1 Journey into the Unknown
‘That men should wander forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold and fiercest gales . . . makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling.’
CAPTAIN ROBERT FALCON SCOTT’S DIARY, 2 AUGUST 1911
Scott was referring to the harrowing journey three of his men had just completed to Antarctica’s Cape Crozier emperor penguin colony in the winter of 1911.
This expedition, undertaken while Captain Scott was waiting out the winter prior to his ill-fated push to the South Pole, was led by Dr Edward Wilson, the expedition’s doctor, zoologist and Scott’s most trusted companion. At that time, emperor penguins were thought of as among the most primitive of birds, as they bred in the depths of an Antarctic winter. Wilson suspected an evolutionary link between emperor penguins and dinosaurs. If he could collect newly laid eggs, their embryos might hold the answers to his theory.
Crank forward 80 years, and Captain Scott’s diary could well be foretelling a series of journeys I was about to make to that very same penguin colony in the depth of a similarly foreboding polar night. Unlike Wilson and his team, who man-hauled sledges in atrociously cold conditions for nineteen days, I would make my journeys in the relative comfort of a Hägglunds snow vehicle. In a modern context, I was still going to have it tough. The winds would be just as fierce and the temperatures just as cold.
It was January 1991 — high summer in New Zealand. My soundman and I waited on the tarmac to board our aircraft. It’s 30 degrees Celsius, and we are sweating heavily in our Antarctic survival gear. Our next ten months were to be spent in temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Celsius — so cold that a cup of boiling water thrown into the air instantly snap-freezes into hail. I was terrified at the thought.
We were to join a small group of eleven Kiwis, wintering at New Zealand’s Scott Base, to film a documentary for Television New Zealand’s renowned Natural History Unit. It would be about the life cycle of the emperor penguins of Cape Crozier, demanding several daunting 85-kilometre journeys over heavily crevassed ice, in the middle of a long Antarctic winter. I felt grateful to have been chosen but also anxious. Few had ever encountered the emperor penguin in a polar winter at Cape Crozier since Wilson and his two companions, Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, in 1911. That their winter expedition ended in disappointment, infamously described by Cherry-Garrard as ‘the w
