that no-one knew who among the two last sledge-parties would be going on led to Birdie Bowers having to march all the way without skis, while Scott, Wilson, Bowers and Evans glided on beside him. If this was a rational decision, it's very hard to understand what it was based on. The choice of the blustering drunkard Evans for the final journey (he'd actually been dismissed from the expedition for public drunkenness by Scott's second-in-command in Lyttelton, until reinstated by Scott himself) has also been questioned before and since. He was the first of the party to die, and was ill from a cut on his hand for much of the way to and back from the Pole.



5. refusal to respect the chain of command or back up his subordinates
   

   
   Captain Oates put this very succinctly in a letter home: "the fact of the matter is that he is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere, and when he has got what he can out of you, it is shift for yourself" [quoted by Huntford, p.420]. One shocking instance of this is his decision in his 1905 account of the Discovery expedition not to allow any of his subordinates to speak for themselves or write their own account of the (quite major) explorations they undertook. This completely reversed the normal way in which such expedition reports were written - before and since - and led to threats of a libel action from Shackleton, among others. His reinstatement of Petty Officer Evans by reversing his second-in-command's decision led to an undermining of the authority of the latter, also coincidentally named Evans - the then Captain, later Admiral Evans, author of South with Scott (1921). Captain Evans was one of the hapless three sent home at the last stage from the final Polar party, despite having been promised a place in it. Nor does that appear to have been due to any lack of fitness, given the fact that both Lashly and Crean, sent back with him, were more than a match in robust good health and polar experience for any of the others at this point in the journey.



6. lack of magnaminity or vision
   

   
   After careful subediting by a committee headed by Kathleen Scott, his published diaries were seen at the time as a classic of manly endurance and understatement. When published in full by Roland Huntford in 2010, the full degree of his self-pity and almost rabid hatred of Shackleton were revealed for the first time. Most verbatim diaries do, of course, contain passages one would rather suppress, but when extensive rewriting as well as subtantial omissions are necessary to fit them for the public eye, one does begin to question a little the character of the man who originally wrote them. Again, neither Mawson, Shackleton or Amundsen have suffered at all in reputation from the posthumous publication of their private papers.



7. incompetence and sentimentality
   

   
   The classic case of this, referred to again by Cherry-Garrard as well as Huntford, is Scott's decision not to push his final, "one-ton" supply dump as far south as possible. Why not? Because it might involve cruelty to the horses:
   

   
   "I have had more than enough of this cruelty to animals ... and I'm not going to defy my feelings for the sake of a few day's march."
   "I'm afraid you'll regret it, Sir," said Oates ...
   "Regret it or not, my dear Oates," Scott answered, "I've made up my mind, like a Christian. [Huntford, p.367]

   
   Sound good, doesn't it? "Like a Christian" - or like a sentimental fool? All but one of the ponies died on the way back from the depot (one actually had to be dispatched with a pickaxe in the head by Oates himself as it couldn't climb out of the icy water and was about to be eaten by killer whales). The few extra miles which might have been gained were the ones which separated Scott's last camp from the supplies that might have saved them from death (Oates, of course, was already dead at that point). I don't think anyone can refuse Scott the right to decide to commit suicide in the snows through sheer incompetence and pigheadedness (though the "Christianity" of such a decision might well be doubted) - dragging his companions down with him through no fault of their own is a little less admirable, though, surely?

[Apsley Cherry-Garrard: The Worst Journey in the World (1922)]

By contrast with all this, in Amundsen Huntford saw a man determined to learn from his own mistakes, not too proud to take information wherever he could find it, and absolutely committed to the health and welfare of his men. In all the years since 1979, it's been hard to dispute the implicit preference his book presents to us.

Put simply and brutally, if you want to be worked almost to death, infected with scurvy, and then subtly disparaged in the expedition account, sign up with Captain Scott. Who knows, you might even be offered the chance of literally freezing to death a few miles away from an (inadequately marked - another great cause of controversy in the subsequent inquiry) food depot?

If you want to get back alive, with tales to tell, and a patron for life, choose Amundsen. Admittedly, though, if for any reason you felt you had to dispute or rebel against your leader's decisions during the voyage, you'd find him an implacable and unforgiving enemy subsequently.

I suppose, finally, what's most amazing about the whole thing is just how powerful the Scott myth still is. Huntford's two subsequent exhaustively researched lives of (respectively) Shackleton (1985) and Nansen (1997), both of them praised and celebrated by him virtually without stint, could not remove his reputation as a muck-raker and a rabble-rouser. Foolish, ill-conceived books have continued to appear, by such luminaries as Ranulph Fiennes, in an attempt to restore the fabric of the Scott mythos to its former unblemished whiteness.

For myself, I can say that I read Admiral Evans' South with Scott at school, and - later on - grew addicted to such works as Scott's own diaries (as presented in volume one of Scott's Last Expedition (1913)). When I first encountered Huntford's book in 1981, it came as quite a revelation to me. I realised that a truth could sometimes be reconstructed despite all the paper-burning fervour of white-washing hagiographers, that such revealing asides as Captain Oates':

If Scott was a decent chap I'd ask him bang out what he means to do. [quoted in Huntford, p.420]

could lurk like timebombs in the archive until the time came for them to be revealed. The effect was to give me back some faith in the whole process of writing history.

Scott's reputation as a hero is - I think most people would now have to acknowledge - largely a product of careful spin-doctoring. Ditto the aspersions on Amundsen for somehow unfairly "robbing" the English of their natural preserve, the South Pole.

The distinction Huntford was trying to make, I think, was between complex, flawed characters such as Shackleton and Nansen, with their inner demons and complex personal relationships, but their simultaneous willingness to set something (the survival of their followers and crew) in front of success in a quest, and masochistic individuals such as Scott and Wilson, with their martryr-complexes and refusal to value anyone above themselves and their own weird life-paths.

The types are superficially similar: no-one denies Scott's physical bravery and stamina, his refusal to admit defeat. Nor will we ever cease to marvel at Wilson's mad mid-winter journey to observe the Emperor Penguins at Cape Crozier. In neither case, though, was getting back to tell the tale seen as much of a priority - nor were the lives of companions and subordinates held in any great esteem.

Shackleton, by contrast, lost not a single man in his Endurance expedition, and showed the supreme resolution to turn back within a hundred miles of the Pole in 1908. Better, as he said to his wife on his return, a live donkey than a dead lion.

Courage at other people's expense - the courage of a General Haig, dining on partridges at his French chateau as his troops drowned in liquid mud at Passchendaele - is still preferred by many people to the courage of what Francis Spufford might call "more democratic" leaders, who won't accept a sacrifice they're not willing to make themselves.

It is, in the end, a matter of taste. Haig and Scott are, for me, birds of a feather. Spufford would say that that's because I'm trying to judge them by the standards of my own, very different era. I would say that what distinguishes them from Shackleton and Amundsen is a crucial failure to learn from experience. If you are incapable of acknowledging error in yourself, and compelled always to blame it on others, your mistakes (and both Haig and Scott made many of those) will never benefit you - or those around you.

When, on the other hand, I look at Shackleton (or, for that matter, Douglas Mawson) over the gap of the years I find a fanatical determination every bit the equal of Scott's, but coupled with a humanity and a determination to learn from every misstep which requires no particular special pleading to be comprehensible by the standards of any age.

[Scott & co. at the Pole (1912)]

[For more of my views on the literature of Antarctic exploration - particularly Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition of 1911-14 - see my essay "The Great White Silence" (the title of Herbert Ponting's 1924 silent film about the Scott expedition), forthcoming in the next issue of brief magazine, guest-edited by Scott Hamilton.]