Discovery Hut Redux

Photos © 2006 Seth White

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Hello again, from the tight confines of a 747, about 1/4 of the way through the endless Auckland-LA flight. I am starting to develop a serious dislike for this flight. What's worse is that I got bumped up to Business Class on my way down, so now I'm fully aware how much better life is just fifty feet ahead of me. Business Class on Qantas is N-I-C-E. At least I can report that I'm not stuck next to some gigantic, snoring bear of a man, or a woman with a whiny toddler. So. On with the blog, as I try to stay awake a bit longer so that I can get fully exhausted and perhaps fall asleep after my battery runs out. I did a few Discovery Hut tours this year, the last one with my friends Karl and Scotty and a few guys from the firehouse. After a short while the firehouse guys left, so it was just myself, Karl, and Scotty looking around the place...soaking it up and enjoying the quiet. And I was finally able to have a bit of time to take photos of the place in peace.

This is the interior of the hut as you walk in the main door and turn right. Alternatively, if you go straight when you walk in, you soon meet a wall and can only turn left round a corner. Here you find a small room with slabs of mutton hanging from the walls and penguin skeletons on a table. I forgot to take a picture of that room, but it isn't that memorable. This main room is nicer to look at...if you can call this nice. I think I talked about this before in my previous webpage, but it is still true: this is a dreary, miserable place. Luckily today was warm, as it usually feels noticeably colder inside here than outside. But still, after two hours I was ready to get back outside. Trivia: There is a modern wooden placque on the floor directly in front of you as you walk in the hut, which tells you a bit about Commander Scott's Discovery expedition. This is because he wasn't yet a captain in those days.
So you walk in, turn right, and take a few steps. As you look back over your left shoulder you see the middle of the hut. Part of the anti-charm of this place is the smell. So much seal blubber has been burned in here that the ceiling timbers are stained black, and an unforgettable pungent smell continually seeps out from anything it has penetrated - which seems like everything. There is no other smell I've encountered quite like it. This picture shows a bit of the roof area, with soot-blackened wood. There is an oddly shaped sub-roof built in part of the hut, and I never understood why people put up boards at a weird angle in the back area. Scotty pointed out that this must have been done to conserve the heat from the tiny blubber stove. I would guess this is also the reason that the hut is divided in two sections by a well-stained black tapestry. I wonder if both these improvisations were done by members of Shackleton's Ross Sea Party, as they could certainly used all the heat they could get when they were stuck in this hut.
Along the center of the hut are stacks of crates, with a thick, blackened curtain hung from the ceiling in between them. All four major expeditions at Ross Island between 1901 and 1917 used this hut, and so to me this IS the most important historic building in Antarctica. I always point this out to people, because I think many stationed at McMurdo kind of take this building for granted, especially since it's right at our doorstep and it's also not as well preserved as the other two huts (I used to think this way but do not anymore). What's more, I believe there are artifacts here from each expedition. Some artifacts are obviously from a certain journey, such as the crate in the foreground of this photos which is from the Terra Nova days. But I am not knowledgeable enough to date most other things in the hut.
When you reach the wall, but before turning left to go around the curtain, there is a nondescript crate with some blue tins. What's notable to me about this is something I actually just recognized now. The rounded wooden thing on top of the crate is an improvised snowshoe. I forget which expedition made this, but I just saw another one exactly like this in the Lyttelton Museum (at least I think it was there and not the Canterbury Museum).
So when you round the corner to your left and get on the other side of the curtain, here is the view to your left. I brightened this photo up a bit, to bring out some of the detail of the objects. But the scene really isn't that good looking. If it looks uninviting in this photo, it is even less so in person. What I want to do next time is to take pictures which are accurately bright...which I hope will bring out the melancholy of this place.
Taking a few steps forward and then turning left to face the curtain you see this rough blubber lamp hanging from a pole. At your feet is the blubber stove, and to your right is a small bunk area with various articles of clothing laid out.
A close-up of the lamp. It is always amazing when I see the same things in a museum that I have seen at one of these huts. It is one thing to see this stuff behind a glass panel, in a well-lit, well-documented display. It is quite another to actually see these things in the places where they were used - in this dark, miserable, smelly hovel that represented salvation for so many tired men. When I say this place is miserable, I'm not really being dramatic. When it was offloaded from the Discovery and erected here, the crew had notions of perhaps living here. When they realized how damn cold it was they changed their minds and everyone lived aboard the ship. This hut was used for storage and scientific activities...as well as the occasional theatrical production. Two other small huts were also built to the northwest, which were used by Bernacchi for scientific observations. One of these other huts was burned by Shackleton in a vain attempt to signal his ship for rescue, as it had just set off northward as his party returned from a(nother) arduous sledging experience. The good news was that the ship returned anyway and picked them up.
Here is the blubber stove, the most fascinating thing in the whole place for me. I read Lennard Bickel's "Shackleton's Forgotten Men", and the descriptions of five guys hunched over this shitty little stove for months on end, a stove which belched out more smoke than heat, is etched in my mind. I understand a later book by Kelly Tyler about this same expedition has a lot more information and research in it, but I haven't gotten to that one yet.
Another view of the stove, with some crates and a bottle of cognac in the background. On the crates are reminders that, whereas the Pratt's Special Dog Biscuits contained inside are concerned, you should only "USE ON THE VOYAGE". Old chap, you simply MUST resist the urge to dip into these cases before your voyage has commenced!
As you continue on past this humble kitchen area, there is a small shelf on the right, about head-high. The end piece of this shelf is made from a crate, upon whom the manufacturer of some random foodstuff affixed this label, which brags that his/her product had won "300 GOLD MEDALS".
Looking back to the left from where you see the "300 GOLD MEDALS", there are a few more bleak-looking crates. And again in case you forget, these also remind you to "USE ON THE VOYAGE".
Continuing onward, you pass through a doorway and turn to the left. Here you are in a rectangular room and are facing the main entryway, although you can't see it due to a wall in between. So to access this last room you need to walk all the way around the hut, counterclockwise as viewed from above. In this room are various interesting items. This particular doorway actually does have a door, which is cracked open and is a nice part of this "still life" picture.

As a note, Mackintosh left his signature in the Discovery Hut, along with that of Wild. Kelly was nice enough to point this out earlier in the season, and I wasted no time in finding them. I can read the date 1-21-15, and I think the signature of Gaze is also there, but I couldn't read the rest of them even with a flashlight. Anyway, these signatures are on the wall almost directly opposite the blubber stove, about head-high. It was interesting to see this...I had seen Mackintosh's signature at this hut, and at the Terra Nova hut I'd seen Richards' message that Mackintosh, the one-eyed sea captain and leader of the Ross Sea Party, was dead. Another excellent find was noticed by one of the firehouse guys during this tour. He was looking at the door I just mentioned, and piped up that there was some sort of writing on it. He spelled out the letters as he found them, with "NIMROD" being the result. The Nimrod was Shackleton's ship during his 1907 expedition - how cool is that? There is a lot of other graffiti on the walls of this hut, but most of it is modern. For example, we now know that, say "Dick Lickerson, Deep Freeze 1964" was here. I actually feel bad at the moment, since I did scrawl my name on the tail of the Pegasus airplane when we visited it in 2003. Having seen two of the huts that season, I didn't regard that 40 year old plane as a real historic item. And besides, it was covered in signatures already. Still, it was kind of a lame thing to do. But now everyone who visits Pegasus will know that SWW was there in 2003, and I'm sure they will be very pleased and satisfied to learn this.
On shelves to your left as you walk into this last room are some random items, from tins to bottles to a primus stove. This primus, by the way, looks very similar to the camp stoves you get issued in your survival bags...which go wherever you go when you're dropped off in the field where there is no established camp. That design works, plain and simple.
Here is another still life picture, with biscuits looking almost (*almost*) good enough to eat. Good thing I had a big dinner that day. Speaking of Mackintosh, the Canterbury Museum has a large archive of historic Antarctic documents. And I didn't realize that any old schmo, me for example, can look through their catalog and request to view specific items. Natalie, the curator, was nice enough to point this out, and in the 45 minutes I had before that department closed I headed up and had a look at a few things. There were a million things in the catalog I wanted to look at, but in the interests of time I only asked the custodian to pull out a few. One of them was a letter written by Mackintosh that was found at Hut Point. It was mostly illegible, since the paper was stained by grease and dirt. But I could read a few words here and there, and his signature was plainly visible. Two words that really stuck out were "hard job". This no doubt is an economical description of the depot-laying that he and the others had done. Understatement seemed to be a pretty common trait among those guys. Another great item was a luggage tag signed by Shackleton himself. When I saw it, I had to smile to myself because it looks almost exactly like a type of baggage tag we still use on the ice. It is a rectangular piece of stiff paper, with two neighboring corners clipped off at 45 degrees. Between these two corners, on the long end, is a hole with a reinforced backing around the hole. You then take a piece of wire and stick it thru the hole, and wrap the wire around the handle of your cargo. When I left the ice a couple days ago, all my bags had tags just like this on them. Just the same, except mine did not say

E. H. Shackleton
"Aurora"

On the same shelves is this striking tin. This is one of my favorite pics from the trip.
One more photo of a tin before I sign off. This one was actually sitting on a crate in the front part of the hut. The laptop battery is almost dead - perfect timing. Hope to get some sleep now, and wake up in LA. Did I mention I dislike this flight?