Hello! Today we are at Hut Point Peninsula on Ross Island in Antarctica, and I have the privilege
of being with Lizzie Meek who works with the Antarctic Heritage Trust and helps to conserve the
Huts in this area from the heroic era of Antarctic exploration. And today we are at the Discovery
Hut which was built by Scott and his team on their first expedition to Antarctica in 1901.
And as you can see we're in a really bleak spot.
Right now it is next to McMurdo Station but when this hut was built of course that station did not
exist. There is not a single blade of grass, it's very windy, it's on the edge of the sea ice of
McMurdo Sound. It's a very atmospheric place and I unfortunately have Lizzie to tell us a little bit
about the background of the Hut, perhaps something about your work and take us on a tour inside.
So if you're all right with that Lizzy would you like to say anything about
an introduction to where we are? I think just that it always strikes me that such a contrast
between this building which was designed for an Australian context, so it has a very unique
Australian looking design with a full veranda and then you see it here in Antarctica which
is completely the opposite of a hot Australian climate. But nevertheless despite all of that
it lasted through all of the subsequent Heroic Era expeditions, was incredibly well utilized
and it's still here today. Fantastic! Let's unlock the door and have a look inside. Let's go, great!
Yeah this was designed to actually have all of their stores boxes to be stacked
up to this height here, to provide an additional wall. So they could have
free and easy access to the curtilage for whatever purpose they wanted to but
they could also enclose it and make it into a room. So at different points you
would have have had stores or even the ponies were stabled in this outer area at some times.
We're in the main space of Discovery Hut at the moment and originally it was put up on
shore intended by Scott to leave a small shore party here while the rest of the men left on
the boat and went back further north. What we're seeing now is a kind of a modification from all
the subsequent expeditions who came through most of whom were focused I think on trying
to make this place warmer. We're here today, it's pretty cold miserable place to spend an
extended period of time. I can smell a kind of fat smell - tallowy. What you're smelling
is seal blubber and the main source of that is this enormous pile of seal blubber too
right here. When Scott and the discovery team left they took away with some of the original
cast iron stoves that were designed for this space so that subsequent expeditions coming through had
to build their own stoves. And they built a stove which was designed to run on this seal blubber.
Now you're looking at the blubber stove
made from fire bricks and pieces of chimney flu and you can see how the blubber's run down all
around the stove and the original axe for cutting up the pieces of blubber. And actually in the pan
on the top there presumably the last cooked food left by the Ross Sea Party. So that's morsels
of seal. That's right. Yeah seals were a hugely important local food source and they supplemented
that with their their sledging biscuits and some of the other rations they had with them.
Some of the items that we have here are just very very typical for all of the expeditions.
The real sledging rations and what I love is the ration bags that we have down in this box
here which has got classic labeling from Scott's Antarctic Expedition in 1910. And
inside you've got cotton calico bags which hold things like cocoa, curry powde,r sugar,
flour that sort of thing which have been carefully weighed out into these
lightweight bags so that they weren't taking heavy tins on their expedition.
Over there is a homemade blubber lamp constructed from an oatmeal tin which they've cut down and
then they would have dropped a wick in to the slab of blubber and then just set light to it. And
we're looking at some of their clothing here, so the Ross Sea Party had to improvise a lot of their
clothing because they were low on supplies, and so they sort of constructed trousers and other things
out of out of canvas or out of taking a vest or a waistcoat and joining some sleeves onto it.
And this is a sleeping platform. So you don't want to be right on the floor,
you want to be close to the stove. So yeah two or three men kind of squished in there like sardines.
This is the physical laboratory that we're standing in and we're actually standing right
next to the remains of the base for the pendulum instruments for taking magnetic
readings. Finding the true location of the South Magnetic Pole was one of the great
discovery goals of those early expeditions. And Shackleton and co managed to achieve that.
So what have we got on the shelves here. A few unknown items, a lot of tins of food
opened and some with food remnants in them. Quite a lot of items from this hut are no longer here
for a couple of reasons. One is that in the early days and the 60s a number of items were removed
to New Zealand and put into museums, and secondly from the 50s this area was the site of American
base camp. It was a little bit of souveniring that occurred. That's fantastic - um any other little
corners that we should have a look? We should we should have a look at the small room around
the corner which was a storeroom. It was also more interestingly used by the Ross Sea Party
as their latrine and that's why there's a hole in the floor and probably some remains somewhere
down there. The ship called it New Zealand on its way south and they collected around about 40 live
sheep. Typically mutton would be a Sunday special meal to make a change from the tinned meat.
And you're also looking at some skeletons from some emperor penguins which were most likely
a food source penguins as opposed to scientific specimens because they haven't been taxidermied.
So Liz tell me a little bit about the work that you've done on this particular hut. We're standing
in a hut which has been through quite a major conservation project carried out by the Antarctic
Heritage Trust. And the Trust has been working in the Ross Sea region since 2005 in particular on
a long-term cold climate conservation project to preserve the expedition bases that have been left
in this area by the early heroic era explorers such as Scott, Shackleton and and Carsten
Borchgrevink. So there's five expedition bases that we care for and with that comes a collection
of artifacts that numbers to a little over twenty thousand across all of those expedition sites.
This building used to regularly get quite a lot of snow and ice coming into it every year and
we've had to dig that out. And in addition to that it was building up a very thick ice layer
underneath the foundations and all of that was having a damaging effect on the collection inside.
We pinned the foundations more solidly to the the ground layer and we also lifted all of these floor
panels and pulled the ice that had built up out from underneath the building. And then to prevent
ice from seeping in underneath every summer when the ice melts and there's sort of free-flowing
moisture around this area we actually installed a perimeter dam around the outside of the building.
So now the foundation area is ice free. So having completed all of that work on the the building
and it also involved lifting some of the ceiling panels back into place and removing some historic
asbestos that was obviously a hazard. I think you were talking to me earlier on about having
visited this hut many many years ago and walking in and having a sense of it being kind of cold
and dark and desolate. And one of the reasons it feels different to you today is that that level
of moisture that used to sit inside this building envelope has been removed. It's a lot drier, the
rust has been removed off the artifacts as part of their stabilization and treatment, you have a
difference in humidity and a difference in aroma within the hut that makes it feel more welcoming.
Such an incredible experience coming to this place where the atmosphere feels like so tangible.
For me it's got a feeling of desolation or an attempt to make a home in a desolate place and
the feeling is that it would have maybe partially successful but perhaps not fully so. I think the
other way you could look at it is - how wonderful it would have been to see this after weeks and
weeks of sledging. I mean you know we've just come from a modern day lovely warm base, but when this
is the only shelter in the landscape it suddenly takes on a whole new significance and meaning and
that's what I think about when I step inside here. I actually think I'm out of the wind I'm safe from
the worst that Antarctica throw at me and even though it's dark and gloomy it represents safety.
Thank you so much ! My pleasure!